Abstract
Cultural narratives and framings of ecological degradation and related practice clearly play a part in the social organisation of denial as described in the previous chapter. In this chapter the narrative framing of ‘environmental problems’, together with the academic attention that the communication of these problems has increasingly garnered, is explored in more detail. This chapter explores further interdisciplinary work focusing on how framings—understood variously as narratives, discourses and stocks of knowledge circulate and supposedly infuse personal and social understandings of the nature of ecological crisis and how to respond, alongside work advocating the fundamental importance of narrative in meaningful human life. This is a disparate body of work, and the key task in this chapter is to establish connections between psychosocial accounts of collectively organised defence mechanisms short on detail when it comes to the particular discourses centrally involved, and work highlighting dominant discourses less clear on the ways in which they are circulated, legitimised and, at least potentially, challenged.
…What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us. (Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati)To hell with facts! We need stories! (Ken Kesey)
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Notes
- 1.
For example the ‘Seven Dimensions of Climate Change’ project commissioned by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) is an attempt to reframe public debates about climate change https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/reports/the-seven-dimensions-of-climate-change-introducing-a-new-way-to-think-talk-and-act/; the Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN) has consistently focussed on the importance of narrative in communicating climate change effectively http://www.climateoutreach.org.uk/about/; Mediating Change is an Open University research centre acting as an umbrella for various climate change and culture programmes of work that have explored the importance of narrative in a series of events, podcasts and publications http://www.open.ac.uk/researchcentres/osrc/research/themes/mediating-change
- 2.
Lakoff argues that ‘framing’ is essential to narrative. Frames are typically unconscious structures that organize thinking. Whilst we might be tempted to think of frames as metaphorical rather than material, cognitive and brain scientists claim that they have an identifiable biological base: ‘physically realized in neural circuits in the brain’ (Lakoff 2010, p. 71). Frames allow us to discern roles (a suitable metaphor for an emphasis on narrative), the associations between them, and, according to Lakoff, the relations between different frames too. He offers the example of a hospital: ‘A hospital frame, for example, includes the roles: Doctor, Nurse, Patient, Visitor, Receptionist, Operating Room, Recovery Room, Scalpel, etc. Among the relations are specifications of what happens in a hospital, e.g. Doctors operate on Patients in Operating Rooms with Scalpels’ (p. 71). If frames can also indicate the relationship to other frames, a hospital frame also slots intersects with other frames such as Welfare, Health, Work, Death and Birth. Narrative, on the other hand, is a ‘system of frames’: a meaningful combination of frames that communicates something as truthful (Lakoff 2010, p. 73). Lakoff does not offer any definition of narrative beyond this assertion, and is unclear about where a ‘frame’ ends and a ‘narrative’ begins.
- 3.
The authors differentiate between two different kinds of strategy for maintaining personal persistence whilst accommodating the need for change—Narrative and Essentialist. They find that these strategies are largely contingent on culture: the first distinctly characterizes Aboriginal, the second non-Aboriginal youth. Despite their labels, both strategies rely on narrative structures in different ways to ‘manage’ the need for both continuity and change.
- 4.
I am not going to entertain the divisive, elitist assumption that whilst we see through master narratives of, say consumerism, it is others—one version or another of ‘the masses’ – who are unwittingly transfixed.
- 5.
Hoggett also dismisses the Dark Mountain Project for advocating a version of apocalyptic survivalism. He claims that they ‘have already abandoned hope and seem to be engaged in the same kind of retreat’ (2011, p. 265) and harbour the deluded belief that they alone ‘have the foresight to prepare for the worst and the moral fibre to prevail’ (2011, p. 268). I discuss this accusation in more detail elsewhere (Adams 2014).
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Adams, M. (2016). ‘Its All Folded into Normalcy’: Narratives and Inaction. In: Ecological Crisis, Sustainability and the Psychosocial Subject. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-35160-9_9
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