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Article published In:
Methodology of Narrative Study: What the first thirty years of Narrative Inquiry have revealed
Edited by Allyssa McCabe and Dorien Van De Mieroop
[Narrative Inquiry 31:1] 2021
► pp. 72–96

Narratives as discursive practices in interviews

A linguistic anthropological approach

ORCID logo | Binghamton University (SUNY)

Humans are prone to tell stories when they interact with each other. Knowing how many stories we tell in a day could be a difficult endeavor, especially because what counts as “a story” varies across disciplines and cultures. Narratives have always been primary modes in human communication and engagement across cultures, however, and have been used as key analytical tools across numerous disciplines in the social sciences and beyond. While defining narratives has been a daunting task in narratological studies, it is important to appreciate that narratives have also been studied for their pragmatic effects in the here-and-now of speech participants’ interactions and across various spatiotemporal configurations. Through an analysis of a set of narrative practices that I collected in Senegal (West Africa) and in Northern Italy in interview settings, I demonstrate that narratives are also performative interactional events in which their sociocultural surrounding is always fluid and can influence the story in unpredictable ways as it unfolds in interaction.

Keywords: chronotope, discourse strategies, interview, narrative practice(s), Northern Italy, Senegal, storytelling
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • From narratives-as-texts to narratives-as-practices
  • Narrative practices in and through spatiotemporal scales: The Bakhtinian chronotope
  • Intimate stances and intimate identities in storytelling practices
  • Narrative practices in fieldwork interviews
    • Performing intimacy through “participant transposition”
    • Intimate identities in and through northern Italian executives’ narratives
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 September 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20086.per
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