Iterative emplotment scenarios: Being ‘the only Ethiopian’

Abstract

The realism-social constructionism debate has been consequential over the last several decades. Silverstein’s vocabulary of micro-/macro-contexts aids in understanding why the tension can be a useful epistemological heuristic for discourse analysts. Narratives were collected in focus groups of Ethiopian-Israeli college students. Five narratives were selected for ethnic mentions and found to have a particular ‘iterative’ ‘emplotment scenario’ (IES) – recurrent storylines and settings – across tellers and telling events. ‘the only Ethiopian’ is an IES of being sent away to a majority-White elementary/secondary school, socially isolated and denigrated. How are we to understand it when a particular plotline and setting recur in our corpora? I argue that although each story and storytelling is unique, they all borrow from a larger-than-single-telling, already existent trope, that is, a budding master narrative. Taken together, a unique view of a particular socio-cultural process – in this case, something of what it means to be an Ethiopian Israeli – emerges.

Keywords

Conventionalization identity iterative emplotment scenarios narrative practices positioning small stories

Introduction

Do we construct our own cosmologies and identities, or are they formed prior to any given interaction and provided to us? The realism-social constructionism debate has presented a significant tension in the social sciences over the last several decades, where many studies (including in a sister journal to this) make camp on one or the other side. For instance, this tension plays a central role in the exchange between Hammersley (2003a, 2003b, 2003c) and Potter (2003a, 2003b), wherein Hammersley points to implicit realisms in Potter’s work, whereas Potter (2003b) stresses the realness of the constructions he analyzes, as well as a constructionist reading of ‘prerequisites for the analysis’ that are otherwise taken as a realist’s historical assumptions a priori to analysis (p. 800). Are social constructionism and realism mutually exclusive and destined to never be resolved?

This article is not an attempt to resolve this tension, which would be impractical as it is impossible; rather, the purpose here is to put forward the tension as a useful heuristic in conceptualizing how creative/effective and rote/appropriate participants are in any particular interaction. The tension can, thus, serve as an aid to analysts in conceiving of their own epistemologies. The theoretical framework of the argument is provided by Silverstein’s (2003) depiction of the mechanisms at work at any given t₀ of interactional real time and its relation to both past (t_−1…) and future (t_1…) via the pragmatic functions of presupposition and entailment, thereby justifying both realist and social constructionist underpinnings. Below, this framework is operationalized with Georgakopoulou’s (2005, 2008, 2013a) narrative terminology: ‘iterative’ ‘emplotment scenario’ (IES) – repeating storylines and settings – where a main aim of small story research is the capturing of iterativity (2013b: 203). IESs constitute a unique case to be analyzed by Silverstein’s presupposition/entailment lens as their repetitiveness is indicative of an already existent conventionality, yet their particularities and uniqueness index their emergent quality.

At an empirical level, the purpose of this article is to argue for the existence of a particular IES that iterates across my corpus, thus creating a window into a larger socio-cultural process. This work emerges from a larger study of three focus group sessions in which a total of 46 prototypical narratives were collected among Ethiopian-Israeli college students, and finds five of these narratives across two of the sessions with the same basic plotline and setting. Following Georgakopoulou, I call this phenomenon an iterative emplotment scenario (IES); in particular, I call the IES found in my corpus ‘the only Ethiopian’, following participant phrasing. Below, I hope to argue that an IES is a budding ‘master narrative’ (De Fina, 2013), larger than a single telling event yet smaller than a full-blown master narrative. In fact, participants can be observed scaling their own utterances (Lempert, 2012) explicitly by making meta-iterative statements – mentions of recurrence – but also implicitly by virtue of the macro-parallelism (Urban, 2000 [1991]) their stories exhibit one to another.

The next section reviews literature that seeks to find a middle ground between realist and social constructionist positions.

Beyond the dichotomies

Within the realism-social constructionism debate, scholars readily engage each other sympathetically; much of the debate centers on whether to privilege the ‘finding’ or ‘making’ of knowledge, where both camps have recognized that the one entails the other (Bhaskar, 1993: 185–187; Shotter, 1993: 77), but this in no way resolves the tension. The realists say,

But if there are real socio-economic-political structures causing people in these ‘new’ times to be out of work, to feel isolated and/or to lose their sense of citizenship, then not to acknowledge this is to fall prey to the very ‘rational-invisibility’ of disorder … (Bhaskar, 1993: 187, emphasis in the original)

In other words, we constantly find ourselves in situations not of our own making (cf. Urry, 2000: 14). On the other hand,

A constructionist intelligibility opens what can be a precious space for reflection, reconsideration and possible reconstruction … We are prompted to explore alternative understandings of ‘what is the case’, and to locate meanings that enable us to go on in more adequate ways. (Gergen, 2001: 10)

In his seminal discussion of constructionism, Hacking (1999) writes that a title such as ‘The Social Construction of the Holocaust’ is generally unwanted and would be seen as an act of Holocaust denial (p. 4). And yet, constructionist narrative analysis has been conducted by Schiffrin (2002) in her collection of Holocaust oral histories:

Living through catastrophic events such as the Holocaust changes one’s life in multiple and complex ways … As social constructivist theories of identity (e.g. Gergen, 1987) suggest, the massive loss of significant and familiar ‘others’ not only disrupts one’s former sense of normal relationships and the moral order in which they are supposed to reside; it also threatens one’s sense of self as an integrated and continuous entity. (p. 310)

The title of Hacking’s work, The Social Construction of What?, is particularly poignant as it affords the opportunity to make subtle distinctions; Schiffrin’s analysis explicitly takes a social constructionist view of the self and a realist view of the world, which Hacking predicts for obvious reasons given the topic. Yet, being explicitly constructionist on identity and implicitly realist on the rest of the world is a wider feature of much narrative scholarship, but this cannot be the way to resolve the constructionist–realist tension.

