Disorderly Discourse: Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics). This item is unavailable.Disorderly Discourse: Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics)

This volume contains eight essays that are at the intersection of two important areas within linguistics: conversational analysis, and the use of narrative in the creation, mediation, and resolution of conflict. The contributors explore these issues in a variety of cultures and languages.

Involving everything from war to playground disputes, narratives generate, sustain, mediate, and represent conflict at levels of social organization. Still, despite the vast amount of research that has been conducted on conflict and narrative in a number of disciplines, the way they interrelate has seldom been explored in any depth; in fact, most studies treat narrative merely as a source of information about conflict rather then as a part of conflict processes. The contributors to this collection argue that language consists of socially and politically situated practices that are differentially distributed on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and other categories. They draw on new approaches to the study of both discourse and political processes in challenging previous assumptions about narrative and social conflict as they interpret disputes that emerge in a variety of settings in Brazil, Fiji, Crete, Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela. These essays substantially further our theoretical and methodological understanding of narrative and conflict and how they intersect.