Dina Goldstein: Telling Tales

Alasdair Foster, August 20, 2022
Storytelling has a long history reaching back more than thirty thousand years. It was a way to integrate experiences to create meaning, a way to connect past with present and imagine the future, a way to explain the inexplicable. Stories are the root of cosmogony (how the world was created), history (where we came from), religion (the things beyond explanation), science (how things work), philosophy (how we should live), politics (how we should organise ourselves)… It is only relatively recently that those strands have separated out into different disciplines. For many millennia they were woven together, clothing a persuasive if patchy world view. As we moved from hunter-gathers to farmers and citizens and on into urban industrialism, our narratives evolved with context.