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By Root 945 0

succinctly expressed in the Boy Scout motto, “Be prepared.” Hunter-gatherer life was “a never-ending stream of tasks, obstacles, and hazards, local solutions to which the individual is not born knowing.” The folklore of contemporary foragers, she observes, uses stories to enable “people acquire information, rehearse strategies, or refine skills that are instrumental in surmounting real-life difficulties and dangers.” She cites the the Kalahari hunters, who sit around the campfire describing recent hunts and those from the distant past. This is shoptalk, with anecdotes need not come in the form of strictly factual accounts: it can culled from fable and mythology too, and in fact may be more memorable when so presented. As an example of the latter, Sugiyama cites Yanomamo folktale about how Jaguar is chided by Millipede for walking noisily through the jungle. Millipede rounds and softens the soles Jaguar’s paws and teaches him to walk softly, without breaking branches. The story is replete with information and advice: about jaguars (predators humans), about the importance (for humans) of walking quietly when from a village or camp, and by analogy also about strategies for ambush and mea sures to avoid attack by other tribes. The tale is about local threats and strategies (both jaguars and humans) but also makes vivid more universal issues, emphasizing “our vulnerability to predation and a concomitant safety rule: whenever potential predators may lurk (be they human nonhuman), it pays to tread lightly and be vigilant.”

Conceived in this way, the problem-oriented thought experiments, information, and analysis of problem situations that storytelling addresses directed at an outer environment of resources, dangers, and opportunities. But just as important in the social context of hunter-gatherer bands the inner psychological experience of one’s fellows, the shared emotional and intellectual world of the tribe. It is here that fiction comes into own in terms of its particular artistic potential to portray and examine inner experience and demonstrate an adaptive relevance that extends beyond the issues so far discussed. Stories, now and presumably in prehistory, are about human life—the desires, emotions, calculations, struggles, frustrations, and pleasures that are the stuff of human experience. Animals as characters in stories—from the Yanomamo folklore to Aesop’s fables to Europe an fairy tales to Kipling to the fantasy literature of Tolkien to The Lion King—are invariably stand-ins for human beings. Physical objects or phenomena—the sun and moon, the wind, clouds— humanized in stories all over the world as imaginary people. But purely natural history—the “story” of the earth’s geological history, for example—is a recent, and from a narrative perspective rather peculiar, idea. Rocks are passive recipients of action, not initiators of it. Stories are essentially about agency and emotion, which generally rules out a central place for rocks as main characters, unless they can be converted metaphor ically or symbolically into humanlike entities.

Mere human agency and feeling are not, however, enough to make a story. Again, cross-culturally today and through all of known cultural history, stories are about problems and conflict: competing human interests for power or love are prime topics, as well as natural threats to limb (in which case a dangerous animal may well be an animal a surrogate person). In this way, the most abstract characterization can be given of stories is that they involve (1) a human will and some kind of resis tance to it. That is why “Mary was hungry, Mary dinner” narrates a sequence of events that does not yet seem like a story, while “John was starving, but the pantry was empty” does sound like beginning of one. Obstacles—to life, wealth, ambition, love, comfort, status, or power—are one central element in the fundamental idea story; the other element is how a human will triumphantly overcomes— tragically fails to overcome—obstacles. Stories are intrinsically about the minds of real or fictional characters