Personal Experience Narratives Research Articles

Participation frameworks and gender in the narrative conversations of gypsy children

This paper presents an analysis of conversations around narratives of personal experience between a mixed-sex group of Gypsy children and non-Gypsy teachers and researchers. Data was obtained in two institutional contexts, a classroom in a public school and a class in a summer-school program, through semi structured interviews and conversations. Our analysis uses tools derived from conversation analysis and the ethnography of communication and examines two aspects of conversational organization. On the one hand, turn distribution according to the gender of participants and, on the other hand, the distribution of conversational roles in co-narrative episodes. In general terms, our findings show that girls play a much more active role in these conversations than boys. These results are discussed in the light of the institutional context in which they are produced and in relation to cultural patterns of the Gypsy community regarding men and women’s orientation towards work.

Collaborative oral narratives of general experience: when an interview becomes a conversation

This article explores the shift in speech genre from a peer group interview speech event to an activity type with interactive features resembling a casual conversation and the consequent effects on the narrator, interviewees and process of story-telling. It reports on sociolinguistic interviews in which collection of oral narratives of personal experience among members of the Greek Cypriot community in London becomes collaborative and facilitates the co-production of spoken personal narratives (hence the ‘general experience’ of the title). The highly social act of narrating sees the emergence of explicit and implicit collaborative strategies, specifically the use of prompts and requests for clarification, which appear to be an inevitable outcome of narrating in a setting where the audience is wider than just the interviewer.

Folklore in a Hurry: The Community Experience Narrative in Newspaper Coverage of the Loma Prieta Earthquake

Abstract Personal experience narratives are staples of newspaper reporting. Though the stories are elicited, summarized, and retold in the third person as community experience narratives, they retain their power to make sense of experi and to bind readers into a symbolic community. This study examines coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco newspapers to explore some of the methodological and eth issues that confront reporters and folklorists who elicit and inscribe personal experience narratives.

Folklore in a Hurry: The Community Experience Narrative in Newspaper Coverage of the Loma Prieta Earthquake

Personal experience narratives are staples of newspaper reporting. Though the stories are elicited, summarized, and retold in the third person as community experience narratives, they retain their power to make sense of experience and to bind readers into a symbolic community. This study examines coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco newspapers to explore some of the methodological and ethical issues that confront reporters and folklorists who elicit and inscribe personal experience narratives.

Fathering for Eternity: Generative Spirituality in Latter-Day Saint Fathers of Children with Special Needs

This article presents the narratives of personal experiences of 35 Latter-day Saint fathers of children with special needs and discusses how their religious beliefs and practices have influenced the meaning of those experiences. The narratives provide a window on how one group of highly religious fathers makes sense of having children with disabilities or chronic illnesses. For these fathers, belief in a divine plan that includes both mortal and eternal life created a coherent Sense of meaning despite disability and death. That plan involved continuation of family relationships beyond death. The fathers'belief in this divine plan created an expectation of an eternal relationship with their children free from the limitations of illness or disability experienced in this life. These fathers' beliefs and expectations inspired them to make and keep a commitment to a sacred responsibility of loving, serving and caring for their children with special needs. These fathers' experiences are also interpreted in light of a generative theory of fathering and faith and interms of Kenneth Porgornent's (1997) theory about conservation and transformation of sacred significance in religious coping and adaptation.

Narrative ability in high-functioning children with autism or Asperger's syndrome.

This study examines the narrative abilities of 28 high-functioning children with autism or Asperger's Syndrome and 22 typically developing children across two different discourse contexts. As compared with the typically developing children, the high-functioning group performed relatively well in the storybook context but exhibited difficulty imbuing their narratives of personal experience with the more sophisticated characteristics typically employed by the comparison group. Furthermore, children with autism or Asperger's Syndrome demonstrated impairments inferring and building on the underlying causal relationships both within and across story episodes in both narrative contexts. Findings further revealed that the narrative abilities of children with autism or Asperger's Syndrome were associated with performance on measures of emotional understanding, but not theory of mind or verbal IQ. Findings are discussed in relation to the social and emotional underpinnings of narrative discourse.

He's like ‘Do it now!’ and I'm like ‘No!’

Some innovative quotative usage among young people in London. In this article, Levey looks at its use in a south-eastern variety of English, specifically in narratives of personal experience by primary-school children in an outer London borough.