Gergen, in a work whose stated purpose is to find common ground with realism, offers some answers that also speak back to Hacking’s comment on the social construction of the Holocaust. Gergen (2001) writes,

Further, in fine constructionist form, protagonists from both sides of the aisle would be happy to demonstrate how the Nationalist Socialist party – through the rationalization, glamourization and circulation of discourse within German culture – created the conditions leading to the Holocaust. (p. 17)

Here is a depiction of what a study of the social construction of the Holocaust would look like, which would be interesting to juxtapose against the moments found in Schiffrin’s oral histories. Gergen’s constructionism conceptualizes the genesis of these ‘invisible orders’ back to specific interactions and discourses, which then impose themselves on Schiffrin’s storytellers. Thus, scholarship interested in both ‘finding’ and ‘making’ is possible when it takes into account the durability of constructions manifest by their iterations. Below, I hope to construct a window into socio-cultural processes of a historical moment where a particular discourse/narrative begins to take shape. In doing so, I am in need of a technical vocabulary theoretically conceptualizing the givenness and the constructedness of talk.

Silverstein’s dialectics of sociolinguistic life

The discussion above requires theoretical mechanisms to clearly conceptualize how both realism and social constructionism operate in real-time discourse. In his article, Silverstein (2003) makes much larger points than I wish to make here; appropriately then, this overview is brief and selective. Therein, Silverstein presents his conceptualization of micro- and macro-contexts, respectively, for any hypothetical speech event. As to micro-contexts,

Now in relation to micro-social context in the most general sense, any such socially conventional indexical (Legi)sign [=type] is dialectically balanced between indexical presupposition and indexical entailment. That is, its indexical meaning is composed of two aspects. One is its indexical ‘appropriateness-to’ at-that-point autonomously known or constituted contextual parameters: what is already established between interacting sign-users, at least implicitly, as ‘context’ to which the propriety of their usage at t₀ appeals. The other is its indexical ‘effectiveness-in’ context: how contextual parameters seem to be brought into being – i.e., causally and hence existentially entailed – by the fact of usage of the indexical (Sin)sign [=token] itself. (2003: 195)

The inclusion of both realist and constructionist underpinnings is apparent in his explication – ‘what is already established’ and ‘brought into being’. Silverstein goes on to qualify that the relationship is not simply a linear one from past to future, but is also mediated vertically by many other layers. Nonetheless, presuppositions have a past orientation and entailments have a future orientation, as is evident from his Figure 1 (2003: 195).

As regards the macro-context, he writes,

… cultural values as articulable and rearticulable in micro-contextual interaction are notoriously ‘ideological’, that is, they emerge in the micro-contextual dialectic as essentializations (frequently straightforward naturalizations) of a kind of ‘logic’ of evaluational stances (good/bad; preferred/dispreferred; normal/deviant; etc.) underlying social partitioning as the presuppositions/entailments of semiotic action that instantiate such partitions of social space. An essentialization or naturalization is a discovery of ‘essences’, qualities or characteristics predicable-as-true of individual things (including persons, events, signs of all sorts), and in particular predicable-as-true independent of the micro-contextual instance of presentation of the thing at issue. That is, to the ideological perception, essences perdure, and, when naturalized, they are grounded in cosmic absolutes, or at least relatively more cosmic and absolute frameworks-of-being than the micro-contextual indexicality with respect to which they manifest themselves … (2003: 202–203)

For Silverstein, inhabitable categories of identity are composed of partitions of social space, values associated thereof, essentialization of those partitions and values, and authorization via ritual practice of the essentializations. As in the micro-context, both realist and constructionist understandings are brought into relation and are part of a cultural process that perdures across single events. Further, note that ‘rearticulable in micro-contextual interaction’ is a key notion for the present argument as it is a process of iteration that results in naturalized essences. Rather than linger further on discussion of this technical vocabulary, I attempt to incorporate it into the following analysis, which should also serve to further elucidate its usefulness. The next section develops the particular discursive construct of this study for analysis.

Iterative emplotment scenarios

In studying the mechanisms of colonization and proselytism of the Maya by Spanish priests, Hanks (2010) finds that iteration is a key practice in affecting habitus across the masses, starting at the level of the individual:

… repeated or highly valued practices tend toward routinization and memorization and can become automatic for the actor. Eventually, the categories (identifications and exclusions) that imbue these routinized dispositions come to have the status of ways of seeing the world and oneself. (p. 95)

Iterativity provides conceptualization of how particular practices emerge as more or less enregistered – socially recognizable as indexical of a particular group of people (Agha, 2007a).

