Finding Culture in Narrative

Abstract

The study of narrative in its many forms is emerging as an important method in cultural and linguistic anthropology. Students of narrative can build on a solid set of questions and hypotheses about this genre that have emerged from centuries of study in literature, folklore, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis, as well as from the anthropological tradition itself. Cultural and linguistic anthropologists now agree on one fundamental point: that narratives are not merely overtly “about” some “content,” such as what happened when, where, and to whom, but that they somehow make public the covert underlying presuppositions that organize the worlds in which speakers live. The cultural knowledge that resides in these presuppositions is often so “transparent” to speakers that it is unutterable. Anthropologists build on this insight through the application of methods that will permit us to identify these covert—yet publicly available—presuppositions, so that we can make the same kinds of inferences that speakers must make when they find meaning in narratives. In the analyses below, I review some of these methods. They build on three general assumptions: first, that the narrative genre is universally defined by the iconic match between a sequence of narrative clauses and a sequence of events, second, that narratives are universally built from certain structural components, and, third, that interlocutors exploit covert knowledge of the narrative icon and of these components in the work of building coherence, a collaboratively achieved sense that an interpretable stretch of talk has been produced.