Monica
Siegenthaler
Anthropology 104
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My name is Monica Siegenthaler and I’m going to be talking
about Family, particularly storytelling in families. I chose to study family
because I work with families and children. Everyone has a family whether it’s
one you have lived with your whole life or if it’s one that you made yourself.
Our society, every society, the entire human race is made up of families.
I am really excited to talk about storytelling. I’m a
theatre major so storytelling is a big part of my life. As far back as I can
remember stories have been a big part of my life and a part of my family. My
mother use to tell my sister, two brothers and me stories since we were very
small. These stories were told to her by my grandmother, who was told them by
her mother and so on as far back as we know. She told stories from all over the
world about magic sticks in sacks, donkeys that could spit gold, giants with
golden hair, bears that started wars with birds and three brothers always
searching for the greatest wonder in the world. My mother told us that stories
tell us how to live and why. I have no idea how I will bring up my children but
I know I will tell them stories.
Storytelling is a huge part of our
society, it doesn’t stop when we are young. We watch movies, read books, and
talk about our own stories. If someone said to you today “This one time me…”
(or one of the other many ways we start) then you heard a story. A story, a
legend, a myth starts with an event that you or someone else witness. You tell
someone about it, then they tell someone else but they tell it differently then
you did. They emphasize on different details and parts. The person they told it
to tells someone else and so on until a month, a week, a day, a few hours later
someone tells you the same story, so changed that you don’t even recognize it.
Once upon a time my mother went shopping in a thrift store
near where we live on a very cold winter day. There she found an old rabbit fur
coat that she decided to buy. It was fury all inside and soft to the touch. All
the way home from the store after my mother had bought it, my older sister was
lecturing my mom about how wrong it was to have that coat and how many fuzzy
rabbits had to die to make it. The very next day I stole it and wore it to
school. My mother loves to tell this story about me and my sister to show how
different we are. It’s comical, she always gets people to laugh at it. It’s
very popular to be told to the parents of our current boyfriends.
Stories bring people closer together. We tell stories of
past experiences or of our friends and family’s past experiences to bring
ourselves closer to people. We make the people in our lives the heroes or
villains of our stories. In this story my sister is the selfless activist and
I’m a spoiled, selfish princess. That’s what we are in the story, but that’s
not the point of the story. It’s to show people how different we are in a
comical way. She could tell them a thousand other stories about us that reveal
all different aspects of our personalities. But she likes this one because it
has a 98% success rate.
“When you tell a story to a friend, you can transfer
experiences directly to their brain. They feel what you feel. They empathize.
What's more, when communicating most effectively, you can get a group of
people's brains to synchronize their activity. As you relate someone's desires
through a story, they become the desires of the audience. When trouble
develops, they gasp in unison, and when desires are fulfilled they smile
together.”(Gowin) that is why we tell stories, to relate to people. When your
friends or family are going through a difficult time you tell them a story of
when you went through a difficult time as a way to offer comfort or disperse
advice. When you first meet someone you search for a common interest, say rock
climbing, and exchange stories related to the topic, mountains you have climbed
or injuries you have had.
Stories are used all over the world for a variety of
reasons. We tell stories to children to try and get them to go to sleep, for
entertainment, or to calm them down after a bad dream. Besides entertaining,
many stories were used to frighten children into behaving. If you’re not good,
Daddy and Mommy will leave you and your brother in the woods where you will
find a house made of candy (AWESOME!) and inside a witch will try and eat you
(significantly less awesome).
The Native Americans used stories to explain things to
children and teach them about their history. “Each time a story was told, it
breathed life into the culture, cultivated their verbal language,
gave meaning to the tribe’s history, and also taught life lessons about things
like love, leadership, and honor, as well as their symbiotic connection to the
earth and intimate relationships with the animals they depended on.”(Tracey)
Storytelling is also used in a variety of therapy
techniques, specifically with children, such as theatrical therapy and the
Mustual Storytelling technique. “Storytelling communicates with children on
multiple levels. Stories serve as models, teach values and skills, and can
provide insight on both a conscious and unconscious level. The Mutual
Storytelling technique uses the child’s language to introduce mature responses
and healthier resolutions to the child’s difficulties, as they are communicated
in the child’s spontaneously produced stories.”(Gardner)
Stories
teach us, change us, and maybe even reveal to us what we want to become. For my
field work I decided to not make a questionnaire because I knew it would be too
long. I choose a few people and asked them about the stories, movies, and TV
shows they liked as children and how they think it influenced them.
