Storying Identity

The creative potential of stories often remains underexplored in common conflict resolution practice. Western conflict resolution models tend to be biased towards a left-brain approach that favours analysis and rational decision making. Yet conflicts are often messy, unreasonable, highly emotional and filled with entangled histories.

Narrative is generally employed in conflict resolution processes in a factual mode: stories are told to 'filter' so-called 'facts'. This narrative mode does not allow much room for the play of imagination, displacement, identity and extension of boundaries. It does not make full use of fiction and fable as age-old cultural resources for conflict resolution.

Stories are one of the most revealing tools for exploring the question of how people define their identities, how they see and wish to place themselves in the world. Stories are a reservoir of collective memory, individual experience and action and can complement the more 'rational' approaches to conflict resolution.

What can anthropology contribute to the concept of story in conflict resolution practice? As an anthropologist facilitating many cross-cultural and cross-boundary encounters, working with story has offered me additional approaches in facilitation, training and mediation which are sensitive to difference. I work on the premise that telling and listening are not only means of establishing fact, but also sources of transformation.

I want to share four concepts of story that I find particularly useful. According to context, the language in which the concepts are presented must be adapted for the participant age group and cultural setting. It is crucial to leave as much room as possible for stories to find their own form and rhythm and not to prescribe a particular format. The four concepts presented can be used in sequence (varying the order) or individually.

Mediator/facilitator and participant roles
But first, a word on the potential roles of those involved in the storytelling session. Mediators/facilitators can find themselves in different roles:

• storyteller - giving example stories or parables onto which participants can project their own conflict;
• formaliser of the narrative process (the control agent);
• narrator;
• interpreter;
• translator;
• animator;
• guardian of truth/legitimiser;
• listener/audience;
• 'diviner' of words and solutions/a new language in which to speak about the conflict;
• keeper of listening space.

• storytellers;
• listeners/audience;
• characters in the story;
• witnesses to another story;
• narrators.

• destabilising set coherences;
• detecting and pointing out dominances;
• pointing to ruptures/gaps in the narratives and exploring alternatives;
• balancing between the specific and the general;
• exploring commonalities and differences;
• differentiating between collectivity and individuality.

As mentioned, these four concepts/tools can be used singly or in combination.

Story as Worldmaking: The Patchwork Gown

This concept looks at stories as an expression of the experiences that create and shape our world.

I use the model of a patchwork 'memory gown' of lived and learned experience. Imagine that everybody wears such a gown and our gowns expand as we gain experience. The patches are stories in different forms and colours and together they shape the way in which we view the world and make decisions. The spaces in between mark unstoried experience that cannot yet be verbalised. Sometimes the storytelling is about helping such unstoried experiences to find story form - for example, if a conflict consists of an 'inexplicable' emotional tangle.

Example: Let participants tell stories of previous experiences of conflict and how they dealt with them (storied experience). What commonalities can be drawn from the different ways of experiencing conflict?

The different forms, shapes and colours can be found in the patchwork gown of every human being. They are part of the larger fabric of human experience that provides common ground and allows us to relate to each other. Yet each story is recognised for its own uniqueness, perspective and content as everybody 'wears their own gown'. Draw out commonalities between different ways of dealing with conflict and also sketch the creative, unique approaches that appear in the stories.

In a successful mediation this acknowledgment of common experience (more often connected to emotional handling of that experience rather than 'fact') can provide a basis for interaction. Often parties have - narratively speaking - placed themselves in separate experiential worlds, which 'the other' cannot enter unless this 'fabric of human experience' from which all our experiences are woven is recognised.

Example: Explore the current conflict as an 'unstoried' experience. Let participants imagine they are telling the story to a person from another planet/country who has no clue about the context or surrounding events. Let them explain their ideas and actions and help sketch out values and perceptions inherent in the story.

Afterwards it can be useful to let a 'talking stick' make the rounds. This is a Native American practice where a symbolic stick is passed around a circle of people, and only the one holding the stick can comment on the story presented and speak about their feelings. All others listen. Everyone has the chance to hold the stick.

Enlarging Frameworks

This concept is about using fictional stories, fables, parables or anecdotes to approach the conflict.

Example: The facilitator or mediator can become the narrator of an exemplary story. But participants can also offer to share a story. Ask for or tell a story onto which the current conflict can be projected.

Part of working with another story is to break up singular persepctives and link them into enlarged frameworks transcending boundaries of:

• space - from the local to the global (linking the current conflict to events in other places);
• time - working with circles and cycles (linking the current conflict to events in other times). Stories speak as much of the future as they tell of the past. Narrative, then, plays a part in how an environment is constructed, how characters are portrayed and how meaning is assigned to their actions in a particular context.
• culture/group - reflecting cultural resources/practices that aid constructive conflict resolution. Stories convey underlying cultural value systems and reflect the set priorities which guide actions and reactions in a conflict. The facilitator can detect undercurrents of the conflict and also speak about its historical context.

• time;
• place & setting;
• point(s) of view;
• themes;
• characters & their relationships;
• memories of the past;
• moral questions;
• values & priorities;
• visions.

Utopia: Transformative Powers and Change

This concept is about generating alternative stories.

Example: Let participants write/tell a utopian story of how the conflict could/should end. Encourage imagination and multiple possibilities.

Most stories tell about conflict. In both factual and fictional writing, conflict is most often the driving narrative force. This aspect offers the chance to (re)view conflict as a dynamic, potentially positive force for change. The questions to ask:

• Who crosses boundaries? Who breaks deadlocks? How?
• What are the possibilities of alternative identities?
• What mindframes are transcended?
• Are new relationships created?
• Are common practices destabilised? Traditions broken?

This concept helps create alternative perspectives on the conflict, including 'wearing the other's shoes' and building empathy.

Example: Write an 'outside' narrative of the conflict, placing imaginary characters in the different roles. Let participants tell the story in the third person using different names.

Example: Let each participant write a short play about the conflict and encourage a number of 'assistant actors' to enact it upon a 'stage'. This is a creative way of telling the conflict story. At the same time, the creation of characters provides distance and allows the real role players to comment from 'the outside'.

Example: Let each participant imagine they are 'in the shoes' of the other(s). Then let them write/tell the story mutually assuming the other's perspective and telling about how they imagine that the others view them and the conflict.

Basically, in working with storytelling in these ways, mediators/facilitators are changing the parametres of self and identity. In the words of psychologist Ira Progoff, "[Storytelling is about] switching the frame of reference from the small world of self-righteous egos to the large universe of sacred time."

Anthropologist Undine Kayser, currently based at the University of Cape Town, does mediation, facilitation and training for various organisations, including Youth for Understanding, an international NGO which promotes cultural understanding among the world's youth.

CONTENTS    HOME