ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the works of cultural psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, literary critics and linguists, contributing to highlighting the nexus between mind, culture and narrative and to the development and improvement of the narrative turn in legal scholarship since the 1980s. Human culture is itself the product of a dialectic between sometimes conflicting ways of ‘constructing reality’. Culture is construed by J. S. Bruner as something dynamic, a repertoire of responses to individual actions: it must enable its members to do something with their acquired knowledge. The purpose of the ‘narrative action’ is to restore the canonical state of things or to create a new one: normally it takes shape while respecting culture and tradition. Legal narratives then build a bridge between the initial reality, intended as cultural visions, and ‘possible’ and ‘alternative’ social and cultural constructions of reality. A conception of the law as a ‘system of forces’ is flanked by another, of the law as a ‘system of meanings’.
