Migrating Myths

Twenty autobiographical narratives recounted by Russian women migrants living in Vienna serve as the empirical basis of a study on discursive processes under the conditions of migration. The migration accounts are collected in narrative interviews lasting a minimum of one-and-a-half hours each, covering the migration experience of women of various ages and social backgrounds and with various emigration motives from the early 1970s to the present, including the new forms of migration of artists and business people `shuttling` between Russia and Austria that developed in the course of the 1990s. A major goal of the present project is to take a discourse analytical perspective on the phenomenon of migration, focusing on the cultural/ideological implications of migration and its consequences for subjectivity. The project is meant as a contribution to the research focus on Intercultural Communication of the Department of Slavic Languages, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, stressing the interactive negotiability of meanings and the relevance of power relations in communication (cf. http://www.wu- wien.ac.at/wwwu/institute/slawischafel.html, Forschung Interkulturelle Fachsprachenkommunikation). The focus of interest in the present project will be the traces of discourse, i.e. the socially shared `narratives` (cf. Mieke Bal 1997, Sandomirskaia 2001) and `myths` (cf. Roland Barthes 1972) by which the migration experience is represented in the accounts, the metaphors by which the traversing of socio-geographical space and autobiographically relevant places are depicted, the arguments by which women`s decisions for certain ways of action are explained and/or legitimized - briefly, discourse elements reproduced and/or transformed by the interviewees. The `narratives` and `myths` identified in the Russian women`s accounts will be studied and interpreted in their Soviet, Russian and Austrian interdiscursive relations. Special attention will be paid to conflictive situations depicted in the accounts, as they point to crises of subjectivity and discursive struggle.

"Migrating Myths. Discursive Processes in Russian Autobiographical Migration Accounts" was an empirical study informed by the tradition of British Cultural Studies. The data material it was based upon was oral narratives of the experience of migration and life in another country collected in narrative interviews. These were conducted by the project co-worker Katharina Klingseis with female Russian migrants living in Vienna. Our focus of interest was on the interview partners` coming to terms with the discursive space they had entered, their narrative and discursive interpretations of their experience (cf. Paul Ricoeur; Reinhard Sieder). For analysis and interpretation of the interview transcripts we resorted to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA; Norman Fairclough, Teun van Dijk). CDA conceptualizes any production of speech or text as a fundamentally social act and allows the researcher to reveal the discursive structures and the social character of individual speech. Our special interest was in the recurring `myths` (Roland Barthes 1964) that can be ascribed to identifyable discursive themes and are reproduced, or often enough deconstructed, in the representations of autobiographical events. These `myths` play an important part in turning the biographical events into human experience. Thus, by submitting individual autobiographical narratives to discourse analysis, we were exploring the `interface` between society and the subject, which can be called identity (Stuart Hall 1996).