Living with Stories
Living with Stories
Living with Stories
Edited by William Schneider
5.5 x 8.5 184 pages

Published: 2008

ISBN 978-0-87421-689-9
cloth $27.95

ISBN 978-0-87421-690-5
e-book $23.00

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William Schneider is curator of oral history and associate in anthropology at the Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he introduced oral history "jukeboxes," innovative interactive, multimedia computer files that present and cross-reference audio oral history and related photos and maps. Among other works, his publications include, as editor, Kusiq: An Eskimo Life History from the Arctic Coast of Alaska and, with Phyllis Morrow, When Our Words Return: Writing, Hearing, and Remembering Oral Traditions of Alaska and the Yukon.

Living with Stories

Telling, Retelling, and Remembering

Edited by William Schneider

Also by William Schneider: So They Understand

Living with Stories echoes Levi-Strauss's famous maxim that some phenomena are 'good to think with.' These fine essays and commentaries reveal how such reflections sink into life experience and circulate in stories told and sung aloud.
—Julie Cruikshank, author of Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination

Living with Stories is, first of all, a compelling read. The diversity of approaches to the re-telling of narratives and the variety of cultures in which that diversity is explored are remarkable. The breadth of analytical perspectives provides a unique contribution to narrative scholarship. Each author has carefully taken the tools of his or her discipline and brought them to bear on specific performative moments in particular culturally relevant ways.

—Margaret K. Brady, author of Some Kind of Power: Navajo Children's Skinwalker Narratives

In essays about communities as varied as Alaskan Native, East Indian, Palestinian, Mexican, and African American, oral historians, folklorists, and anthropologists look at how traditional and historical oral narratives live through re-tellings, gaining meaning and significance in repeated performances, from varying contexts, through cultural and historical knowing, and due to tellers' consciousness of their audiences.