[Linganth] AAA CFP - Words that Travel: Narrative practices over space and time

[Grace Reynolds]

Dear colleagues,
Please consider the following, albeit down-to-the-wire, call for papers and forward as you see fit.

Many thanks,
Grace Reynolds and Alison Broach, University of Virginia

CFP: AAA Annual Meeting (San Jose, California; Nov. 2018)
Conference theme: “Change in the Anthropological Imagination: Resistance, Resilience, Adaptation”
 
Words that Travel: Narrative practices over space and time
Draft panel abstract, subject to updates

This panel examines the processes through which stories move through people and over time. We are particularly interested in the metalinguistic features and mechanisms through which stories and the voices of storytellers become entextualized (Urban, 1996) into other contexts and effect real change. As utterances travel, they retain residues, flavors, and pieces of their prior contexts (Bakhtin 1981). This influences the course of their journey, since those embedded contexts including features like authorship and voice can craft re-entextualized utterances into powerful tools that drive social movements or other social formations. 
 
In attempting to describe what stories do as they flow through people, classic linguistic models fail to take into account the complexity of participant roles engaged in these or other “utterance events” (Irvine 1996). Work by Hymes (1974), Goffman (1981), and others (Bakhtin 1981; Hill 1995; Irvine 1996; Keane 2000; Minks 2013) have recognized this shortcoming and called attention to the fact that speakers have complex relationships with their own, and others’, words. Irvine (1996) proposes that, rather than focus on devising an increasingly complex formula for mapping participant structure, we instead focus on the process itself by which these structures are imagined, constructed, socially understood and distributed.  Still under consideration, however, is a means of taking into account the culturally-specific ways that prior or parallel utterance contexts, real or imagined, influence and inform any stretch of discourse, allowing speakers for example to assume responsibility for some voices in their speech, but not others.  

We bring together papers that examine the processes through which stories—used loosely to encompass songs, poetry, and other narrative practices—and the voices within them travel through time, space, speakers, and listeners. Voice in particular is often imbued with a moral quality when attributed to speakers such as deceased ancestors, community elders, or the leaders of social movements. What are the processes through which such voices become embedded within others and revoiced? What role do these voices play in the construction of participants’ social imaginaries? We especially welcome papers that address what the flow of voices through time and space contributes to the construction and maintenance of systems such kinship, social movements, or identities.
 
Please send abstracts (250 words max) with paper title and presenter information to both Alison Broach (acb2fj at virginia.edu) and Grace Reynolds (gr3ck at virginia.edu) by the end of the day on Friday, 6 April. If included on the panel, session participants must be registered AAA members and registered for the meeting by 16 April.



Citations
Bakhtin MM. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, transl./ed. M Holquist, transl. C Emerson. Austin:  University of Texas Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hill, JH. 1995. “Voices of Don Gabriel: responsibility and self in a modern Mexicano narrative.” In The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, ed. D Tedlock, B Mannheim, 97–147. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hymes, D H. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Irvine, Judith T. 1993. "Insult and responsibility: Verbal abuse in a Wolof village." In Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse, Edited by Hill, Jane H., and Judith T. Irvine, 105-134, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Irvine, Judith T. 1996. “Shadow conversations: The indeterminacy of participant roles,” In Natural Histories of Discourse, edited by Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, 131-159.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Keane, W. 2000. Voice. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 9(1–2): 271–73.
Minks, A. 2013. Voices of Play: Miskitu Children’s Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Tucson: University of  Arizona Press.
Urban, G., 1996. “Entextualization, replication, and power,” In Natural Histories of Discourse, edited by Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, 21-44.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.




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