HOW important are stories? Are they rice or cheesecake?
The Nieman Storyboard’s Jacqui Banazynski posted on March 13 about hearing from journalist Lina Vaaben of Denmark how she gave away bags of rice tied with quotes from her favorite writers, as well as cheesecake, to writers taking part in a conference on storytelling that capped her fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark.
Whom did the Agta people value most in their community? In an article posted on niemanstoryboard.org, Vaaben recalled that this was the question anthropologists of the University College London, a public research university, sought to answer by conducting a field study with nearly 300 members of 18 different camps of the Agta, also known as the Aeta, one of the earliest inhabitants pursuing a hunting-gathering life in the northern part of Luzon.
As rice is the resource given to express the importance of a member in the tribe, the participants were given tokens to represent rice and asked to give these to the persons they thought were most needed in their community.
The results were unexpected: the Aetas offered most of their tokens of rice to their tribal storytellers, besting the hunters, fishermen and food gatherers among them.
Publishing their study in 2018, the anthropologists “concluded that the storytellers were held in high esteem because they contributed to an understanding of the group’s social interaction and reinforced the norms and ethics of the tribe,” wrote Vaaben.
For the journalist and teacher, the value Aetas placed on their storytellers seemed to signify that “storytelling may perform a beneficial group-level function: The better the stories were told, the better the tribe worked.”
Vaaben interviewed Prof. Daniel Smith of the Population Health Sciences at the University of Bristol, who said that in small-scale societies, like the hunter-gatherer Aeta community, storytellers promote the “ethics of cooperation and equality” in their stories, in keeping with their “highly egalitarian” social structure.
However, in stratified societies with major discrepancies of wealth and power, those who control resources and thus have power also direct the more prominent stories, which “can be more self-serving” than beneficial to all.
According to Smith in the same niemanstoryboard.org essay, there are scientists who even view stories as serving no social function at all. Humans love stories because their structures appeal to a human cognitively and emotionally, almost like the music Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker refers to as “evolutionary cheesecake” or what Vaaben equates with “something delicious we developed because it meets some of our innate needs.”
Vaaben wrote in her essay that she saw the parallels between the egalitarian Aeta community and contemporary society: stories and storytellers matter. As hunters and gatherers of information, journalists as “professional storytellers... are providing sustenance of a kind and bear a huge responsibility to do it ethically and with a constructive purpose.”
For Banazynski, journalists must “recalibrate” and “remember their mission” in times when the instantaneous access to information ironically increases people’s level of anxiety and depth of confusion. By returning “over and over again... to the touchstone of credible and transparent sourcing,” the press can help the community they cover and “try to serve,” she said.
With technology turning everyone into a communicator, the opportunities to share stories also confer on citizens the obligations to do so as acts of “social solidarity,” particularly for those with fewer resources and greater vulnerabilities during crises.
The Aetas are wise for valuing their storytellers, they who transmit and keep alive the stories needed to sustain the tribe: equality, cooperation, gender sensitivity and mutual benefit.
We will do well to anchor our new media and new capabilities on this timeless wisdom.