Tell the stories

According to Patricia Riles Wickman, the importance of the role of the storyteller cannot be overemphasized:

Cultures in which the entire responsibility for replication and perpetuation of the cosmogony is bounded by the ability of its members to hold its elements within the living memory of each generation, without recourse to written codification, embody a type of dynamism within themselves that is unique to orally codified cultures.  This dynamism is both parent and child of the process: such cultures are constantly required to perform, at the same time, twin activities, regenerative and perpetuative.  They encode and institutionalize a ritualized cosmic past that objectifies the culture, even as they reinvent and reinvigorate a social present that uses as its benchmark the very cosmogony that is constantly being reinstitutionalized. This is the process by which, within orally codified societies, the reproduction of a structure become[s] its transformation. [p.60, Wickman]