Text and context

Literacy research concerns at least three levels of context. In the most general sense, context is considered as equivalent to culture, or the general social structure of a community and its bearing on the uses of and attitudes toward literacy. The term “cultural context” will be used to refer to this level. On a more particular level, context has been used to refer to the relationship between participants engaged in communication in a situation involving oral or written communication. The terms “situational context” or “context” indicate this level. A third level concerns whether or not speaking and writing constitute different relationships between text and context. (Here the term “context” refers to either or both of these levels, and the term “text” has various definitions.) I use the term “text” both for oral communication transcribed into writing and for written communication, and the terms “strategies,” “conventions,” and “devices” to describe text–context relationships.

The first level, writing in the context of social structure and culture, concerns the consequences and implications of literacy for technological change, worldview, education, communication, and most generally, culture. The increasing amount of scholarly material in this area provides strong backing for a theoretical model of multiple literacies, a variety of ways in which oral and written communication can be categorized.

Whereas storyability (what gets told as a story) concerns seemingly unlimited possibilities for the content of stories, tellability (who has the right to tell a story) concerns limitations or prohibitions on telling. Tellability is potentially limited by concerns for discretion, sanctions against invasion of privacy, promises of secrecy, and discouragement of immodesty. The adolescents were particularly concerned with these limitations and focused more concern on whether a person had violated the unstated prohibitions in telling a story than on whether the story was good. Their evaluations focused on entitlement more than on the amplification of the incidents described. This focus was safer from challenges of exaggeration or inaccuracy and, in addition, redirected attention from the incidents to the current storytelling situation.

Storyability is most often evaluated retrospectively, although categories of storyable events may exist prior to individual instances of them. Further, people may engage in certain behaviors with a prior awareness that their behaviors belong to a certain category. People sometimes play out behaviors as though in a script, and they may announce, while in the midst of an activity, their intention to report the experience to others. The statement “Just wait till I tell my friends about this” acknowledges that the experience is storyable. In contrast, some events may not be appropriately told as stories.

Marci: If Marie's the one who always gets into fights

how come you're the one who's always in trouble with the teachers?

Stacie: Cause Marie do the fightin' and I do the talkin'

Although relationships between talkers and fighters rarely work out so neatly, Stacie's explanation demonstrates the important and precarious relationship between narrative and event and, specifically, between the participants in an event and the reporters who claim the right to talk about what happened. This relationship, which can also be understood as the relationship between text and context, is an essential part of social conventions for communication and represents a missing piece of the puzzle of understanding the uses of oral and written communication in everyday life. The adolescent world presents a particularly transparent case of the relationship between an event (a fight) and a narrative (a fight story). The adolescents worked toward the possibility of replacing physical battles with verbal negotiations (and defined growing up in those terms). However, the relationship between the event and the narrative was not as simple as learning to talk about what happened, since narratives are never such direct references. The question of authorship of one's account, and the concomitant right to report what others had said, along with considerations of audience, presented as many problems for talkers, such as Stacie, as did fighting.

This chapter focuses on multiple tellings, oral and written, about a fight. Unlike most of the fight stories told at the junior high, these stories concern a fight that actually occurred. The multiple tellings provide an opportunity for the close examination of differences between oral and written versions and between versions told among adolescents, among adults, and told (and written) by adolescents for adults.

A few points elaborated in earlier chapters have a bearing on this discussion. First, the story is not the same as the event described; further, events are categories of experience, not to be confused with the experiences themselves. Stories are one way of categorizing experiences as events. Second, stories build shared knowledge by creating categories of experience as tellable. Fights are one such category. Third, clarity is not necessarily the professed or assumed goal of storytelling, and stories may conceal as well as reveal. Mutual intelligibility involves more than clarity and depends upon shared means of communication (codes, narrative devices, framing devices) rather than upon pieces of information.

Rarely are so many versions, oral and written, told by adolescents, teachers, and reporters available for research. Although retellings are a common phenomenon in everyday storytelling, custom decrees that ordinarily one may not be the audience for more than a few versions. The versions presented here were not solicited; rather, they were collected as they were told, as part of everyday conversations.

