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In the mid-eighties and early nineties the drive to generate and disseminate new and/or recycled social “truths” was quite palpable to most astute observers of Spanish and Portuguese culture. For a long time, I contented myself with believing that this was a peculiar trait of, as taxonomically oriented social scientists like to say, “societies in transition.”

As my studies on the theory and practice of nation-building deepened, however, I came to realize the artificiality of this distinction. As my dearly admired mentor Itamar Even-Zohar has convincingly shown, “culture-planning”—the orchestrated efforts of social elites to generate cohesion and proneness-to-act among otherwise unruly and heterogeneous national populations—is a ubiquitous, if also often largely unexamined, activity in every society. Indeed, it is precisely in those places where the population has the lowest consciousness of its presence that it can usually be found in its strongest and most well-organized condition.

I thus began to realize that I was probably wrong when I concluded earlier on that the art of storytelling was dead in the USA. My mistake, it seems, was in hoping to find it in the places—such as the dinner table and the back porch—where I had seen and heard it in my childhood.