Chicana traditions: continuity and change

The first anthology to focus specifically on the topic of expressive culture, Chicana Traditions features the work of native scholars: Chicanas engaged in careers as professors and students, performing artists and folklorists, archivists and museum coordinators, and community activists. Blending narratives of personal experience with more formal, scholarly discussions, Chicana Traditions tells the insider story of a professional woman mariachi performer and traces the creation and evolution of the escaramuza charra (all-female precision riding team) within the male-dominated charreada, or Mexican rodeo. Other essays cover the ranchera (country or rural) music of the transnational performer Lydia Mendoza, the complex crossover of Selena's Tejano music, and the bottle cap and jar lid art of Goldie Garcia. Framed by the feminist concept of the borderlands, a formative space where cultures and identities converge, Chicana Traditions offers a lively commentary on how women continue to invent, reshape, and transcend their traditional culture.

Are Birds Free From the Chains of the Skyway? Balancing Freedom, Responsibility and Reflexivity Disability Service Provision

Using personal experience narrative, I will discuss the role of disabled disability service providers as agents in an emancipatory process. Reflexivity is required in order for disabled disability service providers to be effective change agents on behalf of other disabled people without falling into the trap of imposing their own theoretical paradigm or personal agenda onto their disabled service consumers.Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me, "How good, how good does it feel to be free?" And I answer them most mysteriously, "Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?" Bob Dylan

Discourse stance

The aim of this article is to integrate findings reported in the preceding articles in this collection, employing a global discourse perspective labeled discourse stance. The paper attempts to clarify what is meant by this notion, and how it can contribute to the evaluation of text construction along the major variables of our project: target Language (Dutch, English, French etc.), Age (developmental level and schooling), Modality (writing vs. speech), and Genre (personal experience narratives vs. expository discussion). We propose a general conceptual framework for characterizing discourse stance as a basis for an empirically testable potential model of this key aspect of text construction and discourse analysis. Unlike the cross-linguistically data-based studies reported in the rest of this collection, which involve quantitative as well as well as qualitative analyses, this concluding article presents selected pieces of text from our sample to serve as case studies that illustrate our general line of reasoning, rather than to test specific hypotheses.

Personal Experience Narratives and the Social Construction of Meaning in Confrontational Discourse

Abstract Toronto’s African Caribbean community is marked by the different, sometimes conflicting perspectives on oral traditions held by those who had acquired primary enculturation in their home countries and those who had been raised in the metropolitan Canadian context. This article analyzes an instance of naturally occurring discourse where the interactants hold asymmetrical cultural definitions of the tradition of Trinidadian obeah. It demonstrates how narrative is used to construct authoritative evidence during verbal conflict, illustrating how negotiated discourse and status-role identities are emergent attributes of the interaction itself and not qualities of the performer or the text when considered independently of this situational context.

Narrative discourse in young children with histories of early corrective heart surgery.

Narrative attainment was assessed in a group of 76 four-year-old children at risk for brain injury because of histories of early corrective heart surgery. Elicited personal experience narratives were coded for narrative components, evaluative devices, and information adequacy and were contrasted with narratives produced by a comparison group of typically developing 4-year-olds. The production of autonomous narrative discourse was identified as an area of special vulnerability for children with this medical history. Despite considerable heterogeneity in narrative performance, children with early corrective heart surgery produced fewer narrative components than typically developing children. Results suggest that the elaboration of events and contextual information, the expression of subjective evaluation and causality, and clarity and explicitness of information reporting may constitute special challenges for this population of children. Implications of these findings for clinical assessment and possible risks for socioemotional relationships and academic achievement are discussed.

Personal Experience Narratives and the Social Construction of Meaning in Confrontational Discourse

Toronto�s African Caribbean community is marked by the different, sometimes conflicting perspectives on oral traditions held by those who had acquired primary enculturation in their home countries and those who had been raised in the metropolitan Canadian context. This article analyzes an instance of naturally occurring discourse where the interactants hold asymmetrical cultural definitions of the tradition of Trinidadian obeah. It demonstrates how narrative is used to construct authoritative evidence during verbal conflict, illustrating how negotiated discourse and status-role identities are emergent attributes of the interaction itself and not qualities of the performer or the text when considered independently of this situational context.

