Telling Our Selves

Ethnicity & Discourse in Southwestern Alaska
Erscheinungsjahr 1996
ISBN: 978-0-19-509476-3
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 5, 232 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 540 g

Reihe: Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics

In this book, Chase Hensel examines how Yup'ik Eskimos and non-natives construct and maintain gender and ethnic identities through strategic talk about hunting, fishing, and processing. Although ethnicity is overtly constructed in terms of either/or categories, the discourse of Bethel residents suggests that their actual concern is less with whether one is native or non-native, than how native one is in a given context. In the interweaving of subsistence practices
and subsistence discourse, ethnicity is constantly recreated.

This type of discourse occurs in a conversational setting where ethnicity is both implicitly and explicitly contested. While the book is ethnographic, it is not "about Eskimo's." Rather it is about how Bethel residents use similar forms of discourse to strategically validate disparate identities. In this context, the homeland of Yup'ik Eskimos, subsistence is the focus of people's interactions, regardless of their ascriptive ethnicity. Even people who spend little time in subsistence
activities spend a great deal of time in subsistence conversation. Unlike traditional ethnographies which focus on traditions, and consequently tend to reify the past, this contemporary ethnography focuses on contemporary preoccupations of identity and meaning. The ethnographic description becomes a device
for preserving and explicating the opulent polysemy of situated talk.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hensel, Chase

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Sprachsoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophische Anthropologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik