ABSTRACT
Stories create many social and cultural links with people and places perhaps far away in distance, time or life experience. This chapter addresses these communications function of story, though I am choosing not to separate them. If a story is communicated by one person to another, there is inevitably a social element, and if there is a social element, there is inevitably a cultural context within the story, affecting the storytelling and its teller and listeners. If I talk of story as a repository of cultural information there are associated social and communication issues. The meaning of ‘culture’ has required a little more consideration. I can apply the term to the culture of a nation or race, or I can apply it to an organisation or small community or group. Much of what I will be saying in this chapter applies at all levels – and I will comment where distinction needs to be made. As with the previous two theory chapters, there are many aspects of this chapter
to which I will return in later areas of the book, but here, in particular, I focus on story at the interpersonal level and education as a site of significant interpersonal interactions. Where I return to a topic later, I deal with it here in less detail. Within this chapter, I have considered various social uses of story and have
covered each under a separate heading. I list them here in order to provide an overview of the chapter, though the first heading is a review in itself. I have tried to sequence the sections so that they most logically feed into each other. The sections are as follows:
a review of the social role of story; story as satisfying human interaction needs and entertainment; story as a means of conveying information, knowledge and unspoken under-
standings in a social group; story as a representation of expectations and norms of behaviour; story as a means of transmitting culture and as a repository for culture; story as a conveyor of morality and subversion and as an initiator of social
change; story and its role in education and the sharing of views of the world.
