Summary
Homo narrans, ‘storytelling human’, is a name for our species that makes storytelling, more than language or reason, the thing that sets humans apart. It’s modelled on Homo sapiens, ‘wise human’. Scholarly use may go back to a 1967 paper by the German ethnologist Kurt Ranke, but the term is usually credited to the communication theorist Walter Fisher, who listed rival labels such as homo faber and wrote: “I now propose homo narrans to be added to the list”.
Fisher built it into his narrative paradigm: people judge what they hear less by formal argument than by whether a story hangs together and rings true to their experience.
Rationale
Story-first thinking like Fisher’s is where our inquiry began, under the name ‘deep narrative’. We now suspect what lies deepest is “more like an orientation than a story”, so we hold this with a caveat.