What is a story?

What is a story? I recently read a very interesting book Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses. Salesses says "Craft is part of the history of Western empire...What we call craft is in fact nothing more or less than a set of expectations. ...These expectations are never neutral. They represent the values of the culturally dominant population..."

Wow! While this is very obvious in hindsight, I'd never thought about it this way before.
A writer (in the culturally-dominant Western population) might say a story is: a protagonist with a problem acts to solve that problem and either succeeds or fails. Said problem could be: man against man, man against nature, or man against self.
The idea that the protagonist has power over his/her life is definitely part of this culturally-dominant paradigm.

In fact, a story could be something, anything else.
What do you, think a story is?