Local boons: The many lives of family stories

"Why did she never tell us this?" My stunned aunt Chanda-phui turned to look again at the small, brightly painted Shiva temple in the Kathiawar peninsula of Gujarat, western India. Moments before, a gray haired stranger had ambled in through the temple gate, settled on a ledge, and casually narrated the founding legend of this village temple: a legend that featured Chandaphui's mother, my grandmother Ba. This soft-spoken man had most likely not imagined that he would be addressing Ba's descendents to explode over eighty years of silence and unsettle our conceptions of ancestral identity. I position this unexpected revelation at the heart of my essay to consider the role of family stories in self-narrations. Even before I studied cultural anthropology or folklore, I had delighted in stories; a scholarly training gave me further reasons to work with oral narratives of many genres, including family stories. Across the years, I have come to appreciate how even as personal narratives are culturally shaped in form, theme, and performance style, collectively shared narratives are personalized around particular sensibilities and experiences (cf. Narayan, "Honor," Mondays, Storytellers; Narayan and George). Here, I summarize some of the mythically contextualized reminiscences told by the feisty woman I was lucky to know as a grandmother. I juxtapose her self-narrations to the alternate life stories lodged in court documents and the local legend of a temple's founding. I consider all these accounts part of my family stories. In presenting them here, I argue for the analytic value of reflecting on the powerful intersubjective space of family stories in considering cultural-and multicultural-self-images in life stories. By family story, I mean stories told by or about family members, though there is clearly a wide and culturally inflected range to who is included in the family and the kinds of stories that are told. As the historians Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson observe in their edited volume Between Generations: Family Models, Myths and Memories, "'Family' is a cultural image constructed out of real individuals, and also, sometimes, mythical ancestry" (2). Family stories can 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. In India, the presence of caste bards, the Bhats or Charans, also extend family stories into a more formalized arena (cf. Bhatnagar et al.; Shah and Shroff; Snodgrass). Folklorists and anthropologists with training in folklore (Boatright; Brandes; Morgan; Zeitlin, Kotkin and Baker), oral historians (Bertaux and Thompson), developmental psychologists (Fiese et al.; Pratt and Fiese), and scholars of communication (Langellier and Peterson; Trujillo) have all written in various ways about family stories as a means of transmitting identities. A more interdisciplinary and accessible account, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Family Stories Shape Us, by Elizabeth Stone, has been reprinted in several editions since it first appeared in 1988. For many scholars though, family stories may seem a lightweight interest, particularly if these stories are one's own: something more appropriate to dinner tables than seminar rooms, conferences, or publications. 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. Occasionally, in prefaces or acknowledgments, anthropologists acknowledge their own family backgrounds as the source of scholarly interest. With a growing acceptance of more reflexive and auto-ethnographic approaches, anthropologists' own family stories increasingly surface into publication, whether in memoirs (Bateson; Orlove; Welland), or as woven through essays or ethnographies relating to the themes of the family stories (Abu-Lughod; Behar; Waterson and Rylko-Bauer). A powerful 2005 issue of Anthropological Quarterly focused on four anthropologists' family stories of holocaust, exile, and diaspora; as Paul Farmer pointed out in his commentary on that issue, such painful stories are "resocialized" through analyses to illuminate issues of structural violence. In the sorts of works I've mentioned, the family stories are clearly historical, speaking to structural issues; the stories from India about my grandmother Ba, though, are partly historical, indexing gender inequality and kinship practices, but also evoking a realm of mythology, legend, and divine power.