Telling stories is one of the fundamental things we do as humans. Yet in scholarship, stories considered to be “traditional”, such as myths, folk tales, and epics, have often been analyzed separately from the narratives of personal experience that we all tell on a daily basis. In
Storytelling as Narrative Practice, editors Elizabeth Falconi and Kathryn Graber argue that storytelling is best understood by erasing this analytic divide. Chapter authors carefully examine language use
in-situ, drawing on in-depth knowledge gained from long-term fieldwork, to present rich and nuanced analyses of storytelling-as-narrative-practice across a diverse range of global contexts. Each chapter takes a holistic ethnographic approach to show the practices, processes, and social consequences of telling stories.
Elizabeth A. Falconi, Ph.D. (2011), University of Michigan, is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of West Georgia. Her recent publications include a chapter entitled “The Social Mediatization of a Zapotec Transborder Community,” in the coedited volume
Rural Voices.
Kathryn E. Graber, Ph.D. (2012), University of Michigan, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. Her publications on language, media, and materiality in Russia and Mongolia include a monograph on Buryat minority media (Cornell, forthcoming).
Scholars, university instructors, and anyone else interested in narrative, storytelling, discourse, anthropological and sociolinguistic approaches to language, linguistic and cultural heritage, identity formation, and pragmatics. Anthropology, linguistics, folklore, and rhetoric.