Oral narrative

Gaelic tales from the best of Cape Breton's storytelling tradition.
John Shaw has been documenting Cape Breton's Gaelic traditions since the 1960s. In The Blue Mountains and Other Gaelic Stories from Cape Breton he presents thirty tales recorded between 1964 and 1989. The collection includes popular tales such as The Dragon Slayer, hero-tales of Fionn Mac Cumhail and his warrior band, accounts of the famed carpenter Boban Saor, stories of robbers and thieves, comic tall tales, historical legends, and accounts of clan traditions brought over from the western Highlands.

Shaw provides both the Gaelic texts and English translations. When possible, he identifies both the original Gaelic storyteller and the local reciters. Reciters in the collection include Joe Neil MacNeil, a major Canadian storyteller, as well as others whose stories have never before been published. The Blue Mountains and Other Gaelic Stories from Cape Breton showcases a unique and neglected storytelling tradition.
(From McGill-Queen's University Press)

At the time when the interview was conducted, Ma-Ngconde was one of the foremost traditional healers and diviners in South Africa. She has been consulted by a wide range of South Africans of all races: from high-ranking politicians and wealthy entrepreneurs to the inhabitants of rural villages in the Eastern Cape. This interview with Ma-Ngconde explores the nature of the work carried out by traditional practitioners in contemporary South African society by focusing on the career of a particularly successful individual.

This book describes the career of the near-legendary South African inyanga (medicine man) Khotso Sethuntsa (1898 - 1972). He derived much of his wealth from the charms and potions that he sold, particularly ukuthwala, a hazardous magical procedure for long-term wealth, widely believed to involve the ownership of a mamlambo, a wealth-giving spirit.  The ways in which magic can be converted into a marketable commodity are explored, as are the ways in which Sethuntsa made use of mythmaking to further his career. The links between magic and politics are also examined. Sethuntsa operated in the days of white minority rule and leading Afrikaner Nationalist politicians, including H.F. Verwoerd, visited him. It has been claimed that they sought his medicines for political power.

Español: El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en analizar el aporte de la narración oral en el origen del teatro. Para ello tomaré como corpus la película La camarera del Titanic, y me valdré de las aproximaciones metafóricas, que en ella encontramos, a una teoría en construcción. Me interesa resaltar la idea de “teoría en construcción” para definir una postura frente a la teorización sobre el acontecimiento teatral, teorización siempre en movimiento y resignificada en tanto el teatro sea.
Esta película es una realización del director español Bigas Luna. Está basada en la novela de igual nombre, de Didier Decoin, una producción franco-hispano-italiana, estrenada en el año 1997.
Teniendo en cuenta el acontecimiento teatral como manifestación de una construcción, ¿Cómo narra la película La camarera del Titanic, el origen del teatro en la narración oral? Pregunta que intentaré responder desde la Filosofía del Teatro; realizando cortes en el corpus para rescatar los momentos en los que aparece tratado el tema que nos ocupa: la narración oral como origen del teatro, teniendo en cuenta los conceptos de convivio, poíesis y expectación y la noción de liminalidad.

This paper will focus on the relationship between professionalism and cultural constructions of selfhood, in particular the differences between group-based and individual-based identity-building processes. The underlying assumption in this paper is that the interpreter’s cultural parameters affect his/her view of professional role and professionalism. This assumption further raises the question of whether or not s/he is also guided (consciously/unconsciously) by the host country’s understanding of ethics and professionalism and if these two potentially opposing values tend to converge over time: in other words do interpreters’ professional values and professional codes of ethics change as they are increasingly integrated into the host society? Case studies based on interviews with community interpreters in Italy about what they understand as being essential to professionalism will be reported on, shedding light on and potentially corroborating these claims.

Colección de cuentos folklóricos argentinos de la especie de cuentos animalísticos recopilados en investigaciones de campo, clasificados por el sistema ATU, acompañados de un estudio preliminar, con descripción de tipos temáticos y tabla de narradores

This paper assumes that ideology, discourse and power are intimately connected, and that
discourse is the mouthpiece of ideology. Power is thus negotiated, manipulated, expressed,
rejected and challenged interpersonally through discourse in settings defined by institutional
power asymmetry. This paper examines the issue of power as a governing factor in
community —and public service interpreting by using Fairclough’s distinction between
power behind discourse and power in discourse, that is, hidden power that guides the interpreter’s
status and role, guiding the interpreter’s discourse and interpreting strategies. Three
categories of institutional relationships are examined: relations between actors in any institutional
setting, these same relations in cross-cultural encounters, and these same relations
in interpreter-mediated public service encounters. Lastly, the paper discusses power in relation
to the interpreter’s role.

