So do spin doctors and media executives and therapists. The overarching narrative determines the meaning of events. From my own research on news stories about violence in KwaZulu-Natal, it seems to me that once a dominant narrative has achieved a level of general acceptability, people, as social actors, tend to frame and situate their experience within that overarching story. It takes a new set of political conditions, and the courage to question the apparent accord between events and the stories that communicate them, before new narratives of events will begin to emerge. In this way, a changing political landscape offers optimum conditions for the rethinking of given explanations that appear to contain so much common sense.
People are able to play with the structures of given stories and create new stories.
Gilsenan's work suggests that in times of change, irony becomes a dominant mode and heroes become fools. His work is well demonstrated locally by the 'Yebo Gogo' Telkom advertisement that subverts and mocks a narrative of identities offered by grand apartheid. But narratives do not change only via irony and parody. In telling her their life stories, the activists inevitably explained how their stories were different from 'the norm'. Distinguishing one's own story from dominant narratives that would define one's identity is a potent means of empowering people to be agents of change, and key among the arts of resistance.