In each narratology I sense regression from living story to narrative structure as the territory becomes the map and live story becomes chronicle and formalism. We have reviewed these story deaths in a chapter for a book edited by Robert Westwood and Steve Linstead The Language of Organization (Boje, Alvarez & Schooling, 1999). The book covers a range of approaches drawing on linguistic theory and models, including semiotics and postmodernism, and the contributors include Barbara Czarniawsk a, John Hassard, Mark Gottdeiner, Bob Cooper among others. Steve Linstead wrote me "I have pencilled in a chapter which I have called ""Reclaiming Story in Organization Narratologies and Action Sciences."

Were stories ever alive? Kaylynn TwoTrees (1997) of the Lakota taught me three things about stories:

1. Stories have a time. "You tell story at a certain time of the year, a season, or time of the day. There are Fall and Spring stories."

 

2. Stories have a place. "You recount stories at this place and places have their own story. Every university has a place that has its story."

 

3. Stories have a mind. "Every creation, even a story, has a life of its own. We create a story and it has a life. The stories have origins. You must tell a story with permission."

For Kaylynn, stories must be re-contextualized back to their time, place, and mind. And you just do not mess up a story or tell it with out permission. "What is the Lakota penalty for changing a story, telling a story wrong or without permissio n?" I asked. "It is death," she replied. Why death? "Because, the story in an oral culture is the entire living history of the community." Stories live, unless we kill them.

Barre Toelken (1996) is a folklorist who questions Eurocentric story scholarship which seeks to fit stories into typologies and collections, including many of the practices of his own discipline, folklore.

His academic colleagues had two reactions (1) some agreed with the decisions and (2) "many told me it was anti-intellectual to quit and that it was my duty to the folklore profession to go as deep into the field as I could and share the results; I was surprised by how many in both of these camps soon began inviting me to their campuses to talk about Navajo stories some more’ (p. 52).

For the Navajo, stories are living embodiments of reality, living dramas, a language that creates reality, not the reverse (Toelken, 1996: 53). Narratologists and folklorists are oftentimes eager to rip a story from its native cultural and performa nce context, probe its structure and metaphor, contrast it in a typology with other stories, mimic it in plagiarized performance, or display it like a museum piece. This is what I mean by narratologies killing story. Some stories do not explain anything, beg for interpretation, and performing them is culturally insensitive, even dangerous.

Toelken (1996) recounts how she began her folkloric career collecting Navajo storiesin the 1950s, while living with a Navajo family. In the 1960s she analyzed stories as embodiments of Navajo worldview focusing on content and performance style, tex ture and audience response. In the 1970s he did better translation work and with "the help of a Navajo friend" did "phrase-by-phrase translation" of stories not given such close attention in his earlier work. The more rigorous transla tions pointed out errors and misreadings of his earlier work. And in the 1980s he "discovered by way of an earnest warning from a medicine man, that [his] whole thirty-year flirtation with Navajo stories was getting dangerous" (p. 54). The 1980s were his attempts to adjust the use of Navajo stories he had circulated that needed corrections. And since then, his Navajo brother-in-law began having serious misfortunes.

The stories that were told badly and perhaps without permission, in the wrong place and time, are affecting the "mental and physical imbalance" (p. 55). Telling "Native stories for non-Natives out of context may be dangerous to our menta l health: for we know there will always be a discrepancy between what the story is – as a living articulation – and what you and I think it means as an example of something-or-other" (p. 56).

I think that stories live in modern and postmodern culture, not just in indigenous culture. The book I am writing Spectacles and Festivals of Organization (1999) is a critical look at the storytelling of spectacles of production and consumption. It intermingles the Situationist movement, particularly the work of Guy Debord (1967), postmodern spectacle theory work by Steven Best and Douglas Kellner (1997), and the Ahimsa (non-violence) discourses. The spectacle gives an apologetic story for makin g/consuming more and more stuff, "the undisturbed development of modern capitalism" (Debord #65). Spectacle narrates everywhere, in the advertising extravaganza, from the four-story Coke bottle that houses digital Storytelling Theater to a Disne y that has migrated itself to the Malls and Airports, and is mimicked from Las Vegas to the local shopping mall; in spectacles in our living room, like the Super Bowl (with digitized advertising superimposed on the field of play and Reebok icon-jerseys ba ttling with Nike icons). Festival would means being critical of materiality.

Spectacle narrates inherently artificial prescriptions for the happy person in the happy society. Our life is just too "saturated with spectacles" and we are too pacified in their "permanent opium war" (Debord, 1967: #44). Spectacl e, says Debord, allows us to sleep walk, as if drugged, stumbling blindfolded through a devolving landscape of ecological and human horror; while cocooned in artificiality and illusion; mind-numbed by cyber media into passive stupefied spectators.

Ahimsa stories life into the material conditions of all beings; resists the fetish of overproduction and conspicuous consumption; stories plant, animals, and humans as living.

1999 "Reclaiming Story in Organization Narratologies and Action Sciences." To appear in Robert Westwood and Steve Linstead The Language of Organization.