The Intersection of Karuk Storytelling and Education

seven minutes, three-quarters of them told by the mothers.” (34) Further down the page,
he cites Roy Schafer:
We are forever telling stories to ourselves. In telling these self-stories to
others we may, for most purpose, be said to be performing straightforward
narrative actions. In saying that we also tell them to ourselves, however,
we are enclosing one story within another. This is the story that there is a
Self to tell something to, a someone else serving as audience who is
oneself or one’s self…On this view, the self is a telling.
These approaches indicate that language contextualized as narrative is important to the
creation of a Self, but in so doing, they beg the question as to the importance of language.
Bellah notes that the importance of pre-linguistic, mimetic communication (127), so what
does verbal language contribute? He clarifies, importantly, that
…there is no reason to think that, because premodern members of the
genus Homo did not have modern language, their mimetic action was
silent (as the word ‘mime’ might imply). On the contrary, there is every
reason to believe that vocalization had developed well beyond the simple
cries in use by the great apes. Donald argues that some form of voluntary
voice modulation – what he calls prosodic control of the voice – was a
necessary step along the way to the evolution of language. He writes:
‘Prosodic control of the voice – that is, regulation of volume, pitch, tone of
voice, and emphasis – is logically more fundamental than, and prior to,
phonetic control; it is much closer to the capabilities of apes than
phonology. It is close to what Darwin thought might have been the origin
of the speech adaptation, a kind of rudimentary song.’ (128)
This position that mimetic and verbal communication exist in a continuum, as opposed to
separate and discrete media, is significantly more pleasing than Schrag’s philosophical
obsession with verbal and textual language. When we communicate in conversation with
each other, a significant percentage of our communication is gestural. One of the artistic
media that I aim to address in this thesis, theater, presents a fairly dramatic synthesis of
mimetic and linguistic communication.
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