In 1969, Robert A. Georges published a seminal article, Toward an Understanding of Storytelling Events. The essay challenged long-standing notions about nature of stories, process of story transmission and change, and meaning and significance of stories. Georges criticized premise stories are surviving or traditional linguistic and the a priori assumption means of discovering meaning and significance of these entities is through collection and study of story texts (p. 316). He proposed instead a dynamic schema treats narrating holistically as communicative and social experience in which identities and interactions of participants shape process of narrating while nonverbal and paralinguistic channels convey information crucial to generation of messages and vital to interpretation of meanings. Barre Toelken incorporates event into title and contents of a chap ter of his book on dynamics of folklore (1979:123-149), noting his indebtedness to Georges. Sandra Dolby Stahl remarks on importance of Georges's holistic approach to her understanding of personal narratives (1989:5). Richard Bauman's book on story, performance, and (1986) appears to depend in its fundament on concept of narrating described by Georges years earlier. In presenting a model, Georges's article also serves as a model.' It remains most articulate statement about how to conceptualize narrating. His treatise laid cornerstone for a behavioral approach in folkloristics, and influenced generations who have researched verbal Although some students of objects now employ premises similar to those Georges propounded, few cite his publications in their work. Because he wrote about narrating (e.g., 1969, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1986, 1990), perhaps they fail to realize methodological parallels between his thinking and their own, or maybe they have not shifted from other perspectives to behavioral one. As I demonstrate in this paper, Georges's research on verbal behavior offers much to study of Before relating analysis to making of things, however, I discuss several concepts, among them material behavior. Most readers know another term, of material Folklorists, geographers, archeologists, and others often use it to refer to objects people make and ways in which they alter their physical environment (Jones 1987:3). Although art historian George Kubler complained many years ago about the bristling ugliness of `material culture' (1962:9), name persists. Its popularity owes much to its inclusiveness. Writes Simon J. Bronner (1985a:3): Material is made up of tangible things crafted, shaped, altered, and used....It is art, architecture, food, clothing, and furnishing, to name a few genres. An abridgement of material manifestations of culture (Jones 1970:4748), label material culture not only emphasizes tangible but also privileges cultural. As Jules David Prown defines it, Material is study through artifacts of beliefs-values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions-of a particular community or society at a given time (Prown 1982:1). For Prown, objects embody and express aspects of a group's culture. James Deetz (1977:24) both enlarges notion of and makes emphatic when he defines as that sector of our physical environment we modify through determined behavior. The physical environment admits more than artifacts usually mentioned in definitions of culture, contends Deetz. Our body itself is a part of our physical environment, so such things as parades, dancing, and all aspects of kinesics-human motion-fit within our definition of as comprising anything physical shaped by culturally acquired rules (p. 25). The appellation coincides with a particular bias and preoccupation in research. …