On the Status of African Oral Tradition Since 1970s: An Interview with Robert Cancel

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Mirzeler
Keyword(s):  
Kavkaz-forum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Э.Т. ГУТИЕВА

В контексте признаваемой историчности осетинского нартовского эпоса на основании рассказа англо-нормандского церковного историка XIIв. Ордерика Виталия о смерти и погребении Вильгельма Завоевателя и нартовских кадагов, посвящeнных гибели и захоронению нарта Батрадза, впервые ставится вопрос о сравнении нартовского героя Батрадза с историческим деятелем. Основное внимание уделено следующим сюжетообразующим мотивам: конфликт с народом/высшими силами; жар как причина смерти; смертельное ранение, полученное на поле брани, но не от рук врага; зловонность усопшего; упоминание названия усыпальницы; проблемы при захоронении слишком крупного человека в неподходящую ему по размерам усыпальницу; выплата выкупа за возможность захоронить героя. Решение данного вопроса во многом определяется статусом текста церковной хроники. Признание его валидности может служить основанием для рассмотрения данных нарративов как описаний одного исторического события разными средствами. Такой подход даeт возможность рассматривать алгоритмы мифологизации и институционализации прошлого в народной памяти. Таким прошлым для осетин является история их предков, сармато-аланских племeн. В родословной Вильгельма есть определенные пересечения с аланами, что подтверждается наличием множественных бретонских и нормандских родственников с именем Алан в ближайшем окружении короля. В качестве альтернативной интерпретации допускается возможность возведения текстов к одному первоисточнику, и если рассказ Ордерика является фабрикацией, подражательством существовавшей устной традиции, то отмеченные параллели можно квалифицировать как выход на поверхность архаических пластов, общих для двух традиций. Не исключается вероятность прямого заимствования, вектор, траектории распространения и время которого нуждаются в уточнении. Возможно, данные сюжетные мотивы являются произвольными совпадениями. In the context of the acknowledged historicity of the Ossetian Nart epic, based on the systemic coincidences of the story of the 12th century Anglo-Norman church historian Orderikus Vitalius about the death and burial of William the Conqueror and the Narts’ Kadags dedicated to the death and burial of the Nart Batradz with the historical hero Batradz, the question of comparing the Nart hero Batradz is raised for the first time. The main attention is paid to the following plot-forming motives: conflict with the people / higher powers; extreme heat/fire as the cause of death; mortal wound received on the battlefield, but not at the hands of the enemy; the stench of the deceased; stating the name of the burial-place; problems with burying an oversized corpse in a too narrow tomb; payment of the ransom for the opportunity to bury the hero. The solution to this issue is largely determined by the status of the text of the church chronicle. The recognition of its validity can serve as a basis for considering both types of narratives as descriptions of one historical event by different means. This approach makes it possible to consider the algorythms for the mythologization and institutionalization of the past in the people's memory. Such past for the Ossetians is the history of their ancestors, the Sarmatian-Alan tribes. In the genealogy of William there are certain intersections with the Alans, which is confirmed by the presence of multiple Breton and Norman relatives named Alan in the immediate circle of the king’s kins. As an alternative interpretation, these narrative can be traced to one primary source, and if Orderic's story is a fabrication, an imitation of the existing oral tradition, then the noted parallels can be qualified as an emergence of archaic layers common to the two traditions. The possibility of direct borrowing is not excluded, the vector, propagation trajectories and time of which need to be clarified. Less likely these plot motives are arbitrary coincidences.