Taking a more strictly narrative focus, Georgakopoulou (2013b) follows Ricoeur in defining emplotment (or sometimes emplotment scenarios) as ‘the act of arranging events together, grasping them into a coherent whole. This involves bringing diverse and potentially heterogeneous events into an imaginative order’ (p. 224), and often they are of two major types – transgressions and routines (2013a: 96). Imaginative orderings are not arbitrary; they indicate storytellers’ orientations, conceptualizations, and positions to a world of objects and processes. The term scenario, then, is likened to Agha’s (2007b) use of chronotope, which he defines as ‘semiotic representations of time and place peopled by certain social types’ (p. 321). For instance, in collecting life stories from Latvians of their experiences of the Soviet invasion and its consequences, Skultans (1997) finds that ‘Each [story] spoke of an individual life and yet rested on a common structure. My argument … is that the similarities between these life histories derive both from Latvian history and from membership of a symbolic and textual community’ (p. 761). In this, Skultans speaks to the constructionist–realist tension.

A particularly relevant study to view through Georgakopoulou’s lens is Wortham et al. (2011), who study a particular IES called ‘payday muggings’ set in the U.S. East Coast suburb of Marshall. This town, traditionally made up of Whites and Blacks, has witnessed a recent influx of Mexican immigrants. ‘Payday muggings’ feature a particular emplotment, which can be reduced to three crucial plot points: (1) Mexicans work for Whites; (2) Mexicans get paid on Friday; (3) Blacks mug Mexicans on pay day. This drastic reduction can be developed by the following plot points depending on the position of the teller (to be further developed later): (1) Mexican immigrants settle in Marshall; (2) Blacks view Mexicans as encroaching on their neighborhoods and taking their jobs; (3) Whites like hiring Mexicans, who are depicted as better workers than Blacks; (4) banks do not allow Mexican immigrants to open bank accounts due to a lack of paperwork and thereby leave them no choice but to carry cash on their persons; (5) sometimes muggings are reported to the police and sometimes not.

Now, what is particularly interesting is that this emplotment iterates and circulates across the three communities represented as the collectivized figures in the story, such that the particular positionings therein depend on which collective the teller associates with. White participants were readily available to tell these stories, whereas Black participants were hesitant, and Mexicans were always portrayed as victims. Within this iterative emplotment, Wortham et al. (2011) investigated racialization processes and models of personhood. These plug directly into identity:

the models of personhood … are indexed by these narratives as they move and change across space and time (Agha, 2007a; Agha and Wortham, 2005). In doing this, we focus on the ‘congealing’ (Silverstein, 1992) or ‘enregisterment’ (Agha, 2007a) that occurs when signs of identity and the models of personhood that they index become durably associated with some group. Models can stabilize in this way across interactional, ontogenetic or historical time, as work done across contexts allows a model of some group to become presupposed. Such an approach allows us to study the emergence and solidification of racialized models as they are constructed and revised over time. (p. 8)

The unique affordances presented by narrative allow for vivid configurations and arrangements of social space by congealing an assemblage of diacritics – markers of difference – into a more solidified ‘model of personhood’ embedded in the socio-historico-political context of a storyworld. When a group of people are depicted as partitioned into Whites, Blacks, and Mexicans, each with their own particular conventionaliz(ed/ing) ways of acting within a particular story, then this arrangement becomes indexical of the ‘lived experience’ (cf. Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008: 379) for those people and then frames their view of ongoing events.

The ‘payday muggings’ study particularly corresponds with the present argumentation, as the authors write:

We argue that the stories are so common – even with muggings declining and even when narrators do not themselves know anyone who has experienced a mugging – because these stories help Marshall residents make sense of each other at a time of rapid demographic change. (Wortham et al., 2011: E57)

In other words, there is a reality where muggings decline alongside constructions that they persist; the latter is no less ‘real’ as the residents construct each other and their worlds to cope with real demographic changes maintaining partitions in social space across time. In this, the tension between the realist and constructionist positions is explicitly illustrated. Now that the theoretical and operationalizable vocabulary has been set out, the next section delineates the methods of the study.

Methods and ethnographic vignette

At the time of data collection, protesting against various discriminations of the Ethiopian-Israeli community (the approximate nation-wide population 115+k) was ongoing, which awakened me to the community’s plight and set me forth on a scholarly path investigating identity processes among individuals belonging to the community. Over the years since the data collection, the community has protested on several occasions, the most recent of which occurred this past year over a case of police brutality and general discrimination. The current study is an attempt to uncover some of the processes involved in what it means to be an Ethiopian Israeli during these turbulent historical moments.

Participants in this study were all Ethiopian Israelis enrolled in a program at one of Israel’s private institutions of higher education. The purpose of the program is to select successful Ethiopian Israelis and send them to the various schools within the college. Success is mostly indicated by a military career; the women are mostly officers and the men are mostly in elite units. Their psychometric scores, however, are not taken into account in their acceptance process to the program as those scores are viewed by the administration as being culturally biased. Participants are not native English speakers, but their relative fluency does indicate their success and social mobility in a modern Westernized country. Initially, I – an American immigrant to Israel since 2003 – was assigned to facilitate an extra-curricular course (no grade) supporting their conversational English skills; the program would run for all three years of the students’ undergraduate life. The course has since been accredited by the college, and students now receive grades for their work in the course; all data collection took place before accreditation. Data collection took place in the second semester of the 2006–2007 academic year, and this was the second year the program was being run on campus. By the second semester, I had already known the second-year students for a year and a half and the first-year students for half a year, such that I had already built a rapport with them to the point where some of them (not all) felt comfortable enough to broach taboo topics, both on and off the record. Participation in the study was voluntary and consent was given in writing.

