Presenting self and aligning as a team through narratives of victimhood among Kazakh-speaking village neighbors

Abstract

This study illustrates how personal narratives of victimized self serve two Kazakh-speaking village neighbors to accomplish self-presentation during a mealtime interaction. Integrating Goffman’s (1959) theorization of self-presentation with narrative positioning (Bamberg, 1997; Schiffrin, 1996) and Muslim cultural practices (e.g., Al Zidjaly, 2006), this study conceptualizes mealtime conversations as frontstage and examines two victimhood narratives after providing the sequential overview of the twelve narratives occurred in the interaction. The analysis illustrates how linguistic construction of agentive and epistemic selves of the narrators position them as victims (whose personal items are stolen) in relation to other neighbors (who do the act of stealing) in the story world. This juxtaposition of “I” vs. “Others” in the story world allows the neighbor-tellers to present an idealized self (morally superior neighbors) and function as a team by getting lower hand and aligning with one another against a third party (morally wrong neighbors) in the interaction.