ABSTRACT
Which communicative, narrative and semiotic resources (re)produce sameness and index belonging to a social movement? This chapter investigates the transnational articulation and socialisation into the Emmaus founding story, which narrates the first spontaneous encounter between Abbé Pierre and Georges Legay. The narrative analysis of chronotopes in the Universal Manifesto entextualisation reveals that the “origins” story is intertextual with the Emmaus Biblical parable (Luke 2413–2435), as people in a life crisis draw renewed hope from a serendipitous encounter. This central text calls for the re-enactment of this encounter between “men” from different social backgrounds in local “communities” in which the “origins” story is both retold and embodied. A wide array of ethnographic data from two local communities shows that participants orient to the same cultural chronotope of place-time-personhood. Some tell personal stories of transformation in finding “new reasons to live” that are intertextual with the founding story. Novices’ socialisation into the founding story occurs in daily practices, including storytelling, with the support of semiotic artefacts. Generally, oral storytelling by established members is preferred over written texts. Crucially, the narrative appropriations create not only sameness but also difference through their conditions of production and circulation.