Author(s):  
Антонина Петровна Липатова

В статье осуществлена попытка рассмотреть цикл рассказов, группирующихся вокруг святыни, как живую, «самонастраивающуюся» систему. Структуру цикла образуют нарративы, описывающие этиологическое и историческое прошлое святыни и ее чудесное настоящее. В случае рутинизации устной традиции структура цикла нередко подвергается изменениям. Предмет нашего рассмотрения - корпус текстов о сакральном объекте в условиях широкого официального признания, сопровождающегося рутинизаций устной традиции. Происходит своего рода «перераспределение» ролей в рамках цикла. Сюжет этиологической легенды, зафиксированный во множестве письменных источников, становится «официальной историей» края. Рассказчики теряют интерес к ней, в традиции осуществляется пересказ, а не рассказывание по законам фольклорного текстообразования. Примета легендарного - актуальность информации. Трансформантный тип вариативности, характерный для этиологической легенды, становится приметой рассказов о поругании святыни. Традиционно рассказы о разрушении сакрального объекта рассматриваются как «дочерние» образования. Однако при широком официальном признании статуса объекта рассказы о его разрушении начинают восприниматься как «ядро представления», именно с их помощью объясняется сакральность. Таким образом, говорить о деградации устной традиции даже при широком официальном признании не приходится. This article attempts to consider a cycle of stories grouped around the image of a shrine as a living, “self-adjusting” system. The cycle is formed of narratives that describe the shrine’s etiology, its history, and miraculous present, but the cycle often changes as the oral tradition becomes routinized. The article analyzes a corpus of texts about shrines that have wide official acceptance and are subject to the routinization of the oral tradition. In this case a kind of redistribution of roles takes place within the cycle. Many written sources record an etiological legend that serves as the official “history” of the region. Thereupon, narrators lose interest in it, which results in a paraphrase rather than a storytelling according to the usual laws of folklore text formation. A mark of legends is the topicality of their content. The variations characteristic of etiological legends (of the transformative type) become a marker of tales concerning desecration of the shrine. Traditionally, stories about the destruction of a sacred object are considered “daughter” (subsidiary) formations. But with widespread official recognition of the status of a shrine, stories about its destruction often begin to be perceived as the “core of representation,” since it is with their help that the shrine’s sacred character is explained. Thus, one cannot speak of the degradation of the oral tradition even given its widespread official recognition.


Diachronica ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Lipski

The Afro-descendents of Panama’s Caribbean coast maintain the tradition of the Negros Congos, a series of folkloric manifestations occurring during Carnival season, and including a special cryptolect based loosely on Spanish. According to oral tradition, Congo speech was devised among captive and maroon Africans in colonial Panama as a means of hiding their speech from their colonial masters. Widely felt — both by Congo participants and by outside observers — to consist only of deliberate deformations of Spanish words and semantic inversions, Congo speech in reality also contains numerous elements traceable to Afro-Hispanic communities in other former Spanish-American colonies. Data drawn from twenty-four Congo communities demonstrate systematic regional variation — phonetic and lexical — that verifies the status of Congo speech as a cryptolect undergoing natural language evolution. These data also contribute to the search for the geographical locus of the original Congo dialect.


2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Y. Michael Barilan

In 1977, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) changed the section on abortion in the colonial criminal code which Israel inherited from the British mandate in Palestine. Like most other Western countries who relaxed their laws on abortion in the 1960s-80s, Israel made abortion legal for almost all women who seek it. Nonetheless, the Israeli law on abortion differs substantially from other nations' laws. In no stage of pregnancy does the woman have an absolute right to abort—she always needs an approval from a special committee; yet, the woman's stage of pregnancy is nowhere a relevant legal criterion for permitting or forbidding abortion. The law does not explicitly grant the fetus any value either, as the law speaks only of “termination of pregnancy.” Indeed, Israel has one of the highest rates of late abortions among the developed countries and one of the most liberal laws on the regulation of infertility treatments and research on extra-corporeal embryos.Jewish religious law (Halakhah) ignores both questions central to the modern ethical, political and legal debate on abortion: the status of the fetus and the autonomy of women. Furthermore,Halakhahis not expressed in the language of rights, such as the rights to life and privacy, but rather in the language of obligations and limitations on action. A rich symbolic world of values and virtues complementshalakhicpositivist formalism by inspiring and demonstrating desirable ways of life and modes of valuing human action. Regarding abortion, the dialectics between Jewish law (the formal law, which delineates right from wrong) and morality (which inspires and portrays ideal modes of action as part of a largely oral tradition of private counseling and synagogue preaching) reach a powerful climax. The religious law prohibiting abortion is one of the most liberal among human legal systems, but the values of procreation and preservation of human life that inform the moral discussion are fundamental.


Etkileşim ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 128-149
Author(s):  
Mustafa Algül

Myths, epics, and tales have survived for centuries in the oral expression tradition and have been permanently transcribed from oral tradition into written form. They are the most frequently recreated narratives in the cinema with their fantastic narrative structures. Hollywood cinema has been using tales as visual narratives for years. Tales, which have been turned into a structure open to the interpretation in accordance with the changing world, on the one hand is being reediting continuously. On the other hand, they gain new appearances along with intertwined narrative structures. In Into the Woods (Rob Marshall, 2014), four different fairy tales were used together. In this study, it is aimed to determine what kind of changes has been carried out in the film in terms of the different stages of the fairy tales. For this purpose, while collecting the data by examining the narrative structure of the fairy tales, the action areas are identified in terms of the “five components” in the Greimas’ ‘canonical narrative’. Briefly, the main object in this paper is to explicate the status of the film within the types of the cinematic narratives.


