What’s Your Role in the Grand Narrative: Sinner or Magical Being?
Every society has a grand narrative that dictates the culture’s norms, note narrative therapists Alan Parry and Robert E. Doan in Story Re-Visions: Narrative Therapy in the Post-Modern World. That grand narrative also dictates the role you play in your personal story—until you challenge and change it.
I remember the scene distinctly: I was sitting at my kitchen table and all the walls were decorated with flip chart paper. As part of my graduate studies, I had begun charting the laws, or morals, of the grand narratives of two major types of societies.
I had read the work of Riane Eisler, a cultural theorist, several years prior. In The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler had identified two designs a society could choose from for its grand narrative: dominator and partnership. The former was hierarchical; the latter was a network of relationships.
I decided to map the design of those grand narratives, informed in part by my studies in Jungian psychology and feminist theory.
Choose Your Adventure
A top-of-the-head activity, I documented the designs of two grand narratives, each of which fell roughly into masculine and feminine ways of being and leading.
Choice 1: A Patriarchal/Masculine Design
I began with the grand narrative for the American culture I’d been born into, in large part to understand why I had such a negative self-image. This grand narrative’s morals, or beliefs, leaned toward the masculine and, in their aberrant forms, patriarchal.
These morals, or beliefs, included:
Life is dualistic (either/or)
Reason and analysis rule
Human beings are imperfect/sinners
Hierarchy/power over ensures survival
Choice 2: A Matriarchal-Matrilineal/Feminine Design
At the time I was also studying feminist theory and women’s prehistory, so I also mapped the grand narrative, and related beliefs or morals, for societies whose orientation was more feminine.
These included beliefs such as:
Paradox is part of life
Intuition and emotions give us information
Human beings are magical/spiritual beings
Symbiosis and systems thinking ensure survival.
Fictional Bones
As I sat in my kitchen, and stared at the my handiwork, I suddenly saw the fiction of beliefs. I was tangentially aware of this when creating stories for corporate training. But I had never seen that fiction in my culture’s grand narrative, nor been aware of how those beliefs my own story to my detriment.
Why, I was a pawn in a larger social game, I realized. So was my dad, whom I had blamed much of my life for my issues with men and power. The grand narrative was manipulating us both.
As I stared at the pages that littered those walls, it dawned on me: If it’s all stories anyway, I could choose the one I liked. I could play out the role of the sinner, as my patriarchal religious upbringing demanded I do. But I could also choose the role of a magical being, as matriarchal/matrilineal cultures suggested as an option.
Guess which role, and story, I chose?
M. Carolyn Miller, MA, designs narrative- and game-based learning. She also writes and speaks about the power of story in our lives and world. www.cultureshape.com