The First Annual Story Field Conference Examples of Cultural Metanarratives and Story Fields*

In this conference we aren't trying to formulate one dominant cultural metanarrative, story field or Big Story for everyone to buy in to. But we do want to explore examples and favorites for deeper understanding and common threads that can inform our co-creations.

This page provides some examples of articulated Big Stories and metanarratives we might explore together. Many of them resonate with each other, but each has a unique flavor and "center of gravity."

If you have or know of other such metanarratives that would be good to include here, please submit them to .

"The Great Turning"

• David Korten, "Change the Stories, Change the Human Course", a downloadable .doc in which Korten vividly describes the competing metanarratives of Empire (the corporate version of which we are mostly living in now) and Earth Community (the kind of just, sustainable society that can be created from deeper understanding of ecological and indigenous realities), and the Great Turning underway from Empire to Earth Community.
• Joanna Macy's Great Turning website, a complementary vision which inspired David Korten's vision, informed by socially conscious Buddhist, Feminist, and Earth spirituality.

The Great Story of Evolution (Becoming Conscious of Itself)

• Tom Atlee's Learning to Be Evolution is a good introduction to this metanarrative -- that we are characters in a 13.7 billion year evolutionary story, and that we represent the universe, the Earth, and Evolution becoming increasingly conscious. Humanity's survival, meaning, and evolutionary destiny are tied up in finding out what is involved in being evolution, consciously and wisely, and living into that understanding as individuals and as a civilization.
• The Great Story of Evolution website provides a more explicitly spiritual way to explore this metanarrative from many angles, in the celebratory tradition of Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Michael Dowd, Connie Barlow and other developers and promoters of cosmic-scale evolutionary spirituality.

Humankind Surviving through Alliances with Animals and Plants

We seek more concisely articulated resources for this metanarrative, but these will serve as place-holders for now.

• Indigenous science and spirituality - story-woven and usually place- and culture-specific
• Deena Metzger's work with elephants and other animals, indigenous wisdom and medicine traditions, and nature-grounded consciousnss
• Starhawk's novel The Fifth Sacred Thing describes an alliance with bees helping save a pagan San Francisco in their nonviolent defense against an invasion
• Highly developed systems of working with nature centered on science -- permaculture and biomimicry -- and on spirit or metaphysics -- Findhorn and biodynamic agriculture.

• A "Big Story" or "cultural narrative" loosely connotes the commonly-held big picture story that most people in a culture use -- consciously or unconsciously -- to explain their lives and legitimize their assumptions. It is the narrative manifestation of a culture's worldview.
• A cultural myth can be a Big Story or some aspect of it -- i.e., one of its component stories that explains or teaches -- especially if it involves archetypal images, characters, or events that embody core truths about life. Myths are often held to be sacred. In this site, the word "myth" does not carry the connotation of being false, as it often does elsewhere.
• A "metanarrative" connotes an articulable big-picture story that often claims to be universally true. Sometimes metanarratives are associated with ideology ("the Marxist metanarrative") and domination, and are therefore seen as something to be asserted or resisted.
• A "story field" is the psycho-social field of influence generated by the implict coherence of and interactions among a culture's many stories, events, roles,practices, symbols, physical arrangements, artifacts, cuisine, etc.. A story field shapes the awareness and behaviors of the individuals and groups within the culture. It can be referred to -- and aspects of it described -- but it cannot be fully articulated.

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This conference is being organized with support from the Kellogg Foundation and the Co-Intelligence Institute.
Illustration credit: Dana Lynne Andersen, in From Lava to Life: the Universe Tells our Earth Story by Jennifer Morgan -- Courtesy of Dawn Publications