Volume 25, Issue 5

Not a single day passes without it being an anniversary of something. At the time of writing this editorial, Cardiff— TEXT  ’s current editorial home—celebrates its centenary anniversary and the (western) world celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of the Victory in Europe (VE) Day. While Cardiff’s centenary celebrations span a whole year (2005), although clustered around a few days/dates and rather muted otherwise, the VE Day celebration marks the exact day when the Second World War ended, i.e., 8 May 1945. The celebration format for TEXT  ’s silver jubilee shares features of both these events: it is a year-long celebration, but this special issue marks a pivotal moment.

Text   is 25 years old in 2005. When members of the editorial board were asked about ways to mark that anniversary, one obvious answer was to design a special issue on the topic of anniversaries. The response to a general call for papers was quite strong, even though not all the papers proposed were completed in time, and not all those submitted appear here. But it was clearly a topic that can be approached from many theoretical and methodological perspectives, and one given surprisingly little attention to date.

We analyze the interactional organization and embodied actions of children and adults involved in gift-opening activities. Attention is drawn to gift-opening as a situated activity system, comprised of gift-opening activities occurring within shifting participation frameworks and intense focus clusters. Talk and embodied actions (the use of objects, body orientations, and the structure of the environment) are revealed as seamlessly conjoined in the midst of a routine birthday party. Attention is further drawn to an extended summons–answer sequence involving initiation of a gift-opening, enthusiastic response cries, positive assessments of the gifts, the offering and prompting of thanks, and related actions. It is revealed that children at the party are not just playing games and opening gifts, but involved in a complex social system where adults model and facilitate the construction and integration of past, present, and future relationships. Implications are raised for understanding how gift-opening activities provide opportunities for examining how language development and childhood socialization are enacted as interactional achievements.

Personal narratives have most often been studied as they occur in conversations. Here narratives told at a family ritual, specifically a wedding anniversary, are the focus of attention. The main argument is that it is through the telling of narratives of personal experience that a private relationship, such as a marriage, is made visible. This research also contributes to our understanding of retellings (stories already known to the participants). Specific attention is paid to how anticipatory laughter functions in retelling narratives, and the way in which it marks group membership, for only members know to laugh before the joke is told. Finally, this research contributes to our understanding of how children can be socialized into the family, and to family values, through the telling of narratives at a ritual.

Anniversaries and commemorations are commonly sources of group solidarity and identity reaffirmation. In particular, the communal marking of historical anniversaries can be seen as a mode of community celebration, commemoration, and display. Such events play a significant role in reinforcing the history, culture, and identity of the group, as well as strengthening feelings of commonality and solidarity between community members. In this paper, however, we want to look at situations in which community commemorations also function as sources of exclusion and division . In Northern Ireland, historical anniversaries and displays (particularly Protestant Orange marches) are both a central means of cultural/communal expression, and a source of division, sectarianism, and sporadic violence (Bryan 2000; Jarman 1997). Moreover, notwithstanding constitutional devolution and the ongoing peace process, research suggests that attitudes to symbolic community displays remain strongly partisan. Here, we apply an empirical discursive framework to better understand the meaning of such commemorations at the level of grass-roots community identification in Northern Ireland. Drawing on focus group data from working-class urban groupings (both Protestant/unionist and Catholic/nationalist), we examine how such anniversaries are constructed and negotiated in ‘real-life’ talk and interaction; and hence how they come to function simultaneously as points of solidarity and division within the community as a whole.

Cinco de Mayo celebrations in the United States differ greatly from those in Mexico. Even popular notions of what is observed or celebrated widely contrast between the two countries. This article analyzes Internet websites, migrants’ narratives, and participant observation data of public celebrations to describe different types of storytelling. As migrants attend the public celebrations, transcendent stories about Cinco de Mayo are a way to reconstruct their identities.

This article describes how national holiday coverage in newspapers attempts to align citizens by valorizing certain kinds of holiday activities and behaviors. In a study of evaluations used over a period of over 150 years in news stories about US Independence Day (the Fourth of July), it finds that chief loci of evaluation are the concepts of impressiveness, appropriateness, restraint, and particularly the emotion and enthusiasm of the audience. From its footing as an authority and general critic, the newspaper defines a standard of public behavior for anniversaries, built around attendance at and to the occasion, and display of affective capacity. In the context of national holidays, a certain amount of ‘flooding out’, as long as it does not physically endanger others, is considered supportive of the social structure rather than disruptive of it. The organizers of the events may also be evaluated from the newspaper’s footing as an independent critic of the government. The systems of evaluation are seen to be integrated with the system of news values, since they highlight information that is important and new. In addition, the results are compared with the APPRAISAL framework in systemic functional linguistics, and some difficulties in using the framework with this material are noted.

Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Text  by offering a range of reflections and analyses of socially and culturally situated anniversaries from around the world is an intellectually stimulating move. As a textual practice, it allows the journal to foreground this anniversary occasion, yet to do so in a way that is faithful to the journal’s focus on empirically-based studies of spoken or written texts.