This study explores the way in which the economic, the erotic and the supernatural are brought together in the practice of ukuthwala, the Xhosa term for a dangerous, powerful procedure for long-term wealth, widely believed to involve the ownership of a wealth-giving being, focusing on the life of a near-legendary South African seller of ukuthwala the inyanga (medicine man) Khotso Sethuntsa (1898 – 1972). The combination of the erotic, the sensual and the economic that characterizes the ukuthwala procedure is embodied in the form of the wealth-giving spirit known as the mamlambo. It is said that those who undergo ukuthwala take on ownership of this being, which grants wealth at a terrible price. The genesis of the mamlambo is examined, and the reasons why ukuthwala has become a widespread practice in southern Africa are discussed.

SAVCI, Bilgesu. Through Storytelling in New Media: The Morphological Analysis of Vladimir Propp in Private Weblog Narratives, Master’s Thesis Ankara, 2015.
This study aims to analyse the narratives produced and published on private web blogs by using the morphological analysis method used by Vladimir Propp for classification of the Russian folktales. As one of the most commonly used new media, web blogs are the atmospheres in which people produce and share personal and independent narratives. These narratives differ from the traditional media texts not only in the context of the medium and non-traditional written language usage but also in the context of the audience. Within the scope of this study 38 different private web blog narrations were morphologically analysed in an attempt to demonstrate how these narratives are formed in a different manner from the traditional media texts. The morphological analysis method of Vladimir Propp was taken as a model for the analysis of the web blog narrations. Therefore, the morphological method adopted to the sample of the study consisted of the actions of separating the formative parts of the narratives and discovering the regularities of these parts of the narratives. As a result of the analysis, it is argued that the private web blog narratives included in this study have formational regularities as seen in the folktales which are the samples of oral narratives and this fact disambiguates the bardic nature of new media. Additionally, it is seen for the first time that the blog narratives could be analysed morphologically and the tools of classical narratology could be adopted for the analysis of new media texts as suggested in the post classical narrative theory.

There is a structural/genetic continuity between everyday oral narrative and elaborate literary narratives, with listeners gradually becoming an audience. Literary stories which narrate some character's oral narrating keep us aware of this continuity, and build bridges between advanced literate and oral forms, reappropriating orality for literature, and constructing advanced interactional forms precisely through a return, with a difference, to the origins of narrative interaction. The paper examines some aspects of oral narration in written fiction, and suggests the general proposition that retelling is a crucial concept in narrative analysis, as narratives always retell earlier narratives.

La dixi és un dels fenòmens primordials del llenguatge i la comunicació, però no ha estat suficientment estudiada a partir de corpus reals, els quals mostren una varietat d’usos molt interessant. En aquest article, analitzem els díctics espacials en un corpus de narracions orals procedent del Corpus Audiovisual Plurilingüe i diferenciem set tipus de dixi espacial: la dixi situacional, que assenyala l’espai de l’enunciació; la dixi textual, on el díctic assenyala el text com a espai i té un antecedent en el text; la dixi am Phantasma i la presentacional, on el díctic espacial no assenyala l’enunciació ni el text anterior o posterior, sinó que ens situa en l’espai de la memòria i el coneixement compartit; i tres usos, indefinit, expletiu i gramaticalitzat, en què el díctic no assenyala cap element lingüístic o extralingüístic, sinó que ocupa l’espai d’una expressió que no es troba o deixa sense concreció algun espai sintàctic o discursiu. L’anàlisi mostra que els díctics espacials constitueixen un mecanisme molt freqüent i variat en la construcció de la narració i permet observar tipus de dixi característics de la gramàtica de l’oral.

In this paper we describe an interaction between an elderly female bilingual storyteller (Quichua-Spanish) and myself as an interviewer, in a rural town in the department of Figueroa (Santiago del Estero, Argentina). A story about the literary character of the fox and the context of the interaction prompted a reflection, which had a notable impact on the research problem and the passage from literary criticism to an ethnographic sociolinguistics.
The result was a redefinition of the objectives of the research designed to explore historical-sociolinguistic factors on the Quichua language, how it impacted in a troubled bilingualism and local sense of these oral tales. This route also allows me to see how folk and sociolinguistic knowledge, in their unselfconscious fields, can affect cultural and linguistic complexity of the populations under study.

