Expedition diaries as a discursive practice (descriptive model parameters): problem statement

The article is devoted to the development of a descriptive model of a folklore expedition diary as a discursive practice. Different types of diaries, the problem of their intra-genre typology, aspects of study, nomination of discourses that include texts of this type are considered. The relevance of such a study is determined by the attention of representatives of different humanities to ego-texts created by an ‘ordinary’ person, the development of interdisciplinary branches such as autoethnography, autobiographical studies, history of everyday life, and memory studies. At the same time, the relevance is conditioned by the need to identify and describe different types of discourse, in particular diary discourse and its varieties. The study involves 56 diaries created by students of the Faculty of Philology of Tomsk State University during summer folklore practices from 1960 to 1980 in the villages of Tomsk, Novosibirsk and Kemerovo regions. In these diaries the students recorded their impressions, described their work in the villages, communication with folklore bearers, as well as the collected material. The novelty of the study is determined by the aspect of their research – for the first time the expedition diary is considered as a discursive practice and for the first time diaries of this type are studied. The paper examines the key markers of the expedition diary as a discursive practice and substantiates the need to analyze them from this perspective. Based on the existing descriptive models and the peculiarities of the material under study, a descriptive model of the folklore expedition diary is proposed. The model includes the following parameters: socio-cultural context of discursive practice (sphere, institution, social groups, number of communicators); communicative purpose, communicative strategies, description of interdiscursive inclusions; duration of discursive practice; participants of communication (images of the author, addressee, informant); composition; chronotope; speech genres; conceptual saturation; means involved (verbal/non-verbal). This model has been tested on the diaries: it has been revealed that they reflect the extralinguistic conditions of their creation, the author and addressee do not always coincide, time and space are expressed explicitly; in the structure of the diary there are speech genres of edification, greeting, farewell, etc., one of the key concepts is the concept of “Way”, the linguistic embodiment is characterized by a rich repertoire of lexical and grammatical means.

discourse, discursive practice, diary discourse, diary, practice diary, expedition diary, field diary