Placeholder text

Go to cart

Telling Our Selves

By Chase Hensel

Telling Our Selves

By Chase Hensel

0 - Default Title
Description
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.
Product details
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
236
Release Date:
1996-11-28
Publication Date:
1996-11-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
019509476X
ISBN13:
9780195094763
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
540 g
Height:
157 cm
Width:
235 cm
Thickness:
19 cm
Buy on Amazon
Currently sold out