Oral tradition, volume 01, number 2 (May 1986)https://hdl.handle.net/10355/637152024-03-28T10:03:30Z2024-03-28T10:03:30ZAbout the authors (Oral Tradition, 1/2, 1986)https://hdl.handle.net/10355/849222021-07-01T09:00:57Z1986-05-01T00:00:00ZAbout the authors (Oral Tradition, 1/2, 1986)
1986-05-01T00:00:00ZAustralian Aboriginal Oral TraditionsRoss, Margaret Clunieshttps://hdl.handle.net/10355/640122020-06-24T17:58:14Z1986-05-01T00:00:00ZAustralian Aboriginal Oral Traditions
Ross, Margaret Clunies
In 1988 non-Aboriginal Australians will celebrate two hundred years' occupation of a country which had previously been home to an Aboriginal population of about 300,000 people. They probably spoke more than two hundred different languages and most individuals were multilingual (Dixon 1980). They had a rich culture, whose traditions were centrally concerned with the celebration of three basic types of religious ritual-rites of fertility, initiation, and death (Maddock 1982:105-57). In many parts of Australia, particularly in the south where white settlement was earliest and densest, Aboriginal traditional life has largely disappeared, although the memory of it has been passed down the generations. Nowadays all Aborigines, even in the most traditional parts of the north, such as Arnhem Land, are affected to a greater or lesser extent by the Australian version of Western culture, and must preserve their own traditions by a combination of holding strategies. Thus in 1988 many Aboriginal Australians will be inclined to mourn the Bicentenary with its reminder to them of all they have lost.--Page 231-232.; Margaret Clunies Ross, a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, has for some time had a special interest in the oral traditions of the Australian Aborigines. She has carried on fieldwork, particularly in North Arnhem Land, and has written numerous articles and monographs on this area.
1986-05-01T00:00:00ZBack matter (Oral Tradition, 1/2, 1986)https://hdl.handle.net/10355/640172021-07-01T09:00:55Z1986-05-01T00:00:00ZBack matter (Oral Tradition, 1/2, 1986)
1986-05-01T00:00:00ZThe Collection and Analysis of Oral Epic Tradition in South Slavic: An InstanceBynum, David E.https://hdl.handle.net/10355/640192020-06-24T17:50:04Z1986-05-01T00:00:00ZThe Collection and Analysis of Oral Epic Tradition in South Slavic: An Instance
Bynum, David E.
The earliest certain textual evidence relating to the South Slavic oral epic tradition that has been discovered up to the present is a little less than five hundred years old. That earliest scrap of evidence has come down to us in literary learning as the result of a conscious act of collection by an Italian to whom not only the poetry itself but also the dialects of the South Slavs were entirely foreign. What was true of him in his time has remained true in principle of all the collecting activity by all the collectors who have recorded oral traditional epic poetry in the South Slavic world ever since: collecting has, by its very nature, been the act of outsiders to whom the tradition was essentially strange, who nevertheless were interested in it as though it were literature, and who did not understand it. Thus the whole history of knowledge about the South Slavic oral traditional epos has been shaped by three constant factors: 1. The tradition has been substantially alien to all its cognoscenti, regardless of their nationalities. 2. It has been valued and acquisitively pursued by them for its perceived literary features. 3. But the possession of texts from the tradition, no matter how the collecting has been done, has continued always to pose some of the most difficult historical and analytical problems known to literary science; namely the questions of how, why, and when narrative poetry arose in human culture to begin with, which of its original characteristics have remained constant in the life of such traditions, and what they disclose about the nature and history of the human mind. Those questions are all as unanswered today as they were five hundred years ago, and are indeed all now far more problematical than ever before.--Page 302.; David E. Bynum (Cleveland State University) was trained in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University. His The Daemon in the Wood: A Study of Oral Narrative Patterns (1978) treated the motif of the two trees in the world's folk literature. Dr. Bynum is also an editor of the Parry Collection series Serbo-Croatian Heroic Songs.
1986-05-01T00:00:00Z