Narrative Theory and Function: Why Evolution Matters

Sugiyama, Michelle Scalise

doi:10.1353/phl.2001.0035

Cited by 62 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The mythology represents for him the summation of knowledge on the basis of which he must act” (Opler, 1940, p. x; see also Goodwin, 1939; Street, 1972; Biesele, 1993; de Marrais et al, 1994; Scalise Sugiyama, 2008). Forager oral traditions also appear to serve as a repository for information relevant to recurrent problems of forager existence, such as manipulating and being manipulated by others (Scalise Sugiyama, 1996), locating and harvesting resources (Scalise Sugiyama, 2001a,b), famine (Sobel and Bettles, 2000; Scalise Sugiyama and Sugiyama, 2009), predator avoidance (Scalise Sugiyama, 2004, 2006), free riding (Scalise Sugiyama, 2008), wayfinding (Scalise Sugiyama and Sugiyama, 2008), and errant children (Scalise Sugiyama and Sugiyama, in press). Research on mental time travel – the ability to recall the past and imagine the future – provides a framework for integrating all of these claims.…”

Section: What Do Humans Learn From Storytelling?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Forager Oral Tradition and the Evolution of Prolonged Juvenility

Sugiyama¹

2011

Front. Psychology

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The foraging niche is characterized by the exploitation of nutrient-rich resources using complex extraction techniques that take a long time to acquire. This costly period of development is supported by intensive parental investment. Although human life history theory tends to characterize this investment in terms of food and care, ethnographic research on foraging skill transmission suggests that the flow of resources from old-to-young also includes knowledge. Given the adaptive value of information, parents may have been under selection pressure to invest knowledge – e.g., warnings, advice – in children: proactive provisioning of reliable information would have increased offspring survival rates and, hence, parental fitness. One way that foragers acquire subsistence knowledge is through symbolic communication, including narrative. Tellingly, oral traditions are characterized by an old-to-young transmission pattern, which suggests that, in forager groups, storytelling might be an important means by which adults transfer knowledge to juveniles. In particular, by providing juveniles with vicarious experience, storytelling may expand episodic memory, which is believed to be integral to the generation of possible future scenarios (i.e., planning). In support of this hypothesis, this essay reviews evidence that: mastery of foraging knowledge and skill sets takes a long time to acquire; foraging knowledge is transmitted from parent to child; the human mind contains adaptations specific to social learning; full assembly of learning mechanisms is not complete in early childhood; and forager oral traditions contain a wide range of information integral to occupation of the foraging niche. It concludes with suggestions for tests of the proposed hypothesis.

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Section: What Do Humans Learn From Storytelling?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Forager Oral Tradition and the Evolution of Prolonged Juvenility

Sugiyama¹

2011

Front. Psychology

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“…Other theorists have developed the definition of emplotment to include the use of goal-directed action aimed at the resolution of a problem 13 14. Some have further invoked the universality of plot structures across cultures to support the thesis that narrative capacities are a crucial cognitive development in human evolution, particularly for transmitting information across generations 15 16 17…”

Section: From Life Narratives To Therapeutic Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ability to identify narratives develops in children across cultures and does not appear to require explicit teaching 17. The universality and innateness of narrative abilities, however, does not preclude differences in narrative competence, and psychologists have noted that in early childhood narrative style differentiates correlative with parental attachment 77.…”

Section: Narrative Competencementioning

confidence: 99%

Finding a voice: revisiting the history of therapeutic writing

Peterkin

Prettyman

2009

Med Humanities

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We review the history of therapeutic writing, focusing on the role of narrative competence and the use of writing therapy for stress, trauma and coping with chronic illness. After providing a historical overview of the evidence for writing's positive effects on health and the hypothesised mechanisms underlying this effect, we ask whether narrative competence can explain and improve writing's benefit. Narrative competence is defined across two dimensions: (1) Emplotment, or the ability to construct and comprehend goal-oriented connections among temporally situated events; and (2) Meaning, or the ability to understand and communicate contextual interpretations of ambiguous story structures. We suggest that the ability to construct well-organised and meaningful narratives is an important skill for successfully coping with life stressors and trauma, enabling individuals to create coherent stories from fractured memories and to facilitate cognitive processing of traumatic events. Given the positive effect of narrative competence on psycho-physical health, there is a need to broaden medical use of narrative competence therapies beyond the current interventions aimed at fostering empathy among healthcare providers, to include therapies for the patients themselves. Toward this end, we briefly explore one clinical model currently offered by Dr Allan Peterkin and colleagues at Mount Sinai Hospital providing group Narrative Competence Psychotherapy (NCP) for individuals living with HIV.

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“…Bruner (1990) and others (Daiute & Nelson, 1997;Pinker, 2007;Sugiyama, 2001) have argued that narrative is a sensemaking tool used by human communities across time to make sense of phenomenon. Others have suggested we as humans have evolved this capacity for making narratives as a specialized human tool that has evolved across our history as a species.…”

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confidence: 99%