Imdeduya

Variants of a myth of love and hate from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea

Author
Gunter Senft | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027244567 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00
 
e-Book Open Access
ISBN 9789027265890
 
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This volume presents five variants of the Imdeduya myth: two versions of the actual myth, a short story, a song and John Kasaipwalova’s English poem “Sail the Midnight Sun”. This poem draws heavily on the Trobriand myth which introduces the protagonists Imdeduya and Yolina and reports on Yolina’s intention to marry the girl so famous for her beauty, on his long journey to Imdeduya’s village and on their tragic love story. The texts are compared with each other with a final focus on the clash between orality and scripturality. Contrary to Kasaipwalova’s fixed poetic text, the oral Imdeduya versions reveal the variability characteristic for oral tradition. This variability opens up questions about traditional stability and destabilization of oral literature, especially questions about the changing role of myth – and magic – in the Trobriand Islanders' society which gets more and more integrated into the by now “literal” nation of Papua New Guinea.
[Culture and Language Use, 20] 2017.  xvi, 244 pp.
Publishing status: Available

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Table of Contents
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Senft, Gunter
2018. Pragmatics and anthropology. In Pragmatics and its Interfaces [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 294],  pp. 185 ff. DOI logo

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Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CF/2P: Linguistics/Oceanic & Austronesian languages

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2017004872 | Marc record