STORIES AND RELATIONSHIPS

How do the supposedly true stories we tell about the past influence ou r relationships in the present? What, in other words, is the rhetorica l value of historical texts, written and oral? In this essay, I argue that more attention should be paid to how people socially create stori es about 'what really happened back then', to suit their own political interests; and how, in the process of doing so, they partition the wo rld into cognitive territories known as 'selves' and 'others'.