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Marvels & Tales 18.1 (2004) 108-110



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Indian Ocean Folktales. By Lee Haring. Chennai (Madras): National Folklore Support Centre, 2002. 146 pp.

Lee Haring, compiler of the Malagasy Tale Index (1982), now presents 27 tales from Madagascar, the Comoros, Mauritius, Réunion, and Seychelles. The oral sources range between the 1880s and 1990s. The text names the folk tellers when known, and notes relevant dates, places, languages, and original collectors. It provides chronologies of the Southwest Indian Ocean and of seminal folkloric work there, with maps of the region and of each island nation accompanying the introductory note in each section. Haring himself collected two tales with collaborators, and must have done all the translations from the French.

A letter from the India-based publishers asks that the review "explore the significance of the attempt in bringing out the culture of the Indian diaspora." In the Southwest Indian Ocean, that diaspora includes quite distinct Gujarati merchants, Malabar coast slaves, Tamil laborers and laborers from Surat in Gujarat (Haring seems to imply Tamil laborers in Surat, which is unlikely) and, since one tale seems to be from Telegu (91), the Telegu community too, which Haring does not name, as well as North Indian speakers of Hindi and allied languages.

However, none of the seven Madagascar tales nor the five from the Comoros has an Indian purview, and this volume very properly represents various coexisting diasporic cultures. The region, with no indigenous peoples, has one of the world's most mixed populations through colonization, slavery, indentured labor and trade: French, British, Malagasy (with strong Arabo-Persian cultural influences), East African, some West African, Indian, and Chinese. Consequently, various Creole languages developed. Each ethnic group "attempted to reconstitute a mental universe by integrating older models into the new socio-cultural environment." Often ethnic diversity means that "that sharing of folklore is the only sharing that takes place" between these five groups of islands (2). For instance, the Réunionnais story of "Marie Zozeh" was collected in Mauritius and has a Mauritian allusion.

Mixing allowed borrowing from other traditions, made people aware of their own cultural heritage, and means constant discussion about cultural identity. Haring notes that in nationalistic periods, those searching for cultural roots often used folklore as a tool for nation-building (e.g., Ireland, Finland, Bangladesh), but that narrow nationalistic or communitarian notions of "cultural purity" and of exclusive "ownership" of cultural materials, used as "badges of identity," are mythical and misguided, for all cultures are mixed cultures (3-4). Nevertheless, quests for identity by the island nations has lead some of them to take folklore collection seriously, notably the Comoros and Seychelles (see 39, 117, 142). Haring's collection could have included more information on local attitudes over time to cultural preservation, borrowing, [End Page 108] and ethnic/cultural distinctness; on the proportion of stable tale-types to "new and unpredictable pieces" created by migration, as in the Comoros; and on the basis for the selection of tales.

In a firmly bonded community such as in this region, an old person transmits community values to youth through folklore. However, across generations "often the only sharing that takes place is the [...] tale," and folklore transmission is "no longer the passing of pure tradition from one generation to another" (4)—if it ever was. Haring stresses folktale hybridity and mutation over languages, ethnicities, space and time; decries myths of "unbroken transmission;" and celebrates new modes of transmission of folk materials such as radio storytelling. Since latter-day islanders consult books for a memory of tradition, Haring sees the digressions and additions of a radio storyteller to folktale-based stories as resembling the practice of village storytellers. Haring questions a view of "tourism as an evil means of corrupting the purity of the past" (4), seeing tourism as a means of sharing folk traditions (like his anthology).

However, even if certain cultural material is hybrid in itself, I feel that material recorded in a form before a period of great cultural change, and similar material modified after it, are not the same thing. Not all cultural change or inventiveness...

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