After their arrival in Trešnjevica (central Serbia), the Roma inhabited the part of the village called Mala Trešnjevica (placed on the hill and very poor), while the Serbians moved to Velika Trešnjevica, near the fertile bank of Morava. But the modification of the social context (exactly the enriching of the Roma population) led to blurring the borders between these two communities: the Roma are now buying Serbian houses and moving to Velika Trešnjevica, where they live together with Serbians. Both Serbs and Roma attend the village church; the grave is also common. The term used by the Serbians from Trešnjevica with respect to the Roma is Gypsy, and with respect to their language Romanian. The author’s intent is to analyze the discourse of the Serbs from Trešnjevica about the Roma in this village, as well as the culture of the Serbian villagers, with the intent of a better understanding of the specific character of Roma culture and of the Serbian one. The culture of the Roma from Trešnjevica is a complex phenomenon, wrongly interpreted both by Romanians and by Serbians, although the influence of these two cultures is obvious. The attitude towards Roma, as deduced from the Serbs’ discourse, is not based on the opposition we — they. Except for the financial situation, there are no themes which spontaneously activate the subject Roma. Serbs are interested in those aspects of Roma life which, by their nature, are exposed to the entire community, such as field work and celebrations (Saint George, Ispas, etc.). However, Serbs cannot give details about Roma holidays and rituals of the family cycle (birth, wedding, funeral), which points to the fact that they are not aware of them and do not take part in them. The attitude towards Roma culture is expressed in the Serbs’ discourse in three different ways. The first one is by noticing the significant differences between the Roma and own culture (e.g. paying for the bride, the special way of celebrating Saint George, sorcery). The linguistic distinction we — they is activated the most in those segments of discourse making reference to cultural differences. The second way of expressing the attitude towards Roma culture and, in the same time, a special kind of communication between Serbs and Roma, can be noticed in the discussions about the customs Roma took and adapted {paparude, läzärife) or about their music making. At the discourse level, this kind of cultural connections is marked by the preponderance of terminological marks over the ethnic ones: in order to describe Roma customs, the Serbians, instead of ethnonyms, use the terms läzärife, paparude, bands, which points to the fact that Roma, at least within the frame of these customs, are fully integrated into the Serbian culture. The third way refers to “translating” Roma culture, by means of Serbian cultural and linguistic codes. Thus, like in every translation process, the closest linguistic and cultural equivalents are found. Everything that is “lost in translation” marks the individuality of each of the two cultures.

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Već je utvrđeno da je za Rome Banjaše osoben višestruki identitet i etnička mimikrija, te da se u formiranju identiteta romski supstrat preobli-kuje u kontaktu sa drugim kulturama (Sikimić 2003a:76). U slučaju Roma iz Trešnjevice, u pitanju su, pored romskog supstrata, rumunska i srpska kultura. Imajući to u vidu, logičan je metodološki zahtev da se u istraživa- nje Roma Banjaša uključi i kontaktni ne-banjaški govor i kultura (južno- slovenski, romski, rumunski). U usmenom diskursu trešnjevičkih Srba ot- kriva se specifičnost interkultume komunikacije Srba i Roma. Ovakav tip diskursa je već istraživan kao „komšijski diskurs“. U radu su predstavljeni rezultati etnolingvističkog istraživanja u selu Trešnjevica od 26. do 28. avgusta 2002. godine. Razgovori sa informatorima transkribovani su po metodi etno-dijalekatskog teksta. Informa- tori su obeleženi početnim slovima imena, a pitanja istraživača data su u zagradama. Prevodeći romsku kultumu realiju, Srbi uočavaju njenu osnovnu semantičku struktum i nalaze značenjski pandan u svom kodu sa najviše po- dudamih semantičkih komponenti. Npr. Soimane i vile imaju zajedničke seme: ženska, natprirodna bića, lepe spoljašnjosti, koja žive u prirodi (oko drveta i voda), koja čoveku mogu nauditi. To je etnocentrični „metod odomaéivanja“ koji eliminiše kultume razlike i redukuje romski kultumi  tekst na svoj: tako Soimane postaju vile ili vile sejmane, romski trans — bajanje od vile, zilje marj — slava, itd. U ovoj interkultumoj komunikaciji važna je pragmatična dimenzija prevoda, tj. osnovno razumevanje romske kulture uz pomoć matičnog коda radi ostvarivanja osnovnih funkcija zajedničkog života. Sve ono što je „izgubljeno u prevodu“ ukazuje na realnu distancu izmedu srpske i romske kulture kao i na njihove posebnosti.


