Myth and Identity

Abstract

Abstract Mariawk (talk, discourse, story) refers to all forms of discourse including myth, everyday speech, and those important occasions such as public moots, discussions in a men’s house, and disputes when oratory comes to the fore. Every event is told and retold several times, from the different perspectives of individuals and groups. Such reconstructions should be considered as extensions of the events themselves, as their continuation in a verbal medium—as parts, that is, of collective and personal kay. Continuous communication, as well as people’s relation to their past and future through the recollection and narration of events, constitutes the narrative time of the village. Such public time ‘is not the anonymous time of ordinary representation but the time of interaction. In this sense, narrative time is, from the outset, time of being-with-others’ (Ricoeur 1980: 188). Mariawk might be seen as constituting identity and temporality on two different axes: vertical, relating people who lived in the past with those who live in the present; and horizontal, between consociates.