Storytelling without telling: The non-linguistic nature of narratives from evolutionary and narratological perspectives

Abstract

In the last two decades, ‘storytelling’ has become a popular term in the evolutionary sciences. However, this notion lacks a systematic and nuanced definition. Treated intuitively, it has usually been seen as a verbal enterprise. By approaching storytelling from a cross-disciplinary perspective, this paper aims at showing that, contrary to the common assumption, the human ability to tell stories is not restricted to the verbal medium. To show this, I define storytelling and provide a set of minimal criteria for a narrative act. Then, I proceed to identify these conditions in different semiotic resources – pictorial and gestural – to demonstrate that narrating can also transpire non-verbally and with the use of different modalities, mainly the visual, but also the vocal-auditory. I also point to the directions for further discussion of non-verbal narratives in the context of language evolution and the need for evolutionary research on storytelling to have a firm foundation in disciplines such as narratology.