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In:Identity Perspectives from Peripheries
Edited by Yoshiko Matsumoto and Jan-Ola Östman
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 352] 2025
► pp. 188–217

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Chapter 9
Voices from the Kazakhstani periphery

Constructing an identity of a village woman through a selfportrait in a mealtime narrative

 | Northeastern University
Published online: 13 June 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.352.09kul
Abstract
The study integrates Schiffrin’s (1996) work on agentive and epistemic selves and Bamberg’s (1997) model of positioning to examine how an identity of a peripheral Kazakh woman is achieved via a self-portrait and a co-construction with another Kazakh woman in a mealtime conversation. Focusing on one ten-minute story about a dying husband collected in rural Kazakhstan, the analysis demonstrates how the narrator crafts her self-portrait of an exemplary wife via an agentive self who provided her ill husband with care and an epistemic self who evaluated her actions as meeting village gender norms. The narrator draws upon this self-portrait to display her identity of a village Kazakh woman receiving validation from the audience via external evaluation in the form of voicing other villagers. Positionings in the story and storytelling worlds reflect bigger gender discourse of constructing women in terms of family obligations and notions of place, accountability, and ideologies. The analysis offers an insightful window into what it takes to be a woman from the periphery showcasing identity as an emergent and moldable process.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Identity and narrative
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants and data
    • 3.2Data analysis procedure
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Story world: Narrative selves and positioning
    • 4.2Storytelling world: Enhancing the self-portrait of a proper wife
    • 4.3Global level: Crafting the identity of a village woman
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (41)
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