Day 8

We discussed the seven possible origins of Storytelling from Pellowski, Chapter 1:

1. The need for playful self-entertainment

We noticed how telling and retelling lead to more invention with language, suggesting that elevated language arises from such "playing."

2. The need to explain

We are familiar with the notion that storytelling may be a panacea for primitive ignorance. Why do the seasons change? Where did we come from? And so on. In this regard, storytelling continues to be an important method of education. However, the implication that "fanciful fairy tales" were the result of child-like ignorance and fear, deserves scrutiny. There may be an action of endowment wherein the story endows the surrounding world with the ideas and insights of the people, turning the world into our book of memory. This relates to #7: the encoding of social norms. We heard Chip tell the story of raccoon's tale in which he clearly imitated certain human behaviors, suggesting that raccoon's lost beauty was a direct result of his self-important pride.

3. Religious need to honor or propitiate

4. The need to communicate experience

Additionally, storytelling allows us to create experience via the empathic response of the listener. In this way, storytelling helps us amplify our own experiences and makes it possible for an individual to amass experiences, and in so doing, approach learning and wisdom.

5. The aesthetic need for beauty, order, and form

The aesthetic need can be understood as the desire to "make special."  According to Ellen Dissanayake of the University of Washington:

"Each of the arts can be viewed as ordinary behavior made special (or extra-ordinary). This is easy to see in dance, poetry, and song. In dance, ordinary bodily movements of everyday life are exaggerated, patterned, embellished, repeated--made special. In poetry, the usual syntactic and semantic aspects of everyday spoken language are patterned (by means of rhythmic meter, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance), inverted, exaggerated (using special vocabulary and unusual metaphorical analogies), and repeated (e.g., in refrains)- -made special. In song, the prosodic (intonational and emotional) aspects of everyday language--the ups and downs of pitch, pauses or rests, stresses or accents, crescendos and diminuendos of dynamics, accelerandos and rallentandos of tempo--are exaggerated (lengthened and otherwise emphasized), patterned, repeated, varied, and so forth--made special. In the visual arts, ordinary objects like the human body, the natural surroundings, and common artifacts are made special by cultural shaping and elaboration to make them more than ordinary."

6.To record history of ancestors and leaders

7. To encode and preserve social norms

See above