Participants were asked to tell stories from different periods of time in their life. The participants were given 15 minutes to brainstorm on a piece of paper. Participants were asked to divide their papers into three columns: in one column they were asked to divide their life into periods of experience, in the second to list the stories from each period, and in the third to add any moral or lesson that emerged from the story. Next, participants told their earliest story to their peers in a round. After every round, the next round of stories began moving forward through the various periods in their lives until all the stories were told. The stories were recorded on an MP3 recorder and later transcribed. Participants were asked to tell stories, but they chose what story to tell: semi-spontaneous, that is, solicited but not elicited. Participants were told that I was gathering data for my doctorate and that I was interested in their stories. Data were produced in three focus group sessions: session 1 had four participants and produced 19 narratives; session 2 had three participants and produced nine narratives; and session 3 had five participants and produced 18 narratives (in each of the latter two sessions, one participant did not wish to participate in the study, but still took part in the activity), with a total of 46 narratives.

Of the 46 narratives, this study first selected narratives for mentions of ethnic/religious categories (exogenous identity category labels), of which there were 13 with a total of 109 single mentions therein. Seven of these narratives were told in the first session with 88 mentions, four narratives in the second session with 19 mentions, and only two in the last session with three mentions. The first session overwhelmingly contains the lion’s share, which would suggest that once the exogenous categories were put into play, they remained relevant throughout the session; ethnic mentions were usually found clustered together, with only a handful of cases where a single mention was not proximal to another. This study then further selected, from among the 13 narratives, five that shared a particular IES. However, I intentionally do not analyze these narratives as ‘second stories’ (Ryave, 1978; Sacks, 1992) as I am interested here in that the second batch were told on a separate occasion by tellers not present at the first session and thus not in response to the first tellings.

There is a component of the interaction order that is particularly relevant to the findings of this study. At the time of data collection (storytelling time), the 13 participants represented a very small minority on campus and a mostly newly arrived one at that. They were dispersed among six schools within the college, and thus many found themselves as the only Ethiopian student in their various classes. Often, the participants of the study were the first Ethiopians any of their classmates had ever met. With ‘the only Ethiopian’ IES, storyworld time and storytelling time inform one another in particular ways, as storytellers explore various ways of handling their present situation through shared rehashings of past ones.

Being ‘the only Ethiopian’ in class: An IES

The five narratives are analyzed below in the order in which they were told, and they are partitioned by the two focus group sessions in which they occurred.

The first session

The following narrative is divided into two sections – the opening and the main events – so as to deal with them separately. The first two lines orient to the interactional setting of the classroom and activity, then lines 3–18 constitute the lead up to the events of the story, which are presented later (lines 19–44):

DD – ‘the only Ethiopian girl in my class’

1 ok, this is weird

2 =I mean I’m not used to it (P)

3 so: ok so: uh when I was growing up I always had two worlds like worlds

4 =like um high school my high school and my junior high school and my whatever me

kita alef {first grade}

and everything

5 I always I was always like the only Ethiopian girl? uh in my class

6 cause the whole like everyone uh the whole absorption center the whole Ethiopians went to another school.

7 and my mom was just like oh I don’t want her to go there?

8 and uh: I kind of like lived in a different in two different worlds worlds

9 like y’know they had different codes and and languages that I spoke with the Ethi with the Ethiopians

10 and the different ones that I spoke with um: with the Israelis?

11 but I kind of I kind of like y’know succeeded to fit? everything where its supposed to be

12 and like I was adjusting? and stuff (P)

13 until um: I was in uh: in junior high

14 and uh: I had like my whole like I was y’know pop kind of popular whatever

15 =y’know I had good friends

16 I had fun in classes

17 and y’know I never felt different?

18 because I don’t know I kind of like adjusted well I guess

This excerpt bears features of big, ‘reflective’ stories usually found in interview settings as it chunks big swaths of time. Note the explicit meta-iterative utterance setting the scenario and framing the iterativity of the event: ‘I always I was always like the only Ethiopian girl in my class’ (line 5). Like in all the ‘the only Ethiopian’ stories, the storytellers as figures in their own stories are not the agents of their isolation; a parent is. In line 7, DD voices her mother as the agent deciding to send DD to a different school from that of the rest of the Ethiopians at the absorption center. Her isolation is forced upon her; but unlike some of the other tellers of this IES, DD initially presents herself as successfully navigating both ‘codes’ only to later contrast it with a story of isolation and discrimination, ‘the only Ethiopian’. DD builds the whole premise of the frame for the ensuing narrative on her relationship to the relevant ethnic/national category, namely that of distinct and separate ‘two worlds’. The social types that people each world speak different codes, and DD is fluent and well-adjusted to both. Storytelling and storyworld time run parallel as the storytelling event takes place within a course for Ethiopian students to improve their conversational English, and yet the course takes place within a larger academic setting based in the Israeli context. In the excerpt above, DD claims to be well versed in navigating both spaces.

Thus, the presuppositions revolve around taken-for-granted cultural differences that impose a particular order on the storyteller as a figure in her own narrative. The entailments involve the construction of a particular position of popularity and know-how within the imposed divisive order. However, the realist–constructionist divide is not so clear-cut; an inherent complexity lies in the effectiveness of the construction of this divisive reality by the storyteller as parasitic on its appropriateness to a conventionality of distinguishing cultural differences, especially in immigrant narratives (Baynham and De Fina, 2005), when among in-group members. On the other side, DD can only make effective entailments by virtue of the reality of herself as an embodied entity positioned within a particular historical moment at a particular physical location among other embodied entities, all of whose family genealogies originate in a particular global region, i.e. Ethiopia, all of which has a materiality that imposes its own ‘invisible’ structures and orders. Thus, both aspects of the tension are evident simultaneously in the talk (not organized by past vs present) operating across various layers at any one moment and leading to the conclusion that our constructions are made of real (found) constructs, themselves constructed at some prior point.

