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Narrative as Cultural Practice

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Jens Brockmeier
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22
NARRATIVE AS CULTURAL
PRACTICE
Jens Brockmeier

Introduction
The history of storytelling extends over the entirety of cultural history. It is a very diverse
history, if we can refer to it as one history at all. Still, we do not know of any cultural
world without storytelling, without being populated by homo narrans. It is therefore
astonishing that academic language studies have only recently discovered narrative as a
powerful cultural form and discursive practice whose scope goes far beyond the sphere
of literature and written texts. This “discovery”, sometimes referred to as the narrative
turn, can be viewed from different angles. Underlying this chapter is a cultural approach
to narrative. It suggests that we conceive of narrative as a cultural discourse in a two-
fold sense: first, because stories and storytelling are inextricably embedded in cultural
contexts of action and interaction and interwoven with larger social webs of symbolic
meanings and, second, because they only exist as part of a multitude of diverse cultural
traditions. Although narratives are always shaped by cultural traditions, they simultane-
ously also impact on them, and they do so in a wide spectrum of options, ranging from
the affirmative and supportive to the critical and alternative. In what follows, I explain
these two ideas which are intertwined in several respects.
In order to do so, I have to outline what is meant by narrative, an enterprise that turns
out to be more complicated than expected because the structure, scope, and nature of
stories and storytelling are understood very differently in different contexts of inquiry. It
is, in fact, subject to debate and controversy in a number of disciplines. The point of view
from which I engage with this issue is its relevance for the understanding of narrative as
a cultural practice. Approaching it in this way is motivated by the effort to show that we
cannot understand the meaning of stories and storytelling – multiple as it is – without
conceiving of narrative as a cultural form of life. This argument is at the centre of the
first part of this essay. In the second part, I further qualify it in explaining that there is
no universal “ontology” of narrative, but only culturally specific practices of storytelling
that give rise to different notions of narrative and narrativity.
The argument that narrative practices are culturally diverse and deeply mingled with
local traditions dovetails with debates on the world’s cultural and linguistic diversity.
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Exploring the variegated and colourful map of humans’ storytelling practices relates,
for instance, to discussions on the multitude of local, regional, and national dialects and
accents of English – forms of language use that are different from those associated with
the concept of a standardized international English. Against this backdrop, making the
case to conceive of narrative practices as cultural practices is to widen the scope of narra-
tive theorizing in both the humanities and the social sciences from its traditional focus
on English and other standard average European languages to a truly global, multilin-
gual, and multicultural orientation. Only this allows us to comprehend narrative as such
a multifarious form of communication and reflection that not only plays an important
practical role in everyday life, but also affords humans to envisage storyworlds of great
complexity, mixing the personal with the social, political, mythical, and religious world
views. These storyworlds evoke what may be the most intricate constructions of human
imagination.

Historical perspectives
I have mentioned that the perspective on stories and storytelling as cultural forms of
life, adapting Wittgensteinian terms, is closely associated with the narrative turn in the
human sciences and beyond. However, it may be more precise to refer not to one turn
but to a series of narrative turns. Beginning in the 1960s, storytelling became the sub-
ject of interest first in literary studies, narratology, and socio- and ethnolinguistics, and
then successively in philosophy, history, the social sciences, psychology, medicine, and
the health sciences (Hyvärinen 2010). In the process, our picture of narrative changed
extensively. A ubiquitous practice of meaning-making, narrative has been taken, for
example, as essential for the construction of personal identity (“narrative identity”), the
understanding of our constructions of time and autobiographical memory, and the social
presentation and positioning of oneself and others – be it in personal or institutional
contexts such as work, school, hospitals, or courts.
In all of these contexts, stories and storytelling are carried out in forms of oral, written,
and otherwise linguistic or performative practices. Often different media and forms of
performance (oral, written, imagistic, IT based, dance, etc.) – sometimes called semiotic
environments – are intermingled: for example, consider a story told in a letter read aloud
by a character in a film that is shown to students in a classroom. Storytelling practices in
all these semiotic environments are organized by particular genres, plot models, motifs,
ways of temporal ordering, intertextual (that is internarrative) references, and other nar-
rative techniques – such as camera work and editing, to refer to the film example just
mentioned – all of which are shaped by specific cultural traditions. The same is true
for specific narrative contexts, occasions, or routines (e.g. face-to-face encounters, politi-
cal meetings, clinical sessions, journalistic or research interviews). In all these forms,
practices, and contexts, narratives are embedded in local cultural-historical traditions of
storytelling that come with their own rules and conventions.
At the same time, narrative practices not only draw on but realize bonds of inter-
generational and historical continuity, executing an important function in establishing,
preserving, and transforming over-arching cultural traditions. That stories contribute to

