Our heritage consists of stories. Although the focus is often on tangible things, such as old buildings, objects and paintings, it is the stories surrounding these tangible objects that brings history to life. There are different ways of looking at the relationship between storytelling and cultural heritage. Cultural heritage organizations are increasingly convinced that the use of storytelling improves the visitor’s experience. Exhibitions are presented in the form of a story, in which the curator often assumes the role of dramaturg and the exhibition manager takes the role of director.

What happens if you go one step further? Isn’t the story an intrinsic part of the cultural heritage? Put simply, does the object, whether it is an archaeological find, painting, building, or even a landscape, exist without the story? For example, consider a piece of pottery found in an archaeological dig. At first glance, it is simply a broken piece of material from Tuscany, Italy. However, once it is connected to its context, the story tells us that the pottery was perhaps part of a jug used in the wedding rituals of princes during Renaissance times in Livorno. In this example, you can ask yourself whether it is ‘the object’ or ‘the story’ that is part of the cultural heritage of the area. Perhaps both, because neither can exist without the other, certainly not in the context of an ‘exhibition’ (or a guided or even virtual 3D tour).

Yet another question arises. What about the stories themselves? Stories that are not related to an object or a building, such as the sharing of a tradition by a community elder with a young person, or stories transmitted orally. Are these also part of cultural heritage? According to the agreements of the Faro Convention they are; however, some actors involved in the professional field, including those providing funding and in government organizations, still tend to focus on tangible objects. Therefore, they overlook a large part of cultural heritage. Moreover, this reduces the transmission of an otherwise shared history to a few voices, where history is the realm of the powerful or those who were able to create objects that could withstand the test of time. This is far from inclusive and this is why we need to encourage the active involvement of diverse narratives in cultural heritage. This is what we mean by the democratization of cultural heritage.

In May 2019, the Storytelling Centre invited James Bradburne, the director of the prestigious Pinacoteca di Brera, a museum of classical and modern art in Milan, to speak about the relationship between storytelling and cultural heritage. A large part of the seminar was literally about how to use stories in an exhibition, how to use storytellers to bring objects to life and how to produce a good audio tour. Bradburne took us deep into the heart of information exchange, first taking us to conventional museums where, next to the paintings or sculptures, there is usually a small plaque with an explanation of the work written by the curator, who is the expert. Bradburne indicated that this was a form of one-way transfer of information, but he also wondered whether there was any real communication – whether a story was being told. After all, the viewer’s story played no role in this constellation.

‘Is the museum for the curator or for the public?’ Bradburne asked his audience. He strongly believes that the museum belongs to both, but that this is not reflected in most exhibitions or museums. He has changed this at Brera and is increasingly trying to involve the viewer’s story in the museum experience, sometimes even putting that story centre stage. One of the consequences is that the signs next to the exhibits are no longer written by the experts in the standard fashion. Visitors are also invited to share their experience, as are the museum’s support staff, such as cleaners and the technical department. In this way, he is hoping to democratize the experience of art and heritage, showing that the audience’s story is as valuable as that of the expert.

It might be clear that there is much to consider when it comes to the relationship between cultural heritage and storytelling, but there is more consensus on the role of narrative in the transmission of heritage. A story can bring history to life and make it tangible. However, this requires careful thought to be given to the transfer. A chronology of actual events listed according to the year they occurred is usually uninspiring and unmemorable, while a narrative colouring of history often appeals to the imagination. In recent years, we have regularly assisted employees or volunteers at cultural heritage sites to develop ways of transferring historical information in an engaging way. Before we go into the practical details of how to link historical facts to stories, we will first look more closely at the difference between the historian and the storyteller – a topic that always offers food for thought.

The narrative historian vs the history storyteller

How do stories and history relate to each other? History largely comes to us through stories, especially when it comes to history that goes way back, where we have few tangible remains. Is the image that such stories sketch always true? Not necessarily. Even at the individual level, time colours all memory. Certain events become more important while others fade into the background or may even disappear forever. Some personal feelings might be magnified, while factual details may be omitted. In addition, every memory is part of a bigger picture and not everyone may have gotten that bigger picture.

