Cultural Narratives, Influencing Perspective & Shaping Society
I am working on an ebook, this is what I currently have started for a section on cultural narratives.
Relative Obscurity
Cultural narratives don’t seem to attract much discussion, generally people aren’t familiar with the concept. They recognize the words cultural and narrative independently, but what they create and how they function when used in unison is hazy at best.
When I have mentioned cultural narratives, people often look confused or ask what I mean by cultural narratives. Googling cultural narratives doesn’t provide a vast selection of insightful material, it’s typically found in academic papers. The limited representation and discussion are startling considering how prevalent they are within our lives.
Cultural narratives play a critical role in shaping society and individual perspective, they shouldn’t be flying below the radar, unrecognized. How often do people lament, “that is just how it is,” “always been that way,” or “that is how we do things?” They are referencing cultural narratives, and no, they are not fixed. Rewriting cultural narratives is always on the menu, not an easy order to fill but it is there, and a vital consideration to take when the social climate is unraveling.
Defining cultural narratives
Cultural narratives are the stories and beliefs we use to create identity, structure, and meaning. Cultural narratives offer insight into who we are, what we believe, where we came from, and what we value. Cultural narratives establish and enforce social norms and taboos. Recorded history is a form of cultural narrative. Myths and fables are forms of cultural narratives. Religion is a cultural narrative. Customs and traditions are cultural narratives.
Cultural narratives bind people together, they define and reinforce moral and ethical boundaries. Cultural narratives establish societal norms and taboos. People build their identity, their character, through the lens of cultural narratives. A person’s ability to exist within a culture, a community, is directly tied to how they adopt, practice, and support the cultural narratives held by those people, that community.
What follows is an excerpt from:
Social Work, Volume 39, Issue 4, July 1994, Pages 351–359, https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/39.4.351
Culture, Theory, and Narrative: The Intersection of Meanings in Practice
Dennis Saleebey
Two essential characteristics of the human condition important for social work practitioners to remember are (1) human beings build themselves into the world by creating meaning, and (2) culture gives meaning to action by situating underlying states in an interpretive system. Practice is an intersection where the meanings of the worker (theories), the client (stories and narratives), and culture (myths, rituals, and themes) meet. Social workers must open themselves up to clients’ constructions of their individual and collective worlds. The major vehicles for this are stories, narratives, and myths. Acknowledging and helping to refurbish them does not doom social workers to psychologizing what are, in part, social and political problems. Social workers can assist in the “insurrection” of subjugated meanings and help get them into the agency, school, hospital, commission, institution, community, and profession through externalization. Such an approach to practice helps clients edge into the larger and often oppressive world, strengthens the self, and emboldens the folklore of the group.
A social worker, according to the excerpt, brings their theories, derived through education, to meet the client. The client brings their narratives and stories to discuss how they are interfacing with culture. Culture is constructed of myths, rituals, and themes of the community.
For this book, myths, rituals, themes, stories, and personal narratives are representative of the over-arching cultural narrative.
Humans require meaning, cultural narratives work as a guide to steer humans into discovering what is meaningful and what is not meaningful according to the culture or community. Cultural narratives also define how a person’s chosen identity, purpose, or meaning will be received within the context of the community.
As a side note, we can see how a reinforcing loop begins to be worn between the cultural narrative, the community at large, and the individual. The individual seeking meaning uses the cultural narrative to define themselves in ways the community will find favorable.
Using the cultural narrative to define one’s meaning reinforces and validates the cultural narrative. Community members wishing to stay in favor of their peers use the cultural narrative to assess the value of those around them, reinforcing and validating the cultural narrative.
We can understand how challenging it can be to break these narratives. Our primal biological nature seeks community for survival, acts that jeopardize a position within the community are often shunned, consciously or subconsciously. Going against the grain is seen as rebelling, people are labeled agitator, heretic, or nonconformist.
Examining these labels is insightful. Agitator, a person who disturbs what is accepted or deemed normal. Nonconformist, a person who doesn’t wish to follow what is accepted or deemed normal. Heretic, a person who doesn’t conform to what is accepted or deemed normal.
Opposite the heretics, agitators, and nonconformists are a band of individuals seeking control & power, people who realize being an authority in the narrative elevates your status. If the masses believe a person possesses greater knowledge and ability within the narrative they are willing to be led, they will listen, they are open to suggestions & will follow. After all, people need to remain in the circle.
Evolution of cultural narratives
Cultural narratives are a key component of human existence, our ability to commune is heavily influenced and directed by cultural narratives. Cultural narratives are not going anywhere.
How do you change something you don’t know exists? How do you change something you don’t understand? Cultural narratives play a pivotal role in human culture, recognizing and understanding them leads to the option of modifying them.
Cultural narratives are subject to the forces of evolution, as our body of knowledge & wisdom grows so does the opportunity for our cultural narratives.
Step 1) recognize that cultural narratives exist, step 2) understand that they are subject to evolutionary forces and that they are meant to change.
The change we seek in our modern culture and society must be addressed at the base programming level, the root. We need to develop an entirely new cultural narrative, a new operating system. A new cultural narrative that embodies and capitalizes on the wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and technological capabilities attained by the human species over our recorded history is coming.
The new narrative is not the old narrative, trying to conceptualize the new narrative with the mindset molded in the old doesn’t work. It takes time to learn the new language, to see the new program from an entirely new perspective.
Establishing New Cultural Narratives
Crafting new cultural narratives is one of the few actions that can strike deep enough to institute systemic change. Installing a new cultural narrative is like installing a new operating system on a computer. An operating system’s function, a direct reflection of its name, establishes, directs, and executes how a system will operate. A cultural narrative and an operating system mirror one another. A cultural narrative is an operating system for culture and society.
Upgrading an existing operating system is not the same as installing a new operating system. Arguably, humanity has been upgrading the same operating system from the beginning. I will reference this operating system as the primal biological narrative in future chapters.
Humanity has been attempting to run the same primal biological narrative, or operating system, with upgrades focused on doing the same things only better. Doing things the same but better, to me, means keep producing excess disposable goods but making them compostable or recyclable. Use certain segments of the world’s population to serve another but make a solid effort to establish a “fair trade” policy for that labor.
Let’s keep doing what we are doing but let’s do it better, isn’t a terrible strategy when the upside potential is abundant. Making improvements is making improvements, human maturation, historically, has been a slow roll up a steep hill. The same but better strategy starts to fall apart when the model it is being applied to is approaching max expression and the margin for improvement is minimal, or if the model has expired and needs replacing. Sound familiar?