| dc.description | In the wake of the feminism debate, socio-ethnological studies on the place of women and femininity in occidental civilizations have been multiplying. So have they as well for "archaic" or "traditional" civilizations, which share among other common features the domination of men over women by means of patriarchal, patrilineal, and virilocal family organization. It is not surprising, then, to find that this fate of being dominated appears in the ideological discourses produced by these societies, particularly in the collective representations that are objectivized in religious texts, folklore, and oral literature. In this essay, I propose to examine two female figures in some relevant texts from Bambara-Malinke (West Africa) oral literature. Despite the many resemblances, I do not mean to assert that the social functions attributed therein to women are characteristic in the same terms of other patriarchal societies of Black Africa.//: Translated by Lee Haring. Issue title; "African Oral Traditions." | eng |
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