Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

In two college classrooms an ocean apart, students are given a task. After studying a variety of creation myths, they are asked to compose their own story. The results reveal how narrative continues to insist on the cosmological power of the sea to shape communities for better or worse.

Paper long abstract

In two college classrooms an ocean apart, students are given a task. After studying a variety of creation myths, students are asked to communally compose their own stories for their small slice of the world. The results are revealing, giving us insight into how people today, in Scotland and the US Gulf Coast, still link the sea to both creation and destruction, with the shore often standing in as the mediator of human affairs. From floating casinos to the destruction of major hurricanes and continental drift, from merfolk to powerful old women, the insights gleaned from a close look at these student narratives have much to tell us about the bodies of water that govern so much of their lives. In the process, they also revealed a geopolitical and environmental awareness in which the sea is at once in danger and dangerous, ever present and always just beyond the reach of knowability.

The students’ creation stories and the way they engaged with the task demonstrated a core principle of folklorisitic theory–narratives provide a way for people to make sense of the world. Yet these stories, perhaps because of the cosmological level the genre required, demonstrated students’ sense of the larger powers, environmental, political, economic, and historical, that have direct bearing on their lives but are unpredictable and capricious. At the same time, the task gave them narrative power to insist on the importance of the sea in shaping their communities for better or worse.