Storytelling as a Narrative Practice is a book arising from diverse contexts studied via ethnographic fieldwork and edited by two sociolinguistic anthropologists, Kathryn Graber and Elizabeth Falconi. To gain a holistic perspective, the book ties storytelling and narrative practices together and gathers many disciplines, including anthropology, folklore, linguistics, media studies, and communication studies.
There are three main approaches that scholars advocate in the book. The first approach is deconstructing the taken-for-granted division between formal and informal performance. The second approach is discussing interdiscursivity in relation to the ways speakers use communicative resources in narratives. The third approach is to acknowledge interviewing as an essential method in the study of storytelling and narrative practices. The contributors to this book offer new insights on the interview, challenging the ideas that they are merely elicited speech or fabricated interactions between interviewee and interviewer.
Storytelling as Narrative Practice is divided into three parts, moving from smaller-scale to larger social aggregates: Boundaries of the Self, Negotiating Heritage, and Constructing Discursive Authority. The first part deals with establishing and probing the boundaries of the self. The first chapter, “Defining Choices Redefined: Heroic Life Narratives of Taiwanese Buddhist Monastics,” by Hillary Crane, shows that Taiwanese Buddhist monastics tell counter-stories to construct a positive public image of themselves against the backdrop of stereotypical images created by previously told stories. The second chapter, “Telling Stories, Enacting Institutions: Learning How to Narrate ‘Coming Out’ Experiences,” by Stephen M. DiDomenico, tells how narrative became a critical resource for enacting institutions, especially for LGBTQ advocacy in NGOs. Examining performances of rehearsed coming-out stories, DiDomenico indicates that they are used for constructing identity and giving other people a structure of coming-out stories to tell for themselves.
The second part starts with “The Heritage Narratives of Yiddish Metalinguistic Community Members: Process of Distancing and Closeness” by Netta Avineri, who argues that heritage narratives become a tool for people to make meaning out of their personal lives in relation to their cultural backgrounds. These heritage narratives connect Yiddish language learners with other attendees, with their own past, and with current community members. In chapter 4, “Trajectories of Treasured Texts: Laments as Narratives,” Korina Giaxoglou discusses laments as cultural products and social practices that express grief publicly and gather communities in their sense of loss. Decontextualized versions of these stories, enacted without a real sense of loss, are portrayed as being more distanced from actual pain, and more fixed, based on their linguistic features.
The third part’s first piece, chapter 5, “Telling Traditions: The Dynamics of Zapotec Storytelling,” by Elizabeth Falconi, shows how a narrator blurs the boundaries between personal experience narratives and traditional storytelling to serve his communicative needs and establish his authorial position. Falconi indicates that the stories of her informant are differentiated from each other, not on the basis of content but rather on the way they invoke social relations. Chapter 6, “Etiological Storytelling and the Interdiscursive Trajectory of a Diagnostic Odyssey,” by Jennifer R. Guzmán, examines illness narratives and focuses on how positioning in the medical system leads to different stories, and how people in these settings use storytelling differently. The meaning of the narrative, she suggests, is closely tied to the process and the context of the telling as people seek to deal with medical uncertainty. Chapter 7, “‘Syphilis is Syphilis!’: Purity and Genre in a Buryat-Russian New Story,” by Kathryn Graber, shows how people interpret the production process of television news and how interviews can be seen as speech events. Her discussion of these interviews indicates that language ideologies are discussed before filming the broadcast news in several settings, and that decisions on how to proceed are made on this basis. Graber argues that conveying the news should be seen as storytelling, deriving from decisions about who has a right to tell the story and what is the proper context for enacting the story, among other considerations.
Storytelling as Narrative Practice analyzes many narrative forms—narratives of personal experience, traditional storytelling, stories of everyday life—and directs critical attention to a variety of different genres and narrative practices. Analyzing narratives under the umbrella term “stories” and blurring the lines between different kinds of stories allows us to appreciate the fluidity of genres as well as the intersections of different story genres: for example, the integration of small or everyday stories into “traditional” storytelling. The authors in this book create a platform for rethinking taken-for-granted analytical distinctions, especially between spontaneous informal storytelling and formal storytelling, to reveal the social life of stories. They challenge these concepts by offering examples of texts, such as lamentations, analyzed in both funeral settings and in mundane social interaction. Intertextuality emerges as a discourse strategy that creates different meanings, selves, and voices. These essays show that texts belonging to different genres can appear in similar entextualization processes, and that they can have similar social functions in relation to socialization, community creation, and transmission of knowledge.
Storytelling is depicted in this collection of essays as a creative tool to connect people by making all sorts of experiences intelligible to others as well as to the tellers themselves. We see that storytelling can lead to a reformulation of time so that people can experience, for example, the future and the past in the present moment. In a broader scheme, this book depicts storytelling as what humans do, and it focuses on what stories do for people who tell them and listen to them. In this process, we discern that language plays an important role in expressing and enacting lived experience, and how it reaffirms and reworks experience in the process of storytelling.
In Storytelling as Narrative Practice, storytelling is located in a hybrid place between performance and language, as these are melded together in verbal artistic genres. This book contributes to linguistic anthropology, folkloristics, and narratology, by blurring taken-for-granted categories and thereby liberating narrative practices. Indeed, I expect this book will be useful for all readers interested in oral storytelling.
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[Review length: 995 words • Review posted on March 4, 2022]