Women, folklore and communication : informal social gatherings in a Franco-Newfoundland context

• Main Author: Desplanques, Marie-Annick
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 1991
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/1379/; https://research.library.mun.ca/1379/1/Desplanques_Marie-Annick.pdf; https://research.library.mun.ca/1379/3/Desplanques_Marie-Annick.pdf

As elsewhere in the world, Franco-Newfoundland women feel a need to socialize with their peers. They do this whenever the opportunity arises, although their role as wives, mothers or housekeepers is so demanding that they must actively create such social occasions. -- This doctoral dissertation focuses on the dynamics of verbal interaction which takes place during such informal women's gatherings. Verbal interaction in these contexts is often expressed in specific folklore genres and an examination of these genres in characteristic ethnographic contexts permits the delineation of patterns of women's communication and enables us to make an assessment of their significance. The data allowing for such an examination were collected during three summers spent in the community of Cape St. George, Port-au-Port Peninsula, Newfoundland. Tape-recorded interviews made as a participant observer were used to obtain biographical data from selected informants, and to record interaction in small groups of women, men, and mixed groups. Fieldnotes supplement the tape-recorded data, documenting the sociocultural context, ranging from concrete physical surroundings to abstract kinship patterns, in order to convey the full social ambiance. -- This study adopts the principles of ethnoscience, essentially an emic approach seeking to determine the folk's own definition of experience, as a method of classification and data organization utilizing folk taxonomy. The data is analysed and discussed following the theory of ethnography of communication, a method of analysis facilitating the examination of the organization and meaning of acts of communication in sociocultural contexts. The gatherings are considered as communicative events, whose participants are members of the same speech community. Folklore genres occurring in these events are examined in terms of the dynamics that govern and result from their expression. Because such gatherings recur with high frequency and exist in different but recognizable variants (according to time, ...