Disorderly Discourse Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality [Paperback]

Conflict plays a crucial role in social interactions, and representations of conflict are an important aspect of language. Stories and narratives involving everything from war to playground disputes generate, sustain, mediate, and represent conflict at all levels of social organization. Still, despite the vast amount of research on conflict and narrative in a number of disciplines, no one has yet examined how these play off of each other; in fact, most studies treat narrative merely as a source of informationaboutconflict rather then as a part of conflict's process. The contributors to this collection argue that language consists of socially and politically situated practices that are differentially distributed on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and other categories. Each of them, writing from the perspective of their own disciplines, challenges previous assumptions about narrative and social conflict as they interpret a range of disputes that emerge in a variety of settings. Taken in total, these essays substantially further our theoretical and methodological understanding of narrative and conflict and how they intersect.

This collection constitutes a significant contribution to anthropological linguistics, the ethnography of communication, ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguistics. It will interest students of conflict/conflict talk in several fields. --Allen Grimshaw,Indiana University

[T]he essays reveal a great deal about the ethnographic realities of the present, and they show that linguistic anthropology can be particularly effective at illuminating cultural phenomena. --Journal of Anthropological Research

This collection is blessed with an excellent and very thorough introduction as well as a high standard of carefully written, individual essays. It should appeal to a broad readership...will interest those intrigued with broadly philosophical questions about narrative. --American Anthropol³6