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tionally known soap opera character who had just gone blind - not the actor,
but the character. But that is not unusual: culture always reconstitutes itself by
swallowing its own narrative tail - Dutch boys with fingers in the dike, Colum-
bus Christianizing Indians, the Queen's honors list, the Europhilia that dates
from Charlemagne.
What creates a culture, surely, must be a “local” capacity for accruing sto-
ries of happenings of the past into some sort of diachronic structure that per-
mits a continuity into the present - in short, to construct a history, a tradition,
a legal system, instruments assuring historical continuity if not legitimacy. I
want to end my list of narrative properties on this rather “obvious” point for
a particular reason. The perpetual construction and reconstruction of the past
provide precisely the forms of canonicality that permit us to recognize when a
breach has occurred and how it might be interpreted. The philosopher, W. T.
Stace, proposed two philosophical generations ago that the only recourse we
have against solipsism (the unassailable view that argues that we cannot prove
the existence of a real world, since all we can know is our own experience) is
that human minds are alike and, more important, that they “work in com-
mon” (Edwards 1967). One of the principal ways in which we work “mentally”
in common, I would want to argue, is by the process of joint narrative accrual.
Even our individual autobiographies, as I have argued elsewhere, depend upon
being placed within a continuity provided by a constructed and shared social
history in which we locate our Selves and our individual continuities (Bruner
1990: Chapter 4). It is a sense of belonging to this canonical past that permits
us to form our own narratives of deviation while maintaining complicity with
the canon. Perhaps Stace was too concerned with metaphysics when he invoked
this process as a defense against solipsism. We would more likely say today that
it must surely be a major prophylactic against alienation.
4.
Let me return now to the original premise - that there are specific domains
of human knowledge and skill and that they are supported and organized by
cultural tool kits. If we accept this view, a first conclusion would be that in un-
derstanding the nature and growth of mind in any setting, we cannot take as
our unit of analysis the isolated individual operating “inside her own skin” in a
cultural vacuum. Rather, we must accept the view that the human mind cannot
express its nascent powers without the enablement of the symbolic systems of
culture. While many of these systems are relatively autonomous in a given cul-
ture - the skills of shamanism, of specialized trades, and the like - some relate
to domains of skill that must be shared by virtually all members of a culture if
the culture is to be effective. The division of labor within a society goes only