The second half of DD’s narrative is designed to come in stark contrast with its first half. The next segment begins exactly where we left off; here, DD begins to recount the particular event that illustrates the points she made in the previous segment. This is a complicated narrative doubly embedded in two parallel historical moments – the ‘Blood Chapters’: these were two instances where Magen David Adom (the Israeli counterpart to the Red Cross) were found to be dumping Ethiopian-Israeli blood donations in 1996 and 2007, with the stated purpose of protecting the general population from above-average rates of HIV-contaminated blood (see Seeman, 2010: 150–179 for a detailed account). DD’s relation to these two events is interesting in that she was a child during the first event and among the organizers of the protest during the second event. Storyworld time is set in the former and storytelling time is set in the latter:

DD cont’d – ‘the only Ethiopian girl in my class’

19 and I and once and um: (P) my best friend her father was a was a profess was a doctor ya

20 ya he was a doctor in

Hadassah (hospital in Jerusalem)

21 and u:m this one time after the whole blood? demonstration uh: got blown

22 y’know the whole? story

23 uh (P) the next morning she was we were sitting down together? of course and everything

24 and uh we were talking? about it

25 and like I don’t even about how we got to this discussion,

26 and apparently? her father was a doctor said

27 its very justified like whatever they did?

28 because y’know all the Ethiopians have you most a lot of them have HIV

29 but I guess? he kind of like explained that to kids

30 like and I don’t know how exactly he explained to her

31 because she was a kid? of course

32 he didn’t ask the right answers?

33 so I don’t know

34 so? uh: when we were sitting in my class?

35 she said something like ya? my father says he’s right and blah blah blah

36 =she was very y’know she thought her dad is some god or something

37 and if he says and everything he says is uh: is the: word of u:m

Allah {God}

38 so uh: I was got really hurt?

39 and uh we start arguing? about it,

40 and we um (P) and we had a big? big? fight

41 and the whole class came and supported her?

42 and uh I was really hurt,

43 that that’s I think the point when I discovered that uh y’know that’s the point when I thought that y’know I would always be different?

44 no matter y’know how much I would uh try to justify? that uh what’s it called to adjust? to the: Israeli society?

This story is designed to contrast with its opening presented in the previous segment; in the latter, DD claimed that she was always popular, and yet in the events of the story she is isolated from her classmates. DD casts her best friend as the antagonist, who builds her argument on an embedded exemplum (cf. De Fina, 2013: 52–54) in which her father is positioned as the authority and representative of the medical establishment. Note, the father’s depiction of ‘all Ethiopians’ (line 28, along with subsequent qualifying repairs in the same line) starkly contrasts with DD’s earlier ‘the only Ethiopian’. Classmates sided with DD’s friend, and DD is hurt (line 42). Lines 43–44 serve as a coda that highlight the contrast with the narrative’s opening – DD realizes her differences from her mainstream peers. However, DD continues to recount after the coda how she ran home to her mother, who provided the necessary comfort.

Thus, ‘the only Ethiopian’ IES is manifest; the storyteller’s past self is positioned in the story as an ethnically isolated schoolchild, a position in the service of the narrative’s complication. The question this study asks is, ‘does DD uniquely construct this particular way of depicting herself or is it an already existent trope that DD borrows from a larger discourse?’. Furthermore, how are we to understand DD’s depiction of herself as ‘the only Ethiopian’? Whatever the analysis of a single narrative may find, our understanding is indeed affected when we find other storytellers also constructing the same depictions in similar ways across different storytelling events. The argument put forth here understands both aspects of the question to be in play. Her depiction is both ‘appropriate to’ (presupposes) and ‘effective in’ (entails) the context (remember Silverstein’s vocabulary reviewed above). DD utilizes an ‘already established’ person-category and familiar narrative scenario of isolation at school, which is also an effective interactional tack designed to tell an interesting and meaningful story for a particular audience. This tack is a recurrent narrative practice, as evidenced in the following. However, DD constructs this particular arrangement of person-category, isolation, and accusation as a component of her personal experience/history in her own unique way – the story’s details and much of its content are not replicated.

The next narrative does not immediately follow after DD’s; it does, however, follow after another two rounds of storytelling. It begins with the facilitator, myself, organizing the activity by transitioning to the next storyteller, DN. He tells a story from his elementary school:

DN – ‘one black among all this white boys’

F 1 what’s next?

DN 2 next e:m

yesodi {elementary}

3 (P) eh: growing as a black children? among eh white children, in the class. (P)

4 its eh: y’know (P) its very strange

5 because eh: lot of questions,

6 because eh: of you being? eh black.

7 uh what are you doing at home?

8 and eh how do you came? to Israel

9 a lot of a lot of things like that.

10 and eh the fact I was kind of strange, eh brought me to a lot of eh fighting (P) with eh: children.

11 so one time I kicked a ball on someone.

12 and eh (P) the teacher took me out?

13 and eh: eh the other guy?

