{"id":537,"date":"2007-11-14T21:58:48","date_gmt":"2007-11-15T01:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=537"},"modified":"2007-11-14T21:58:48","modified_gmt":"2007-11-15T01:58:48","slug":"narrative-trust-and-understanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/narrative-trust-and-understanding\/","title":{"rendered":"Narrative, trust, and understanding"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Acts of Meaning<\/em> (1990), Jerome Bruner writes,<\/p>\n

To be in a viable culture is to be bound in a set of connecting stories, connecting even though the stories may not represent a consensus.<\/p>\n

When there is a breakdown in a culture (or even within a microculture like the family) it can usually be traced to one of several things. The first is a deep disagreement about what constitutes the ordinary and canonical in life and what the exceptional or divergent. And this we know in our time from what one might call the ‘battle of life-styles,’ exacerbated by intergenerational conflict. A second threat inheres in the rhetorical overspecialization of narrative, when stories become so ideologically or self-servingly motivated that distrust displaces interpretation, and ‘what happened’ is discounted as fabrication. On the large scale, this is what happenes under a totalitarian regime, and contemporary novelists of Central Eurpope have documented it with painful exquisiteness–Milan Kundera, Danila Kis, and many others. The same phenomenon expresses itself in modern bureaucracy, where all except the official story of what is happening is silenced or stonewalled. And finally, there is breakdown that results from sheer impoverishment of narrative resources–in the permanent underclass of the urban gthetto, in the second and third generation of the Palestinian refuges compound, in the hunger-preoccupied villages of semipermanently drought-stricken villages in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not that there is a total loss in putting story form to experience, but that the ‘worst scenario’ story comes so to dominate daily life that variation seems no longer to be possible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These observations strike me as deeply insightful.<\/p>\n

Too often within the academy I see interpretation displaced by distrust, precisely because of what Bruner intriguingly names the “rhetorical overspecialization of narrative.” I have seen less of that displacement in the community of teaching and learning technology practitioners than I have in my disciplinary community. I suppose some part of me has always hoped that the groups could find not only synergy but healing in each other’s company, and that we could help each other become our best selves. I suppose I still have that hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Acts of Meaning (1990), Jerome Bruner writes, To be in a viable culture is to be bound in a set of connecting stories, connecting even though the stories may not represent a consensus. When there is a breakdown in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bHwM-8F","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}