Inundating Cultural Diversity: A Critical Study of Oral Narratives of Kurichyas and Guarani in the Structuralist Perspective

Abstract

The paper seeks to explore the practicability of using Vladimir Propp’s framework to study the oral narratives of the Kurichyan tribe of Wayanad, Kerala, India and of the Guarani tribe of Paraguay, South America. For this purpose, Narippaattu (Wolf Song) of Kurichyar and The Beginning Life of the Hummingbird of Guarani are chosen. Out of the 27 functional events identified in the former, six of them do not fit into the Proppian framework and of the 13 identified in the latter, three of them do not conform to the Proppian structure. The events which are matched with Proppian events are tediously paralleled and do not correspond to each other entirely in the Proppian sense. None of the events identified in both tales show any linear or causal progression. Through this, I argue that an attempt to study narratives that originate from communities with multiple subtle diversities in terms of a universal structure will be problematic and mostly futile. We will lose the culturally distinct, subtle manifestations in the narratives in the endeavour to make them fit into any universal framework.