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the creation of cultural traditions is not a new discovery. Within linguistic anthropology,
the study of this role of narrative goes back to Edward Sapir’s (1949/1933) view of nar-
rative as a “culture-preserving instrument”. This line of thought can be further traced
back to the work of philosophers and linguists of the enlightenment such as Wilhelm
von Humboldt. To conceive of the circulating stories of a community – myths, fables, fai-
rytales, religious and historical legends, and other folk stories – as part of what Wilhelm
Wundt described as Völkerpsychologie was not unusual among literary and cultural-history
scholars in the first half of the last century, the time of Sapir and Whorf. Classicists
such as Milman Parry examined the transmission of ancient Greek narratives in a world
of orality, and early ethnographers of oral narrative and folklore, such as the Russian
Formalists, investigated what they saw as culturally canonical folk tales. Many works
of the period were inspired by similar interests in the cultural nexus among social life,
language, narrative, and other semiotic environments, such as the studies of Michael
Bakhtin (1993).
More recently, linguistic anthropologists, ethnographers of narrative, and other
language researchers in the wake of Sapir and Whorf have extended the view of nar-
rative as a “culture-preserving instrument”. The new approach is meant to encompass
not only the function of narrative for a cultural tradition, but also the function of a
cultural tradition for narrative or, more exactly, for the specific organization of narrative
“speech events”, storytelling performances, conversational and other “small stories”.1 In
this literature, the idea of narrative practices as cultural practices has led to the analysis
of language-specific and culture-specific narrative forms across the entire spectrum of
discourse forms and contexts – including genres, semantic and grammatical resources,
indexical systems, situated contexts of communication, conversation strategies, and lan-
guage socialization.
In addition to the study of narrative as a cultural practice, we can identify a social-
science-based line of narrative ethnography. It emerged from the effort to investigate
ordinary people’s “own stories” through narrative interviews and personal “documents
of life” (letters, diaries, files, etc.), material viewed as a window on distinctive social
and cultural worlds. An early classic in the “Chicago tradition”, which was theoretically
shaped by George Herbert Mead, was W.I. Thomas and Forian Znaniecki’s (Thomas
and Znaniecki 1958) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. This work on the immigra-
tion experienced by Chicago after the end of the First World War initiated a stream of
ethnographic case studies of particular social and cultural communities. Whereas these
studies were primarily interested in the content of people’s narratives and the social and
cultural life they represented, the focus widened to what Gubrium and Holstein (2008)
have referred to as the second narrative turn in the social sciences. In the course of this
shift (which Gubrium and Holstein associate with their own work) the very practices of
storytelling and their social and cultural circumstances moved to the fore.
Starting in the 1960s, this new orientation was supported and complemented by
ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and conversation analysis entering the scene of lan-
guage studies. All of them began to shed new light on the interplay between the content
and internal organization of narratives, and the social conditions – ranging from the
dynamic of face-to-face encounters to “communities of practice” and larger cultural and

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historical environments – that regulate the production, distribution, and circulation of

narratives. As a consequence, the study of narrative has become more differentiated and
pluralized, extending text- and story-orientated paradigms to action- and performance-
orientated paradigms as well as to models of pictorial and embodied narrative (Hydén
and Brockmeier 2008, Kohler Riessman 2008, Mattingly 2007).