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Dupa ce s-au stabilit in Trešnjevica (sat aflat in partea centralä a Serbiei), romii au populat partea numitä Mala Trešnjevica (plasatä pe deal $i foarte säracä), iar sârbii Velika Trešnjevica, aflatä in apropierea malului roditor al Moravei. Insä modificarea contextului social (§i anume unbogafirea romilor) a dus la çtergerea acestor granite: romii cumpärä acum case sârbejti $i se muta în Velika Trešnjevica, unde locuiesc împreunâ eu sârbii. Biserica din sat este freeventatä atât de sârbi, cât çi de romi, iar cimitirul este, de asemenea, comun. Termenul pe care sârbii din Trešnjevica îl folosesc pentru a-i denumi pe romii din localitate este figani, numind, în schimb, limba pe care aceçtia о vorbesc, românà. Autoarea îçi propune sä studieze discursul sârbilor din Trešnjevica referitor la romii din acest sat, precum çi cultura sârbilor din localitate, în scopul unei mai bune înjelegeri atât a specificului culturii sârbe, cât çi al celei rome. Din perspectiva discursului „vecinilor“ (sârbi), cultura romilor din Trešnjevica ne apare ca un fenomen complex, greçit interprétât atât în „cheie“ sârbeascâ, cât $i româneascâ, eu toate câ influenjele celor douâ culturi de contact sunt evidente. Atitudinea fata de romi, în discursul sârbilor din Trešnjevica, nu este bazatä pe opozitia noi — ei. In afara situa(iei financiare, nu existä nici о temä care sä activeze spontan discujia despre romi. In sfera de interes a sârbilor inträ acele forme aie viefii romilor care sunt, prin natura lor, expuse întregii comunitäti: munca câmpului çi särbätorile câmpeneçti (Sfântul Gheorghe, Ispas etc.). In schimb, despre praznicele rome $i ritualurile ciclului familial (naçterea, nunta, înmormântarea), sârbii nu pot oferi prea multe detalii, ceea ce demonstreazä faptul câ nu le cunosc çi nu participâ la ele.
In discursul sârbilor, atitudinea fa(â de cultura romä se exprimä în moduri diferite. Primul este observarea diferenjelor semnificative ale acesteia fa(a de cultura proprie (de exemplu, cumpârarea miresei, modul special de särbätorire a Sfantului Gheorghe, descântatul de Çoimane). Distinctia lingvisticä noi — ei se activeazâ cel mai putemic în acele segmente de diseurs care se referâ la diferenjele culturale. Al doilea mod de exprimare a atitudinii fata de cultura romä $i, în acelaji timp, un tip special de comunicare între sârbi $i romi, poate fl observât în discujiile despre obiceiurile preluate §i adaptate de romi (paparade, läzäri(e) sau despre integrarea acestora în diferite
evenimente (ca muzican(i). La nivel discursiv, acest tip de legäturi culturale este marcat prin preponderenta märcilor terminologice fatä de cele etnice: pentru a descrie obiceiurile respective, sârbii folosesc termenii läzärife, paparude, fortnaß/ orchestre, $i nu etnonime, ceea ce indicä faptul cä romii, m cadrul acestor obiceiuri, sunt complet integral în cultura sârbà. Al treilea mod este reprezentat de „traducerea“ culturii rome în cod lingvistic $i cultural propriu. Astfel, ca în orice procès de traducere, se vor gäsi cele mai apropiate echivalente lingvistice çi culturale. Tot ceea ce „se pierde prin traducere“ marcheazà individualitatea fiecareia dintre cele doua culturi.

This paper considers the first ever novel and the last one published by the Ivorian author, Ahmadou kourouma before his death, in a stylistic comparative exposition. While most other research works seem to see a stylistic distance between these two works, this paper has been able to establish a rapprochement by unearthing the salient oral narrative techniques employed by the author in the two fictions. Hence, rather than being poles apart, this research study has proved that a common flavour of orality sustains artistic creativity in both narrations.

