Narrative Practice and Cultural Change by Steven Grant Carlisle

Narrative Practice and Cultural Change by Steven Grant Carlisle

Author:Steven Grant Carlisle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030495480
Publisher: Springer International Publishing


Societies with Diverse Dialects: Holding Together, Moving Apart

The fertility of an anthropocentric social garden—one in which we can see the variety of ideas, interpretations, and Rortian dialects that sprout up and compete like weeds against more established conceptions—creates a methodological problem: How can we talk about both social coherence and variation? People do not orient themselves directly toward sets of discourses or semantic categories, but rather toward the people in their immediate cultural environments. These friends, co-workers, enemies, and relatives are complex beings, contributing their own quirks and agendas to their environments. Sometimes they share discourses, sometimes they don’t. In addition to assimilating information to old models, then, people must accommodate their models as they listen to one another’s dialects, evaluating, negotiating, and learning from them.

How are societies able to maintain recognizable languages while allowing people to live lives and explore meanings that cause them to develop idiosyncratic dialects at the same time? What keeps societies together, preventing dialects from evolving into mutually incomprehensible languages? In a prescient piece critiquing anthropological notions about conformity (cited in part in the first chapter, but which bears expanding), Edward Sapir wrote:While we often speak of society as though it were a static structure defined by tradition, it is in the more intimate sense, nothing of the kind, but a highly intricate network of partial or complete understandings between the members of organizational units of every degree of size and complexity ranging from a pair of lovers or a family to a league of nations of that ever increasing portion of humanity which can be reached by the press through all its transnational ramifications. It is only apparently a static sum of social institutions; actually it is being reanimated or creatively reaffirmed from day to day by particular acts of a communicative nature which obtain among individuals participating in it. (Sapir 1949: 104)



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