Local Boons: The Many Lives of Family Stories

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

    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 languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationLocating Life Stories: Beyond East-West binaries in (auto)biographical studies
    Editors Maureen Perkins
    Place of PublicationHonolulu, USA
    PublisherUniversity of Hawaii Press
    Pages239-258
    Edition1st
    ISBN (Print)9780824837303
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2012

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