Critical issues

Reconsidering narrativity
Given the broad spectrum of narrative practices, the variety of disciplinary approaches,
and the diversity of linguistic and epistemological orientations, it is not surprising that
there is debate and disagreement on how to understand and investigate narrative and
which conclusions can be drawn from narrative analysis. Traditional narrative theory was
less troubled by such concerns. Concentrating on written texts, most narratologists agreed
on a set of universally given features of “storied forms”. With some variety, definitions
typically assumed that (1) narrative is the representation of a sequence of action or events
and that this representation (2) is aligned in a certain temporal order and (3) unfolds
with some kind of inner structural coherence. In this view, both the first and the second
feature, sequentiality and temporality, essentially contribute to the third feature, narrative
coherence. In addition, there are other criteria, such as the closure of the plot structure
and break of a putatively given normativity. All of this makes up what in the writing-based
Aristotelian tradition of poetics is classically defined as narratio, a well-formed story with
a well-wrought plot (Brooks 1984). This tradition also shaped the understanding of oral
everyday narrative by empirical linguists in the last decades of the twentieth century that
was paradigmatically formulated by Labov’s structuralist definition (Labov 1972, Labov
and Waletzky 1967). According to this definition, narrative was a detached and autono-
mous linguistic form of discourse with a clear beginning, an orientation, a complicating
action, an evaluation, and a clear conclusion with resolution and coda.
Today, after the heydays of Aristotelian narrative theory, structuralism, psycho- and
cognitive linguistics, and Labovian narrative analysis are long over, many authors
approaching narrative from a cultural point of view agree that no definition or typol-
ogy of narrative is universally watertight and, what is more, that narrativity covers not
only good but also bad stories – small, fragmented, broken, and weird stories (Ochs and
Capps 2001, Georgakopoulou 2007, Medved and Brockmeier 2010). Typically, everyday
narrative practices do not strive for closed and well-structured stories; forms of action
that serve many purposes, they have fuzzy borders. For Ochs and Capps (2001: 3), they
are the oral country cousins of the well-wrought narratives that are articulated in writing.
Repudiating the idea of a “narrative ontology” (Leitch 1986) that constitutes an entity
globally identified as a narrative or (good) story, novel concepts have been suggested. They
assume, for example, that narrativity is a matter of degree. It is perceived not in an either-
or but in a gradient, more-or-less way, revolving around local prototypes of what counts as
narrative (Herman 2009). Another approach distinguishes several aspects or dimensions
of narrativity that are more or less involved in narrative events (Ochs and Capps 2001).

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There also are theories that entirely do away with the idea that narrative is the representa-
tion of a sequence of events in terms of story or plot and embark on a view of narrative as
being shaped by the social contexts, the “narrative environments” (Gubrium and Holstein
2009) or “narrative occasions” (Herman 2009), in which storytelling occurs. “Narrative
occasions” is taken in a double sense as communicative (or narrative) environments that
shape “how acts of narration are to be interpreted, and, reciprocally, as contexts shaped
by storytelling practices themselves” (Herman 2009: 37). In a similar vein, narrative is
conceived of as a kind of human “experientiality”, as a form in which we experience
the world and ourselves in contexts of social interaction and understanding (Fludernik
1996).
Not surprisingly then, there are fundamentally different conceptions of what is per-
ceived as narrativity (or tellability, prototypical stories, or narrative experientiality) when
it comes to different cultural worlds (Brockmeier 2012). Different cultural worlds may
give space to different “local theories of what constitutes a narrative and what the role of
narrative is in specific communities” (Georgakopoulou 2007: 21). The local situatedness
of storytelling may even lead to discursive interactions in which narrators and listeners/
co-narrators operate with incompatible common-sense notions of stories and, moreover,
use these notions as rhetorical acts within their exchange: “This is not the story here”
(Stokoe and Edwards 2006). Genuine conversational narrative always has unexpected
turns and developments that make it difficult, if not impossible, for a single teller to
present a premeditated plot; indeed:

it is often hard to determine who is the primary teller, especially when the events
were jointly experienced or the basic story is already familiar. Conversational stories
may be deeply contextualized, diffuse, and not easily detachable from the local con-
ditions that occasion them.
(Norrick 2007: 127)

To explain and illustrate the last point – the local and cultural situatedness of narra-
tive – I home in on one particular aspect of narrative: its capacity to organize experiences,
thoughts, and ideas in terms of coherence.

How coherent are stories?

