The social life of stories

the long version

In this study of indigenous oral narratives, Julie Cruikshank moves beyond the text to explore the social power and significance of storytelling. Circumpolar Native peoples today experience strikingly different and often competing systems of narrative and knowledge. These systems include more traditional oral stories; the authoritative, literate voice of the modern state; and the narrative forms used by academic disciplines to represent them to outsiders. Pressured by other systems of narrative and truth, how do Native peoples use their stories and find them still meaningful in the late twentieth century? Why does storytelling continue to thrive? What can anthropologists learn from the structure and performance of indigenous narratives to become better academic storytellers themselves? Cruikshank addresses these questions by blending the stories gathered from her own fieldwork with interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives on dialogue and storytelling (including the insights of Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Harold Innis, among others). Her analysis reveals clearly the many powerful ways in which the artistry and structure of storytelling mediate between social action and local knowledge in indigenous northern communities.