Discourses of Identity in Liminal Places and Spaces

Roberta Piazza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351183369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection highlights the interplay between language and liminal places and spaces in building distinct narratives of selfhood. The book uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine linguistic and social phenomena in places shaped by displacement and social inequality. The book also looks at chronotopes, the Bakhtinian-inspired concept of the interconnectedness of time and space in identity. The volume demonstrates how studying liminal places and spaces can offer unique insights into how people construct language and selfhood in these spaces, making this key reading for researchers in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, geography, and linguistic anthropology.

Part I

Liminality and Chronotope

1 Chronotopic Identities: The South in the Narratives Told by Members of Mapuche Communities in Chile

Maria Eugenia Merino Dickinson and Anna De Fina

1. Introduction

In this chapter, we focus on the centrality of what we will call “the chronotope of the south” in the discourse of members of Mapuche families who, due to poverty conditions of their indigenous communities, have migrated to Santiago in search of work opportunities and can thus be regarded as belonging to a group which is liminal to society. We will concentrate on narrative discourse and on the ways in which this chronotope is recruited by the interviewees in order to authenticate a “real Mapuche” identity for themselves and to negotiate it with the interviewer. The analysis will also allow us to trace and describe how the chronotope is conceived of by interactants in terms of space and time and what kinds of actions and identities are associated with it. This in turn will provide a picture of how members of these Mapuche communities define their ethnic identity.

1.1. Storytelling as Practice

Narrative discourse has a central role in the interviews and focus groups that were conducted with members of Mapuche families. This in itself is an interesting fact as it points to the orientation that these interviewees show towards their past both in terms of family origins and in terms of past events. Young and old Mapuche told in the interviews many narratives about traditional practices carried out by their parents and relatives on specific occasions, about their experiences with travels to the south and prolonged sojourns there and their memories of family life as children. Older Mapuche also told historical narratives about the origins of their people and their struggles with the Chilean government.¹ These narratives, as discussed later, represented a great variety of genres: from canonical stories as described by Labov (1972), to habitual narratives, to “narrative references”—i.e., brief evocations of past actions mainly attributed to family members—to historical recountings (for an extended discussion of these narrative types see Merino et al. 2017). This variety demonstrates a point that has been made repeatedly by interactionally oriented scholars of narrative (see Young 1987; Ochs and Capps 2001; Baynham 2003; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012, 2015), (i.e.) that everyday narratives take many different forms, that these forms need to be investigated in concrete occasions of interaction and that a primacy of the focus on the canonical story can only lead to neglecting not only other narrative genres but also the multifaceted ways in which people convey meanings through storytelling. We do take as a reference for the definition of narratives in context their being usually, but not always, about the past and the fact that the events depicted happen in some kind of scenario and involve specific characters, but we also regard the description and study of narrative discourse as fundamentally grounded in concrete storytelling exchanges. This view then leads to a conception of storytelling as a semiotic practice that is always embedded within other discursive and non-discursive practices and cannot be isolated from them.

People tell and recognise stories and narratives as part of other communicative and institutional practices such as legal depositions, convivial exchanges, medical consultations, interviews, social media communications and these contexts profoundly change not only the kinds of genres that are deployed but also the participation frameworks that interactants enter into, the storytelling modes, and the kinds of communicative and informational functions that these texts have. Thus, scholars (see among many others Page 2012) have shown, for example, that what counts as a story on Facebook and on social media in general may be quite different from what counts as a story in face to face interaction.

In this chapter we follow such interactionist and practice-based perspective, and, therefore, we investigate narratives as emerging within interviews that involve members of the same ethnic group, although not of the same local community. This situation makes identity negotiations particularly important, especially in the context of questions about the maintenance, omission of Mapuche customs in Santiago de Chile and that is why theorisations about identities are relevant to the analysis carried out here.

1.2. The Social Construction of Identities

Our frame of reference is social constructionist conceptions of identity (Hall 2000) that regard it not as a collection of attributes residing in mind and perception, but as a process that is continuously negotiated at the local level through discursive work (see Bucholtz and Hall 2005; De Fina et al. 2006). Within these views, the relevance of specific identities cannot be presupposed by the researcher but needs to be demonstrated through close attention to local interactions (Benwell and Stokoe 2006) and to the way categories of belonging are introduced and negotiated. Much of this literature also recognises the interplay between brought along and brought about identities (see Baynham 2015), in the sense that the interactional sphere constitutes the arena for the indexing or the explicit reference to identity categories that are widely shared socially and transcend the local scale such as gender, age, ethnic belonging, etc. Ways in which such links between the local and other scales are created and positionings are established by participants in discourse vary from the use of explicit discourse categories and acts of identity to the indexing of social identities through linguistic elements and expressions, to switches in style and language variety. Narrative has been shown to be a privileged site for the construction and negotiation of identities (see Georgakopoulou 2007; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015) thanks to the possibility for narrators to position themselves simultaneously as characters at the level of the storytelling world, as participants at the level of the storytelling world and as people in different social worlds (see Bamberg 1997; Depperman 2013). We will show in our analysis how these positions are achieved through the evoking of actions and characters in story-worlds that are firmly anchored in the chronotope of the south.