Human beings, as already said, communicate by a number of different means, one of
which is narrative. In everyday life, storytelling is usually intermingled with other dis-
course practices such as conversation. Communicating events, experiences, and ideas in
the form of narrative involves organizing these events, experiences, and ideas in a way
that makes them perceivable as narrative, giving them the shape of a story, whether this
is a “good story” that is easily identified as such or a “bad story” that does not match
traditional criteria but still shows some aspects of narrativity.
One traditional criterion of a proper story is that it is coherent. However, vis-à-vis the
new understanding of narrative, the question is how we can define coherence without
resorting to the narrative ontology of structural (which mostly means structuralist) and

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psycholinguistic coherence postulates. These postulates presume the universal existence

of narrative structures as they have been maintained by narratologists extrapolating
features from standard average European language traditions. This, however, has often
been tantamount to denying the enormous cultural diversity of narrative practices. Take
English as an example, for which this diversity is manifest not only among different
European and non-European cultural worlds of narrative (shaped by English, Irish,
Scottish, American, Indian, Sri Lankan, Australian and many other global traditions of
English). It also is patent in manifold local narrative cultures within these globally distinct
traditions. Therefore, is there any exclusive characteristic of stories and storytelling in the
English language? Drawing on the research literature and on my own work on narratives
in a number of different languages and cultural worlds, I suspect that the enormous
distinctiveness among the different global and local narrative traditions in English or
varieties of English precludes possible universal features.
What seems more promising to me is to investigate some minimal conditions under
which we identify an account as a story or, differently put, as an act of narrative meaning
constitution. What do we do when we tell and understand a story? First, we bring a
perspective to our experience, thought, imagination, and emotion that structures the
cultural world in which we live and positions ourselves and others in this world. Second,
we connect several elements to each other to constitute a whole, a structure of meaning
that is more than the sum of its isolated elements. Third, we engage in an action, enact-
ing or performing, within a discursive and cultural environment that, at the same time,
is shaped by this enacting or performing. In sum, a discursive sequence is understood as
narrative in so far as it configures a perspective, a synthesis of meaning, and a form of
life.
How do these minimal conditions relate to what traditionally has been called coher-
ence? Typically, the coherence of a narrative structure has been conceived of as organized
along a diachronic dimension, that is as a temporal sequence. To challenge this close
alliance of coherence and temporality, let me highlight a few ways to narratively create
what I have called a synthesis of meaning without resorting to temporal sequentiality.
To begin with, there are many narrative accounts that can be organized within a spatial,
thematic, or historical framework. There also are poetic and rhetorical forms, based, for
example, on the use of metaphors, metonymies, allegories, and other specific narrative
techniques, that give discourse sequences a storied form.
Broadening the cultural horizon, we find societies whose narrative repertoires not
only mirror structures of power and social stratification, but also determine which
experiences can and cannot take shape in a linguistic form. For instance, in colonial
Swaziland, a small country in southern Africa, both the white ruling class and the indig-
enous Swazi culture made it impossible for black workers to show and articulate a specific
form of anger essential to the experience of Swazi workers, as Mkhonza (1995) reports.
One reason for this was that the narrative repertoire of siSwazi, the language of black
people, lacked any genre in which this specific experience of anger could coherently
be contextualized. Like the social categories of space, time, and moral duties, narra-
tive genres of siSwazi were racially “indexed”. In many non-western cultures, mythical
narratives of origin unfold along patterns of genealogy or kinship, whereas time or the

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sequentiality of events is present only as an unspecified background of timeless “mythical

