Applied ethnopoetics

Author: Blommaert, Jan

Source: Narrative Inquiry, Volume 16, Number 1, 2006 , pp. 181-190(10)

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Buy & download fulltext article:

Price: $37.41 plus tax (Refund Policy)

Abstract:

Ethnopoetics is a form of narrative analysis designed, initially, for the analysis of folk stories and based on an ethnographic performance-based understanding of narrative emphasizing that meaning is an effect of performance. It offers opportunities for analyzing `voice'. The ways in which speakers themselves organize stories along indexical patterns of emphasis, focus, super- and subordination and so on. As such, it is a potentially very useful tool for tracking `local' patterns of meaning-making in narrative. I argue that ethnopoetics could be productively applied to data in which different systems of meaning-making meet — a condition that defines many important service-providing systems in globalizing contexts. Asylum applications in Western Europe are a case in point, and examples will be used from that domain, but the potential usefulness of such an applied ethnopoetics stretches into many other types of service encounters in which crosscultural storytelling is crucial.

Keywords: Anthropological Linguistics; Asylum Seekers; Coherence; Ethnopoetics; Performance

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ni.16.1.23blo

Affiliations: 1: Institute of Education, University of London

Publication date: 2006-01-01