Book | Chapter

Human beings have a biological need as a species to tell tales—or produce cosmologies—in which to live. These "tales' refer to what Northrop Frye calls an "integument of culture," a kind of protective substance that human beings "wear" in order to protect our embodiment. Culture is sustained in language and ongoing enactment of the relevant story or set of them in which we live and that gives us the ropes to constantly construct, actualize, and reify who we humans beings are. Our embodiment, our animal existence, makes us fragile and needy and this neediness shows in that our species' survival depends biologically on the ability of cultures to keep human groups living together, sharing meaning, building social interaction. However, the Western liberal tradition of thought saw itself in the necessity of exiling awareness of human neediness in order to paint a picture of individual powerful agency and rationality that are supposed to make humans worthy of moral consideration. The range and depth of human tales are ruled by diversity amid individuals and human groups; these tales emerge from the numerous particularities that characterize human life and also from various levels of interaction and exchange; from family life to communal, tribal, local life, all the way to the national, international, and global levels.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230111424_2

Full citation: