CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

With an interest in habitual communicative practices in the public sphere, the trajectory of stories in an institution is examined as a venue to explore the positions of types of social actors. The theoretical framework is provided mainly by studies of intertextual relations as reflecting and reproducing social power and studies of the articulation of ideologies in rituals (Blomaert 2001, Briggs & Bauman 1992, Silverstein & Urban 1996). The data were collected through ethnographic fieldwork in criminal courts. The crucial function of stories in the various stages of the criminal process is made possible by the exploitation of the multiplicity of participant roles, control on the telling and the tales, and the weight assigned to written as opposed to oral official communication. In the hearings, during a witness examination, the trial lawyer becomes a Relayer of the written story (deposition in the preparatory stage) confronting the witness over the previous version of the testimony. This strategy is a complex display of institutional power which makes witnesses accountable for the form and the level of detail of their previous story versions. The trial lawyers story-telling rights exercised in reading supersede the authorship privileges of witnesses. Witnesses responses to this interactional move range from mild resistance to swift admissions that the earlier version must be closer to the truth. The circulation and manipulation of stories in court procedures reveal institutional practices which contradict legal principles supporting orality, but resonate with dominant beliefs in the community about truth-containing texts.