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oapen-20.500.12657-640332023-07-21T02:44:34Z Folktales of Mayotte, an African Island Haring, Lee Turin, Mark oral narrators;literary skills;versatility;small African island;French ethnographer;interview;1970s-80s;ancient values;preservation;postcolonial world;island of Mayotte bic Book Industry Communication::J Society & social sciences::JF Society & culture: general::JFH Popular beliefs & controversial knowledge::JFHF Folklore, myths & legends bic Book Industry Communication::J Society & social sciences::JH Sociology & anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography bic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HB History::HBT History: specific events & topics::HBTD Oral history The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France. The author’s innovation is to read ethnographic researches as play scripts—to see printed folktales as accounts of live performances. One storyteller after another comments symbolically on what it is like to be a formerly colonised population. Storytelling women, in particular, combine diverse plots and characters to create traditional-sounding stories, which could not have been predicted from the African, Malagasy, Indian, and European traditions coexisting in Mayotte. Haring’s account shows them to be particularly skilled at irony and ambiguity, conveying both submissive and rebellious attitudes in their tales. He makes Mayotte storytelling accessible to a new, English-speaking audience and demonstrates that traditional storytellers in those years were preserving, but also critiquing, their inherited social order in a changing world. Their creative intentions, cultural influences and widely different narrative styles constitute Mayotte’s system of the arts of the word. Literary specialists, folklore enthusiasts, and people who like reading stories will find much to appreciate in this engaging and sophisticated book. 2023-07-20T11:41:16Z 2023-07-20T11:41:16Z 2023 book 9781805110040 9781805110057 9781805110101 9781805110095 9781805110071 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/64033 eng World Oral Literature Series application/pdf Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International 9781805110064.pdf https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/OBP.0315 Open Book Publishers 10.11647/OBP.0315 10.11647/OBP.0315 23117811-c361-47b4-8b76-2c9b160c9a8b 9781805110040 9781805110057 9781805110101 9781805110095 9781805110071 ScholarLed 10 200 Cambridge open access
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The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France.
The author’s innovation is to read ethnographic researches as play scripts—to see printed folktales as accounts of live performances. One storyteller after another comments symbolically on what it is like to be a formerly colonised population. Storytelling women, in particular, combine diverse plots and characters to create traditional-sounding stories, which could not have been predicted from the African, Malagasy, Indian, and European traditions coexisting in Mayotte. Haring’s account shows them to be particularly skilled at irony and ambiguity, conveying both submissive and rebellious attitudes in their tales. He makes Mayotte storytelling accessible to a new, English-speaking audience and demonstrates that traditional storytellers in those years were preserving, but also critiquing, their inherited social order in a changing world. Their creative intentions, cultural influences and widely different narrative styles constitute Mayotte’s system of the arts of the word.
Literary specialists, folklore enthusiasts, and people who like reading stories will find much to appreciate in this engaging and sophisticated book.
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