Narrative Appalachia (west Virginia, Ethnopoetics).

Narrative Appalachia, based on two years participant observation in the coal camps of Raleigh County, West Virginia, traces the relational logic of a narrative culture through a variety of story genres in their performative and interpretive contexts. Discourses of neighbor and kin, shame, borned again Christianity, memory, places, and signs are based in a narrative structure which transforms meaning from a formed and bounded thing into an interpretive practice--a search for meaningfulness through telling and hearing a story. This search, which has the structure of a quest involving encounter and confrontation, places speaker, audience, and text in a historical situation. Culture can be understood not only as a code or a structure but as storied discourse which has a speaking subject and follows conventions of traditional genres. Ways of framing and reading talk as just talk, talk of ideals (ideas) or talk that is a sign, or as banter, double talk, gossip, lyin, braggin, hypocrisy, or runnin your mouth name the social functions of different narrative styles. The encompassing cultural voice is that of a class identity (the working class of people or the pore people) that is also an identification with the hills and with a way of speaking. It voices an opposition to the city where they say even neighbors do not speak and where people are slaves to the almighty dollar. The analysis uses structuralist, post-structuralist, and narratological theory to develop the concept of cultural voice in the place of world view. The concept of cultural discourse contests the structuralist paradigm that weights langue over parole as well as the deconstructionists' refusal to recognize concept or tradition. Stories are used to evoke Appalachian voice, and dialogic confusions between the anthropologist-asking-questions and the informant-refusing-the-closure-of-exegesis are recorded to note Appalachian (narrative) opposition to a distanced, stereotyped American reading of their situation and their culture.PhDCultural anthropologyFolkloreSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128038/2/8712214.pd