The mundane and the limits of the human. About storytelling and its relationship with the mundane.

A useful way to think of the mundane is as a story that, we assume, does not need to be told. If something is mundane, we

assume, it is something with which everybody is so well acquainted that relating these details is not only boring but redundant.

The assumption that the mundane does not bear examining is the same assumption as that of a story that does not need telling.

But it is precisely these stories that we assume are so self-evident they don’t need to be told that play crucial roles in

determining who we are and, more crucially, what we exclude, silence and ignore in order to maintain this determination.

Considers the fascinating comeuppance anthropologist Elizabeth Bohannon (Shakespeare in the Bush) received when she explored her hypothesis of the universal resonance of Hamlet by telling the story to a group of elders of the Tiv, a West African tribe that had never heard of Shakespeare. Journal of Mundane Behavior