Note on Story-Stealer

This is the context for this one. We were talking about different ways of telling stories.

In article <66cqs9$gfd@metro.usyd.edu.au> emma.grahame@womenstudies.su.edu.au "Emma" writes:

> A lot of Australian Aboriginal people have this too. The story
> goes with the country it is attached to, and can, indeed *must*
> be told by the people of that country in order to keep the country
> looked after, but there are very complex rules about how and to whom
> the story can be told. The stories are encoded into symbolic
> forms and pictures, and these can be seen but sometimes not
> explained to people who are not in a position to know. People have
> different relations to their mother's country and their father's
> country, the country where they were conceived, the country where
> they were born -- and therefore to the dreaming stories of those
> regions. And one of the things I like about that culture was
> that age and wisdom made a person more and more powerful in
> relation to the dreaming stories -- some of the rules relate
> to age, and stage of life, and some to particular talents or
> intelligence. It's one of the huge problems with the
> anthropological transcription of Aboriginal stories - they
> are then available to people who should not know them, and some
> people think that this has disastrous consequences, for all
> involved. The story is no longer safe, no longer under the
> protection of someone entitled to it.
>
> This is very general of course -- Aboriginal cultures were at
> least as diverse as the cultures of, say, Europe, and their
> languages as different from each other as Spanish and Uzbek.
> Which isn't surprising given the distances. But it is inspiring
> to know that before white people invaded, there wasn't a hill,
> waterhole or valley that didn't have a series of stories
> attached to it, in a trail of dreamings that covered the whole
> continent, linked through different languages and cultures.

The thing that immediately strikes me about this is just how very different it is from the Indo-European idea of a story as something that is instructive. Entertaining yes, that too, but also instructive, wherther it's telling you the history of something or someone or teaching something as an example. Whether it's the Mediterranean idea of story as analogy and metaphor or the Celtic idea of story as simile and mnemonic example, it's all clearly part of the same idea of story as teaching tool. Teaching tool that it is clearly beneficial to share with as many people as possible - a lot of Celtic stories as we have them written down in the C.9 have little tags on them out of the oral tradition that say things like "A blessing on all those who listen to this tale of Finn, and long life to all who tell it." and "Let all gather round and hear this story of Llyfarch Hen and all gain wisdom from it." Disseminating stories widely is seen as wholly positive.

I like the idea of a trail of dreamings, but I find it very very alien.

I wonder whether the people of that culture feel the same way as we do about them being lost - whether _we_ feel the story in itself is worth knowing as a story, because that's our tradition, whereas they might feel differently - not just that it is being told by the wrong people at the wrong time but that that isn't the story, that without the context and the telling you don't have anything.

I bet they hate anthropologists.

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