Multisemic Speech Genres as Vehicles for Re-inscribing Meaning in Post-conflict Societies: A Mozambican Case

Abstract

Beyond material destruction and human suffering, civil wars entail the violent transformation and erasure of existential, social, relational, cosmological and ontological meaning. A central conceit of this chapter has been that confronted with the presence and persistence of a violent past, the circulation of verbalised stories, memories and experiences represents crucial social attempts at re-ordering a world that has been disordered—to re-inscribe social meaning. Such a process—what Das calls 'the social employment of stories'—is characterized by communal, collective narratives becoming personal, and some (but not all) individual stories being de-originated, appropriated and retold by many. This process of appropriation and personification of a circulating story was clearly evident in the story told and remembered in this chapter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)