14 and he start to explain us about eh: what I have done

15 and he took us to the class

16 and then he explained to the whole? class what I did

17 which I kick eh his eh balls

18 and what the effect of that

18 that eh he maybe not eh have children (others laughing) something like that

19 so I felt very? eh: eh bad? bad of it

20 a:nd (P) the situation that I was black one black? among all this white boys

21 it was eh so? strange

22 and it (P) if I remember now it was going like in every period of time

Here, the story is framed at both ends by ethnic mentions, yet the eventive utterances (lines 11–18) do not contain any ethnic mentions; the teacher, who reprimands DN in front of the whole class for kicking a ball at another child, is not depicted as orienting toward ethnicity. Nevertheless, DN’s isolation as ‘one black among all this white’ intensifies the event – an instance of being singled out is operative within a color/ethnicity framework. Note that DN refers to his ethnicity through color lexicals rather than national ones (cf. De Fina, 2006 for use of color lexicals as identity categorizations). Moreover, lines 4–10 and 21–22 provide explicit meta-iterative statements as in DD’s story above, namely that the type of instance depicted in lines 11–19 is construed as a recurrent phenomenon, as is the construing of said instances into a single IES (type), in the storyteller’s life.

So, what can it mean to be ‘the only’ or ‘one among many’? Construing oneself as ‘the only’ of a category is an act of double partitioning – once from all non-group members and then again from all group members. As an IES, ‘the only’ can thus also be said to function as an extreme case formulation (Pomerantz, 1986) and is not only a way to defend against challenges/accusations, but also a way of ‘“consensus formulations” … as well as to various ways of normalizing and pathologizing people’s actions and characters’ (Edwards, 2000). This particular formulation is observed in much wider usage. A quick online search of ‘the only’ hits upon such pop-cultural items as a comedy sketch (Little Britain’s ‘The only gay in the village’), a comic book series (The Only Living Boy), and a painting (Pauline Boty’s depiction of Marylin Monroe as The Only Blonde in the World). The trope iterates, and it is a narrative trope telling of a double partitioning; it resonates with a need for isolation characterized by a double alienation – one from one’s own group and one from the other.

However, this particular act of double partitioning is set within an immigrant in interaction with a host society context. And thus understood, these tellings are an exploration of a particular strategy in the negotiation of the challenges presented by communitywide immigration. They are, in this sense, also stories of initial interactions across the boundaries of the two social types – immigrant and host – of these narratives.

Thus far, this section has provided two analyses of an IES titled here ‘the only Ethiopian’, which can now be reduced to the following plot point arrangement: (1) storyteller as figure is sent to an all-White school (note the passive construction of the verb); (2) storyteller as figure senses isolation; (3) storyteller as figure is denigrated by teacher or peers. There are two isolations in this emplotment scenario: that from the Ethiopian-Israeli community (plot point 1) and that from the mainstream White-Israeli community (plot points 2–3). Further, the scenario (chronotope) is set in a school classroom complete with its ethnically constituted character-types; also note, the parallelism in scenario across storytelling time and storyworld time - looking back from the college classroom to the school classroom. Silverstein’s framework has aided in our understanding of any moment of talk as both appropriate to context configured in complex and particular ways (immigrant context, collegiate context, storytelling context, etc.), but then also effective within that configuration.

The second session

The next narratives are from the second focus group session, which was attended by different participants who had not heard the stories told in the first session. For the following story, two interlocutors are present (MA had not yet entered the room). The first utterance is provided by myself and it references YG’s earliest memory that he thought to recount and not his very earliest memory ever. Note how the first half of the narrative (lines 2–16) conveys optimism, which is very quickly dismantled by the rest of the narrative, much like the unfolding of DD’s story earlier. This is the first story YG tells:

YG – ‘the first time I ever been called nigger’

1 F YG what’s your earliest memory

2 YG since uh: it’s kindergarten

3 a:nd [acc]I remember like ss (P) [acc]it was a routine this wa waking up in the morning

4 I was I was all the time really excited going out to the kindergarten.

5 =I used to like dress? to to get dressed right before y’know like I was g get out of shower at the night before.

6 I would I would like my mom would put me up to bed

7 and then when she was leave the when she was leave the room

8 I would get in to my my closet open up and take and take out clothes and put the clothes under the pyjama and (chuckles) go to sleep.

9 And I ???? like the

10 to kindergarten to kindergarten and

11 and you know when you’re a when you’re a kid

12 you’re never thinking about like the- the the- (st) when you’re getting not mm when you’re disliked by s by somebody

13 because every time like every time (P) there is like a it was a period of time like everyone is liking you

14 because you’re a kid.

15 a:nd it was the same thing with with my- with my kindergarten.

16 I thought that like I have all my friends and da da da da da

17 and I remember that like (P) when we had ss when you you change your kindergarten

18 like they they change the the also the kids

19 so there were new kids.

20 and? (P) nobod no like none of the guys liked me

21 like none of them.

22 they? they used to play all the time together

23 and they used to call me like nigger? all the time.

24 =that was the first time I I ever been called ni?gger,

25 and I just I just remember like everything

26 its- like the the the like the the games they they were playing

27 like the like the the everything like that that happening there I remember everything thats

28 a?nd [acc] I don’t know I I always think about myself

29 that its its something that never bothered me

30 but its great that I still remember.

31 ?And that’s what it is?