Is that bad? When it comes to the process of finding ‘truth’, it is important to look for historical evidence as provided by primary sources.. This is the work of the historian, not the storyteller, it might be argued. Storytellers look to the experiences behind the evidence, they colour history as it was, bringing it to life. But this could be just as important for the professional storyteller, the historian, as it is for the grandmother who tells her grandson about the war years. Just as the storyteller needs to be a historian to get a handle on the story, the historian needs to be a storyteller in order to tell and present the story. Neither the storytelling historian nor the personal history storyteller is a fantasist who merely invents a great story. Historical reality guides the process but it is illustrated with images that make it tangible.

One good example is a story that was developed for a project at a Dutch Royal Palace about the Russian princess, Anna Paulowna, and her husband, the later King William II.

^[1] The story is set in the 1820s, with the couple having chosen to live in Brussels, rather than in their main residence in the forests in the heart of the Netherlands. However, their palace in today’s Belgian capital was hit by a devastating fire in 1820, in which the Tzar’s daughter lost many of her jewels. So far, all of this is true.

The teller of our story introduced herself as a distant relative of a maid of Anna Paulowna. She told the story of how, after the fire, the maid had painstakingly trawled through the smouldering remains of the palace looking for the jewels. In gratitude, the future queen gave her a pearl, which the storyteller said was passed down to this day in the maid’s family. This was a bit of artistic licence, however, as the narrator was not related to the girl who searched through the ashes for days. It is even questionable whether such a maid existed.

This is a good example of pushing the boundary between fact and fiction. Is it exceeded here without a purpose? We remember this story from beginning to end, with the actual historical event and the people involved engraved in our memories. This is an example of how the storytelling historian can prompt the imaginations of the listeners so they create their own vivid images of what took place or may have taken place at a historical heritage site. The historian has to stay within the limits of what the primary sources tell.

When we introduce this topic during training, especially with people dealing with cultural heritage, it often leads to robust discussion. For some, it is inconceivable to stretch the facts a little and put them to our own use. This contradicts their ethical attitude to historical science. Others have less trouble with the idea and find it much more important that they engage their audience with the story. Who remembers a guided tour or lecture after many years? At the end of the day, it is up to the narrator (tour leader, guide, curator, storyteller) to decide how far they want to go with the embellishment or artistic licence. The most important thing is that they feel comfortable about the way they share a story with their audience and that there is transparency about the verifiable historical facts on which the stories have been built.

Embedding the historical story

There is another, related aspect that can strongly contribute to the experience of a historical story that also lies outside the ethical field of finding ‘truth’. This involves the combining of a personal story with the historical story, and thereby connecting the personal, emotional and/or universal domains.^[2] Before we go deeper into this, we should explain these domains a bit further.

By ‘universal’ we mean the domain of the ‘big stories’ (following Lyotard’s idea in The Postmodern Condition, but also the ideas of Harrari in Sapiens).^[3] This concerns the story that provides direction, which teaches you about ‘good and evil’, how you can best arrange your life or what you should or should not do, at least according to a certain ideology. It can also be considered the factual and/or ideological information in the story. By ‘factual information’ we mean the information that has been stripped of all imagination and that is reduced to the established facts.

For example, in a historical story, this would be the fact that a certain event took place on a certain date; that it was witnessed and recorded by people who were present. These elements mean it belongs to the universal domain (although we are aware of the different perspectives that can colour the facts). The same can be said of stories that certain ideological and/or religious groups assume to represent a truth, although not in a factual historical sense. In these cases, the universal domain concerns the message of a story, what the story teaches the listener, similar to the didactic lessons of fairy tales, folktales and myths.

In historical stories, these ‘messages’ are often poorly remembered if they are transferred without such a context. If they are communicated through a story, however, they are usually heard immediately and will be remembered. This is because they tap into the other two domains: the personal and the emotional.

