Abstract
Toronto’s African Caribbean community is marked by the different, sometimes conflicting perspectives on oral traditions held by those who had acquired primary enculturation in their home countries and those who had been raised in the metropolitan Canadian context. This article analyzes an instance of naturally occurring discourse where the interactants hold asymmetrical cultural definitions of the tradition of Trinidadian obeah. It demonstrates how narrative is used to construct authoritative evidence during verbal conflict, illustrating how negotiated discourse and status-role identities are emergent attributes of the interaction itself and not qualities of the performer or the text when considered independently of this situational context.
