Stories go to the heart of folklore as both a discipline and a vernacular discourse. For many years, the elusive storyteller has been sought out by the collector first here and then there with varying degrees of success. Margaret Read MacDonald warns us in the preface to this book that “we have thousands of folktale collections in our libraries and yet hardly a word from the tellers themselves” (viii). Ten Traditional Tellers sets out to redress this remarkable situation by presenting to us in a new light ten storytellers from diverse cultural backgrounds. The result, achieved in an apparently effortless style, is disarming and unexpected at times. Here we are introduced to a former secretary, a bartender, a monk, an orphan, a drummer, a teacher, a contract manager, and an educational consultant who are “on a mission” to share their stories. One transcribes Lushootseed texts, another tells bawdy Tibetan tales. Some tell stories to recover the lost stories of the Asante, others to communicate with troubled youth in an orphanage. Across a diverse range of languages and cultures the story itself becomes liquid, almost escaping any dry scholarly attempt at strict definition.
The crucial importance of the storyteller is emphasized again and again, the vital role of remembrance, the responsibility to transmit, the custodianship of knowledge that can represent past cultures but also transform them into more contemporary configurations. In many cases the narrators represent a professionalization of storytelling that borrows from both the past and the future. Rinjing Dorje reminds us that there was no censorship in local tradition, the nastiest of jokes were enjoyed with a “jolly irreverence.” Here there are no silly or jaded rehearsals of customs and superstitions. Roberto Carlos Ramos nurtures the tabloidesque headline in speaking of car crashes, robberies, accidents, or kidnapping. A monk in Isaan Phra Inta Kaweewong combines vernacular operas with older palm leaf manuscripts “to remind people to think of ancestors from the old times” (70). The book is written in a very accessible style that reveals many interesting aspects of narrative in a casual way. Won Ldy Paye sees the storyteller as the “archive of tradition” and brings the native sociability of the Dan society of Liberia to his professional storytelling. He will greet his audience, smile, shake hands, argue if necessary. In New Caledonia, the native society of Léonard Sam, storytelling during the day was unheard of while in Kumasi in Ghana, the hometown of Peter Pipim, tone was more expressive in the darkness than gesture.
Although the book does not engage directly with any particular theory or perspective, the author asks an important question in the final chapter: how traditional are such narrators? The very definition of tradition is strained “when a teller begins to share tales beyond the close community, when a teller begins to add to her or his repertoire from books or other traditions, when a teller becomes part of today’s revivalist storytelling movement” (199). The best illustration of this is the fact that one narrator (the term “teller” seems a little unsatisfactory at times) adds a story to his repertoire that the author, a folklorist, revived from an anthropological text. The story passes from the oral vernacular or native discourse through the literate academic discourses of folklore and anthropology and on to the professional raconteur. The fact that stories are not merely oral or sedentary but multimedia and diasporic should not surprise anyone, least of all folklorists. As the author points, out the links between print and orality reach far back into antiquity and predate Gutenberg’s invention. Based upon the revivalist storytelling circuit itself, Ten Traditional Tellers highlights the move from the cabin to the museum, from the fields to the library, from the manuscript to the sermon, from the home to the conference or festival. While it raises questions, it points to a world of opportunity and cultural agency that proponents exploit. This book illustrates that new skills, new media, and new vernacular worlds dictate that there are many gradations of tradition.
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[Review length: 668 words • Review posted on May 31, 2007]