- narrative forms of communication are universal
- narrative forms of communication are implicitly tied up with moralizing, in the process of making events narrative (narrativizing)
- alfredo says that the French and german work now is so based on material culture descriptions etc that it is more annal-style than narrative, and is thus not moralizing. Shanks points out that the choice of items is itself a framework even if not completely narrative- a catalogue of bronze age swords says that the bronze age is about bronze, is about swords, is about fighting, etc, and that it is NOT about pottery or textiles etc.
- can there be history without narrative?
- No. you can’t, even in the annals, you add narrative in yourself.
- In the catalogues, we see narrative, and the writers make little bits of narrative, but we add in the entire over-arching narrative.
- Even a list of facts is actually a story—causal relationships are stories too.
- Narrativization vs. storytelling vs. discourse
- Story has a plot, beginning, middle and end. Something that is done.
- Narrative also has a plot, but does not necessarily end, etc. objective. Something that is. Appropriate to use for things with structures and forms. (a bronze age sword catalog is positioned within a narrative structure, but is not storytelling) very different from fiction.
- Discourse is subjective, with no plot.
- White assumes that any narrative form, regardless of what it is, is political in the sense that it has discourses across discursive boundaries.
- Storytelling is a big part of archaeology these days, TAG has a storytelling group fairly often. But you always have to ask by what right people are appropriating the story of the people they work on. Paul Mullins works in African American archaeology, and would never tell stories, he instead chooses to present his positionality clearly. The way these things are done imparts half of their message.
- There is no critical apparatus for evaluating archaeological narratives. And if you dealt with them, you probably couldn’t get it published.
- reality
- There is a constant tension between the annal form which only represents real events, and narrativized forms which represent only imagined events (which may coincide with ‘real’, but which even in that case are actually just the ‘wishes, hopes and dreams’ of the narrator).
- Narrative is representation ‘re’-presentation that deal with the privileged events of the real, but it is always filtered through the lens of the narrator.
- How do judgments of goodness for narratives apply to the narrative’s hewing to the ‘real’ events?
- A good narrative is persuasive, lays out a question that is interesting and attempt to persuade the reader to it.
- A bad narrative fails to do this.
- Is it that there is a profound correspondence between the narrative and the source material, or is it that the narrative is just very convincing?
- These two things are not mutually exclusive,
- I think the first is most crucial.
- We oppose rhetoric to evidence—for rhetoric to be successful it must have evidence to support it.
- In terms of archaeology, there is always a re-performance. The bronxe age swords are now—we are making lists and catalogues etc, and performing with them. Is their original meaning/use primary, or is ours? Does one have to be secondary?
- Shakespeare—he wrote the plays, but every performance, even the first that he directed, was an interpretation, a ‘re’-presentation of the material. So is the first one primary?
- Site specific performance event art—what is the story of the event, if it happened in hamburg 1974, how can you appreciate it now? interviewing the participants, watching a video, looking at photographs? This is not a self-contained entity, it is different, and it changes in time. Is the original part primary, or is our interpretation of it now primary? Similar with art that is meant to decay/change over time.
