*Draft version Narrator, Audience and Performance in Rural Ukrainian Storytelling

Narrator, Audience and Performance in Rural Ukrainian Storytelling Jennifer Dickinson ([email protected]) University of Vermont, Dept. of Anthropology Introduction: The Place of Stories in Apsha Social Life In my experience, no one is more pitied in Ukrainian rural life than the person who is alone, as I discovered when I would try to sit in the house alone and read or work at my computer. Within an hour, the room would begin to fill with people, holding conversations around me if not directly engaging me in conversation. Soon, I realized that they had come to find me, and, so to speak, bring me back in to the fold. “We were worried about you. Why are here you alone?” they would ask. Over and over again, in varying contexts, people would tell me how much they disliked being alone or working alone, and how much more interesting it was to do the same amount of work in a group than individually. In the village of Apsha, where I did most of the ethnographic fieldwork that informs this paper, family, friends, and fellow workers provide a social net that both supports and envelopes those inside it. And the thread that holds this net together, that defines its shape and ensures its maintenance, is spun from the stuff of everyday life, on the spindle of shared conversations. In this paper, I explore the concept of “everyday” storytelling and the dialogic roles that “narrators” and “audiences” can take up and carry forward in the performance of these stories. Moreover, following work such as that of Johnstone (1990) I argue that stories about everyday life, whether couched as more