What is a story?
What is a story? Some Anthropological Thoughts on Ethnographic Stories and Storytelling
This blog is the script of the podcast that I have recorded recently. I have started a podcast series to discuss and pursue the questions of how anthropologists become storytellers and how stories help curious minded artists, thinkers and academics to make sense of the world. I suggest to pair this blog with Ray Davis’ song, the storyteller. His song from those days when he led the Kinks with his brother Dave. speaks to this series since I want to talk about stories, storytellers to suggest some answers for the question what is a story? I ask the question of ‘what is a story’ to explain stories conceptually and in relation to social life, socialites and socializations. I unpack my question in two layers as if I am peeling onions.
First, I think of how stories and storytellers are entangled.
Second, I think of the location of stories. In other words, is a story located on the side of a storyteller, audience or characters in it?
What is a story?
I borrow from Wilhelm Schapp, a German philosopher, to explain stories. He presented his theory of stories in the seminal book Entangled in Stories after the fall of Nazi Germany when the horror of the war and the trauma of long years of suffering were yet fresh. He wrote:
‘being human is exhaustively determined by [this] entanglement in stories’ (p, 123).
He explained being a human does not mean one has only her own stories, but instead, she would have a story that is entangled in others’ stories. I hand over to Zahra Al-Mahdi, a filmmaker, an artist and a writer from Kuwait whose story can exemplify the entanglement into stories.
Zahra Al-Mahdi shows individuals are entangled in the stories and information that they receive from storytelling machines like TV, and social media different. Individuals/social actors receive stories from various sources and they continue those stories by re-telling them through their own perspectives and thoughts. Similarly, anthropologists and ethnographers experience and absorb stories and information during their fieldwork. They re-tell stories in classrooms, academic writings, and publications by applying analytical perspectives, theories and critical thoughts. They juxtapose various stories beside each other to achieve a larger picture about social phenomena that they investigate. Stories for everyone including anthropologists are about entanglements, relationships and connections of lives, imaginations, perspectives and experiences. For instance, Fran Markowitz (1999) explored gender and sexualities during her research and she shared stories of how men flirted with her during her fieldwork to make a larger point. She explains how they tried to seduce her and they were interested in her because she was there in the field for a short time and they assumed that a short affair with her would be no threat to their families. She usually rejected their propositions but she was attracted to one of these men who persisted in pursuing her. She had explained to him that it is not ethically appropriate to sexually engage with those who she researched but the man was surprised and exclaimed ‘what? Aren’t you a human being?’ The man’s surprise and question made Fran Markowitz to ask ’does being an anthropologist [in the field] automatically preclude humanness as researchers conduct fieldwork in a liminal period of voluntary sexlessness? Or was I confused by his definition of what constitutes a human being? Is sexuality always part of personhood’ (p 167). She shares stories of flirtations and seductions however she is entangled into them not only as a woman but also a professional academic and researcher. She shares the stories not amuse her readers but to raise larger questions that show how every other researcher, anthropologist, ethnographer and human being is entangled into this story. Every story could appear simple at first but we find a larger cosmos hidden in the story by looking deep into a story and asking about how a storyteller and everyone else is entangled into it. Till here, I peeled the first layer by pointing at the entanglement of stories and storytellers which allows me to define stories as the web of life that permeates meanings, feelings and silences because they are more than words organized into linguistic expressions.
Where is a story?
Now, let’s play with the second layer and see how it can be peeled off by asking where one may locate stories and the web of life that permeates meanings. When you tell a joke, which is kind of a story and your audience laugh, then your story is not the joke that you have said, but your story is about how your linguistic expressions (the words that you have uttered) connect to feelings of your audience (their pleasure to hear something funny). The story is located between you and audience. The story is located in the relationship that is formed through words and emotions. Likewise, when you sing a song or play an instrument, and your listeners are moved by it. Their connections to your songs and melodies are the stories, or in other words, stories are about how humans and nonhuman relate, interacts, feel, perceive, sense and represent each other. Stories are somewhere in between within relationships that humans, nonhumans and every other component in and around stories form with each other. Therefore, stories should be located in between and not at the side of storytellers not at the side of characters in stories.
The Use of Stories
For anthropologists, stories are tools of research, writing, analysis, and theorization. Stories help anthropologists to show how a system of meaning is communicated in everyday life, how people construct societies, gods, souls, religions, rituals, technologies, artifacts, gender roles, politics, businesses, law and even themselves. Stories may share general patterns, but the way people construct them is highly dependent on how people experience their lives in relation to everything else. Therefore, when anthropologists such as me share stories, then they are based on their socializations, personal backgrounds, academic experiences, education levels, countries where they have traveled to and everything else that their imaginations are exposed to, but the stories don’t belong to them alone. Stories are formed in relation to others who they have encountered and how they have encountered them. For instance, I always tell stories about how most Dutch people I have met don’t know much about the Middle East and Central Asia or have remained ignorant about other countries. My stories come from how I encountered and experienced some Dutch people’s reaction to my love of rain, winter and cloudy weather. Every time I tell some Dutch people how much I love rain and cold winters, they look at me and say, ‘oh, is Iran very hot?’ It seems they presume my love of rain and snow is based on the fact that I come from Iran. In their minds, they stereotype me as some Nomad riding a camel in the hot desert where I struggle to find water (Off course I exaggerate for the sake humor here but my point is they stereotype me as someone from dry and arid areas). I should clarify, I come from a region in Iran where there are four seasons, and I have seen plenty of rain and snow in my life before coming to the Netherlands. I like rain and snow because I like cold and I cannot stand the heat, I never enjoyed my time as a student in India because of the heat but I enjoy Netherlands because of its weather despite everyday racism. So, my stories about ignorance of some Dutch about Iran and the Middle East, in general, come from my encounters with them, and my stories are entangled with Eurocentric perspective of some Dutch people who don’t have much imagination beyond Europe. In other words, my stories are about how I, a foreigner coming from Iran working in the Netherlands, relate and respond to the Dutch people’s Eurocentric ways of thinking.
Additionally, my stories are entangled to something larger than just me and every other Eurocentric Dutch person. The stories are entangled with the experience of many other who are either migrants or come from a migrant background and have to deal with limits of Eurocentrism and being stereotyped. For example, the underlying points of my story about ‘being stereotyped’ resonates with the story of my Chinese-Dutch colleague who some white Dutchmen insulted at the beginning of the pandemic and rise of COVID-19. They insulted her and said, ‘you bring COVID go back to China’, despite the fact my Chinese-Dutch colleague was born in the Netherlands, speaks Dutch, and she is a Dutch citizen. She was stereotyped as a Chinese tourist because she does not look white-blond or presumably Dutch, and I was stereotyped based on some uninformed imagination of some Dutch people. Her story like my story is about limits of Eurocentrism, exclusion and ignorance of those who think ‘being white’ is equal to ‘being Dutch’. My stories and those of my colleagues with non-European migrant background are indirectly entangled because they refer to a system of meanings and representations in the Dutch society. The system of meanings deals with the politics of identity, who can be assumed as a part of certain group or a category and how people presume about each other and how they relate to each other through stereotypes.
In a way, I am trying to stress that no story is only about a storyteller, but it is always about how a storyteller relates to the world and vice versa. I combine the two peeled layers of stories. I combine the questions of ‘what is a story’ and ‘where is a story’ to offer a more precise conceptual definition of stories: stories are the narratives of entanglement of humans and nonhumans that manifest the web of life formed in-between socialites, localities, everyday encounters and historical contingencies.