The personal domain is touched when personal information about the main character and their environment is introduced into the story. This is not only true for factual autobiographies, but is also the case in fictional stories, in which it is also important to provide personal information about the characters (and therefore the situation). Based on this, the listeners create their own images, processing the information they receive in a systematic and meaningful way.

However, even this information is not yet sufficient to achieve resonance with the listener. To get there, it is necessary to touch the emotional domain, the domain of feelings. Resonance only occurs when something is actually shared at the emotional level. This does not happen on the narrative level alone, the level of the anecdote. However, if an emotional layer is added to the story everything changes, as emotions bring in a human layer and generally enable us to empathize.

In fact, the emotional domain is the lynchpin in the transmission of a story. Without the emotional component, the story loses much of its power. This does not mean that the other domains are not important, as the emotional dimension is only communicated when the context is clear and you have formed a structure based on images. The universal domain is the foundation for the story and without that domain there is no reason to share a story.

In a cultural heritage context, the universal domain is the domain of historical stories and historical facts. This is the part of the story that all narrators at cultural heritage sites have studied and committed to memory. They reel off years and dates as if they were reading a shopping list. There is no passion, feeling or meaning behind the events or stories. What remains, however, is the personal involvement of a storyteller in such a history. That is why it works well to have a story told by someone who experienced the events themselves. For example, an eyewitness account of the Blitz and forced evacuation during the Second World War, or the story of someone who was stoned out of their mind during the Summer of Love at Glastonbury Festival or Woodstock. Of course, this is not always possible, especially regarding older events, simply because there are often no people left who can tell the story firsthand.

This does not mean there is no way to create a personal connection with a historical fact. You might be able to tell the story through the eyes of such a witness, as we did above with the maid. Moreover, we often notice that guides and other staff members at historical heritage sites feel an enormous personal connection to the site and/or the collection. The enthusiasm with which they want to tell us about it says it all. We therefore challenge storytellers to include these personal touches in the story they tell visitors. Some question that can guide you in this approach:

•  What did you feel the first time you came here?
•  What personal memories are here for you?
•  What do you feel when you think of the historic event you are talking about?

And most importantly:

• What is the meaning of this cultural heritage for you, personally?

When you ask these questions, personal and sometimes even emotional stories quickly emerge. These stories awaken the listener’s imagination more than do mere historical facts and lead to sympathy and empathy. These are the ingredients that ensure that the narrator and listener end up in the same mental space, in which the transfer of information is so powerful and tangible that the listeners start playing the historical film in their own heads.

Let’s look at another example. Standing before a famous triptych depicting the Last Judgement,^[4] a guide bravely told the story of how the work was created and how it survived the iconoclasm in 1566. Afterwards, she went into a number of art historical aspects about painting techniques and typical images for that time. I noticed that the group appeared to be listening politely to the story, but I wondered if they were actually registering anything. The fact that I did so, that my mind wandered, suggests I was not particularly hooked either. But then, the guide pointed to the corner of one of the panels.

‘Whenever I stand before the Last Judgement, my eye is drawn here’, she said, and she led our gaze to an angel looking mischievously over his shoulder, with his hand on a young man’s bare bottom. ‘I always wonder what he is thinking’, she said, and concluded her story with a charmingly embarrassed smile. I noticed that she had everyone’s attention at that moment, we all wanted to know what the angel was up to. A few people had their own original ideas about this and someone told the story of how they had seen angels giving mortals a helping hand towards heaven on another triptych. So, the story came to life and this specific triptych will remain in our memories forever. This was all due to the guide bringing her personal interest into the universal domain.

The importance of valuing personal stories

Thus far, we have focused on the importance of stories in cultural heritage and heritage engagement. Now, we will dig a little deeper into the dynamics of meaning-making, the formation of narrative identity and the clear role of cultural heritage within these dynamics. The loss of the big stories or metanarratives obliges us to extract meaning from our own stories. As we will explore further below, these stories are informed by a variety of other stories around us, in which heritage plays an important role as a basis for building an understanding of one’s roots. Encouraging people to work on their own stories and using heritage to provide the initial impetus is a very good way to begin to create meaning. This process of meaning-making is necessary for inclusive development on a social and collective level, and for the enhancement of mental resilience and wellbeing on a personal and individual level. The notion of narrative identity is paramount in these dynamics.