Summary. This essay traces some of the major epistemological shifts in the humanities over the last century, in particular anthropology, which have informed and profoundly altered language- and literary disciplines in Western academia, in particular those relating to the subjectivity of the observer (the anthropological ‘Gaze’), the complex interconnectedness of language and the surrounding socio-cultural network, the ephemeral nature of language itself, and the issue of textual authorship-ownership. Giving due appreciation to the institutional-practical nature of the discipline, the paper attempts to put into relief the interface of philosophical issues that arises as a result of these paradigmatic shifts with practical issues of professional ethics and role-definition in community interpreting. The paper also attempts to show that what emerged in translation studies as the ‘cultural shift’ has already taken place in community interpreting (not necessarily across the board in other forms of interpreting) due both to influences from other related domains and also to the specific cross-cultural nature of community interpreting itself.

Beginning with a critical reappraisal of the notion of “fairy tale” and extending it to include categories and genres which are in common usage in folklore and in literary studies, this book throws light on the general processes involved in storytelling. It illuminates the fundamental ways in which a culture is formed, while highlighting important features of the Irish narrative tradition, in all its wealth and variety and in its connections with the mythical and historical events of Ireland. The Irish Fairy Tale argues that the fairy tale is a kind of “neutral zone,” a place of transition as well as a meeting place for popular beliefs and individual creativity, oral tradition and literary works, historical sources and imaginary reconstructions, and for contrasting and converging views of the world, which altogether allow for a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of reality. The book focuses on stories by Yeats and Stephens, whose approach to the subject marks the culmination of a long tradition of attempts at linking past and present and of bridging the gap between what appear to be contradictory facets of a single culture. This leads to a comparative study of Joyce’s Dubliners, which illustrates the universal and exemplary nature of the notion of fairy tale put forward in the work.

This article examines Tanvir Mokammel’s documentary Seemantorekha as a historical text that opens a representational space to engage with the memories of the 1947 Bengal Partition. Seemantorekha documents the journey of four individuals to their erstwhile homes in Bangladesh and West Bengal. In the moment of seeing their ancestral homes, they share the ‘Third Space’ of being, the premise of which transcends the ideological normative of nations and borders.

Keywords:
Seemantorekha, refugees, Third Space/Space, Partition, West Bengal, East Pakistan/Bangladesh

Lake Varano – along with the narrow isthmus separating it from the Adriatic Sea and the five towns standing around it (Ischitella, Carpino, Cagnano Varano, Rodi Garganico, Vico del Gargano) – is not only an enchanting piece of Gargano (Apulia, Southern Italy) landscape; it is also at the centre of an oral narrative tradition that is here examined in its wholeness (historical background, written and literary sources, ethnographic data, narratological and comparative analysis). It is an etiological legend, namely a narrative explaining the origin and the features of something or someone. As a mixture of history, myth and vernacular beliefs, this legend tells an extraordinary event, i.e. the sinking of an ancient and prosperous city, Uria – punished by a biblical deluge due to the sins of its inhabitants – and the resulting birth of the lake, the surrounding towns and the Annunziata shrine. This last one, according to the legend, was originally the outlying house of Nunzia, a young and pure woman, devoted to praying and spinning. Nunzia is the key figure of the story: thanks to her miraculous ball of thread, she (along with her house) is the only survivor from the deluge and, at the same time, the founder of a new order, both geographical and spiritual, as symbolized by the holy crucifix worshipped within the shrine. As a form of space- and place-lore, as well as of religious tale, this legend tells about the ideas, beliefs and images raised by a particular landscape and the relationships the human communities establish with the territory they inhabit.

Il lago di Varano, con il sottile istmo che lo separa dal mare e i cinque paesi che gli fanno corona (Ischitella, Cagnano Varano, Carpino, Rodi Garganico, Vico del Gargano), non è solo un suggestivo elemento del paesaggio garganico; è anche il protagonista di una tradizione narrativa che qui, per la prima volta, viene esaminata in tutti i suoi aspetti. Si tratta di una leggenda eziologica, ovvero di un racconto che spiega le origini di un luogo o le cause di un fenomeno. Mescolando storia, mito e credenze popolari, questa leggenda narra un evento memorabile, la scomparsa di un'antica e ricca città, Uria (biblicamente punita con un diluvio per i peccati dei suoi abitanti), e la conseguente origine del lago, dei paesi circumlacuali e del santuario dell'Annunziata. È quest'ultimo che, fin dal nome, ci riporta all'umile ma portentosa protagonista della leggenda, Nunzia. È lei la figura chiave, unica superstite di un passato sommerso dal lago e (ri)fondatrice di una storia e di un mondo nuovi, simboleggiati dal Crocifisso venerato nel santuario. Una leggenda affascinante e densa di significati, che ci invita a riflettere sui rapporti che intessiamo con i nostri luoghi e sull'impatto che il paesaggio ha nelle vicende umane.

