ABSTRACT
Analyzing storytelling from the vantage point of orality may be valuable, but one also has to be extremely careful not to project orality as the binary opposite of alphabetic literacy—a projection that is far too facile and sometimes even philosophically dangerous. Consequently, we will need to isolate-or "excavate", in the social theorist Michel Foucault's manner of speaking-those norms most fundamental to the oral episteme of narrative. True, the oral episteme may reflect more natural mode of storytelling, but it also remains a theoretical model subject to flow and variance like that between Tijuana and San Diego, as Bruno Latour argues with respect to what divides prescientific from scientific culture. Ignoring or intellectually jettisoning half of the equation by homing in exclusively on the written doesn’t necessarily serve as an illuminating remedy or rectification either.
