The Social Work of Stories

UBC Faculty Research and Publications

The Social Work of Stories Fee, Margery

Abstract

Marx classified "tricksters" like Coyote, the North American indigenous culture hero,as members of the Lumpenproletariat, and Adam Smith argued that the work of writers and actors was ephemeral. The Aboriginal storytellers here regard their stories as a form of wealth and their telling as useful work. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the Delgaamukw decision that oral stories could be entered into testimony in land claims hearings. This supports their position that stories can produce material wealth.

Item Metadata

Title	The Social Work of Stories
Creator	Fee, Margery
Publisher	ZKS: Zeitschrift fur Kanada-Studien
Date Issued	2000
Description	Marx classified "tricksters" like Coyote, the North American indigenous culture hero,as members of the Lumpenproletariat, and Adam Smith argued that the work of writers and actors was ephemeral. The Aboriginal storytellers here regard their stories as a form of wealth and their telling as useful work. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the Delgaamukw decision that oral stories could be entered into testimony in land claims hearings. This supports their position that stories can produce material wealth.
Subject	Julie Cruikshank; theories of literary value; Aboriginal land claims; Delgaamukw; oral stories
Genre	Article
Type	Text
Language	eng
Date Available	2014-06-03
Provider	Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Rights	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
DOI	10.14288/1.0074543
URI	http://hdl.handle.net/2429/30454
Affiliation	Arts, Faculty of; English, Department of
Citation	Margery Fee. “The Social Work of Stories.” ZKS: Zeitschrift fur Kanada-Studien. 19.2 (2000): 1-13.
Peer Review Status	Reviewed
Scholarly Level	Faculty
Rights URI	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Aggregated Source Repository	DSpace

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