1.5 Narrative and the Transmission of Traditions: Informal Learning Among Italian Artisan Stone Carvers

Narrative is an interactive communicative process occurring in particular social contexts and invoking other texts, tellings, and ideas, including those historically and geographically distant from the immediate context. Telling narratives is part of a larger process of the circulation of knowledge, and the ethnographic study of narrative requires attention to a cultural group’s communicative repertoire. Taking the example of narratives told by Italian artisan stone carvers, this essay explores life history narrative, community memory, and informal pedagogies. The pedagogical practices of informal, apprenticeship learning are rarely recorded in text books but instead are transmitted through narratives that convey not only instruction in particular skills but also values about ways of learning and ways of practicing a skill, including remembered skills no longer practiced. Occurring at the interface between technology and pedagogy, informal learning is deeply embedded in cultural and cross-cultural circulations of knowledge. In a discussion of the uses of narrative in research, including longitudinal ethnographic research projects, the essay addresses central dimensions of narrative research including positionality, frame, local and grand narrative, intertexuality, and dialogic narration.