Storytelling

The significance of narrative to anthropology and ethnography expressed in various ways by all of this week's authors put me in mind of an interview Bill Moyers conducted last month with Parker Palmer, a long-time educator, founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal, and senior associate of the American Association of Higher Education. Palmer discussed the importance of the telling of stories--perhaps similar to Geertz's notion of metacommentaries--to Obama's successful campaign:

"Camp Obama, starting two and a half, three years before the election, when the Obama candidacy was a real long shot, happened around the country. Circles of people gathered together for two or three days and invited to tell three stories [sic].

"And I want to call attention to this because I think movements always begin in this very interior place in the human heart where people are asked to look at and share something of their own lives, their own experience.

"And so at Camp Obama, in small groups and over a period of a couple of days, people were invited, first of all, to tell the story of self. What are the hurts and hopes that bring you to this occasion, to the possibility that this long-shot candidate might represent your interests and might actually get elected? The story of self.

"The second story, very important, the story of us. How do you see your own story relating to the stories of other people you know and to the larger American story that's going on right now? [...] The 'Who am I?' question is important. But the 'Whose am I?' question is equally important.

"... And then finally they were asked to tell the story of now from their point of view. What do you see going on in this moment that makes you think we have a chance to heal some of the hurts and pursue some of the hopes that you've named in those earlier stories?" (www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02202009/transcript2.html)

According to Turner, a story is "a spontaneous unit of social process and a fact of everyone's experience in every human society" (68). Turner adds that while stories tell us about our relationships and stresses and societal tensions, they also "feed back into the social process, providing it with a rhetoric, a mode of employment, and a meaning" (72). In other words, stories don't just display or represent our lives--they give us tools for interpreting and transforming and reassembling them.

A lawyer friend of mine explained that stories are the reason she chose her profession. She told me that the law is all about storytelling, and not in the Judge Wapner sense of drama in the courtroom, but because legal recourse is all about the performance of facts and experience as narrative. She said that in her experience, the best story--the most satisfying, meaningful, truthful story--always wins in court. Her comments seem in keeping with Turner's remarks about reflective ("showing ourselves to ourselves") and reflexive ("arousing consciousness of ourselves as we see ourselves") dramas.

Turner's observations about breach, conflict and redress, and pre-liminal, liminal and post-liminal time, are also fascinating to me, because I write fiction. My current workshop professor often says that all stories begin with disequilibrium. The "why now?" of the story is initiated by a dismembering catalyst--something is thrown into turmoil, and then resolved either through "reintegration," as Turner names it, or "recognition of schism" (69).

In fiction workshops we also talk about the truth and the actual, and that they are rarely the same, and the truest thing is not necessarily the actual thing. This reminds me of Turner when he says that the subjunctive, ritual mood narrates the "'if it were so,' not 'it is so'" (83).

I do sometimes have angst about writing fiction. Am I hiding behind the invented because I am afraid of the real? Is it self-indulgent to make things up instead of document actual lives and experiences? This week's readings have assuaged some of that concern by showing me that narrative itself is deeply human, and that ethnography and fiction-writing are more related than I would have hoped to think.

- Esme