time” (Brockmeier 2004). Likewise, there are many religious narratives in which episodes
appear to be coherently connected because they all belong to an over-arching sphere of
transcendence and wonder; independent from this spiritual sphere, as noted by William
James (1902/1982), religious stories do not appear plausible or coherent. Indeed, they do
not even appear to be stories at all. The same holds true for the traditional narratives of
North American indigenous peoples which are closely related to models of kinship, local
geography, and spiritual order, rather than to narrative structures such as plot, storylines,
and drama (Basso 1996, Cruikshank 1998, Chamberlin 2004).
Turning again to conversational narratives in European and North American everyday
English, even here the typical primary goal is not to elaborate the inherent structural or
temporal coherence of a story; in fact, as mentioned earlier, the story may be unfinished or
just hinted at. Instead, what defines coherence is the conversational dynamic – and thus
the action a narrative is meant to carry out – and not any “narrative logic” (which does
not mean that this dynamic excludes plotted and closed stories). In the course of such a
dynamic, a narrative gestalt typically is perceived as coherent – that is, as a meaningful
whole – within the discursive flow of a social interaction, its institutional constraints,
and the strategies of the participants who make their points and position themselves and
others, that is, bring to bear a particular perspective. What makes up a “good story” told
by a teacher to students or by a boss to employees may draw as much on the institutional
authority of the teller as on its coherence in strictly narratological terms. A conceptual
framework for this has been offered by positioning theory. In explaining the discursive
dynamic of narrative, positioning theory highlights the ways storytellers perform actions
by attributing certain positions to characters in their stories, to the audience addressed by
the storytelling, to themselves, and to the cultural world at large (Bamberg 1997, Harré
and van Langenhove 1999, Harré et al. 2009).
Stories, viewed this way, are not inherently coherent entities, but strategic interven-
tions into ongoing activities. Stories are told in order to do things. They are forms of
action, told by social actors. Against the backdrop of such an action- and interaction-
focused notion of narrative, today supported by many discourse theorists, conversation
analysts, and narratologists, we deal with ways of talking, writing, and otherwise
performing that handle and negotiate stories, story fragments, contested stories, and
allusions to stories, rather than provide well-ordered and sequential plots or storylines.
Accordingly, the organization of narrative – in whatever medium, social context, and
semiotic environment – appears to be a function of what storytelling does within a given
cultural world, not of a paradigmatic model of coherence or temporal structure (see also
Chapter 31).

Current contribution

Narrative as a form of life

To summarize the notion of narrative suggested so far, I again refer to its Wittgensteinian
description as a cultural form of life – or, as Wittgenstein also put it, as a language game

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“consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven” (Wittgenstein 2009/1953:
7). The same perspective can be applied to the understanding I have suggested regarding
what counts as narrative, an understanding that likewise depends on the contextual and
cultural conditions under which the meaning of narrative is attributed to a discursive
sequence. This is to say, there is no such thing as a universal and pre-cultural definition
of narrative.
Exploring this Wittgensteinian perspective on narrative, Rom Harré and I have
described the forms and practices of narrative as fleeting constellations of forms of life
which are best understood within a conception of language as open discourse, that is as
fluid patterns of action and positioning (Brockmeier and Harré 2001). In this view, the
forms and categories of narrative do not exist as abstract models to be made concrete,
but are constrained to take the forms they do by the requirements of the situations in
which they occur. Instead of conceiving of stories as cognitive, linguistic, metalinguistic,
or even ontological structures or entities – we have characterized this as the “ontology
fallacy” of narrative – we have proposed them as modus operandi of specific discursive
practice.

Narrative dimensions
If we take narrative as a property attributed under particular circumstances to certain
discursive (or enactive or performative) practices, several aspects of storytelling are cast in
a new light. This makes narrativity appear – to emphasize just one of these aspects – as
a relative quality that is displayed in a number of dimensions to different degrees and in
different ways. In this sense, Ochs and Capps (2001) have distinguished five “narrative
dimensions” that are helpful in further examining what I have outlined as culturally
situated perception of narrative. Being aware of these relative dimensions permits us to
deal in a non-reductive way with narrative’s puzzling cultural plasticity.
The first narrative dimension, Ochs and Capps propose, is tellership. Tellership refers
to the extent of involvement of different protagonists in the actual recounting or enact-
ing of a story. At issue here is the question of who tells the story. Tellability, the second
dimension, points to how tellable and plausible a story is; this aspect or dimension
contributes to the degree of coherence we associate with the story. We could say that
tellability is about the question of how much the story is in accordance with the notion of
narrative canonical in a particular cultural world. If a discourse goes below a certain level
of tellability, be it in terms of its content, its storied form, or its performance, it is not
perceived as a story any longer. Embeddedness is the third narrative dimension. It reflects
how much a story is entangled with surrounding discourses and social activities, that is
how much it is rooted in a narrative environment. A personal narrative, for example, can
be presented and perceived as a structured whole, as in certain institutional occasions
(courtroom, job interview). Yet it also may be told as part of an ongoing conversation and
hence is related to the organization of turn taking (i.e. the sequence of the contributions),
distributed to distinct subjects or themes and commented on by other interlocutors (see
also Chapters 18 and 20).

