The Work that Stories Do

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We do not often think of stories as doing work. Tractors do work, and so do carpenters. Threshers do work, and so do those who clean houses. Steamrollers do work, and so do painters. But stories? What could they do that could possibly be considered to be work?

Anthropologists, and all of those who look at the underpinnings and the effects of stories, argue that stories do a great deal of work, and work that is essential for the maintenance of our own culture. Myths, along with other forms of traditional stories, do the work of teaching each new generation what the generation before it considers to be important about its culture and society. Myths are one of the most important media that exists for cultural transmission: More than almost anything else in any culture myths help to ensure that the culture itself will continue, that the gods and the languages and the beliefs and values that set one group of people apart from all other groups on earth will continue and will continue to distinguish that group from all other groups.

And yet - and this is at least as important as the ways in which myths help perpetuate culture - myths also allow culture to change. No culture can afford to be static, for the world changes around us, around each society. Dictators and tyrants have from time to time attempted to close their borders to ideas as well as to people, but in the end they always fail because cultures will always be permeable to ideas. Cultures chang

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particular political and economic hierarchy and way of doing things. This function of myth can often be a pernicious one, as those who are granted power and legitimacy through a specific myth tend to try to cling to that power and to freeze myths in a certain moment in time rather than to allow myths and society change as they naturally should - because such changes would endanger their own standing. The final function of myths that Campbell describes is what he refers to as the "pedagogical function" - the aspects of myth that teaches us (according to the tenets and values of any given culture and any given historical period) how to be a human - of what it means to be a human as opposed to a bear or a god or a devil. But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to--and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that (Campbell 31). The Cherokee Flood Myth We can see all four of these basic functions of myth in thousands of traditional stories, including a story that the Cherokee tell about an event early in their own history. This story is likely to be familiar to us even if we have never read
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1916
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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