Variations of maternal support to children’s early literacy development in Chinese and American Indian families: Implications for early childhood educators

This paper presents a study that aims to help early childhood educators understand the cultural context in early language and literacy development. It examines how mothers in Chinese and American Indian families support their young children’s emergent literacy development during everyday interactions. Twenty mother-child dyads in each cultural community participated in the study. The results of the study indicate that Chinese and American Indian mothers differed greatly in the ways they supported their children in early literacy. The Chinese mothers tended to privilege print-based literacy interactions more than the American Indian mothers. The American Indian mothers tended to privilege the literacy interactions that were based on oral narratives of life and personal experiences. Moreover, the mothers in the two communities emphasized and supported different aspects of their children’s early literacy development. The Chinese mothers tended to support their children in explicit, event-specific and elaborative ways. In contrast, the American Indian mothers tended to support their children in implicit and contextual ways. This study suggests that early childhood educators must understand the specific meanings of early literacy in different cultural contexts to maximize the learning potential of every child in the early childhood education settings.

An analysis of speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience

This article presents a framework for analyzing speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience. Building on Labov's idea of evaluation, conversation analytic insights into narrative, Goffman's notion of footing, and Bakhtin's idea of voicing, I describe three role perspectives which speakers orchestrate in the performance of a narrative of personal experience: those of author, interlocutor, and character. I apply this framework to two tellings of the same event by the same speaker — one in which the speaker performs the story more from the perspective of a performed character, the other in which the speaker performs the story more from a current interlocutory position. I then demonstrate that this tripartite role distinction is salient for listeners, who described one of the tellings as revealing more about the speaker at the time of the original event, and the other telling as revealing more about the speaker at the time of the telling. Finally, I suggest how these role distinctions can be quantified, in order to describe the loading of each of the three roles within a narrative.

Contes tendres, contes cruels du Sahel nigerien

Contes tendres, contes cruels du Sahel nigerien. By Genevieve Calame-Griaule. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Pp. 293, photographs, bibliography, index. 22.50 paper) In this book, the dean of French Africanist folklorists has revisited the treeless, drought-ridden West Africa of her early fieldwork, with its of infinite horizons, the soil crackled by drought, the iridescence of the salt-pans, the tents of matting in the encampments, and the elegant veiled silhouettes of the nomads, the clay towns peopled with black-robed women and turbaned men (283). These landscapes became familiar to Genevieve Calame-Griaule when she first visited the arid Sahel with her father, the anthropologist Marcel Griaule. In those years, Griaule created the first great masterpiece of collaboration between a European and an African sage, Dieu d'eau (1948, translated 1965 as Conversations with Ogotemmtti), the elaborate account of the mythico-religious system of the Dogon of Mali. After that beginning, Genevieve Calame-Griaule deepened and extended research into the relation between Dogon worldview and verbal art. The result was her magisterial Ethnologie et langage, a classic of African folkloristics (1965, translated 1986 as Words and the Dogon World). She brought together a team of four more researchers into a number of West African societies in Mali, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Niger, and Togo. The team has produced numerous papers and books studying the meaning(s) of West African narratives through comparative analysis, interrelating texts with ethnographic data. Under her leadership they have founded an Africanist discipline of ethnolinguistics, based on the principles that certain significations can only be discerned through textual and contextual analysis, whereas others require recourse to ethnographic and extra-textual exploration (translated from a 1984 essay). Their regular seminars provide for the exchange of research findings. With other scholars they edit and produce the principal French folklore journal, Cahiers de litterature orale. Also a leader of the Societe des Africanistes, Genevieve Calame-Griaule has made significant studies of both linguistic and paralinguistic codes. Research for this book was carried out in Niger, among the group called Isawaghen, between 1970 and 1978. Two members of the research team are dead, Pierre Francis Lacroix and Suzanne Bernus; the two principal storytellers, Taheera and Aminata, are also gone. Thus the book becomes a memorial to them as well as a memoir of their expedition, a scientific study, and a continuation of the Griaule tradition. Itself a personal experience narrative, the book is a model of presentation of African tales, their tellers, and their setting. The author's introduction, clearly and agreeably written, describes Isawaghen society and its dry surroundings. …

Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live

Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live. By Bill Ellis. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xv + 291, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $38.00 cloth). Bill Ellis has pulled together over twenty years of articles, conference papers, and thinking into a remarkably seamless, strong, coherent, and stimulating study of legend--examining definitions and approaches used in studying legends, investigating uses that people make of legends to comment on and understand what happens to them, and exploring ways in which legends shape and become part of experience. In the first section of the book, The of Legends, Ellis lays a good foundation for the whole, explaining (and questioning) folklore concepts and setting forth a history of theory (describing both an approach and problems with it) with a clarity that is satisfying for both the novice and the professional. Displaying a wide-ranging and thorough grasp of the material, he presents complex ideas with a truly clarifying simplicity. With particular attention to scientific models, he goes over well-known material and material less familiar or, at least, less well accepted, such as memetics, which he shows to encompass long-standing folklore ideas wrapped in new biological terminology. In the second section, Life as Legend, using the specific examples of vanishing hitchhikers, a ghost in a fast food restaurant, and experiences of alien abduction, Ellis explores the manner in which legends are used as culturally comprehensible and acceptable means of describing extraordinary phenomena. In the third section, Legend as Life, a study of various forms of ostensive behavior, he examines cases in which people's behavior and perceptions are affected by legend. Throughout the book, Ellis effectively presents legend as part of a complex communication system, responding to and influencing a whole set of socio-cultural factors both immediate and wider-spread. Maintaining a balance of specific examples and broader concepts, he makes good use of case studies and of actual texts (employing a variety of transcription techniques), both for making his point clear and for demonstrating an analytic approach. He does, however, give more attention to camp horror stories and personal experience narratives than one might expect in a book on legends, though in the former case he uses the genre to scrutinize the role of traditionality in legends, and in the latter he ties them back into discussion of how legend scholars and legend users handle the paranormal. …

Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience (review)

Reviewed by: Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience Frank J. Korom Live like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience. Temporary exhibit organized by the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, Philadelphia. Guest curated by Leela Prasad. 0402- 31121999. Funding provided by the William Penn Foundation and the Pennsylvania Historical Museum Commission. The banyan tree, with its amazing ability to drop down limbs that take root and become new entities while remaining firmly connected to the original trunk, is an apt indigenous metaphor for the transplanting of South Asians to the United States. With the vigorous interest in South Asian diasporan studies among scholars today, this display, initiated by the Balch Institute at the urging of influential members of the local Indian community who later served as consultants for the exhibition, is a timely undertaking. Folklorist Leela Prasad, herself an Indian living in the United States, was contracted to conceptualize the project and conduct the research on which it would be based. In collaboration with the staff at the Balch, Prasad has assembled an interesting collection of historical documents, artifacts, fragments of personal experience narratives culled from oral histories, and contemporary photographs (many shot by David H. Wells and reproduced in the accompanying catalog) in an attempt to provide a context for understanding her own culture's adaptation and growth in American soil. The result is an ambitious but modest attempt to convey some of the complexities of being East Indian in the United States. The exhibit under review, like the banyan tree, begins at the original root as a point of departure: India. As one enters to the left, introductory label texts are arranged on the first panel to provide a historical and cultural overview of the logic underlying the global dispersion of South Asians, including demographic statistics of the approximately 20 million people of Indian descent living abroad today. Maps are also provided to orient the visitor, as are statistics for the number of Indians residing in each state of the United States. As one moves in a clockwise fashion, the common direction taken by pilgrims in the Hindu tradition, the display unfolds in a series of sections, each of which deals with a particular theme. The over-all picture we get is one of rich variety, warning us not to interpret the South Asian immigrant adventure as a homogenous one. As an Italian cab driver in Philadelphia once stated to me years ago when I described to him my own studies in this area, "The melting pot has been flavored with a bit of curry!" Live like the Banyan Treecompels us to move beyond such stereotypes to appreciate the complexity of the Indian experience in America. Of course, easy generalizations are not appropriate for the display of any ethnic community, but this relatively understudied minority faces its own unique set of problems in the politics of representation that must be interrogated to arrive at a more balanced interpretation. After describing the contents of the exhibit, I wish to take up some of the issues that arise directly from it and questions that are veiled by it. The first section focuses on case studies pertaining to departure and arrival. We view the travel documents of Manju and Kishore Sheth, a couple of early settlers in the Delaware Valley, as well as "objects of memory," such as betal ( pan) nut containers, playing cards, a cricket bat, cookbooks printed in a variety of vernacular languages, kitchen utensils, and items of clothing. But lest the visitor get the impression that the traffic to North America was a direct route from India to Ellis Island in the past, some case studies of "Indians" who arrived in the United States from other parts of the world in the aftermath of British colonialism are also provided. The point here is to demonstrate that immigrant identities are complex and multifaceted. Not even all Indians living in North American were born in India, for many are what have come to be known as "twice" or "thrice" migrants; hence, we see, for example, descendents of Indians who were brought to the Caribbean by their British overlords as indentured...

