Narrative Cultures, Situated Story Webs, and the Politics of Relation

Abstract

As Thomas King afffirmed in his 2003 Massey Lectures, truth about stories is that that's all we (2). This is why I am genuinely excited about this new journal, Narrative Culture, and find myself responding somewhat foolheartedly its editors' call for an opinion piece.1 is the scope of culture? are some of the challenges and opportunities the framework of culture poses specific disciplines? in this framework can the place of folk narratives and folk-narrative scholars be? The stories about stories I tell here in answer these questions can only be informed by the stories-experiential, historical, imaginative, place-based, and scholarly-I know. The stories about stories I hope read in Narrative Culture would move us engage with narrative cultures in the plural as situated and interrelated practices where knowledges, desires, and conflicts are negotiated within and across worldly storytelling networks.As the editors' Introduction in the first issue suggests, culture invites interdisciplinary approaches all kinds of narratives circulating in and adapted a wide range of contexts and media: By widening the scope from culture, we acknowledge that informs and reigns supreme in a large variety of cultural phenomena and that culture encompasses more than, for instance, folk narrative, oral literature, popular narrating, or narratology (Marzolph and Bendix 1). Significantly, the editors also remark on wanting to foster exchange and learning across boundaries of learning, boundaries that are not simply disciplinary, but rather result from economic as well as geopolitical imbalances. Knowing that location has a strong impact on scholarship as culture, the editors seek honor . . . the diffferent points of departure taken for granted or simply available scholars in diffferent locations (Marzolph and Bendix 6).From my own location, I take the journal's offfering of a scholarly forum for culture across disciplines and media as well as sociohistorical boundaries deploy culture, a much-contested term, in specific ways. Narrative culture is a set of practices concerned with the production, exchange, and consumption of shared meanings-narratives, in this case-that depend on the work of representation and circulate in competition with one another.2 One of the challenges, then, of contributing the study of culture is construct and engage scholarly tales that decode not only the workings of texts as discourse and story, recit and histoire, in relation one another and as performances their storytelling contexts, but also the workings of power and knowledge that permeate the representational, conceptual, and material practices and efffects of these texts.While this is a specialized and relatively recent understanding of culture,3 it informs a widening range of approaches narrative, and it helps clarify how weighty King's claim actually is. The first Massey lecturer of Native descent, Cherokee fiction writer and theorist King tells stories about family, literature, and history as well as a creation about Charm, a woman who fell from the sky (10-21). In retelling this Earth-Diver creation story, King highlights its principles of curiosity, balance, and cooperation. He comments on how such a is entertaining but easily forgotten in North America where the legacy of Genesis dominates (21). Then he asks, What kind of a world might we have created with that kind of story? (28). Because we live by stories and in stories, he challenges his audience take action: Take Charm's story, for instance. It's yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But don't say in the years come you would have lived your life diffferently if only you had heard this story (29). Stories construct our worlds and us at the same time, emerging from actual negotiations with and in these worlds. …