Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 24:1 (2014) ► pp.131–155

The discursive management of identity in interviews with female former colonials of the Belgian Congo

Scrutinizing the role of the interviewer

Whilst interviews are often regarded as an essential tool for social science, it has long been recognized that the interviewer has a formative role in the locally situated socio-communicative events that interviews are. Using transcripts of interviews elicited from female former colonials in the Belgian Congo, this article examines the way in which the interviewer, himself a former colonial, manages the construction of meaning and identity in relation to two intricately interwoven issues, namely the position of women and colonial society more generally. Findings demonstrate that the interviewer places the interviewees in a position of interactional subordination which also allows him, despite the threat to the interviewees’ face, to construct women as being superfluous both in 1950s-society in general and more specifically in the storyworld of the Belgian Congo, whilst at the same time he avoids any face threat to the colonial society more generally.
Keywords: Identity, Interviews, Gender, The Belgian Congo, Master narratives, Assessments, Colonization, Patriarchy
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 March 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.24.1.06mie
References (44)
Bartesaghi, M., and S. Perlmutter Bowen (2009) The acquisition of memory by interview questioning: Holocaust re-membering as category-bound activity. Discourse Studies 11.2: 223-243. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Boddy, J. (2007) Civilizing women: British crusades in colonial Sudan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Butler, J. (1988) Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 40.4: 519-531. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Buttny, R. (2001) Therapeutic humor in retelling the clients’ tellings. Text 21.3: 303-327.  BoP DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, D. (1992) Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: Who speaks for “Indian” pasts? Representations 371: 1-26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cicourel, A.V. (1964) Method and measurement in sociology. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
. (1976) The social organization of juvenile justice. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Comaroff, J., and J.L. Comaroff (1991) Of revelation and revolution: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. Volume one. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Comaroff, J.L., and J. Comaroff (2009) Ethnicity, inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cooper, F. (1994) Conflict and connection: Rethinking colonial African history. American Historical Review 99.5: 1516-1545. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cooper, F., and A.L. Stoler (1989) Introduction: Tensions of empire: Colonial control and visions of rule. American Ethnologist 16.4: 609-621. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cullen, R. (1998) Teacher talk and the classroom context. English Language Teaching Journal 52.3: 179-187. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2011a) “We are not there. In fact now we will go to the garden to take the rain.” Researcher’ identity and the observer’s paradox. In J. Angouri, and M. Marra (eds.), Constructing identities at work. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 223-245. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2011b) Researcher and informant roles in narrative interactions: Constructions of belonging and foreign-ness. Language in Society 401: 27-38. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
De Fina, A., and S. Perrino (2011) Introduction: Interviews vs. ‘Natural’ contexts: A false dilemma. Language in Society 40.1: 1-11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Fina, A., D. Schiffrin, and M. Bamberg (2006) Introduction. In A. De Fina, D. Schiffrin, and M. Bamberg (eds.), Discourse and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-23. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Errington, J. (2008) Linguistics in a colonial world: A story of language, meaning, and power. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Fabian, J. (1986) Language and colonial power: The appropriation of Swahili in the former Belgian Congo 1880–1938. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Ford, C., B. Fox, and S. Thompson (2002) Constituency and the grammar of turn increments. In C. Ford, B. Fox, and S. Thompson (eds.), The language of turn and sequence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 14-38.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Gartrell, B. (1984) Colonial wives: Villains or victims? In H. Callan, and S. Ardene (eds.), The incorporated wife. London: Croom Helm, pp. 165-184.Google Scholar
Goddeeris, I. (2011) Congo in onze navel: De omgang met het koloniale verleden in België en zijn buurlanden [Congo in our navel: The way of dealing with the colonial past in Belgium and its neighbouring countries]. Ons Erfdeel 54.1: 40-49.Google Scholar
Heritage, J., and D.R. Watson (1979) Formulations as conversational objects. In G. Psathas (ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology. New York: Irvington, pp. 123-162.Google Scholar
Hewitt, J.P., and R. Stokes (1975) Disclaimers. American Sociological Review 40.1: 1-11. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Holstein, J.A., and J.F. Gubrium (2003) Active interviewing. In J.A. Holstein, and J.F. Gubrium (eds.), Postmodern interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 67-80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunt, N.R. (1989) Placing African women’s history and locating gender. Social History 14.3: 359-379. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (1997) “Le bébé en brousse”: European women, African birth spacing, and colonial intervention in breast feeding in the Belgian Congo. In F. Cooper, and A.L. Stoler (eds.), Tensions of empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 287-321. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, G. (1972) Side sequences. In D. Sudnow (ed.), Studies in social interaction. New York: Free Press, pp. 294-338.Google Scholar
Koshik, I. (2005) Beyond rhetorical questions. Assertive questions in everyday interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Linde, C. (1993) Life stories: The creation of coherence. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Meeuwis, M. (2011a) Bilingual inequality: Linguistic rights and disenfranchisement in late Belgian colonization. Journal of Pragmatics 431: 1279-1287. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
. (2011b) The origins of Belgian colonial language policies in the Congo. Language Matters: Studies in the Languages of Africa 42.2: 190-206. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Pomerantz, A. (1984) Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In M.J. Atkinson, and J. Heritage (eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57-101.  BoPGoogle Scholar
. (1986) Extreme case formulations: A way of legitimizing claims. Human Studies 9.2: 219-229. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on conversation (2 vols, edited by Gail Jefferson with introduction by Emanuel A. Schegloff). Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E.A. (1980) Preliminaries to preliminaries: “Can I ask you a question?” Sociological Inquiry 501: 104-152. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinclair, J., and D. Brazil (1982) Teacher talk. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stoler, A.L. (1989) Making empire respectable: The politics of race and sexual morality in 20th-century colonical cultures. American Ethnologist 16.4: 634-660. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tajfel, H. (1981) Human groups and social categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tiryakian, E.A. (1993) White women in darkest Africa: Marginals as observers in no-woman’s land. Civilisations 411: 209-238. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van De Mieroop, D., and M. Pagnaer (2013) Co-constructing colonial dichotomies in former female colonizers’ narratives of the Belgian Congo. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 23.2: E66-E83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wortham, S. (2003) Accomplishing identity in participant-denoting discourse. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 13.2: 189-210. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wortham, S., K. Mortimer, K. Lee, et al.. (2011) Interviews as interactional data. Language in Society 40.1: 39-50. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Cited by (9)