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The fourth dimension is linearity. In personal narratives, linearity emerges when

events and actions are organized along a single, temporal, causal, and closed path, as
is characteristic of an Aristotelian storyline with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Alternatively, it dissolves in narratives that are intermittent, fragmentary, messy, and
open. Finally, the fifth dimension concerns the moral stance conveyed by a narrative.
Personal narratives typically pretend to present not objective versions of events or experi-
ences, but rather perspectives on events and experiences. I have called this one of the
minimal conditions that distinguish narrative from texts in an instruction manual, a
code of law, and a physics book. The perspective depends on the moral stance or position
of the narrator. Stories unfold a perspective, if not several perspectives, that explicitly
or implicitly comes with an evaluative stance. This moral stance – the sense of usual
or unusual, right or wrong, good or bad – gives narratives their edge and urgency, their
charge of personal commitment.

Future directions
To see narrativity in terms of different dimensions that impact on how a discourse or
a part of it is perceived as “storied” in a gradient, more-or-less way permits us to align
storytelling along a broad range of culturally situated formats. These discourse formats,
as I have pointed out in this chapter, range from social activity to a textual reality, from
oral to written discourse, from artistic performance to everyday exchange, from naturally
occurring conversation to literarily composed prose.
Considering the present landscape of narrative studies and the trends of future
research emerging, we recognize a continuously growing awareness of narrative’s mul-
tifariousness. For one, this awareness regards the rootedness of stories and storytelling
in the enormous global and local diversity of cultural traditions, a diversity and richness
that we have not even started to perceive, let alone explore. There can be no doubt that
this opening towards the multitude of global storyworlds and the different languages
that give them life will make increasingly evident that the traditional categorical and
analytical apparatus of narrative studies (and its linguistic home, English and the other
standard European languages) is limited and, in part, inappropriate to capture and
reflect this linguistic, narrative, and cultural diversity.
A second area of growing awareness concerns cultural explanations that localize nar-
rative practices in contexts of social interaction and in the over-arching symbolic webs of
cultural meaning systems. The focus here is less on narratives’ numerous multicultural
forms of life and more on the way in which the inner (linguistic, semiotic, performative)
organization of narratives and narrative practices is part of larger cultural dynamics.
Even here, narrative studies have started to abandon their structuralist, psycholinguist,
and ethnocentric burden to embark on new journeys of discovery. These journeys are
inspired by many new and old theoretical insights provided in fields such as hermeneutic-
interpretive ethnography and philosophy, anthropological linguistics and semiotics,
cultural and narrative psychology, and postclassical narratology – to name a few of those
approaches that have already set off to investigate the makeup of their subjects in the
light of a cultural perspective.

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Notes
1 There is an extensive body of literature on this “new approach” that includes works such as those
of Hymes (Hymes 1964, Hymes 1974), Bauman (1986), Clifford and Marcus (1986), Harré and col-
leagues (1999), Duranti (Duranti 2006, Duranti 2009), Georgakopoulou (2007), and Bamberg and
Georgakopoulou (2008), to mention a few.

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Further reading
Alber, J. and Fludernik, M. (eds) (2010) Postclassical Narratology, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Andrews, M., Squire, C. and Tamboukou, M. (eds) (2013) Doing Narrative Research, 2nd edn, Los Angeles,
CA: Sage.
This collection includes chapters outlining different theoretical and methodological orientations within
the entire spectrum of narrative studies.
Heinen, S. and Sommer, R. (eds) (2009) Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter.
These two books include studies by some of the leading figures of “postclassical narratology” – an
approach to narrative that goes beyond the study of written literature (although many of the authors
started there) – offering a broad spectrum of “narrative disciplines” including literary studies, hermeneu-
tics, cognitive theory, film theory, media and intermediality studies, and social memory studies.
Herman, D., Jahn, M. and Ryan, M.-L. (2005) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London:
Routledge.
This book is a comprehensive overview of all aspects of narrative theory in the humanities and social
sciences after the “narrative turn”.
Holstein, J.A. and Gubrium, J.F. (2012) Varieties of Narrative Analysis, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
How does one analyse stories? This book offers introductions to the most widely used methods for the
empirical study of narrative in the social sciences and their theoretical underpinnings.

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