1987 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 67-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.A. Hamilton

From the time of the translation into English of Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition in 1965, the use of oral traditions as historical sources has become an increasingly technical exercise. Historians of the non-literate societies of Africa in particular have been alterted to, among others, such things as “floating gaps” and “hour-glass effects” in traditions, elongated and collapsed genealogies, the peculiarities and fallibility of human memory, the overlaying of oral traditions with successive ruling group histories, and the functioning of oral traditions as cultural charters.Some scholars consider this ‘reification of method’ to have wrought a tool increasingly honed for historical analysis, able to lay bare within oral tradition historical facts, consistent within themselves and with other oral traditions. Others argue that the elaborateness of the methodology reflects the inherently unreliable nature of oral traditions as historical sources. They suggest that, at best, oral traditions are able to provide reliable data only about the interests of a particular group at the particular moment when they were recorded.This paper addresses the debate over the status of oral traditions as historical sources, with particular reference to the use of traditions in the illumination of the precolonial past. Drawing on some of the insights of the new social historians concerning ideology and first-hand oral testimony, it examines the relationship between ideology and oral traditions in non-literate societies. The argument developed here is that, far from simply representing the interests of a particular group, oral traditions often reflect ideological struggles between the rulers and ruled in a society.


2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-32
Author(s):  
Nataša Polgar

This paper focuses on a specific type of archival material from the first psychiatric institution in Croatia, the Stenjevec Royal National Institute for the Insane in Zagreb, today the Vrapče University Psychiatric Hospital, dating from the period from its foundation in 1879 until 1900. More specifically, it focuses on patient narratives featuring fantastical beings, i.e., narrations about their life relying on the genre of belief legends. Based on this material, which is considered to be an important albeit atypical folkloristic corpus, the paper analyzes and interprets the status and functions of the genre of belief legends (more specifically, the memorate) in daily life narratives, personal stories and in coding affects (primarily fear). The role of belief legends is examined not only from the perspective of oral tradition and literature, but also in terms of their social and psychological position, and through the lens of psychiatric discourse of the time, which recognizes such narratives merely as symptoms of madness, translating and coding them as the language of abnormality and psychopathology.


Author(s):  
L.J. Chen ◽  
Y.F. Hsieh

One measure of the maturity of a device technology is the ease and reliability of applying contact metallurgy. Compared to metal contact of silicon, the status of GaAs metallization is still at its primitive stage. With the advent of GaAs MESFET and integrated circuits, very stringent requirements were placed on their metal contacts. During the past few years, extensive researches have been conducted in the area of Au-Ge-Ni in order to lower contact resistances and improve uniformity. In this paper, we report the results of TEM study of interfacial reactions between Ni and GaAs as part of the attempt to understand the role of nickel in Au-Ge-Ni contact of GaAs.N-type, Si-doped, (001) oriented GaAs wafers, 15 mil in thickness, were grown by gradient-freeze method. Nickel thin films, 300Å in thickness, were e-gun deposited on GaAs wafers. The samples were then annealed in dry N2 in a 3-zone diffusion furnace at temperatures 200°C - 600°C for 5-180 minutes. Thin foils for TEM examinations were prepared by chemical polishing from the GaA.s side. TEM investigations were performed with JE0L- 100B and JE0L-200CX electron microscopes.


Author(s):  
Frank J. Longo

Measurement of the egg's electrical activity, the fertilization potential or the activation current (in voltage clamped eggs), provides a means of detecting the earliest perceivable response of the egg to the fertilizing sperm. By using the electrical physiological record as a “real time” indicator of the instant of electrical continuity between the gametes, eggs can be inseminated with sperm at lower, more physiological densities, thereby assuring that only one sperm interacts with the egg. Integrating techniques of intracellular electrophysiological recording, video-imaging, and electron microscopy, we are able to identify the fertilizing sperm precisely and correlate the status of gamete organelles with the first indication (fertilization potential/activation current) of the egg's response to the attached sperm. Hence, this integrated system provides improved temporal and spatial resolution of morphological changes at the site of gamete interaction, under a variety of experimental conditions. Using these integrated techniques, we have investigated when sperm-egg plasma membrane fusion occurs in sea urchins with respect to the onset of the egg's change in electrical activity.


2000 ◽  
Vol 64 (11) ◽  
pp. 772-774 ◽  
Author(s):  
JG Odom ◽  
PL Beemsterboer ◽  
TD Pate ◽  
NK Haden

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