I talked to Beth, a film student
about her favorite films as a child. “I watched a lot of old movies when I was
a kid. My favorite was Gone with the Wind.”-
Beth. Beth wants to be a Production Designer (basically they oversee all the
design aspects, such as costumes, lighting, and scenery, of a film making sure
they all “work together”) and loved the old style and design of these films and
aims to bring them back into movies she helps create. I asked her about books
she liked, “My mom use to read me Little Bear and Winnie the Pooh.” Beth loved
bears and still does. From these books she saw the lessons these books were
trying to teach her about friendship and family. I asked her about TV shows she
watched, “I didn’t really like TV shows so much. Sometimes I watched Rugrats.”
I also spoke to Austen, an oceanography
student who is very enthusiastic about building things. As a child he read a
lot. “I got really bored with picture books pretty fast.” His parents started
reading chapter books to him when he was four. He was read Magic Tree House,
Hardy Boys, and King Arthur. Austen reached a very high reading level very
quickly and by fourth grade enjoyed reading Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes,
and Harry Potter. He watched TV shows like Doug, Hey Arnold, and Magic School
Bus. His favorite movies were the original Star Wars movies, Indiana Jones, and
the Sixth Sense. Austen has always had an enthusiastic interest in science
fiction and it influenced his want to understand and discover the world around
him.
Nika, a theater student says she had
been “very influenced by stories.” When she was little her favorite movie was
“Gay Purr-ee” an animated film from the 1960s that featured singing cats in
France with Judy Garland as one of the voices. “The movie was beautifully
animated and the music was lovely. I remember that it scared me a little but I
still loved it.” She watched TV shows like Pokemon, Sailor Moon and Dragon
Ball-Z. “I watched whatever my older brother wanted to watch because he was the
biggest and there for, got the remote.” As a child she read lots of old stories
that her mother had saved from her own childhood, like Raggedy Ann. “My mother
read me ‘Alice in Wonderland’ from this copy of the book that had belonged to
her grandmother.” Nika always wanted to be the person in the story. “I spent
hours in my back yard pretending I was Alice.” It was what influenced her to
try out for her first play “Alice in Wonderland” when she was in third grade.
“Since then I have never looked back.”
The stories these people watched or
read as a child has influenced who they have become. I look at small children
in the preschool I work at, I see the books they read and I wonder what it will
mean to them.
I work with children. I see them for eight hours a week. I
see ages from one to five. I was inspired to study them when I realized how
much they love stories. They have books everywhere, even outside. They all love
stories. Some of them love dinosaur books, others books on boats, and others
like them all. I was drawn to this subject of stories and their effects on us from
both them and my mother. I watched how the stories they read influenced their
play. We read a book on ballet and suddenly everyone wants to spin around.
Through my case study I learned how our stories affect us.
Just because you liked dinosaur books as a kid doesn't mean you want to study
them all your life, but maybe it will lead to an interest in animals, or
history. The people I talked to were so changed, so influenced by what they had
read and watched as a young child.
I reflect on talking to Beth, Austen, and Nika. There were
many things that influenced their lives and the way they turned out. I was so
amazed by how big s role stories played. I will be honest I didn’t think that
it would play this big a role. Where would Beth be without “Gone With the
Wind”, or Austen without Star Wars trilogy(or anyone really?), or Nika without
“Gay Purr-ee”? Would they still be here, doing what they do? Or would they be
somewhere else.
Each time a story is told it brings a world to life, it
reminds us of our past. We learn from stories and with the lessons we learn
from them we shape our future. How do you prove you exist? Maybe you don’t
exist. I exist through the stories I tell, that other tell about me.
I remember the stories my mother
tells of me and my siblings as kids. How she connects with people through her
experiences with us and with life. Where would society be without our stories?
I think I would have a fewer friends. Where would you be?
Sources
- Joshua,
Gowin. "Why Sharing Stories Brings People Together." You,
Illuminated . Psychology Today, 2011. Web. 14 Feb 2012.
<http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201106/why-sharing-stories-brings-people-together>.
- Tracey,
. "Native American Stories: A Tradition of Storytelling." Tribe
Scribe. N.p., 2011. Web. 20 Feb 2012.
<http://www.prairieedge.com/tribe-scribe/native-american-tradition-storytelling/>.
- Gardner,
Richard. "The Mutual Storytelling Technique in the Treatment of
Psychogenic Problems Secondary to Minimal Brain Dysfunction." Sage
Journals. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Feb 2012.
<http://ldx.sagepub.com/content/7/3/135.abstract>.