An introduction to narrative identity

The concept of ‘narrative identity’ refers to how our identities are made up of stories that define who we are and who we want to be. Through sharing our personal experiences with others in countless social interactions we create a sense of ourselves through such stories. Narratives and narrative processes play a significant role in both the construction and the continuous maintenance of our identities. Because narratives and stories are social and cultural products, narrative identity offers an inherently socio-cultural understanding of ourselves. People’s narrative identities are, to a large extent, first developed through the sharing of and listening to stories among close relatives. It has often been pointed out that it is within the family that we learn to tell stories and where our journey of constructing our narrative identity begins, with intergenerational and family stories proven to be critical for understanding the self.^[5]

In addition to stories told within the family or a community, we also turn to narratives to make sense of our experiences and our position in the world through broader social and cultural frameworks where we find widely shared cultural stories, histories and master narratives. Here, the formation of a narrative identity touches on the domain of cultural heritage. We tell stories to make sense of our past and our current position, but also to figure out where we are going. The stories we tell ourselves help to guide our actions.^[6] When we identify with a certain narrative, the acts we perform that support this narrative are experienced as personally meaningful. Our personal stories encourage us to act in certain ways, while our actions that meaningfully fit into our life story provide support and confirmation of our sense of self and identity.

There is broad scholarly consensus that people solve their ‘problems of identity’ through creating life stories.^[7] Stories are helpful in the sense of ‘looking back’ at our experiences, and they also play a role in structuring our future experiences. Two central aspects of narrative identity are therefore meaning-making and goal-setting.^[8] Individuals engage in meaning-making to understand situations and experiences in their life – be it daily events or larger life events – by determining what is significant in the situation and connecting this to other parts of their life and their life story.

Co-authoring

The developmental psychologist Kate McLean has argued that we can view identity development as a co-authored project.^[9] What she means by this is that the stories told within one’s family and the larger culture that one belongs to, play a defining role in the stories we tell about ourselves. Stories about our personal experiences are seen to be ‘nested within the experiences of our immediate family members and the stories of past generations, as further nested within the stories of our cultural or historical moments’.^[10] McLean conceptualizes this as ‘a narrative ecology’. This means that we need to understand the individual’s self-story as related to all the other stories and narratives existing around them. Above all, an individual’s personal identity is created through ‘the weaving together of a person’s own experiences into coherent narratives, but also in the weaving together of multiple layers of narratives that surround the person’.^[11]

The development of an individual’s identity is thus dependent upon their engagement and activity in a ‘larger ecology’, such as encountering the stories of others and those of society and culture, which is an ongoing, extremely complex and reciprocal process. This understanding of identity development places people’s social relations and social and cultural narratives at the centre. The idea of a narrative ecology helps us understand how people’s identities and life stories are shaped by their social and cultural context, as well as how identities and life stories are continuously changing and changeable over the course of one’s life.

The cultural influence of master narratives

Understanding the relationship between identity and narratives in a broader social context is especially important when working with people who are culturally and socially marginalized and excluded. All societies have master narratives which are ‘culturally shared stories that communicate what the standards and expectations are for being part of a community’.^[12] Master narratives play an important societal role in communicating the standards and expectations related to belonging to a community, and to social categories such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality. One master narrative that is commonly found in capitalist societies is the narrative about progress and growth. This narrative influences many aspects of society, from economics and politics to how people understand their own personal development, family life and career trajectory. In this narrative, experiences of ‘set-backs’ or lack of growth are seen as negative or signs of failure.