Relationships between narrative and experience

Stories categorize experience. The relationship between stories and experience is always problematic and can be stated in many ways. Most generally, it is a relationship between reality and the representation or appearance of reality, or between signifier and signified, or between language and action, or between art and life. The notion of a relationship between stories and experience should be understood as only one of many ways of stating the problem.

Stories, experiences, and events are different entities. Roughly, experiences are the stream of overlapping activities that make up everyday life. Events, unlike experiences, have potentially identifiable beginnings and endings. Events are a category of experience; stories are constructions of experience. Stories frame experiences as events. Stories are one of the forms that transform experiences into bounded units with beginnings, endings, and foci, and events are one kind of bounded unit. A story is the representation of an event segmented into sequentially arranged units.

There has been a tendency in narrative scholarship to assign experience a sense of objectivity so that experience becomes invested with reality, in contrast to stories, which are supposedly understood subjectively. This unfortunate tendency has led scholars to confuse events with experiences, as though one could experience an event. Events are ways of categorizing experience; in a sense, the category “event” makes experiences accessible to understanding by providing a language for talking about experience.

As noted in Chapter 2, Mexicanos draw on a wide range of accepted speech forms, and they know intuitively which types of expressions are appropriate for which social contexts. Growing up in a given speech community presents the language learner with innumerable opportunities to discover the rules that relate form, context, and meaning. When a researcher leaves her or his own native speech community and establishes contact with another group of human beings, however, no such common body of experience is available to smooth the initial encounters. The same problem arises when investigators work with a different social class or ethnic group within their own society. In filling this gap, researchers commonly draw on the communicative device their speech community views as the best means of obtaining large bodies of information in the least amount of time–the interview. The implicit reasoning seems to be that interviews allow the researcher to assume control of the type and quantity of information being conveyed. This enables him or her to circumvent the usual constraints on the transmission of knowledge (e.g., kinship, age, degree of intimacy, gender, initiation, etc.)

I will argue that this process is really not quite as smooth and successful as we seem to imagine. Our ability to banish the native communicative norms that operate in other environments is far from complete, and the natives' own discourse rules have an odd way of infiltrating the interview.

I must admit to having painted a critical picture of the state of interviewing in the sdcial sciences and linguistics. I initiated the discussion by pointing to a number of serious flaws in the literature on interviewing and by relating the persistence of crucial theoretical problems to a lack of methodological sophistication. Chapter 3 pointed to some of the procedural problems that can impede interviewing and can create serious problems in analyzing the data. I argued in Chapter 4 that native metacommunicative routines can inform the use of interview techniques in a given culture as well as provide precisely the types of data that are crucial for many problems in social scientific research.

It would thus be far from surprising if the reader were to have gained the impression that I am attempting to convince researchers to stop interviewing altogether. Indeed I am not. Interviews are highly useful tools for exploring a host of problems. As noted in Chapter 1, the theoretical and methodological insights that have emerged from such fields as the ethnography of communication, conversational analysis, language acquisition research, and other fields have provided us with the skills necessary for conducting and analyzing interviews in a more appropriate fashion.

Similarly, I am not arguing that greater methodological sophistication can only be gained through becoming a sociolinguist or at least developing more interest in the communicative dimensions of the interview than in the problems under study.

This book has been a real challenge to write, and I hope it proves equally challenging to its readers. Nothing is harder than opening up questions that we already think are solved, finding crevasses and quicksand in what everyone sees as solid ground. Overcoming our reluctance to open Pandora's boxes is especially acute when it comes to “purely methodological” issues. Collecting data is viewed as an intrinsically sound, if not necessarily glamorous, pursuit. The realm of pure theory is exciting and important, even if empirically minded skeptics are likely to dismiss one's efforts as vapid. But methodology loses on both counts, being generally regarded as both mundane and unimportant.

