Social Life of Stories Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory

In this illuminating and theoretically sophisticated study of indigenous oral narratives, Julie Cruikshank moves beyond the text to explore the social power and significance of storytelling. Circumpolar Native peoples today experience strikingly different and often competing systems of narrative and knowledge. These systems include more traditional oral stories; the authoritative, literate voice of the modern state; and the narrative forms used by academic disciplines to represent them to outsiders.