Who Tells Which Story and Why? Micro and Macros Contexts in Narrative
Creator
De Fina, Anna
Bibliographic Citation
De Fina, Anna. 2008. Who Tells Which Story and Why?: Micro and Macros Contexts in Narrative. Text & Talk, 28 (3): 421-442.
Abstract
This article focuses on the inter-relations between storytelling and micro and macro contexts. It explores how narrative activity is shaped by and shapes in unique ways the local context of interaction in a community of practice, an Italian American card-playing club, but also illustrates how the storytelling events that take place within this local community relate to wider social processes. The analysis centers on a number of topically linked narratives to argue that these texts have a variety of functions linked to the roles and relationships negotiated by individuals within the club and to the construction of a collective identity for the community. However, the narrative activities that occur within the club also articulate aspects of the wider social context. It is argued that, in the case analyzed here, local meaning-making activities connect with macro social processes through the negotiation, within the constraints of local practices, of the position and roles of the ethnic group in the wider social space. In this sense, narrative activity can be seen as one of the many symbolic practices (Bourdieu 2002 [1977]) in which social groups engage to carry out struggles for legitimation and recognition in order to accumulate symbolic capital and greater social power.
Description
doi: 10.1515/TEXT.2008.020
Permanent Link
http://hdl.handle.net/10822/559324Date Published
2008Subject
Type
Publisher
Walter de Gruyter
Collections
Metadata
Show full item recordRelated items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Researcher and Informant Roles in Narrative Interactions: Construction of Belonging and Foreign-ness
De Fina, Anna (Cambridge University Press, 2011)In this article I focus on the influence of researcher/informant roles on the types of narratives that are produced and on the ways in which storytelling interactions are managed in research contexts. In particular, I ...