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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 723

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

NGOs as transnational communities: Interdiscursive chains and institutional narratives in an Emmaus chapter in Barcelona

Authors: Garrido, Maria Rosa
Submitted by: Garrido, Maria Rosa (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

The goal of this paper is to explore the appropriation and entextualisation of transnational discourses and subjectivities in a transnational NGO called Emmaus, located in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain). The analysis is grounded on Bakhtin's intertextuality (1981), understood as semiosis across encounters that involves social relations among people and institutions that create and support those textual relations (Gal 2003). The research reported on here forms part of a larger multi-sited ethnography of Emmaus which explores the transnational articulation of two local chapters -one in Barcelona and another one in London- which are embedded in different nation-states and urban sociolinguistic contexts that shape the type of multilingualism and the localisation of discourses (Kahn and Heller 2006). 

Emmaus is a faith-based NGO founded by Abbé Pierre in post-war Paris and dedicated to the (re)insertion of homeless people through voluntary recycling work in live-in "communities" in 36 nation-states. This research conceptualises Emmaus as a multilingual transnational imagined community formed by a network of heterogeneous communities of practice that share a stock of institutional texts, narratives and linguae francae. Emmaus ventriloquises and appropriates discourses, social categories and terms that clasp (Gal 2007) the NGO with Social Catholicism, Liberation Theology and altermondialisme. This interdiscursive community is organised around the founder's story and the paradigmatic stories of its members, in other words, a set of valued texts that produce dispositions and practices for members (Linde 2009). Socialisation into this community involves (re-)telling and performing one’s own story as an Emmaus companion or volunteer within an institutional discursive community mainly based on affective labour. 

This paper traces the interdiscursive chains between (a) the local members' personal narratives, both in the sociolinguistic interview and in everyday interactions, (b) the institutional Emmaus narratives, which blend local shared stories with the transnational imaginary, and (c) the foundational texts, notably the Universal Manifesto and Abbé Pierre's writings. The analysis draws on data collected during a seven-month critical sociolinguistic ethnography of the Barcelona chapter which includes ethnographic fieldnotes, interviews with key participants, interactional data from communitarian assemblies, photographs, institutional documents as well as publications and media materials about Emmaus. The triangulation of different data types sheds light on the linguistic, discursive and semiotic resources that index belonging to a transnational imagined community from a historicising perspective.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). Discourse in the Novel. In Holquist, Michael (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 259-422.

Gal, Susan (2003). Movements of feminism: the circulation of discourses about women. In Hobson, Barbara (ed.), Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gal, Susan (2007). Circulation in the "new" economy: Clasps and copies. Paper presented at the 106th Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington Nov 29-Dec 2, 2007.

Kahn, Emmanuel and Heller, Monica (2006). Idéologies et pratiques du multilinguisme au Québec: luttes et mutations dans un site de la nouvelle économie. Langage et société, 118: 43-63.

Linde, Charlotte (2009). Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press.