Negotiating a Korean National Myth: Dialogic Interplay and Entextualization in an Ethnographic Encounter

Abstract

This article examines a discordant, collaborative telling of Korea’s founding myth, one accomplished by a traditional singer and two native folklorists, including myself. Highlighting the discursive and intertextual construction of talk, I demonstrate how the event’s participants coped with different agendas as we evaluated each other and negotiated our expectations regarding the myth’s content and performance. I argue that dissonant ethnographer-performer interactions such as this one warrant more study. Scholarly attention to the ways specific events and texts develop can help us better understand negotiations of power, authority, and participant roles, as well as the intertextual and intersubjective relations that constitute ethnographic encounters.