Comparing bilinguals' quoted performances of self and others in tellings of the same experience in two languages

This article lends empirical support to the notion that quoted speech is “constructed dialogue” by exploring empirically how narratives of personal experience involve creative performance of locally imaginable personas, rather than accurate or faithful representation of actual people and their words. This work examines quotation in narratives of personal experience as a site where speakers use language pragmatically to enact socio-culturally locatable identities. Using a corpus of narratives in which French–Portuguese bilinguals told the same narratives of personal experience once in each language, it demonstrates that speakers do not quote more extensively when recounting experiences in the language in which those events “originally” occurred. Ultimately, what differs most in speakers' quotations in French and Portuguese tellings of the “same event” are the nonequivalent kinds and ranges of registers in which narrated characters are quoted. More specifically, speakers are more likely to quote themselves as speaking or having spoken in creative, marked registers in French than in Portuguese. This difference in the registers put in the mouths of quoted characters, in particular of quoted selves, may point to ways in which these bilinguals' multiple identities are instantiated within and across their two languages. More broadly, this work reveals ways in which all speakers may use narrative not only to describe the past but also to perform a variety of cultural selves, reinventing and reenacting characters as quoted selves and others.

Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour (review)

Reviewed by: Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour Jeannie B. Thomas Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour. 1998. Produced, written, and directed by Susan Stern. 54 min., VHS format, color. (New Day Films, Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J.) Susan Stern's film takes as its subject matter a doll whose shoes will not stay on her for five minutes, "yet ideologies adhere to her with great tenacity." The doll is, of course, the Barbie doll. Her look at Barbie was prompted by the creation of a game called "Jealous Barbie" by her five-year-old daughter, Nora. Stern ex-plains: "My Barbie Doll had to be jealous of her Barbie doll for hours on end. Her Barbie had better hair, a better car, a better guy. Horrified, I sat Nora down and explained in my best feminist manner that women don't have to be jealous of other women. Nora listened patiently and then said: 'Okay, Mom. First let's play "Jealous Barbie" and then we can play what you want to play.' " Stern told this story to friends, who in turn told her their Barbie stories, all of which provided the impetus for her to make her award-winning film, Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour. In the film, Stern, who is also the narrator, acknowledges that Mattel's marketing of the doll is brilliant, but argues that its efforts would have failed if there had not been "a million stories in America waiting to be acted out; within each buyer was a fantasy life yearning to be made plastic. Barbie was the perfect vehicle." The film traces some of these fantasies as they are enacted by children, Barbie fans and collectors, gays, artists, and groups of adults that Stern calls "Barbie players" who create fantasy lives for their dolls. "Everybody has a Barbie story," Stern says, "and the stories are about us." In the process of documenting some of these stories, she films the San Francisco Barbie Doll Club; an anti-breast implant demonstration outside of the Barbie Hall of Fame in Palo Alto, California; the National Barbie Convention in Birmingham, Alabama; and Mattel's 35th anniversary Barbie Festival held at Disney World in Florida. She also includes clips from Barbie ads; a Philadelphia TV news story with the lead-in question, "Is deep frying a Barbie part of a Satanic ritual?"; and a [End Page 490] contemporary musical video in which Barbie is barbecued. One of the stories that Stern tells is the remarkable one of Barbie's creator and one of Mattel's founders, Ruth Handler. Handler's life story and personal experience narratives about being a woman in corporate America are fascinating and complex. Her creation of the Barbie doll—which was named after her own daughter (the Ken doll was named after her son)—was inspired both by seeing a German sex doll after World War II and by the adult paper dolls with which her daughter and friends played. Outside of these paper dolls, no adult dolls for children were on the market in the 1950s. Handler says she felt an adult doll could help girls deal with physical changes, such as developing breasts, as they grew up and went through puberty. She was initially told by the men at Mattel that there was no way they could make a doll with breasts. However, make a doll with breasts they did: in 1959, Barbie made her appearance, selling for three dollars. At the time, parents hated Barbie but kids adored her, and Mattel marketed directly to kids through television advertisements. Its marketing strategies over the years have paid; presently, two Barbies are sold every second somewhere in the world. Handler's life experiences narrated in the film also include accounts of her tremendous difficulties in the 1970s. She lost a breast to cancer; was indicted for falsifying financial records; and, despite the huge and continuous success of Barbie, was forced out of Mattel. However, she then went on to found Nearly Me, the first company to make customized breast prostheses that are available in department stores. Along with the stories about the creation and marketing of Barbie, Stern also documents the stories of those who buy...