The paper sheds light upon collective ideology which influenced the creation of the basic temporal orientation among the Serbs from Szigetcsép in Hungary. The community has undergone profound social changes since the WWII - predominance of interethnic marriages and language shift - which called into question the community survival. Consequently, the older interlocutors use deictics then/now as the principal temporal markers, whereby then refers to the period from the community settling in Hungary (XVth C) up to the WWII , i.e. period of five centuries, and now refers to the period from the WWII up to the present moment of talking, i.e. period of sixty, seventy years. The temporal deictics actually denote collective time in which the collective is the main actor and at the same time they serve as indexes of two social orders which are opposed one to another. Although these periods are heterogeneous in themselves, the ideology homogenise them: then indexes the authoritarian ideology of tradition whereas now indexes the period of modernisation and fading tradition.

Este  artículo  pretende  avanzar  un  trecho  más  en  la  exploración del vasto y complejo territorio de la literatura medieval, en el cual confluyen lo oral y lo escrito, lo doctrinal y lo popular, lo oriental y lo occidental. En concreto, los propósitos son, por un lado, deslindar si Pedro Alfonso se inspiró en un modelo árabe, bereber o europeo para componer el ejemplo XXIII (Del labrador, el lobo y el juicio del zorro) de la Disciplina clericalis, y, por otro, evaluar el impacto que tuvo  aquel  relato  latino  en  la  tradición  oral  moderna.  Para  ello,  se  expondrán  los resultados de un estudio comparativo entre la versión medieval y las que han sido documentadas recientemente en las áreas lingüísticas del castellano, del portugués, del catalán, del gallego y del euskera, así como en las tradiciones europeas y norteafricanas vecinas de la península ibérica.

This thesis presents a critical overview of a supernatural being, the South Slavic vila, as she figures in the oral traditions of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian peasants collected in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The thesis returns to the conceptual frame of older primary texts (here titled survey studies) used by comparative scholars and updates this work with the knowledge gleaned from a century of research and theory in the fields of folkloristics and historical anthropology. These materials are presented in a distributive frequency analysis model such as those often employed by the Historical-Geographic school of folklore research, but the study is built on a foundation informed by the insights of Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s researches into the diffusion of oral traditions. These traditions are further refined by focusing on the singers, storytellers and believers who used the vila in an emic manner balanced at a nexus point between artistic innovation and traditional dictates. The data is also further contextualized with a focus on the embedded nature of these cultural expressions and a clear portrait of the contexts surrounding their collection and publication in a wider cultural sphere. The aim of the thesis is to present a comprehensive description of the vila’s role in oral traditions to serve as a primary source for scholars doing comparative or interpretive work, as well as to provide a clearer picture of the contexts of the materials to refine such research. In doing so, this thesis produces a comprehensive method and model that can be applied to other supernatural beings, repatriates oral arts back to their original purveyors by undoing academic silencing of subaltern voices and returns critical context to inherited traditions once stripped of them by romantic academic theories.

Please follow this link to an Open-Access copy of the dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11375/24438

This paper provides a comparative analysis of oral narrative productions in French and in Arabic for 5 year old and 7 year old children (picture narrative task). It compares different groups of learners : bilingual Tunisian children in Tunisia in Arabic  and in French, bilingual children from Arabic-speaking families in France, and  monolingual French,-speaking children. The comparisons bear on condensation of narrative, on paratactic / hypotactic organization and on the choice of connectors.

The /Xam texts are replete with references to rain and its power. Conceptions of the rain are central to various narratives, and it is proposed that this complex of ideas (not 'shamanism') is central to understanding accounts the /xam view of the cosmos, as well as rock art.

Tshe dbang rdo rje. 2017. Tricking the Wife. Asian Highlands Perspectives 47:249-250.

One day, a few soldiers came and told Uncle Ston pa that their king wanted to see him. Uncle Ston pa was not worried about himself, but he was worried about his beautiful wife. He would be away for a few weeks since the king lived far away and he knew she was interested in an unmarried man living in a nearby home. ...

Tshe dbang rdo rje. 2017. Tricking the Landlord's Daughter. Asian Highlands Perspectives 47:224-225.