Many master narratives can also be found in the discourses around cultural heritage. Many interpretations, for example of important battles, revolutionary events or even uses of heritage buildings, are often approached from one perspective that is connected to the current master narrative. One example is the relationship between Islam and Christianity in the Netherlands. In the Dutch media, it is common to hear narratives that position Islam as inferior to Christianity, often promoting the false idea that Islam is a primitive religion.^[13] We easily forget that it was the Islamic Ottomans who were the biggest allies of the Protestants in their fight against the Catholics, who were supported by the Spanish King, during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). One of the reminders of this assistance by the Ottomans is a medal created by the Protestant resistance, now exhibited in the Rijksmuseum, with the text: ‘Liever Turks dan Paaps’/‘Rather Turkish than Papist (Catholic)’. The existence of this medal and the reasons behind it are not commonly known by the Dutch population and the story is usually not incorporated into the common narrative identity of the Dutch.

While master narratives can create social cohesion, their normative standards also contribute to the marginalization and exclusion of those who do not meet their definitions of an appropriate or good life. Those who diverge from the master narrative often experience negative consequences, such as rejection, prejudice and exclusion. Resisting master narratives by actively creating alternative narrative constructions is a challenging process for individuals. People who are negatively affected by the narratives might also internalize them, resulting in feelings such as shame or personally blaming themselves for individual problems or failures that are connected to systemic inequalities or oppression by others.^[14]

Becoming aware of how societal master narratives disadvantage people is an important step towards finding opportunities for positive identity development. Many people are aware of these structures, and awareness-raising and various forms of active resistance against oppressive master narratives is common among people who belong to societally and narratively marginalized groups. The queer movement, for example (people who resist conformity to heteronormative gender and sexual identities), actively inverted the negative label ‘queer’ to embrace queerness as a positive and acceptable form of being in the world. Similarly, a movement of people with disabilities inverted the derogatory term ‘cripple’ into the positive label ‘crip’.^[15]

Master narratives, exclusion and belonging

People in less powerful positions, who may also experience structural inequality, often diverge from master narratives. They describe their experience as a loss of connection to others, including feelings of alienation.^[16] Structural and social marginalization are closely linked: ‘not fitting in with the master narrative is about a loss of power, as well as a loss of belonging. This suggests that the work of constructing an alternative narrative is not a solitary activity – one must find another group with which to belong’.^[17] The experience of belonging to a larger group is important for identity development, and studies have found that people address experiences of deviation from the master narrative by finding a group to belong to, which presents an alternative story of belonging.^[18] However, this is a difficult process in an environment where many stories that are part of the broader cultural heritage, or even determine the heritage, are monopolized by the dominant group. This underlines the importance of democratizing cultural heritage by allowing other stories to become part of it. Again, here, we start from the viewpoint that heritage is not a fixed fact but is created out of a dynamic mix of stories and is therefore continually changing and always changeable.

Research shows that for those who do diverge, a lot more ‘identity work’ in the form of autobiographical reasoning, justification and elaboration is required of them to create alternative narratives that create a positive sense of self. Resistance to master narratives is an important basis for narrating positive and resilient identities. This is not left to the individual alone. As the construction of alternative narratives is a social process, they are developed and maintained in relation with others, who are essential. Therefore, the experience of a lack of belonging to a group or the experience of tension in navigating between several groups, can place a serious strain on a person’s identity.

For people who find themselves identifying with multiple groups, stories can be useful to help bridge these identities and rewrite stories of who they are and where they belong. On an individual level, creating alternative narratives about social belonging might be more important than opportunities to develop alternative narratives that challenge the status quo. When the construction of an alternative narrative is supportive of the person’s positive identity development, this resistance to the master narrative can be considered ‘an agentic act that empowers individuals’.^[19]

Here, we would like to emphasize the importance of the act of sharing these alternative narratives, both within a group, and with outsiders. We call this a ‘definitional ceremony’, as introduced by Barbara Myerhoff.^[20] Such ceremonies are rituals that acknowledge and enhance people’s lives, where past, present and future are brought back into alignment, providing a basis for taking action, whether small or large. If such a story is subsequently listened to, it quickly gains in meaning, and this enhances the narrator’s mental resilience, which is likely to contribute to their wellbeing. This notion of ‘ceremony’ might also explain the added value of using theatrical means in presenting stories. This not only draws out the ritual nature of alternative narratives but also offers a space that connects the narrator and the listener on an equal basis. This is the final step in the process of democratization.