Children as Interpreters of Culture: Producing Meanings from Folktales in Southern Ethiopia

Abstract

Folktale performance is a popular cultural activity among the Guji-Oromo, an ethnic group in southern Ethiopia. While Guji-Oromo children gain pleasure from hearing and telling folktales, they also learn cultural practices and values as a result of tale performance. Parents tell folktales to their children in order to teach survival skills and cultural norms, but children also share folktales among themselves. This article analyzes how children produce meanings from the folktales they hear and tell. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork, I suggest that children are actors in their own socialization. As they tell and talk about stories, they reflect on the morals of former generations while also critiquing the social complexities of their immediate environments. While the children are eager to engage with modernity, their interpretations also bolster existing cultural norms.Lik e par ents all over the world, adults in Africa use verbal art in order to socialize children; folktales, for example, often dramatize the skills, moral standards, and values that are useful for reproducing and successfully navigating customary ways of life (e.g.may be seen as the primary purveyors of cultural knowledge: one dictum holds that "a child listens and learns; a child is not mature enough to

Cross-Cultural Analysis of Children's Moral Education: Perspectives on Deception in Korean and Western Folklores

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“…Since folklore transmits traditional values, it often is used to teach moral values to children (Dundes, 1969;Jirata, 2011). One value that is compelling in children's stories, particularly in folklore, is lying.…”

Family Stories: A Teaching Tool for Families and Early Childhood Educators

“…The storytellers of these folktales are what sociolinguist William Labov (1997, p. 397) describes as the -classic image of the story-teller…someone who can make something out of nothing, who can engage our attention with a fascinating elaboration of detail that is entertaining, amusing and emotionally rewarding.‖ The stories may or may not be true, but in this genre, as Labov points out, -credibility is rarely an issue…Tall tales, myths and outright lies carry the day, and we normally do not know or care whether the events as told were the personal experience of the story-teller or anyone else.‖ However, this does not mean that classic storytelling is simply or solely a form of entertainment. Even when the literal truth of the story being told is undemonstrated or unnecessary, quite often the reasons for telling the story are to impart important social commentary about cultural values and morality, whether to reinforce the status quo or to criticize it in a relatively safe and culturally acceptable fashion, and thereby to influence opinion and behavior (Fischer, 1963;Jirata, 2010). A third area of interest for anthropologists who study storytelling is oral history.…”

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