The Dialogics of Southern Quechua Narrative

Abstract

Southern Quechua conversational narratives are dialogical in four senses. First, at the formal level, the narrative is produced between interlocutors; second, narrative embeds discourse within discourse by means of quotations or indirect discourse; third, implicit or hidden dialogue between texts is brought out through the intertextual reference to other coexisting narratives; and, fourth, there is a complex pattern of participation through which dialogue takes place not only between actual speaking individuals but between distinct, intersecting participant roles that evoke multiple interactional frameworks. Rigorous attention to each level allows us to integrate narrative analysis more closely into ethnographic study, in terms of both the social tactics of specific narrative events and the broader discursive frameworks that they illuminate.

The Handbook of Narrative Analysis

“…Instead, with the perspectives of Goffman's (1979) notion of footing and notion of heteroglossia, one can treat "cultural identities" in narrative as multivoiced productions. This multivoicedness results from participants' coordinated presentations, evaluations, and enactments of multiple images of selves and others, across here-and-now narrating and there-andthen narrated events (Mannheim 1998;Keane 2011;Koven 2002Koven , 2007Koven , 2013a. In particular, I draw from recent scholarship that treats such images as voices or figures of personhood (Inoue 2006;Wortham, Mortimer, and Allard 2011).…”

The Grammatical Expression of Dialogicity in Muylaq’ Aymara Narratives

“…The Aymara narrative, and perhaps the Andean narrative in general (see Mannheim and van Vleet 1998), can be thought of as a complex web insofar as each arises from the personal knowledge of the narrator, the shared knowledge of the community, and the existence of other narratives known by members of the community. A given narrative is not discrete: not only are its contents informed by other narratives, but they also inform the telling of future narratives.…”

Shifting voices, shifting worlds

“…Indeed, the distinction between storytelling and everyday conversation is not a hard and fast one in Andean verbal culture. As a number of scholars (such as Howard-Malverde 1989;Allen 1993Allen -1994Mannheim and van Vleet 1998) have shown, on the one hand, stories may crop up in the course of conversation and, on the other hand, story performances may be punctuated by genre-shifting, whereby narrators, at certain points in the narrative event 'break out of performance' (Hymes 1981) and revert to conversational commentary directed at the audience. While there are distinct grammatical markers that keep conversational and traditional narrative separate on the formal level, as I shall summarize below in relation to Huamalíes Quechua, the way in which the genre boundaries blur (Howard-Malverde 1989) is a key feature of storytelling performance with implications for the operation of evidentiality and epistemic modality.…”