This narrative does not actually contain the phrase ‘the only’, but it is still understood here as an iteration of ‘the only Ethiopian’ emplotment scenario because it meets several criteria. YG changes schools (line 17), he is isolated (lines 20–22), and he is denigrated (lines 23–24). Also, the denigration operates within an ethnic frame. Furthermore, the emplotment takes place within the same scenario type that the other ‘the only Ethiopian’ stories do, for example, a hostile, racially isolating school environment. However, the argument can be made that this is a ‘first time I I ever been called ni?gger’ story. Rather than argue the ontology of what type of story this is, I am arguing that this narrative participates in a particular narrative practice, namely the iteration of a particular emplotment scenario - ‘the only Ethiopian’ - as this iteration meets the same criteria as the others before and after it.

Moreover, the narrative does contain several meta-iterative statements: ‘it was a routine’ (line 3), ‘all the time’ (lines 4, 22, 23), ‘every time’ (line 13), ‘the first time’ (line 24) – the last implies subsequent recurrences if only untold here. The meta-iterative statements in the first half of the narrative (lines 1–16) contrast with those in the second half (lines 17–31), with the first half given positive valorization and the second half negative valorization. Also, ‘all the time’ (lines 4, 22, 23) contrasts with ‘the first time’ (line 24).

The next story is the third that YG tells in the rotation of storytellings. MA has not yet entered the room:

YG – ‘because I’m like the only Ethiopian’

1 YG ok so: (P) ok so for me the next period would be: high school? (P)

2 a:nd I divided it to two (P) two parts

3 and (P) ok one of them (P) its uh the more the dealing with my like with myself

4 the: um like I felt during my uh: elementary school

5 I was like all the time like over protected like by my by my parents

6 like I was really was really living like this really over protected (P)

7 like (P) like I had all the time like I had like all the time please and everything ok

8 so: uh, I remember like when I like started highschool (P) so that was the big change

9 because like we were like, sixty sixty kids in elementary school

10 and then in high school its like suddenly your your (P)

11 F What?

12 YG three hundred and sixty kids (P) in one grade (P)

13 and: the whole process? of getting to know new friends

14 and everything it was rea:lly (P) it was really like I it just got this first shock about like

15 I remember like the first grade,

16 all my friends met new friends

17 and we were stop hanging out together

18 a:nd I just like I just remember like going back home

19 like all the time people were doing something like doing stuff

20 or was invited to parties and stuff like that

21 and I I never like I didn’t have friends at all

22 like I all the time go back home like

23 I was really depressed about it

24 like cause like I I thought that like I I can like y’know like um: I don’t know like I a-although I was like I never thought about maybe because I’m like (P) the only E-Ethiopian

25 and I was like being black.

26 its more like being Ethiopian

27 like he’s really different and stuff like that

28 =but it wasn’t I did that’s what I thought about they they were thinking about me

29 its basically (P) I ????? I always always was was caught up in these thoughts about like why its not working

30 and like why its like that and like

31 and I realized that that I wasn’t I wasn’t showing anything y’know

32 like I was just this really quiet kid

33 like really quiet

34 like I never tried to say hi to anyone try

The story continues with YG meeting a female friend who rescues him socially and elevates him into popularity. Here, however, YG describes the ‘big change’ of moving from elementary school to high school where there were many more pupils (lines 8–12) and the social difficulties that followed. In lines 24–27, he explicitly states how he was distinguished from all the rest of his peers along ethnic and racial lines. This story too contains explicit meta-iterative statements – ‘all the time’ (lines 5, 7, 19, 22), where the first two contrast with the second two in terms of positive to negative valorization.

The next story is one that I have analyzed elsewhere (Cohen, 2010, 2012) and thus provided here in abridged form. By now MA had entered the classroom and heard two stories. At this point she tells her own, which happens to be the only one she tells:

MA – ‘because I all the time was the black’

11 that was my way? to show people

12 that don’t don’t mess with me.

13 (laughingly) don’t mess with me because

14 because I all the time was the black eh eh eh when I I mean

15 from eh

kita gi’mel {third grade}

ti:ll (P) almost till

bet {second}

I was one or two or three maximum three eh black Ethiopian kids.

16 so they all the time y’know try to to tease you and nigger: and and and eh

17 oh? eh your food eh its

18 [especially in Be’er Sheva]

. . . ((abridged)) . . .

64 So eh, I went there

65 and I felt very confident in myself.

66 =I was sure that the in the other school everybody liked me

67 so here its going to be the same.

68 I go there

69 everybody’s white of course

70 just me black.

71 and suddenly I was like become very very quiet child

72 from (.) eh child that all the time you can hear and and eh

baleaka ??? {in the band ???}

and and

atsagote {plays}

73 y’know, its all the time I I be there

74 suddenly I was very very quiet and eh

The story continues, and MA goes on to beat up the ‘king of the class’ after he pushes her and calls her ‘nigger’, which was foreshadowed at the outset of the narrative (line 16). She tells ‘the only Ethiopian’ IES to resolve her narrative victoriously, building on depictions of herself as powerful, which is a consistent practice for MA (analyzed in Cohen, 2010, 2012). This illustrates the uniqueness of personal storytelling dispositions as viewed against a background of conventionalized iterativity, that is, all of the other participants resolve similar emplotment scenarios in defeat. ‘the only Ethiopian’ IES depicts a reality not of the participants’ making, yet they have the agency to construct it in particular ways as they see fit.

