Applied ethnopoetics
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Jan Blommaert✝
Abstract
Ethnopoetics is a form of narrative analysis designed, initially, for the analysis of folk stories and based on an ethnographic performance-based understanding of narrative emphasizing that meaning is an effect of performance. It offers opportunities for analyzing ‘voice’. The ways in which speakers themselves organize stories along indexical patterns of emphasis, focus, super- and subordination and so on. As such, it is a potentially very useful tool for tracking ‘local’ patterns of meaning-making in narrative. I argue that ethnopoetics could be productively applied to data in which different systems of meaning-making meet — a condition that defines many important service-providing systems in globalizing contexts. Asylum applications in Western Europe are a case in point, and examples will be used from that domain, but the potential usefulness of such an applied ethnopoetics stretches into many other types of service encounters in which crosscultural storytelling is crucial.
Abstract
Ethnopoetics is a form of narrative analysis designed, initially, for the analysis of folk stories and based on an ethnographic performance-based understanding of narrative emphasizing that meaning is an effect of performance. It offers opportunities for analyzing ‘voice’. The ways in which speakers themselves organize stories along indexical patterns of emphasis, focus, super- and subordination and so on. As such, it is a potentially very useful tool for tracking ‘local’ patterns of meaning-making in narrative. I argue that ethnopoetics could be productively applied to data in which different systems of meaning-making meet — a condition that defines many important service-providing systems in globalizing contexts. Asylum applications in Western Europe are a case in point, and examples will be used from that domain, but the potential usefulness of such an applied ethnopoetics stretches into many other types of service encounters in which crosscultural storytelling is crucial.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introductory remarks 1
- Narrative research and the challenge of accumulating knowledge 7
- The role of narrative in personality psychology today 17
- The promise (and challenge) of an innovative narrative psychology 27
- Biographical structuring 37
- Narrative pre-construction 47
- A new role for narrative in variationist sociolinguistics 57
- Story formulations in talk-in-interaction 69
- Continuity and change in narrative study 81
- Dialogue in a discourse context 91
- Rhetorical aesthetics and other issues in the study of literary narrative 103
- Narrative as construction and discursive resource 113
- The narrative negotiation of identity and belonging 123
- Narratives in action 133
- Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis 145
- Life “on holiday”? 155
- Stories: Big or small 165
- Entitlement and empathy in personal narrative 175
- Frankie, Johnny, Oprah and Me 185
- Rescuing narrative from qualitative research 195
- The performance turn in narrative studies 205
- Applied ethnopoetics 215
- The self-telling body 225
- Narrative thinking and the emergence of postpsychological therapies 237
- Do good stories produce good health? 249
- Living stories 261
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introductory remarks 1
- Narrative research and the challenge of accumulating knowledge 7
- The role of narrative in personality psychology today 17
- The promise (and challenge) of an innovative narrative psychology 27
- Biographical structuring 37
- Narrative pre-construction 47
- A new role for narrative in variationist sociolinguistics 57
- Story formulations in talk-in-interaction 69
- Continuity and change in narrative study 81
- Dialogue in a discourse context 91
- Rhetorical aesthetics and other issues in the study of literary narrative 103
- Narrative as construction and discursive resource 113
- The narrative negotiation of identity and belonging 123
- Narratives in action 133
- Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis 145
- Life “on holiday”? 155
- Stories: Big or small 165
- Entitlement and empathy in personal narrative 175
- Frankie, Johnny, Oprah and Me 185
- Rescuing narrative from qualitative research 195
- The performance turn in narrative studies 205
- Applied ethnopoetics 215
- The self-telling body 225
- Narrative thinking and the emergence of postpsychological therapies 237
- Do good stories produce good health? 249
- Living stories 261
