Reality Effects and Oral Modes of Entextualization

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the possibility of extending “realism” to disciplines beyond art and literary criticism. The notion of the “real” is important in subjects as far apart as folk art, oral literature, and ethnography. But it can have different meanings depending on the context in which it occurs and the kinds of interactions that it may be said to be associated with. The chapter argues that the term “reality effect” may be more useful to describe the emergent quality of everyday interactions and whatever the real may connote in non-Western cultures that anthropologists generally study rather than “realism” with its more limited aesthetic reference. The chapter then presents examples of the ways in which the real may be referenced in oral narratives collected from West Bengal, India, and in case conferences and medical dossiers in a verpleghuis (nursing home) in Arnhem, the Netherlands.