Importance of Storytelling To Human Progress

Sharing experience is not an occasional but a systematic activity of our species, a form of information exchange and social organization. Teachable experience takes an individual receiving an advanced template of behavior much further in his success in life. Sharing and teaching experience have become so intrinsic and advantageous for our species that an investigation of what forms of sharing/teaching are most effective – the best stories and the best ways if taking them - naturally came into play. Before long, such activities as storytelling and playing (ritual and drama) have come to the attention of human communities around the world. Storytelling and its dramatic counterpart – playing, have becomes essential to our progress as the species.

In the 1920s Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher of culture, named the “patron of the humanities in the 1990s) also introduced his theory of dialogism, which became the basis of a new discipline dialogical anthropology. Bakhtin suggested that the dialog is an essential human condition, and a framework of culture, and all its derivatives – texts, stories, films, games, etc. In other words, we always are thinking together, and even we are alone – we create a symbolic imaginary interlocutor to run our ideas by and mimic communication. This idea was wittily reflected in Cast Away, in which Tom Hanks character, alone on the uninhibited island, creates a symbolic being he named Wilson. The ideas of Tuner and BKHTIN correlate on many levels – as a human species we are in constant dialogue with ourselves – thus dialogue is a channel for the productive action-reflection process. In addition to be in a dialogue with ourselves – and this is how we think, as Bakhtin has shown, we are also in neve...

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...ng and sharing experience – hence bonding and identifying with each other – is a process of symbolic construction of community.

Story elements, narrative formulas, poetic compositions and narrative traditions – all represent cultural resonances on human experience of different scales and the forms of self-reflection of culture. Narrative traditions represent essential symbolic processes (Turner) of culture aimed at the symbolic construction of community.

Self-awareness is the main trait of consciousness, and hence a reflection on one’s actions is what makes us human. The more intense is the action-reflection mechanism on the level of individuals, families, groups, and societies, the farther will be the progress of humankind.

Storytelling intensifies, not merely reflects, the mechanism of action-reflection, thus accumulating and efficiently processing experience.