1.3. Time, Space, and the Chronotope

In early theorisations about narrative in linguistics and many other disciplines, time was seen as the defining element to characterise narrative discourse. The primacy of temporal ordering has been accepted as a basic principle of narrative organisation both in narratology (see Genette 1980; Prince 1982; Ricoeur 1984) and in linguistics. Labov (1972) for example, incorporated time in his definition of narrative as the “recapitulation of past experience” (p. 359), while Ochs and Capps (2001) characterised personal narrative as ‘a way of using language or another symbolic system to imbue life events with a temporal and logic order’ (p. 2). However, narrative analysts have problematised a view of narrative based on linear time organisation by showing, for example, that narrative time can be cyclical and habitual and that narrative juncture is not a property of all narratives (see Carranza 1998; Mishler 2006; Baynham 2003). They have also questioned the ‘belief that temporality is the only significant dimension’ in narrative (Adams 1996: 129) and have started to consider with greater interest the role of space and the interplay between time and space in the evocation and structuring of story-worlds (see De Fina 2003; Haviland 2005; Liebscher and Dailey-O’ Cain 2013; Santello 2017). Within this perspective, the notion of chronotope has emerged as a very useful construct to study the connectedness of space and time in discourse. This construct, originally proposed by Bakhtin (1990) has, in recent times, experienced a surge in interest. Originally, Bakhtin (1990) talked about chronotopes in his examination of literary works. In his words:

In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history. The intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.

(p. 84)

Bakhtin was looking at ways in which types of situations or tropes in the novel evoked characters, spaces and times that constituted a unit of some sort. Thus, he pointed to the existence of chronotopes such as that of the meeting, the road, the castle, the salon, the public square. In essence, Bakhtin captured the idea that humans tend to experience and understand reality within specific time/space contexts. As noted by literary critics (see Bemong and Boghart 2010), Bakhtin’s interest in chronotopes was related to his attempt to contribute to a typology of narrative genres, and for this reason, he described how certain chronotopes were used in and characterised the main western literary genres. As this author did not fully develop his theory, a great many interpretations exist not only in literature but also in other disciplines, particularly on the criteria that can be used to identify chronotopes and on the level at which chronotopes can be recognised. In linguistics, many applications have been proposed (see among others Blommaert 2015; Dick 2010; Karimzad and Catedral 2017). In narrative specifically, the construct has been used in particular to refer to the coexistence within storytelling of two different chronotopic realities: the story-world and the storytelling world (see, for example, Koven and Simoes Marquez 2015; Perrino 2015). However, recently the reflection on chronotopic relations has been extended to include identities. As noted by Agha (2007), notions of time and space are indissolubly connected with human identity and action. In his words ‘entextualized projections of time cannot be isolated from those of locale and personhood’ (p. 320), that means that places, identities and times are often tied together in discourse and in other kinds of semiotic practices. In a recent work on this topic Blommaert and De Fina (2017) argued that ‘it is possible to see and describe much of what is observed as contemporary identity work as being chronotopically organized’ and ‘it is organized, or at least with reference to, specific time-space configurations which are nonrandom and compelling as contexts’ (p. 1). Thus, identities that are socially enregistered are often embedded within specific times and spaces, and in that sense, they can be seen as embodiments of social types; for example, indigenous cultural maintenance in displaced contexts.

Social figures as diverse as ancient Greek heroes such as Ulysses or modern football fans can be described in terms of expected behaviours within the boundaries of time/space connections. Thus, social types are not abstract representations: they are located in certain places and in certain historical periods and they are indexically associated with both verbal and non-verbal behaviours. Blommaert and De Fina (2017) discuss how both small and big changes in time and place may be associated with changes in chronotopic identities.

We apply these insights to the negotiation of ethnic identities by members of Mapuche families in interview by showing how their main strategy of authentication of their ethnic identity is a reference to life in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Liminality and Chronotope
• Part II Liminality and Institutional Power
• Notes on Contributors
• Index