Synopses & Reviews
Hannah Arendt famously argued that politics are best understood as a power relationship between private and public realms. And storytelling, she argued, creates a vital bridge between these realms, a place where individual passions and shared perspectives can be contested and interwoven. In
The Politics of Storytellingrevised in this 2nd edition with a new preface and designanthropologist Michael Jackson explores and expands on Arendts notions, bringing stories from all around the world into impressive cross-cultural analysis.
Jackson retells stories from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone, the Australian Aboriginals, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissionby refugees, renegades, and war veterans. Focusing on the violent and volatile conditions under which stories are toldor silencedhe explores the power of narrative to remake reality, enabling people to symbolically alter their relations and help reclaim an existential viability. Above all, he shows how Arendts writings on narrative deepen our understanding of the critical, therapeutic, and politic role of storytelling, that it is one of the crucial ways by which we understand one another.
Review
Ochs and Capps develop a framework for analyzing narratives of personal experience, focusing on five dimensions or features along which narratives may vary when produced by ordinary speakers in natural, notexperimental or literary, settings: "tellership," from one author to collaboration by two or more; "tellability," high to low; highly "embedded" narratives to detached ones; closed temporal and causal "linearity" to open temporal andcausal ordering; and certain, constant "moral stance," or uncertain, fluid stance. The transcriptions to illustrate these features are very accessible but include enough fine transcriptions to be lifelike. The authors' points of viewderive from therapeutic concerns and the power of narrative in memory formation and cultural learning, and from anthropological studies of varieties of narrative in different cultures. Most examples are drawn from the US, but a verywide variety of ages, groups, and settings provides cultural diversity. Literary theory, from Bakhtin, Havel, and Vygotsky is well used. The book includes an exceptionally useful and full bibliography.
Review
“Michael Jacksons The Politics of Storytelling is a radical book for our time. I have never read a more compelling vision of how human beings creatively negotiate the borderlands between their private and public worlds. Not since Clifford Geertz has an anthropologist written with such innovative narrative skill, reaching beyond the academy to illuminate what is culturally at stake in our need to tell stories about the shared worlds we inhabit and remake.”
Review
“A book that delivers to the reader, in graceful and at times evocative prose, profound insights into the human condition with all its vexing contradictions. Jackson has written a powerful testimony to the human spirit.”
Synopsis
This pathbreaking book looks at everyday storytelling as a twofold phenomenon--a response to our desire for coherence, but also to our need to probe and acknowledge the enigmatic aspects ofexperience. Letting us listen in on dinner-table conversation, prayer, and gossip, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps develop a way of understanding the seemingly contradictory nature of everyday narrative--as a genre that is not necessarilyhomogeneous and as an activity that is not always consistent but consistently serves our need to create selves and communities.
Focusing on the ways in which narrative is co-constructed, and on thevariety of moral stances embodied in conversation, the authors draw out the instructive inconsistencies of these collaborative narratives, whose contents and ordering are subject to dispute, flux, and discovery. In an eloquent lastchapter, written as Capps was waging her final battle with cancer, they turn to "unfinished narratives," those stories that will never have a comprehensible end. With a hybrid perspective--part humanities, part social science--theirbook captures these complexities and fathoms the intricate and potent narratives that live within and among us.
Synopsis
book captures these complexities and fathoms the intricate and potent narratives that live within and among us.
About the Author
Michael Jackson is the Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of many books, most recently Being of Two Minds, Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes, The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writings, and Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology, the last published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface to Second EditionIntroduction
Part I - Displacements
The Stories that Shadow Us
"You Never Saw Your Own Faces": Reflections on Privacy and Publicity in the Lives of Refugees
In Extremis: Refugee Stories/Refugee Lives
Displacement, Suffering, and the Critique of Cultural Fundamentalism
Part II - Returns
Preamble
Retaliation and Reconciliation
From the Tragic to the Comic
Prevented Successions
Part III - Histories
Preamble
The Social Life of Stories
Storytelling and Critique
The Singular and the Shared
Notes
BibliographyIndex