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http://dcm.sagepub.com/content/1/3/365.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/1750481307079277

2007 1: 365DISCOURSE & COMMUNICATIONJustin Charlebois

ISBN-13: 97805218340252006, viii + 462 pp. US$24.95 (pbk), ISBN-13: 9780521541916; US$37.99 (hbk),BAMBERG, Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

Book review: ANNA DE FINA, DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN and MICHAEL  

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by Camila Cárdenas on October 26, 2012dcm.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Book reviews 365

Discourse & CommunicationCopyright © 2007

SAGE Publications.(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi

and Singapore)www.sagepublications.com

Vol 1(3): 365–37810.1177/1750481307079277

Book reviews

ANNA DE FINA, DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN and MICHAEL BAMBERG, Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, viii + 462 pp. US$24.95 (pbk), ISBN-13: 9780521541916; US$37.99 (hbk), ISBN-13: 9780521834025.

Discourse and Identity, an insightful collection of papers written by scholars mainly from psychology and linguistics, explores the relationship between language and identity. Contributors to the volume utilize a variety of theoretical approaches such as Narrative Analysis, Conversation Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis. While diverse in theoretical orientations, these researchers conceptualize identity as both locally managed and influenced by global processes. Identity is not a fixed category but is fluid and shifting in inter-action. In the introduction to the volume, the editors outline several approaches to the study of discourse and identity relevant to this book. They reference ‘social constructionism’, ‘categorization and membership definition’, ‘anti-essentialist vision of self ’, and ‘indexicality’. Furthermore, they discuss some of the overarching themes and underlying constructs of the volume. These are ‘positioning’, ‘interaction order’, ‘footing, multivocality and intertextuality’, and ‘indexing local and global identities’.

Part I, ‘Overview: Theory, Method and Analysis’ focuses on theoretical and methodological issues pertinent to the analysis of identities in talk. In Chapter 1, Elliot Mishler challenges the almost automatic assumption of linear time in nar-rative structure. He insightfully reminds us that the past is not fixed, but meaning is constantly being reframed through the retelling of the narrative in the present. Using the concept of ‘framing’, Chapter 2 analyzes a telephone conversation be-tween two brothers concerning bad news. Branca Telles Ribeiro precisely details how the two brothers shift positions and footings in response to the context. In Chapter 3, the storytelling practices of a group of adolescent females is analyzed. Alexandra Georgakopoulou convincingly argues that the various telling roles the participants assume index their larger social identities, standing in relation to each other, and the relationships they share as close friends.

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366 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

The theoretical standpoint taken by Deborah Schiffrin in Chapter 4 shares some similarities with those of Ribeiro and Georgakopoulou. Drawing on Goffman, Schiffrin expertly demonstrates how a multitude of temporary and locally situated identities intersect with more stable social categories. She does this by presenting an excerpt from an interview where a single self-repair indexes other identities.

The chapters in Part II, ‘Private and Public Identities: Constructing Who We Are’, illustrates how global factors such as social processes, ideologies and institutions interact with individuals and their own unique experiences in the construction of various identities. Robin Lakoff selects various food-related texts such as restaurant menus and cookbooks as the sites of analysis to illustrate how discourse and practices around food reveal a collective shift in American identity. She argues that in order to maintain one’s standing as a competent group member, one must change his/her behavior about food to reflect group ethos.

In Chapter 6, Janet Holmes selects workplace narratives to cleverly illustrate the emergence of collective and individual identities. Holmes demonstrates that workplace narratives, even those told seemingly for the purpose of entertainment, have important functions such as constructing a professional and social identity at work. Liliana Cabral Bastos and Maria do Carmo Leite de Oliveira focus on how social identities are presented within institutional contexts. The authors analyze letters to an insurance provider by customers to illustrate how participants construct identity. While the letters written by the customers reflect their ideo-logies about health and fair treatment, the responses by the company employees present themselves as principals on behalf of the company.

The moment by moment construction of teacher identities in discourse is the focus of Chapter 8. Greer C. Johnson demonstrates that while different teacher identities emerge in the local context of the interview, social and institutional constraints are also operating. She provides an example of culturally loaded metaphors to describe activities or procedures.

Susan E. Bell (Chapter 9) draws attention to the role ideologies play in the construction of individual identities through the analysis of an interview she conducted in the 1980s about mothering a ‘DES’ (diethylstilbestrol) child. DES is a synthetic estrogen that was later banned due to its destructive effects on pregnancies. Bell’s interview is located against the backdrop of the 1980s when an ‘intensive mothering’ ideology prevailed suggesting that women’s ultimate fulfillment was found through motherhood. Bell carefully considers the time period and her own perspective on mothering and their influence on her analysis.

Part III, ‘The Gendered Self: Becoming and Being a Man’, is concerned with the construction of masculinity. Scott Kiesling’s analysis of two stories told by fraternity members demonstrates how narratives can be used to construct hegemonic identities. He shows how narrators draw on cultural models in their construction and performance of local narratives.

Luiz Paulo Moita-Lopes looks at how whiteness, masculinity and hetero-sexuality are constructed in the discourse of an adolescent male, Hans. Moita-Lopes demonstrates how Hans accomplishes a particular hegemonic identity by positioning himself against the ‘other’. Thus, Hans’s construction as a hegem-onic male is achieved through interactional positions referencing femininity.

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Book reviews 367

Furthermore, Moita-Lopes recognizes the local and socio-historical constraints operating on how people position themselves within relationships of power.

In Chapter 12, Stanton Wortham and Vivian Gadsden analyze the narrative of a lower class African American male. In his narrative, the man positions himself as a responsible parent who distances himself from the street. An additional noteworthy aspect of this chapter is the use of the positioning framework as a methodological tool. They illustrate how autobiographical narration can position narrators in different ways.

In Part IV, ‘The In-between Self: Negotiating Person and Place’, the chapters concern narratives produced by people who have gone through fundamental changes in their lives. Anna De Fina focuses on how group identity is represented and negotiated in the narratives of immigrants. Furthermore, De Fina advocates an approach to narrative analysis that combines the broad analyses of shared schemata with close textual analysis.

Mike Baynham shows the influence of personal agency and social positioning to the identities that Moroccan immigrants perform. Baynham, too, sees the necessity to consider both how identity is interactionally achieved while shaped by social forces.

Brian Schiff and Chaim Noy demonstrate how individuals reinterpret the past through the framework of the present. This is done through the analysis of a Holocaust survivor’s life story where she makes sense of her own story as a survivor through the trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi guard.

The clarity and accessibility of the current volume makes it useful to both researchers and advanced graduate students. Some of its greatest strengths include the variety of the contributions both in terms of content and methodology and the common link that identity is not fixed but subject to a variety of influences.

Justin CharleboisAichi Shukutoku University, Nagoya, Japan

LILIE CHOULIARAKI, The Spectatorship of Suffering. London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi: Sage, 2006, 237 pp.

Lilie Chouliaraki’s The Spectatorship of Suffering addresses the very important topic of the relationship between western spectators and distant sufferers mediated through television. Examples of sufferers are taken from distant places – distant as seen from the western point of view – such as Somalia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, as well as from New York and Washington, DC, mediated through Danish, Greek and BBC World televisions. The author approaches the question of the ethical role of the media and the power of public action through these particular examples. This approach is inspired by Aristotle’s phronesis – ‘practice that approaches ethics as the situated enactment of values, rather than abstract principles of conduct’.

The book consists of nine chapters. In the first three chapters the author points out weaknesses in media theory and criticizes it for not critically reflecting

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