Return to culture : oral tradition and society in the Southern Cook Islands

Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia

2005

951410966X
9789514109669

English

Bib record

Introduction. Oral tradition and culture -- the islands
I. Interest in oral tradition -- 1. Oral tradition and the interpretive community ; objectification as a cosmographic project ; voices and texts ; revoicing the silence -- 2. The authority of tradition -- tradition: inherited or invented? ; the Maori way ; authority, authenticity and truth -- 3. Basic texts for culture: Oral narratives as tradition and knowledge ; repositories of tradition
II. Strategies for reproduction. 4. Generic models and entextualisation of korero: myth, history and genealogy ; generic models of mythic-historical discourse ; early attempts at entextualisation: puka papa'anga ; an attempt to build an epos ; from superstories to superdiscourses -- 5. Variation and genre as practice: genre as a strategy for reproduction ; the narrator's habitus, perspectives of performance and interpretation ; discussions of tumu koreros and generic models of tua tai'to ; habitus of commoners ; variation and discursive authority -- 6. Spatial memory and narration ; the performance of tumu korero ; spatial memory ; finding the centre of the universe ; exploring and changing borders ; mental maps of the seen and the unseen ; the time-space of narratives and landscape
III. Interpreting narratives. 7. Understanding narratives of the "Other": why is it that we cannot understand all narratives? ; understanding oral narratives ; shared knowledge and conventions of narrating ; cultural models of showing love ; showing love ritually ; adoption as feeding ; pigs, kids and flowers ; oral tradition and shared knowledge -- 8. Changing interpretations of an oral narrative: how are meanings created? ; greed and aro'a ; Moenau, the greedy chief ; conflict between the two halves of Ma'uke ; inter-island wars- a Ma'ukean interpretation ; inter-island politics- an Aitutakian interpretation ; mythical and historical tradition ; changing interpretations -- 9. Chiefs, food and fertility: the ariki's right to food tribute ; food as a metaphor of position and rank ; human flesh ; eating as purification
IV. Metaphors for society. 10. "This is my beautiful line of chiefs": the relationship between talk and society ; listing the elements of society in the Cook Islands ; combining the elements ; experiences of the group -- 11. The elder and the younger- foreign and autochthonous: origin and hierarchy ; Ngaputori: origin ; genealogy or genealogies- path and birth ; path and birth combined ; mana 'ena, mana tangata -- 12. The structure of becoming: coming into being ; from indefinite numbers to definite qualities ; one and many in this world ; the Great Chain of Being
V. Returnings: State and Culture. 13. Chiefs and impossible states: whose state is impossible? ; making society possible ; Tonga: chiefs as nobility ; Samoa: chiefs and lineages ; structural adjustment and the return of the chiefs in the Cook Islands ; people and the decay of the state -- 14. Tilling the soil and sailing the seas: evading people and ethnographic practice ; horizons of bodies ; connecting the horizons ; departing and arriving ; conceptual worlds -- concluding remarks -- map -- illustrations -- references -- general index -- name index.

Anna-Leena Siikala, folklorist, and Jukka Siikala, anthropolgist, have deep-rooted experience working in the Cook Islands and researching at the National Archives in Rarotonga and in Australia.

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05 Dec 2024