文化心理学

Narrative Reverberations

How participation in narrative practices co-create persons and cultures

Peggy ler

Hetdi Fung

Michele Koven

In The Girl with the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape Their Lives , Vivian Gussin Paley (1997) tells the story of a small black girl‟s passion for the books of Leo Lionni, a passion that transforms the kindergarten class and Paley‟s final year of teaching. The student, Reeny, is hooked first by Frederick, the story of a brown mouse whom she recognizes to be a kindred spirit. The students read and reread each book until they have memorized it. They discuss, ponder, and dramatize the story, and create posters tha happen: Characters from different books turn out to be friends, Frederick shows up in a classmate‟s closely guarded fantasy world, previously inhabited entirely by rabbits. The Leo Lionni stories call forth other stories: epics from India, stories from a one-room schoolhouse in Mississippi, Harriet Tubman‟s adventures freeing slaves, including Reeny‟s great-great-grandmother. Paley notes that stories “proceed as if nothing else is going on”(p.viii). In the process, they bring disparate people, places, and times into their orbit. By the end of the school year Reeny, the natural-born leader, innovator, and practitioner of the introspective life, is ready for first grade. Her teacher, contemplating an uncertain identity outside the classroom, faces many questions and a new beginning, but one in which the story of Renny and Leo Lionni‟s stories will play a part.

W e begin with this example because it dramatizes especially well how narrative reverberates through the lives of individuals, connecting them to other people, other stories, and other activities, and teaching them who they are or might become. Our goal in this chapter is to explain how narrative practices such as those in Paley‟s classroom, are implicated in the co-creation of persons and cultures across the lifespan and across a variety of cultural contexts. Although the co-creation of person and culture is widely recognized to be a fundamental problem in cultural psychology, the mechanisms of this process have remained mysterious. W e argue that everyday narrative practices can be fruitfully examined as ony key site for how and where the co-creation of persons and culture is accomplished.

Premises of Practice Approaches to Narrative

The turn toward a practice approach to narrative is part of a larger trend towaed practicecentered conceptions of language in cultural psychology and allied disciplines (e.g., Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Duranti & Goodwin, 1992; Goodnow, Miller, & Kessel, 1995; Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Shweder et al., 2006). These conceptions rest on the premise that to speak is to act-to create, perform, and transform social realities. A number of intellectual currents have fed into such practice-centered views of language including scholarship that addresses the pragmatic features of talk-what people “do”with words(Austin, 1975) and socio-cultural theory, with its focus on semiotically mediated activity(Cole, 1996; W ertsch, 1991). These perspectices converge on a conception of language that privileges the analysis of speech events in context (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Bauman & Sherzer, 1989; Duranti & Goodwin, 1992; Hanks, 1996; Hymes, 1974; Jakobson, 1960). Hanks (1996) describes speech as “a form of engagement in the