Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Maps, family trees, figures, and tables
- Acknowledgments
- Note on transcriptions
- Epigraph
- Prologue
- 1 On being long in company
- 2 A boy finds his mama(s)
- 3 The closeness of strangers
- 4 Embracing talk
- 5 Lines of vision
- 6 The hand of play
- 7 Ways with time and words
- 8 Shaping the mainstream
- Epilogue
- Appendix A Ethnography as biography and autobiography
- Appendix B On methods of social history and ethnography
- Notes to text
- References
- Index
5 - Lines of vision
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Maps, family trees, figures, and tables
- Acknowledgments
- Note on transcriptions
- Epigraph
- Prologue
- 1 On being long in company
- 2 A boy finds his mama(s)
- 3 The closeness of strangers
- 4 Embracing talk
- 5 Lines of vision
- 6 The hand of play
- 7 Ways with time and words
- 8 Shaping the mainstream
- Epilogue
- Appendix A Ethnography as biography and autobiography
- Appendix B On methods of social history and ethnography
- Notes to text
- References
- Index
Summary
Storytellers “talk on against time.” Their stories depend on the possibilities that emerge when characters free themselves from antecedent conditions and envision new beginnings. Listeners want storytellers to put off the certainty of closure, and they distrust “happily ever after” endings for the strangers they meet in stories. The flame that consumes the fate of these strangers yields the warmth they desire in their own “shivering” lives.
The characters in the stories told here are themselves storytellers who work against time: the past they leave behind and the future they envision ahead.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Words at Work and PlayThree Decades in Family and Community Life, pp. 84 - 104Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012