I am writing about storytelling as research methodology and method at the moment and came across these words from Amy Ku’uleialoha Stillman and Jeannette Mageo:
‘Through generating new meaning structures, members of a group who share intragroup memories enjoy the potential for creating new ways of interpreting and acting upon relationships with each other and the world they share. Much of this generative work is done through what Mageo [2001] calls intertextual resonance: “When people hear a story or a story fragment, they also hear echoes of other stories.”‘
Instantly I was reminded of the time I shared with my friend Luke a story about an old feeling on country coming and paying me a visit. He too had felt something similar in the same place. As well as intertextual resonance, it makes me wonder whether there are actors (maybe entities in country) that appear in one story, disappear for a while and reappear somewhere completely different. Slipper and hard to describe things that we don’t always have the words to describe… barely perceptible.
Stillman, AKu 2001, ‘Re-membering the History of the Hawaiian Hula’, in JM Mageo (ed.), Cultural Memory: Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu.
Being with Country 