Original scientific paper
VOICING FOLK FOR THE ACADEMY: INTERDISCURSIVITY AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN A NORTH DALMATIAN ETHNOGRAPHY, 1899-1900
Pieter Plas
Abstract
This paper examines the specific discursive realizations of 'folk identities' in a north Dalmatian ethnographic account from the end of the nineteenth century in the context of early Croatian institutional-
ethnographic practice. By treating the text in question as a site for the dialogic-interactive mediation and production of 'authentic' collective identities between local/folk (dialectal) and centralized, academic-institutional (standard) discourses, it also aims at reassessing its value as a historical and philological source for the study of ethno-cultural identity formation in the region. Adopting a pragmatic/discourse-analytic perspective, and devoting particular
attention to dialogic aspects of the entextualization and contextualization process, our investigation seeks to elucidate latent and overt ideologies, categories and 'performances' of identity in the ethnographic text-as-interdiscursive-construction. The analysis reveals the different levels/orders and strategies/processes of discursive identity formation that emerge from the text, as indexed e.g. by stereotypical predications and attributions. It concludes – and confirms – that systematic and methodic attention for dialogism and polyphony is indispensable to a reliable historical pragmatics of 'ethnographic reality', 'identities' included.
Keywords
identity; performance; dialogism; ethnographic discourse; Croatian (Bosnian, Serbian)
Hrčak ID:
31212
URI
Publication date:
23.12.2008.
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