Lived ethnicity: identity, consciousness, and discursive practice in Grayling, Alaska

Abstract

This thesis is an analysis of data collected from academic, archival, and ethnographic inquiries into the lives, culture, and history of the residents of Grayling, Alaska. The main argument forwarded in this thesis is that forms of discursive practice provide a means, emic and etic, for critically engaging the historically and locally constructed web of meanings that inscribe and inform the lived social reality of ethnic identity of ethnic identity and consciousness in Grayling. Using a communicative-discursive theoretical framework, influences and forces which inform this 'lived ethnicity, ' the strands of the web, are understood dialogically - as discursive forms and 'voices'; they are presented in the shape of local narrative, theoretical debates, explorer's journals, social science observations, etc. The sociohistorical and individual construction of the concepts of 'culture, ' 'history, ' and 'identity' are given particular attention, using the above-mentioned discursive forms and their related contexts as guiding interpretive frameworks.