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Narratives as cultural embedment

Abstract All cultures produce stories; all humans are storytellers. Hence, by implication, narratives must serve a fundamental cultural and existential function in human life. This article suggests the term “cultural embedment” to characterize this function. This article points out that, for narratives to play the role as a tool for cultural embedment, the double structure of narratives always switches back and forth between an object level and a meta level. To capture this reduplication as a contextualized and historical dynamics, Clifford Geertz’s term “thick description” is introduced together with Jurij Lotman’s conception of culture as an interconnected primary and a secondary modeling system. After a short outline of six important approaches to narratives that have to be taken into account, the article proposes a thick description that characterizes narratives as tools for cultural embedment. A final analytical sketch of Chigozie Obioma’s novel An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) briefly demonstrates a non-formalistic approach to narratives as tools for cultural embedment in a dynamic interchange between several levels.