Storytelling Through the Ages

Reviewed By: Laura Leib

This site tries to look at the world of storytelling with a historical perspective. It starts by analyzing the way the oral tradition was treated in Ancient Greece and works up to modern times. The site is basically text with a few photos thrown in, and is a distillation of a symposium held at the Smithsonian Institute April 2001. Several speeches are trancribed here. The speeches themselves are very interesting delving into how scientists have pooh-poohed the value of storytelling as not provable, or perhaps just myths.

For example one speech talked about working at Xerox. The person was hired to figure out a better training set-up for the repair people. He hired anthropologists to follow the repair people around and found that the repairmen talked with other repairmen when they had a problem they couldn't fix and the narrative led them to a solution. So the conclusion was that two-way radios were the best tools to give repairmen for training, so they can access their peers for help! Very interesting.

There is an excellent bibliography in this site, and it seems that the authors, there are four of them are very proud of their achievements, as they call themselves (all four of them) "some of the world's leading thinkers!" In truth the site is very interesting, though lacking in any pizzaz which is commonly found on web sites these days.