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Telling Our Selves : Ethnicity and Discourse in Southwestern Alaska - Chase Hensel

Telling Our Selves

Ethnicity and Discourse in Southwestern Alaska

By: Chase Hensel

Paperback | 19 October 1996

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In this book, Chase Hensel examines how Yup''ik Eskimos and non-natives construct and maintain gender and ethnic identities through strategic talk about hunting, fishing, and processing. Although ethnicity is overtly constructed in terms of either/or categories, the discourse of Bethel residents suggests that their actual concern is less with whether one is native or non-native, than how native one is in a given context. In the interweaving of subsistence practices and subsistence discourse, ethnicity is constantly recreated. This type of discourse occurs in a conversational setting where ethnicity is both implicitly and explicitly contested. While the book is ethnographic, it is not "about Eskimo''s." Rather it is about how Bethel residents use similar forms of discourse to strategically validate disparate identities. In this context, the homeland of Yup''ik Eskimos, subsistence is the focus of people''s interactions, regardless of their ascriptive ethnicity. Even people who spend little time in subsistence activities spend a great deal of time in subsistence conversation. Unlike traditional ethnographies which focus on traditions, and consequently tend to reify the past, this contemporary ethnography focuses on contemporary preoccupations of identity and meaning. The ethnographic description becomes a device for preserving and explicating the opulent polysemy of situated talk.
Industry Reviews
"A unique, sparkling piece of work that should attract wide attention."--Anthony Woodbury, University of Texas, Austin "Hensel is a superb linguistic anthropologist....It's definitely a significant contribution to the field."--William J. de Reuse, University of Arizona "Telling Our Selves is a fascinating ethnography of the Yupiit and an interesting analysis of the symbolic values of their subsistence practices....Hansel's book succeeds in showing the complexity of the interrelationship between language and other social practices."--Discourse and Society "This book is a pleasure to read; it is a major contribution to the development of interactional sociolinguistics, on the one hand, and of social practice theory and critical discourse analysis on the other....It is a fine book that is both theoretically important and ethnographically rich."--Language in Society "A unique, sparkling piece of work that should attract wide attention."--Anthony Woodbury, University of Texas, Austin "Hensel is a superb linguistic anthropologist....It's definitely a significant contribution to the field."--William J. de Reuse, University of Arizona "This is a book that one can enjoy, appreciate, and learn from at several different levels. As well as being a scholarly study of subsistence... it is also a fairly comprehensive portrait of contemporary Yupik life."--Anthropological Linguistics "In my opinion, this is a major book in the field of the anthropology of language and discourse....I recommend this book to anyone interested in discourse practises, and contemporary Yup'ik or Inuit identity."--Journal of Inuit Studies "Hensel's careful technique of treating the raw data of interviews makes this book compulsory reading for those students of anthropology who are preparing themselves for their first fieldwork."--Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute "...an important contribution to our understanding of ethnicity...I recommend this book to anyone interested in ethnicity, the peoples of Alaska, hunter-gatherer subsistence patterns, cultural ecology, the relationship between native peoples and non-natives, sociolinguistics, and ethnography in general."--Notes on Anthropology

Other Editions and Formats

Hardcover

Published: 1st May 1996

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