Conclusions

The five narratives analyzed here have been shown to be iterations of the same emplotment scenario (IES): storyteller as figure (1) is sent to an all-White school (note the passive construction of the verb), (2) senses isolation, and (3) is denigrated by teacher or peers. The fact that the emplotment scenario iterates points to a larger social process – a budding master narrative – than that accountable only at the interaction order. The larger process is one of a recurring construal and experiencing of oneself as alone (in a classroom full of other sentient beings) operative within an ethnic frame. Simply put, construing oneself as isolated and denigrated is a recurrent act across members of the Ethiopian-Israeli community. Moreover, each narrative makes explicit meta-iterative statements in which the tellers scale their narratives (Lempert, 2012) as iterative in their own lives; this form of teller scalability is implicitly complemented by the macro-parallelism found across narratives from different tellers (Urban, 2000 [1991]); macro-parallelism is an inherent feature of IES. Thus, we find ourselves at a particular historical moment at which a particular discourse is taking shape, one of being the only member of an immigrant community within a host community. As much as ‘the only’ is an act of double partitioning, alienation, and isolation, it also seems to be one of crossing boundaries and group mixing, at least in the initial stages. Also, the stories were not all tragedies: DD capitalized on the opportunity to present herself as successful in bridging the divide in the first part of story, and MA depicts herself as a superhero in hers.

Silverstein’s technical vocabulary helps us to understand both constructionist and realist understandings of the phenomenon. He views inhabitable categories of identity as the sum of the partitionings of social space, their associated values, essentializations, and ritual authorizations, which are often presented as given yet reconstructed anew and in particular ways in each new micro-context (2003: 201). In the present case, ‘the only Ethiopian’ is an IES about a teller experiencing (at storyworld time) the partitioning off of a chunk of social space by others in conventional (ritualistic) ways, that is, performing common acts of racism and making the partition seem inherently natural (cf. racialization in Wortham et al.’, 2011, cited earlier). Now, the act of telling such an IES is another ritualistic act (by virtue of its iterations) authorizing and thus distinguishing an Ethiopian essence, not just as Ethiopian, but as ‘the only Ethiopian’, isolated for the denigration of others. By virtue of the tellings, the configuration of this IES becomes part of a ‘model of personhood’ associated with Ethiopian Israelis further naturalizing the model to the group (Wortham et al., 2011). This naturalizing process results in Ethiopian Israelis being defined and defining themselves by the particular arrangement/configuration of social space as exhibited in the IES, exhibiting how certain IESs are conducive to certain positionings and not others (Georgakopoulou, 2013a: 108, note 6). The mechanisms by which this process operates are accounted for in the micro-context where realist presuppositions – this is how the world is – feed into constructionist entailments – this is how I recreate the world (in the service of interactional ends) – as explicated earlier.

That said, the relationship between the larger social process – naturalizing the particular configuration of ‘the only Ethiopian’ IES – and that operating at the level of the interaction is consequential. Namely, ‘the only Ethiopian’ is an IES that the participants are (re)living in their collegial environment at storytelling time. That they are the only Ethiopians in most of their classes and constitute a minority on campus makes tellings of ‘the only Ethiopian’ IES visceral and timely. ‘the only Ethiopian’ IES speaks to a ‘real’ issue felt and lived by the participants and does so in different ways. One distinction that can be made is between MA’s victory and all other iterations that end in defeat. MA’s story can be viewed as her presenting herself as a leader or adviser to those who are experiencing isolation and perhaps denigration, whereas the others are more viewable as garnering sympathy across the group by sharing an ethnically framed experience. Thus, the positioning of the ethnic category is parallel across storyworld and storytelling (cf. Silverstein, 1998: 310, note 24; Wortham, 1994).

In reflecting on the particular analytic/epistemological position throughout The Weight of the World, Bourdieu (1999) concludes the processes he and his colleagues observed are a realist construction; the interviews they collected were both spontaneous, and thus constructed, as well as organized by ‘invisible structures’ built from the social spaces from which the interviewees hailed and toward which they are headed (p. 618). In the five unique moments presented, an IES (both plot and setting recur) is observable, indicating that there is a process here that is larger than a single telling event. The analysis of this process creates a window through which members of a particular community are observed at a particular historical moment, giving shape to a particular discourse/narrative that then works back on that community as a borrowable formulation with which to depict other events. In this way, iterations of ‘the only Ethiopian’ do not only participate in but also construct a larger discourse (cf. Bamberg’s Positioning Level 3 as depicted in De Fina, 2013 and Georgakopoulou, 2013a). On the one hand, it is a story of isolation; on the other hand, it is a story about the interactions of two communities: immigrant and host. But it is also a story that is handled differently by different individuals. And thus, each iteration recalls both double partitioning and early immigrant–host interactions, as well as reconstructs them anew, as storytellers work through the many possibilities of successes and failures (and everything in between) within this particular emplotment scenario so that they can speak to a past that has fashioned a present not wholly of their making in hopes of a future they have a part in constructing.

Footnotes

Appendix 1 Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Leor Cohen is currently Coordinator of English Programs in the Lauder School of Government and Ofer School of Communications at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. He recently completed his post-doctoral visiting fellowship at King’s College, London, studying the narrative practices in a corpus produced by Ethiopian-Israeli high school and college students. His interests include iterativity, spatialization, and reference (world attending) as they are involved in everyday storytelling, that is, narrative practices.

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