Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Blythe, Jennifer M.

Titel

Climbing a Mountain without a Ladder: Cosmology and Oral Traditions

Ist Teil von

• Time & society, 1992-01, Vol.1 (1), p.13-27

Ort / Verlag

London: SAGE Publications

Erscheinungsjahr

1992

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Local oral traditions do not provide the chronologies and verified facts that are characteristic of literate traditions. Oral historians either treat local traditions as reflections of culture and/or social structure or they concentrate on isolating facts from fiction. But people create their pasts and generate their futures from their own ideas of time, space, and causality so it is also important to understand indigenous `stories' in these terms. In Unea Island, three narrative types, each focusing on a different area of space-time, provide some understanding of basic orientations that underlie decisions which islanders make.