Why Unity in Diversity?A Brief History of Culture and Self-

EsteemPresenters

Rita Higgins

Paulette Longmore

Oral narrative, or storytelling has been around since humans

invented language asMYTHS, LEDGENS AND

HISTORIC HISTORIES

Human Experience

How far the oral narrative goes back into prehistory is uncertain.

The symbolic representation of animals on cave walls is the earliest record or written narrative, but oral narrative probably got its start around that time.

What is Oral Narrative?

Oral narrative, in its most simple sense, denotes a people’s use of the elements of speech in order to evoke action in a temporal sequence.

Oral narrative, then, usually contains a plot where specific events occur.

Myths

Recited by Pueblo Indian healers in the kiva

Epic songs performed by itinerant singers in tents in Central Asia

Ballads sung in the Norwegian family market squares

Legends and folktales told by the fireside in Italy

Oral Narrative Also Includes

Jokes told at the inner table in New Jersey

Casual anecdotes based on personal experience such as childhood memories

Any oral autobiography or biography

These are common to all people in all places.

Oral Narrative

Contains performance of the storyteller in one way or another:

Physical expression

Voice intonation

Dance

Dress

Ritual

Culture

Oral narrative has been the chief basis for the creation and continuation of culture itself.

Culture is often dependent upon the stories that people tell.

It is chiefly through storytelling that people possess a past.

It re-creates another world that does not entirely exist as what we know to be reality.

Other Worlds…

Oral narrative encompasses an alternate understanding of human beings as makers of the mental world that they inhabit.

Only human beings possess this cosmoplastic power, or world-making or world-assessment ability.

Storytelling

Storytelling defines the human species as far as our knowledge of human experience extends into the historical past.

It negotiates the world of nature in origin and nature stories.

It negotiates places that are not present and the stuff of dreams.

Time

Human time is created through narrative.

Identity of self or historical community is acquired through the mediation of narrative and thus is a function of fiction.

The human concept of time depends on narrative.

Cooperative Belief Structure

Narrative is a collective unforced agreement among numbers of people concerning the stories by which reality is described.

Therefore, narrative is an unforced agreement among numbers of people concerning stories by how they perceive.

As with archeology…

We tell ourselves about ourselves through meditation upon the archeological record.

History is often formulated by such data as relic and ancient records collections.

History is a re-fabrication story of what is now the past to us.

Prefictionalization

It is not possible to give an historical account of a non-prefictionalized concept of our past.

However, storytelling is crucial to our human understanding of history in a social context.

Paleolithic Period

This period in human kinds history is often perceived as the point in time when humans began the process of storytelling.

This led to the invention of culture.Perceptual models of what is a people were

developed.Thus, storytelling and culture go hand-in-

hand.

What is Storytelling?

For one, it defines what things are by calling to min what they are not.

If we state everything as it is, there is no story.

A story must break with the accepted perception in order to offer something new.

Links

Storytelling links the past and all pasts to a point in the present where humans can conceptualize about events that took place.

Literary, anthropological and folkloric studies attest to this.

Self-Esteem

Ritualized discourse through which powerful people enhanced their prestige and self-esteem articulated a system of values that was meant to be of benefit to society as a whole.

What Forms?

What forms does oral narrative take?

What functions does it perform?

How does it perform these functions?

The Storyteller

The role of creative individuals who tell stories are representatives of their communities in making of an oral culture.

How such narratives express communal values and articulate an individual’s and a group’s sense of identity, includes the consciousness of a past.

Why Oral Narrative?

Oral narrative is a type of social action.

It relates to people’s understanding of the world.

It helps create that understanding through its cosmoplastic power.

Usefulness

The usefulness of oral narrative is that it is a way of promoting social cohesion.

It also articulates changes in mentality that affect society at large, especially during times of stress.

Everyone is a Storyteller

People are natural narrators, retelling stories that they have heard from others.

We create new ones through the use of the imagination and poetic license.

We do not tell all possible stories, but we are selective in our choice among countless possible choices.

Sensual and Magical

Images, music and the actions of the five senses can have powerful stories attached to them. (ex: Like Water for Chocolate)

Storytelling has connected with it powerful intimacies which the present-day culture industry seeks to hide.

Intimacy and Bonding

When people gather together to hear stories or songs performed, they share a single space.

This provides human interchange and exchange of ideas.

Human interchange is sometimes more important than the story itself.

Ritual is Always Variable

Ritualistic verbal formulas and physical gestures are realized differently on different occasions.

However predictable ritual may seem to be, now two performances of it are alike.

Eternal Newness

If a singing, dancing or storytelling tradition exists, the it is re-creative at every stage. Every time a person learns a song or story, she or he remakes it to a greater or lesser extent.

This process of re-creation will continue so long as the world presented in the narratives and the worldview of singers and storytellers coincide.

The Tradition Bearer

New traditions come into being all around us every year, and old traditions die and no one may miss them.

What it boils down to is a series of creative acts that are only partially predictable.

It is a volative process.

The Tradition Bearer

It depends on the volitional acts of individual people who are inseparably linked to a larger community yet who retain their personal identity.

How important do you think it is for you to be linked to a larger community and yet retain your personal identity? Explain.

Warning!

The habits of linguistic usage can and usually do preclude understanding of a foreign culture.

How does ethnocentricity foster prejudice?

Give an example in story form.

Social Cohesion

Storytelling has the power of expression—not to fill a void space but to give voice to “unison songs and stories” that rely on a shared experience that promotes social cohesion.

Knowledge

Knowledge that finds expression in traditional songs and stories helps literally to bring the members of a society together through the ritual occasions of performance.

At the same time, it reinforces a people’s sense of identity and self-worth by preserving social memory through engagement with the ancestral past. (Note Silko’s “Yellow Woman…” story.

Work Sited

Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature

Author: John D. Niles

University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA

Copyright: 1999

The Oral Narrative

Presenter: Rita Higgins

Paulette Longmore

Essex County College

Newark, New Jersey