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Workshop Considers Conversational Narrative and Interaction
The stories ranged from a second-hand recounting of a Finnish man's ghost sighting to a story set in Columbus, Ohio, in the Easton Town Center, where two distinct social groups interacted over the appropriate use of public space, their interaction influenced by racial and socio-economic factors. In both of these examples, Dr. Bromberg, Dr. Amy Shuman, professor of Folklore at Ohio State, and the class considered what the rules for narrative were in the presented scenario, and the risks and obligations involved in the story. The group looked at how the narrator established himself or herself in relation to the story, and how the narrative illustrated the ways that story builds and establishes relationships between people.
"This workshop was really useful to me because I do a lot of fieldwork, transcribing conversations," said Nancy Yan, a Ph.D. student in Folklore. "We looked very closely at people's transcriptions of interviews, and it was really interesting to analyze what people were saying and what assumptions people had-and what world views they had but weren't expressing. It was useful in looking at my own work-to look at interviewing as an oral interaction."
In a well-attended lecture on the last day of the workshop, Dr. Bromberg read from her dissertation, "Building a Social World through Conversational Narrative." Bromberg wrote, "By telling personal stories we build our social identity; by exchanging or withholding our stories we manage our social relationships; and through story exchanges we construe and even change, society." The lecture was sponsored by Project Narrative and the Narrative and Cognitive Theory Working Group.
Most recently, Dr. Bromberg directed a community story project in her home community, a planned community village in Beaux Arts, Washington. The resulting book, Talking about Beaux Arts, is a collage of conversational anecdotes, taped, transcribed and presented in ethnopoetic format, with accompanying photographs. Over eighty former and current residents participated in 18 story exchange sessions-some lived in the Village as far back as 1922.
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