Summary
Meso narratives are the stories a community, movement or cultural group tells about itself: a middle scale between the grand narratives said to justify a whole social order and the small stories people tell in everyday conversation. ‘Meso’ is the middle term of the familiar micro, meso, macro way of dividing up the social world. Applied to narrative, it points at shared stories that are close enough to hear directly yet held by many people.
The term came up in our interview with Leni Velasco of Dakila. We haven’t found a settled definition in published writing, so treat it as a working label; in practice the three levels blur into one another.
Rationale
Part 2’s circles have a middle ring, ‘Community’, between ‘Self’ and ‘Society’. It borrows three-level models while “accepting that this kind of mapping is reductive and limited”. So is sorting narratives by size.