After tricking the landlord's wife, Uncle Ston pa was given even more difficult tasks to do. One day, the landlord and his wife had to go to other villages to invite their best friends and relatives for their daughter's skra ston 'hair changing ritual'  that would be held in a week. They called Uncle Ston pa to their daughter's room and told her to keep an eye on Uncle Ston pa. Before they left, the landlord said to his daughter, Lha mo, "Sweetie, today Ston pa is your servant. Order him to do whatever you like! But remember, don't let him out of your sight!" ...

Witold Wojtowicz, „Nobis hoc opus recitate”. Some remarks about orality
fiction in the „Chronicles” of Anonymus called Gallus.

Compositional devices applied by Gallus expose some features of orality primarily through the imitation of the oral narrative. It allowed an elite audience of Gallus’s work to involve adequately with the traditions of epic, including the narrative into the contemporary Middle-Latin historiographical discourse. Bringing the element of orality (with its stylistic pre-conditions and ways of presentation) into his Latin written chronicle Gallus enabled his projected audience a perception of epic dimension of reality presented. Gallus’s Gesta from the very beginning are (despite the epic orality) „bookish” literature, fully immersed in the clerical literacy. Referring to the previous chapter on theatrical communication Wojtowicz shows that the fiction of orality in Gallus was a cultural convention, not related to any real performance practice.

In the twenties of the XXth century, a Romanian Orthodox priest learned that shepherds isolated on the mountain harrow a cross in a fir’s bark and confess in front of it. Probably because it was performed by a certain (and limited) category of (isolated) people and also because it is so unconventional (even non-canonic, since the Orthodox dogmatic prescriptions require the priest involvement in each sacramental ritual), there are only sporadic attestations of such confession. But, at the beginning of the XXIst century (2014, 2017), I had the chance to record more memories than I expected, related to this ritual, and also to notice people’s attitudes toward it.
The goals of this article are: to enrich the corpus of data about this strange ritual; to identify the coordinates of religiosity, which this ritual is articulated on, and which also validate it; to hermeneutically explore the conception about human’s pure-impure status expressed through the alive (green) vs dead (dried) hypostases of the vegetal world, e.g. of arbors, and to suggest its possible relevance for our times
Keywords: shepherds, local religiosity, Carpathian mountains, apocrypha, Christian confession, Romania, oral narratives

In colonial parlance African women were often compared with slaves: sold to the highest bidder and working like beasts of burden, African women were associated with victimhood and commodification. This discourse entered suffragette activism in Europe, and especially payment of the bridewealth was singled out as an argument in the discussions. Local accounts, evaluations and memories of marriage and bridewealth, had no place in these debates.
This paper will present a Gikuyu narrative from Central Kenya that relates marriage and bridewealth to issues of household autonomy, interdependence, gender, force and agency.

El libro trata sobre los indígenas Lengua-Maskoy (también conocidos con el gentilicio Enlhet) del Chaco Boreal Paraguayo. Consta de dos cuerpos: uno dedicado a las plantas en la cultura de los Lenguas y una segunda parte consiste en una etnoflora donde se presentan 268 especies vegetales sobre las que se dan detalles florísticos y etnobotánicos.
(Esta versión adjuntada está comprimida, y contiene la tapa y al final una errata)

This paper considers the first ever novel and the last one published by the Ivorian author, Ahmadou kourouma before his death, in a stylistic comparative exposition. While most other research works seem to see a stylistic distance between these two works, this paper has been able to establish a rapprochement by unearthing the salient oral narrative techniques employed by the author in the two fictions. Hence, rather than being poles apart, this research study has proved that a common flavour of orality sustains artistic creativity in both narrations.

Analizamos narraciones orales producidas por alumnos inmigrantes que estudian en un modelo de inmersión total en euskera (modelo D) en dos escuelas de contexto sociolingüístico diferente de la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca. Recogemos textos producidos en euskera y en español que comparamos y analizamos a partir del modelo de la arquitectura textual. Estudiamos la estructura, la presentación de los personajes, los organizadores, la cohesión verbal, las modalizaciones y el uso del ergativo en el caso del euskera. Los resultados nos muestran que estos niños aprenden a contar un cuento en vasco y en español y que sus capacidades a la hora de producir ese género textual son similares a las observadas en estudios realiza-dos con niños nativos de L1 euskera y L1 español escolarizados en euskera en el mismo modelo lingüístico. Por lo tanto, podemos afirmar que la escuela tiene un papel mediador fundamental en el aprendizaje y desarrollo de las lenguas.

