Reconstituting Oceanic Folktales

Reconstituting Oceanic Folktales. 

This chapter is about reconstituting the folk traditions within the written traditions. It is also about methodological reconstituting of the body of knowledge produced within Oceania through a process of reading. The attempt to employ structures of meaning from the folktale to read modern written texts is of essence here. This also sets out framework for reading Indigenous texts from within such a context.  “Reconstituting Indigenous Oceanic Folktales” first published in Scholar space, online publications of the University of Hawaii was first presented as a conference paper at the Symposium on Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translation, Colonialism, and Cinema. The English Department, Center for Pacific Island Studies, Indigenous Political Program in Political Science, Center for Asian Studies, Pacific Islands Development Program, the Comparativism and Translation in Literary/Cultural Studies Research Cluster and the College of Language, Linguistics, and Literature, University of Hawaii organized it on 22-26 September 2008.

It is now republished in 

An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific, edited by Kualoha Ho'omanawanui, Joyce Pualani Warren, and Cristina Bacchilega, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2024.

 

Indigenous communities in Oceania have always used folktales to explain their social, psychological, political, and cultural environment. This tradition continues today in the cultural productions of many Pacific writers, artists, and filmmakers. Their “texts” are often saturated with social and political discourses that challenge ideology, tradition, and power. I explore how scholars in various discursive traditions have used folktales as structures for viewing culture, society and events, and I do so in order to re-view folktales within an indigenous cultural production in Oceania.

 

Folktales as Social Cultural Texts

 

If we are to see folktales as “text” then we need to consider the definition of “text” as a social cultural production of society. We need also to attend to the specific demands of theory that address the existence of “text” as a constituting product of social and cultural imaginings. The first place to begin this inquiry is to consider text as a structure of feeling or experience as expressed by Raymond Williams in his discussion of the various discourses we produce in society to explain our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, utterances, and experiences. According to Williams, “…a ‘structure of feeling’ is a cultural hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand such elements and their connections in a generation or period, and needing always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence” (1977, 133). As a cultural text, folktales include "unusual anecdotes, initiations, wonder stories and animal tales" (Zipes, 2022, 28). They are affective in nature and cannot be reduced to belief systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships. As “structures of feeling,” folktales encompass much more than this, including elements of social and material experience not covered by concepts like ideology or worldview (Williams 1977, 133). Folktales contribute to the general folklore of a kindred group or people in a given time and space, where folk-lore is taken to mean stories of a kindred group or people who share at least one thing in common.

Folklore consists of artistic expressions that are “heavily governed by the tastes of the group” that performs or represents them (Toelken 1996, 266).  In folk performances we see “a continual tableau or paradigm more revealing of cultural worldview” that it is possible some of these expressions were created independently by their creators: “Nonetheless, as students of culture have shown, in terms of world view the distinctions between formal culture and folk culture are not as sharp as one would have imagined; apparently, little is exempt from functionings of cultural worldview” (Toelken 1996, 266). Independent emergence of folktales allowed the existence of distinct repertoire of folktales in Oceania. Our discussions will consider some of these folktales told within certain groups, but not in other groups, as is the case in a number of societies in Oceania.

The second consideration here is to think of folktales as texts in the Bakhtinian sense of it as an unending object of possibilities, with its own internally constructed structures of producing and reproducing meanings that are themselves open to further possible interpretations of meaning. Thus we have to consider folktale texts as existing within the social and political sphere of heterogenous commingling of worlds and peoples, of ideas and perspectives, of beliefs and experiences, of private and public discourses, and of new and old ways of knowing. A folktale text is a “subjective reflection of the objective world” and it is “an expression of consciousness” out of which we hold our reflection of the world as our reality (Bakhtin 1996, 113). It is through the notion of text that we take our departures in our various kinds of knowledge productions: “Proceeding from the text, they wander in various directions, grasp various bits of nature, social life, states of mind, and history, and combine them—sometimes with causal, sometimes with semantic, ties—and intermix statements with evaluations” (Bakhtin 1996, 113). We could also relate this view of texts to Julia Kristeva’s notion of text as a “mosaic of quotations” and by which she means: “any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva cited in Hafstein 1996, 307). Kristeva’s notion of text is closer to Roland Barthes’ “conception of the text as plural, where the text is “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (which language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony” (Kristeva 1977, 160; Hafstein 1996, 307). The evocation of Kristeva and Barthes in this discussion is to highlight the easily recognizable link of the notion of text to their various discussions on text and intertextuality around objects of cultural analysis such as folklore in their written as well as verbal forms of utterance. Thus, folktales are also the final product of a mosaic of utterances and various co-mingling of texts and meta-texts that are ever present in different societies.

Indigenous authors, artists, scholars, and filmmakers have constructed contemporary works firmly within the influence of their own indigenous oral traditions. The European difference and separation between high and low cultures is absent in Oceania in as much as folktales have remained very much part of the cultural knowledge system of the people. 

The rest of the paper can be read in An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific.  edited by Kualoha Ho'omanawanui, Joyce Pualani Warren, and Cristina Bacchilega, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2024.