Writing Assignment(due Tuesday 10/13):1.In the opening section of his essay, what does Ferris Jabr tell us about “Red Riding-Hood,”a story that has different titles and details depending on which of the thousands of versions we’re looking at? What aspects of character, setting, or plot do those versions share in common? How have those versions changed in different parts of the worldand over time, according to anthropologist Jamie Tehrani?Based on that evidence, how specifically are stories “uncannily similar toliving organisms”(36)?How, over the “past few hundred thousand years,”did humansbecome “consummate storytellers”(38)?
2.In the third section of the essay, pp. 39-50, what does the example of the Agtapeople, a tribe of indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Philippines, tell us about the meaningof stories to the life and evolution of early humans? What do stories and storytelling DO and what do they MEANto theAgta people, and what does that meaning tell us about the relationship between stories and evolution, according to Jabr?In what specific ways arenarratives—another way of saying stories or storytelling—a way of both “thinking”and surviving?
3.In the final section of the essay, from p. 40-41, Jabr describes the “symbiosis”of living things and their environments: life depends on cooperation between living things and the world around them. Building on your answers to the previous set of questions in #2, what is the symbiosis between humans and narratives (stories and storytelling)? In your view, dostories work the same way in today’s technology driven culture (remember his discussion of memesin the essay’s opening section), and why or why no