A Survey of The Oral Traditions of Sarawak.
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THE SARAWAK MUSEUM JOURNAL |
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Title :
A Survey of The Oral Traditions of Sarawak. |
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Author :
Allen R. Maxwell |
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Abstract:
The traditions and values of preindustrial peoplesare largely passed down from one generation to the next orally. Oral traditions are thus an extremely important source of information for any understanding of a people and their culture. The oral traditions oftraditional peoples are closely connected to their concept of “home”. The idea of “home” includes the region in which people live and work. This area is that portion of the natural environment in which they carry out most of their activities and know intimately, and is an important one to any people. The oral traditions of the peoples of Sarawak are anchored in a spiritualas well as a physical environment. It is from the combination of these two types of environments that a notion of belonging to a place and an area probably develops. Over time people become accustomed to being in their home place. This, of course, is not to say that groups do not move, they certainly do and have been doing so for thousands of years. But it does-take time for people to become used to a new place, and time for their attachments to the spiritual and physical environment to develop. In the Sarawak Gazette I suggested that it is in the oral traditional texts of a group of people that much of the culture and traditions of that group is inscribed and preserved for posterity (Maxwell 1987a).1 It is one particular genre of texts, the ethnohistorical epic texts, that are most important as the “containers” in which so much of traditional culture is to be found. Among some other groups which do not utilize the epic, it is prose texts which appear to play this role. Thus if knowledge of these vehicles for the transmission of oral traditions were to disappear before the texts were recorded,a great deal of traditional culture would be lost forever.
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| DOI: XXXX |
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How to cite:
Maxwell, A. R. (1989). A Survey of The Oral Traditions of Sarawak. The Sarawak Museum Journal, XL (61): 167-208 |
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References
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