These prejudices guided my initial work on the subject. More than a decade of fieldwork with Mexicanos in northern New Mexico had sensitized me to ways in which the interview, as a speech event, limits speakers' abilities to use expressions, such as proverbs, that are deeply rooted in a given interaction. This induced me to review field recordings of interviews in examining the nature of this mode of communication and the problems it presents. I was not surprised to find that my initial interviews (in 1972) had encountered numerous sociolinguistic obstacles (see Chapter 3). I subsequently adopted many features of the dialect, learned some basic social skills, became acquainted with the residents, and gained a sense of their background and present concerns.

Interviewing has become a powerful force in modern society. Starting almost from birth, we are confronted by questions posed by educators, psychologists, pollsters, medical practitioners, and employers, and we listen to flamboyant interviewers on radio and television. Our skill at playing the role of interviewee influences our success in education and employment; our answers will help determine whether we receive such basic services as bank loans or disability pay. On a societal level, polling “pundits” are no longer employed exclusively by such specialized agencies as the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago or the Gallup Poll. Major corporations spend millions of dollars on market surveys that estimate customer wants and resources. Pollsters form integral members of major political campaigns, and their findings have a profound effect on the way candidates approach the voters. “Exit polls” now enable the media to advise West Coast residents as to how the East Coast has voted in national elections – even before the polls have closed.

Research in the social sciences is the great bastion of the interview. Estimates suggest that 90 percent of all social science investigations use interview data (cf. Brenner 1981b: 115). Interviews are used in a wide variety of social contexts. A central component of the anthropological tool kit, interviews have produced a good bit of the information we possess about contemporary non-Western societies. Interviewing is, however, also a mainstay of research within modern industrial societies.

The data were collected in Córdova, a community of about 700 inhabitants in the mountains of northern New Mexico. The residents are Mexicanos, with the exception of one recent Mexican immigrant, two middle-aged Anglo-Americans who have married Córdovans, and occasionally a few transient Anglo-American youths. Mexicanos are descendants of primarily Spanish and Mexican citizens who settled in New Mexico and southern Colorado during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Their ancestry includes a significant Native American element, but the Mexicanos consider themselves to be culturally Hispanic.

Córdova lies in the extreme southeast corner of Rio Arriba County (see map, Figure 1). The foothills area that includes the community is bordered on the east by the Sangre de Cristo mountain range; Córdova lies at the base of the highest peak in this section of the range, the Truchas Peak, which stands at 13,102 feet of elevation. The foothills extend some fourteen road miles to the west, where they are severed by the area's major water course–the Rio Grande. Córdova is situated in a small enclosed canyon, the Quemado Valley. The valley, which runs roughly east and west, is 6,800 feet above sea level. The surrounding hillsides can boast only sparse range grasses, cacti, and small trees, primarily piñons and junipers. The scarcity of arable land and the harshness of the environment are compounded by the scant and variable rainfall–an average of ten to fifteen inches per year (Maker, Folks, Anderson, and Link 1973:6–7).

The preceding pages have hardly eschewed theoretical issues. Thus far, however, theory has been used primarily as a means of highlighting the problems inherent in interview techniques, exploring their theoretical roots, and pointing the way to methodological progress. Such discussion is not, in and of itself, sufficient to show that the adoption of a critical perspective on interviewing is requisite to theoretical advances in the social sciences and linguistics. But the lack of a critical perspective on interview techniques is tied to a number of fundamental theoretical obstacles.

My thesis is that methodological shortcomings have both emerged from and in turn reinforced these theoretical quagmires. The problem is that the goals of social-scientific and linguistic research lie beyond the confines of this highly circumscribed process. The only way to break this pattern is to raise methodological questions from the inferior status they currently enjoy, explore the interpenetrations of theoretical and methodological problems, and revise methodology in the light of theory and vice versa.

A number of important theoretical advances have been made in the last two decades. Scholars from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives have moved away from an emphasis on static structures and codes as abstracted from human conduct. Research has focused increasingly on the way codes relate to messages, or structure to action, and the manner in which the system is transformed through use. Social–cultural anthropology, for example, has moved away from viewing culture as monolithic and static toward analyzing the way in which cultural systems are instantiated in individual events by concrete persons (cf. Crick 1976; Geertz 1973).