Paper short abstract:

In our discipline, storytelling research has always been present, be it through nationally relevant findings on different text genres (saga, fairy tales, lifenarrative, oral history). Compared to the what, the how of storytelling is only a secondary question.

Paper long abstract:

In our discipline, storytelling research

has always been present, be it through nationally relevant findings on the text genres of the

saga, fairy tales and ballads in the 19th century, or be it as documentation of the variance of

a prototypical form, of the repertoire of particular storytellers, their biographies or of

performance. Compared to the what, the how of storytelling is only a secondary question. It

was researched occasionally by such representatives of our discipline as Axel Olrik, Vladimir Propp and Max Luthi. However, the crucial

impulses for an understanding of how storytelling is accomplished came from literary

research; for instance from Käte Friedemann, Eberhard Lämmerts, from Gérard Genette's Discours du récit (1972) and Nouveau discours du récit (1983), and from the discipline of history, for instance from Hayden White. Ethnological storytelling research, in its own interests as a discipline but also with a view to exchange with other subjects, should resolutely address formal questions: How is narrative condensation achieved? Which schemata and patterns facilitate the coherence of the storytelling which endows narrative "truth"? What do we do when we tell stories? This is all the more pressing since the exact sciences themselves have discovered the potential of narrative. According to Evelyn Fox, the goal of scientific research is typically to explain

things and processes which one possesses no clear knowledge. For this purpose, researchers

must find ways of talking about the completely unknown; things about which they can only

guess and speculate - in short: tell stories.