Cited by nine other publications

Perrino, Sabina M.
2024. Chapter 12. Narrative inquiry. In Less Frequently Used Research Methodologies in Applied Linguistics [Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, 6], ► pp. 191 ff. DOI logo
Yang, Yang
2024. “By whom was I left behind?”. Narrative Inquiry 34:1 ► pp. 53 ff. DOI logo
Perrino, Sabina
2021. Narratives as discursive practices in interviews. Narrative Inquiry 31:1 ► pp. 72 ff. DOI logo
Schoofs, Kim & Dorien Van De Mieroop
2021. Epistemic competitions over Jewish Holocaust survivors’ stories in interviews. Discourse & Society 32:6 ► pp. 728 ff. DOI logo
Van De Mieroop, Dorien
2021. The Narrative Dimensions Model and an exploration of various narrative genres. Narrative Inquiry 31:1 ► pp. 4 ff. DOI logo
Yuan, Zhou-min & Xingchen Shen
2021. Radio program hosts’ self-identity mobilization in Chinese radio-mediated medical consultations. Pragmatics and Society 12:3 ► pp. 390 ff. DOI logo
Miglbauer, Marlene
2017. Chapter 11. Workplace conflicts as (re)source for analysing identity struggles in stories told in interviews. In Identity Struggles [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 69], ► pp. 207 ff. DOI logo
Van De Mieroop, Dorien, Marlene Miglbauer & Abha Chatterjee
2017. Mobilizing master narratives through categorical narratives and categorical statements when default identities are at stake. Discourse & Communication 11:2 ► pp. 179 ff. DOI logo
Van De Mieroop, Dorien & Jonathan Clifton
2016. Life stories. In Handbook of Pragmatics, DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.