Storytelling events, violence, and the appearance of the past

Alluding to Sierra Leone's recent violent history, this paper argues that storytelling events offer insights into the ways that people evaluate, discuss, and negotiate social and ethical strategies for making communal life viable in war as well as in peace. At the same time, it explores some of the theoretical implications of Michael Oakeshott's assertion that "there are not two worlds - the world of past happenings and the world of our present knowledge of those past events - there is only one world, and it is the world of present experience" (Oakeshott 1933:108).