‘East’ and ‘West’ as framing categories in learner’s narratives
This study discusses the role played by ideologies of “East” and “West” in shaping understandings and attitudes toward Japan of a group learners of Japanese with mixed ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.
Students in an intensive UG programme at a London university are interviewed before, during and after a compulsory year of study in Japan. A preliminary analysis of learners’ autobiographic narratives (Pavlenko 2007) as they express their aspirations or concerns about the year abroad or retrospectively discuss its impact on their future plans, reveals that for some of them these are salient categories, or broad ideological constructs that enable various types of self-positioning in the local, interactional, contexts (DeFina 2015).
While focusing on the discursive purposes of the deployment of the categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’ during interviews with the researchers, the study examines which specific defining traits within these categories are singled out in the learners’ narratives, the ideological discourses they belong to or possibly originate from, and why such meanings are relevant to the learners.
Powerful discourses about East and West have circulated in Japan from the time of modernization, fuelled by a sustained strand of literature about national identity (Befu 2001) until the present times. These discourses are in principle available resources to the study participants, but Orientalism and its critiques are also accessible discourses in the context of academia. Other conceptualizations of East and West may be more specific to student societies’ locales.
While there is no evidence that students resort to sweeping essentialist generalizations, there is some evidence that the influence of these powerful ideologies plays a considerable role in shaping their narratives and possibly act as a framing device for their understandings of Japan, Japanese people, and of themselves in Japan. The presentation discusses this hypothesis.
Befu, Harumi 2001 Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron, TransPacific Press
De Fina Anna 2015 Enregistered and Emergent Identities in Narrative, in Dervin & Risager (eds.) 2015 Researching Identity and Interculturality, Routledge, New York
Pavlenko Aneta 2007, Autobiographic Narratives as Data in Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics 28/2:163-188
