Abstract
This chapter focuses on family stories. These stories include rehashings of recent events that the speaker may have personally observed; oral history and legends about ancestors that are passed along through generations; and also myths that index a family's relationship to supernatural or divine beings. Family stories offer family members a personalized connection to places and to history. For instance, in India, the presence of caste bards, the Bhats or Charans, also extend family stories into a more formalized arena. For cultural anthropologists, family stories are largely an unmarked analytic category: certainly, other people's family stories appear in life histories, oral histories, and even ethnographic accounts, but they are usually shuffled in amid other sorts of narrative data.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West binaries in (auto)biographical studies |
| Editors | Maureen Perkins |
| Place of Publication | Honolulu, USA |
| Publisher | University of Hawaii Press |
| Pages | 239-258 |
| Edition | 1st |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780824837303 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2012 |