An anthropological discourse analysis of a Deaf Namibian refugee's life story

This dissertation demonstrates how discourse analysis provides access to the ways in which a Deaf Namibian uses available linguistic and cultural resources to construct an identity via narrative. Life stories provide a way to analyze how individuals actively and jointly interpret and negotiate their world view, as narrating a life story involves selecting and interpreting culturally significant experiences. The data were derived from videotaped interactions of a Deaf Owambo relating his life story in Namibian Sign Language to a group of Deaf Namibian peers. The structural analysis focuses on repetition of temporal lexical markers and spatial features including eyegaze movements, headturns and body shifts. Both temporal and spatial linguistic repetition work together to structure the life story in terms of hierarchically organized units, which the researcher terms in ascending order: epitopes, contratopes, chronotopes and hemitopes. These units are inter-textually related and function to give the subject's narrative identity both structure and meaning. The anthropological interpretation involved building a theoretical framework for life story analysis. This framework demonstrates that the details of the structural analysis are critical to a post-modern deconstruction of the text in terms of narrative identity. However the structural analysis masks the unfinalizable fluid spatial elements of the text which constitute the narrator's construction of identity. The anthropological interpretation of the textual construction of socio-cultural identity hinges on the interaction between the narrative structure of the text, its thematic structure and the poetic use of spatial stylistic devices. The essence of the narrator's Deaf Namibian identity is contained in the dialogic inter-textual relations.