The article presents the object and results of a study which combines the psychology of religion and folkloristics in the form of a qualitative analysis of empirical ethnographic material compiled from sources in a local neo-charismatic congregation called the ‘Word of Life’. Personal narrative is discussed as a genre which represents the collective tradition of a religious community. It is a socially-learned speech act and a means of interpreting and sharing religious experience, thus constructing and confirming the faith of the (...) community, both individually and collectively. In the neo-charismatic tradition, everyday speech draws on a literal tradition as well as on socially-shared narrative genres such as ritual testimonies, prophecies, sermons and casual, personal narratives of co-believers. The faith-creative power of these stories can be found in their performative utterances and evaluative structures as well as in non-communication. (shrink)

This article examines the nature and structure of witness and defendant narrative accounts in the evidential portions of courtroom trials, using the O.J. Simpson, Oklahoma Bombers and Louise Woodward trials as a database. The article proposes a means of distinguishing narrative from non-narrative accounts, using Labov's definition of the `minimal narrative' as a starting point, and puts forward a modified model of narrative structure. A range of narrative structures are explored, and the model is used to analyse a series of (...) representative example narratives taken from the trial data. Different types of narrative fragmentation produced by multiple tellers of the same narrative are also examined, along with the frequent disjunction between `tellers' and `knowers'. Lastly, the article explores the relationship between narrative structures and narrative fragmentation and the discourse strategies used by lawyers in direct and cross-examination. (shrink)

Every year, thousands of undocumented Mexican workers enter the United States. Their presence, together with the settlement of undocumented and legal immigrants from many other countries, constitutes the source of one of the most persistent ideological conflicts in American history: the conflict over immigrants' rights. Official discourses in many cases identify being Hispanic with poor performance at school, drug abuse, poverty and violence. However, aside from mainstream images of who immigrants are, little research has been done on the identity that (...) immigrants themselves build and project, and on the processes that affect the formation of such identity. In this article I investigate identity through discourse analysis, looking specifically at linguistic strategies used by a group of undocumented Mexican immigrants to identify characters in storytelling. I argue that immigrants use ethnic identity as a central identification category for self and others in their stories, showing that ethnic mentions are widespread in story orientations, and that they exhibit different degrees and types of relevance depending on their relationship with the interactional context and/or the story world. Ethnic mentions are used in stories to affirm certain characteristics of one's own identity and of the identity of others via the presentation and evaluation of behaviors. In argumentative stories disputable behaviors are openly attributed to out groups, and so these stories help speakers to build images of who they are and how they stand in relation to others. In stories of personal experience, the connections between identities and behaviors are implicit, but they still respond to socially established expectations. Thus, individual stories also contribute to build those expectations about how belonging to certain ethnic groups may affect action in particular domains of life. The pervasiveness of ethnic identification in immigrant stories cannot be understood without resorting to wider social processes that frame the immigration experience of undocumented Mexican workers. In this case, I stress the importance of the pressure that the ideology of race and ethnicity, enacted through public discourse at all levels, exerts on every individual in American society. (shrink)

Bietti, Tilston and Bangerter take an evolutionary approach towards memory transmission and storytelling, arguing that storytelling plays a central role in the creation and transmission of cultural information. They suggest that storytelling is a vehicle to transmit survival‐related information that helps to avoid the costs involved in the first‐hand acquisition of that information and contributes to the maintenance of social bonds and group‐level cooperation. Furthermore, Bietti et al. argue that, going beyond storytelling’s individualist role of manipulating the audience to enhance (...) fitness of the narrator, that these adaptive functions of storytelling may well be assigned to other forms of language use besides narration (e.g., instructional discourse and argumentation). Based on this evidence, Bietti and colleagues claim that the specific adaptive function of storytelling lies in making sense of non‐routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling collective sensemaking. (shrink)