In this illuminating and theoretically sophisticated study of indigenous oral narratives, Julie Cruikshank moves beyond the text to explore the social power and significance of storytelling. Circumpolar Native peoples today experience strikingly different and often competing systems of narrative and knowledge. These systems include more traditional oral stories; the authoritative, literate voice of the modern state; and the narrative forms used by academic disciplines to represent them to outsiders.

Julie Cruikshank's profile page

Julie Cruikshank is professor emerita in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Life Lived Like a Story (winner of the 1992 MacDonald Prize); Reading Voices; and Do Glaciers Listen? (UBC Press 2005)

As the narratives [in this book] shift to reflect changing historical and social circumstances, they document what Cruikshank describes as a relationship between peoples. The Social Life of Stories is a book that belongs on the shelf of everyone interested in developing that relationship as part of an ongoing dialogue between worldviews.

Canadian Literature, Summer/Autumn 1999

Julie Cruikshank’s latest book invites us once again into the fascinating world of Yukon indigenous oral narrative, but with a twist. Looking beyond the text of a story, Cruikshank examines the power and vitality of storytelling, illuminating the ways in which stories and their meanings can shift according to the audience, situation, and historical context. Overall, this book will guide and provide food for thought for academics and senior students in the fields of anthropology, native studies, and history, and in particular for researchers with an interest in oral traditions, narrative and voice, and ethnohistoric research in the Subarctic.

The Arctic, March 2000

Cruikshank provides concrete routes into dialogue between academic and indigenous knowledge systems. This book is required reading for all students and scholars interested in oral history, history, narrative, anthropology, ethnography, and 'the social life of stories.

The Canadian Historical Review