From the Bodhi Tree: the stories of Asia.

Storytelling: a uniquely human tool

What defines a good story? What is it that compels you to listen to a ripping yarn; read on when you stumble across elegant writing: what is it that holds your attention in a cinema?

I reckon a good story has associable characters, a plausible problem and a reasonable resolution. A skilled storyteller is able to weave these three elements into a recognisable pattern and this is what captures you, in whatever context. Everything else is just froth and bubble.

These patterns are as identifiable in a fairy tale as in the serious pages of a business journal; a sporting competition or an academic paper. Every human interaction can be told as a story; and the patterns used to tell all stories are universal.

With minimal schooling, children respond to the descriptions between the good and the bad guys; and understand the problem the hero and heroine must overcome if they are to live happily ever after. Turn to an article on high finance and journalists attempt to draw you into their stories through similar devices. There is an element of the tycoon or corporation’s character that you either admire or loathe; allowing you to identify with their specific peculiarity and wonder at their innovative solutions to technical or financial obstacles.

Even the drama of a sporting field can be best enjoyed by reducing the contest into a story between characters or teams we identify with and whose prowess or limitations we recognise.

The sequencing of the basic elements of a story is most obviously presented in academia, with its formulaic introduction, statement of parameters, experimental techniques, results and analysis. If you are familiar with the specific vocabulary, a well-written research paper is as easy to follow as a children’s story.

Successful advertisers and politicians understand these sequencing techniques. Analyse any of Barrack Obama’s speeches and you notice how skilled he is at setting the scene, drawing you in to include you as a listener and persuading you of the value of his perspective. “Narrative” has become the most overused word in contemporary political analysis because good politicians know how to “capture an audience, stay on message and create a story.” Obama’s acceptance speech is as skilled a piece of storytelling that has ever been delivered.

There are clear anthropological and psychological reasons why we are so affected by stories. Archeologists suggest story telling defines us as humans. Our closest relatives, the now extinct homo sapiens neanderthalensis, shared our primate sensory dependance on audio and visual communication for some 200,000 years. They were an intelligent and accomplished species with a sophisticated social structure, yet there is credible evidence that they eventually lost out, in the competition for resources with homo sapiens sapiens, through their inability to form symbolic language.

We know from rock art dating back over 70,000 years that small bands of early dispersed humans distinguished between a real and an unreal world. This was while the Neanderthal were still a dominate species. They may have had music and dance, but they pointedly did not produce the artistic representations that the tiny human population of the time were beginning to adorn cave walls with. It would seem that the Neanderthal were unable to adapt while we learnt how to use the tool of symbolising the world around us.

The image of our ancestors sitting in a cave and sharing stories is deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness. What is not so clear is how we shared those first stories. Some scientists say that human languages, as we know them today, could only have developed when human group size reached a critical mass; and that this only began as recently as 15,000 years ago with the meltings after the last great ice age. Complex language reflects the social interaction that occurs in large groups, according to this argument.

If this is the case then a logical conclusion is that our modern spoken, and written (which quickly appeared with settled humans), language forms replaced earlier verbal communication that included all the visual and musical prompts we see in caves in Lascaux, the Kimberly and elsewhere.

Neuroscientists label this protolanguage and provide anatomical evidence that our human brain is as, if not more so, predisposed to the processing of music and art as spoken and written language. Besides offering a clue into how our brains will adapt to a world increasingly viewed through electronic gadgetry, this helps us to appreciate the power of story telling techniques and just how much of an impact they have on our human experiences of the world.

Group identity defines each one of us

The impact of storytelling is strongest when seen as a bonding agent. Most of us have sat in a cinema with 1000 strangers, or stood in a crowd with 100,000, and experienced communal emotional responses to a story. This can be tracked directly back to our ancestors in the caves. Whether we danced, painted or told our first stories, we communicated a knowledge on how to survive in a hostile environment as members of a group; and we speculated on our future.

Being provided with an explanation of our identity is an elemental need, whether it be our role in maintaining the future of our group, or what will happen in unforeseen conditions. “Who am I; where do I belong, what will happen” are as fundamental questions, as are the collective questions: “who are we and what sets us apart from others?”

There are straightforward answers to these questions when you belong to a clearly defined group: an extended family, a clan or a tribe. Everyone is known and role plays are understood and acknowledged. It is not difficult to imagine the universal stories given as explanations when these questions were first asked. However, those explanations become less straightforward as the group size becomes larger and role play becomes layered and varied. When this occurs then necessarily the role of the storyteller changes as well.

It is possible to track the change of storytelling from when human group size grew substantially bigger. This occurred during the Neolithic Revolution around 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, once the dramatic environmental changes after the last ice age created a more temperate world; humans learnt about animal husbandry and agriculture; and we first formed permanent communities. For those that consider themselves part of a rational modern consciousness, this is the demarcation point between prehistory and history. For the followers of some interpretations of vedic religions, this is simply a reference point in a cyclical consciousness.

More critically, this is the point in our collective history when economics and politics began to define our role interaction. Once some of us humans learnt to grow and store our food then all sorts of complex role play became necessary. Chiefs became kings and their storytellers became priests.

In a sense this changed storytelling from a tool that brought a group together into a tool that helped make bigger groups feel different from each other. Once we settled, the imperative was not just to ensure the survival of our group but also to keep it from splitting, joining other groups or reverting to the old ways of endless roaming. Changing the course of a river to irrigate a farm; harvesting and defending that farm, are labour intensive activities and only sustainable if people do not go walkabout when the fancy takes them.

The stories of settlement, the stories of farmers, thus have a fundamentally different function from the stories of nomads. The latter wants people to understand their environment and respond accordingly, the former wants people to fear their environment and disassociation from the group. It is the tension between the human wanderlust and curiousity about what is over the next mountain, and the desire for security and familiarly, that underscores our most basic motivations; and it is the distinction between the role of storytellers.

It is how these underlying themes have transformed, and continue to influence, Asian societies that I tell in From the Bodhi Tree: the stories of Asia.