"Head" And "Tail": The Shaping of Oral Traditions Among the Binandere in Papua New Guinea
Abstract
The main aim of this article is to provide some insight into the basic cultural perceptions and oral processes of the Binandere people, who evolved sophisticated oral art forms to register events, something which then came into contact with the Kiawa (European) system of writing in March 1894.1 Although it is beyond the scope of this article to treat the difficult problem of selecting appropriate historiographical models for dealing with the contact between societies with a system of writing and societies with developed oral cultures as in Papua New Guinea, the detailed discussion of one particular culture in Papua New Guinea can throw some wider light on the nature of oral tradition and how it is conceived and transmitted.
Citation
Oral Tradition, 5/2-3 (1990): 334-353.
Rights
OpenAccess.
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