Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature

It would be difficult to imagine what human life would be like without stories—from myths recited by Pueblo Indian healers in the kiva, ballads sung in Slovenian market squares, folktales and legends told by the fireside in Italy, to jokes told at a dinner table in Des Moines—for it is chiefly through storytelling that people possess a past.

In Homo Narrans John D. Niles explores how human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. The book vividly weaves together the study of A...