"Basque and Spanish oral narratives of immigrant children: learning two new languages"

We analyze oral narratives produced by immigrant pupils studying in a total immersion model in Euskera (Model D) in two schools of the Basque Autonomous Community, located in different sociolinguistic contexts. Through an experimental device , we collect texts produced in Basque and Spanish which are compared and analyzed by means of a model of text architecture. We study the structure, the presentation of the characters, the text organizers , verbal cohesion and modalizations and also ergative use in the case of Basque. The results show that oral narrative skills are achieved by immigrant pupils and that the abilities of these children producing this text genre in Basque and Spanish are similar to those observed in studies with either L1 Basque or L1 Spanish native children who study in the same linguistic model. Consequently, we see that school plays an important mediating role in learning and language development.

The purpose of this paper aims to discuss the suitability of material for the animated documentary, looking specifically at texts of a biographical nature, and discussing the mechanisms employed and issues with interpreting oral narratives and memory. From the analysis, I aim to suggest guidelines to my Thai undergraduate animation students so that they may gain ideas about the suitability of material and mechanisms that may help to create an animated documentary.

The paper will discuss materiality:

i) in terms of animation and it’s suitability for documentary.
ii) with regard to the subject material to tackle an animated documentary
iii) in relation to creating a story structure from oral narratives and memories
and the mechanics of construction to get an authentic truth in an animated documentary

Because the nature of animated documentaries is so broad, I have, for this paper, narrowed it to the sub category: subjective autobiographical and biographical works that encapsulate personal oral narratives from memories. I will focus on traumatic memories, which retell a event from a personal perspective, which is skewed by the teller’s own perspective in order to discuss the difficulties of memory itself. This category offers many examples of works to support further analysis and investigation by the students and appears to be particularly suited to the animated form.

Japanese performed narrative genres like kōshiki shōmyō 講式声明 (a Buddhist liturgy), the musical narratives of heike 平家, jōruri 浄瑠璃 and naniwa-bushi 浪花節, and also modern biwa 琵琶 forms are all continuous narratives in sung delivery into which spoken sections may be interpolated. Furthermore, they have all developed a modus operandi of several melody types or musical substyles. They are structured into discrete sections, like paragraphs, each of which features a specific musical substyle. This chapter considers to what extent they are prosimetric, if defined as the alternation of sections of singing and speech. It tracks the balance of prose and verse, and of spoken versus musical delivery in each genre. By examining more closely the nature of the sung musical parts, it attempts to place structural and performance features of these genres in a global context. It concludes that the key difference between Chinese prosimetric narratives and Japanese genres is that in Japan the alternation of prose and poetry cannot be seen as the basic form. Whereas the metric parts in Chinese narratives are lyrical song while the prose parts are spoken delivery, in the Japanese musical narratives the expository narrative sections are in musical delivery, not spoken.

Este trabalho objetivou investigar as narrativas orais de mulheres provenientes de áreas rurais, recolhendo relatos e histórias sobre a vida na Fazenda Guatapará. Como objetivos específicos visou: (a) discutir se, e como, as narrativas orais convergem ou se desagregam nas tramas das memórias produzidas, (b) analisar as fotografias da fazenda em conjunto com as rememorações e (c) contrastar as narrativas apresentadas pelas interlocutoras a fim de problematizar suas continuidades e rupturas. A amostra foi composta por quatro mulheres com idade entre 85 e 95 anos, residentes na zona rural de uma cidade de pequeno porte no interior do Estado de São Paulo. Os resultados obtidos permitiram perceber aproximações entre as memórias individuais e coletivas, situando a fazenda como lugar-comum de pertencimento e reconhecimento das trajetórias das personagens.

Tshe dbang rdo rje. 2017. Tricking the Abbess. Asian Highlands Perspectives 47:236-238.

One day at a ritual gathering, the abbess noticed the most beautiful nun was pregnant. She then called the pregnant nun to her room and asked who the father was.
When the pregnant nun refused to answer, the abbess thought, "Hm, this man in disguise must be very attractive, otherwise she wouldn't protect him. I must find and keep him for myself!" Next, she locked the nunnery gate, stood in a deep ditch, and ordered everyone to jump over the ditch, so she could check between their thighs. The nuns then jumped over the ditch one by one.
Worried that the abbess would see his dangling penis while he was jumping over the ditch, Uncle Ston pa secretly tied his penis with a string from his robe and jumped over the ditch very ...