Truth and Stories

Abstract

This essay attempts to account for a shift, over the past century, in the narrative particle used in San Carlos Apache storytelling. Early text collections feature a verb of speaking. More recent storytellers tend to use a particle glossed variously as a received wisdom particle, a remote past particle, or, most productively, a deferred realization particle. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman, I argue that the collective administrative agendas of government, education, military, and religious personnel on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, orbiting around the conjoined metapragmatics of modernity, Christianity, and literacy, help to explain the social life of these narrative particles. I focus particularly on the role of Lutheran missionaries in San Carlos in supporting the idea of an increased reliability accruing to the deferred realization of writing and reading.

Linguistic Anthropology in 2016: Now What?

“…In the vein of Keith Basso's () Wisdom Sits in Places , members of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation likewise use toponyms, maps, and language curricula to perform land claims, wherein Tlingit is used in indexical and iconic ways (Schreyer ). Extending Basso's work on storytelling, David Samuels () analyzes metapragmatics in storytelling among the San Carlos Apache to demonstrate the intertwined nature of religion, modernity, and literacy amid the competing agendas of the state, the military, and missionaries.…”