Page 138 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

The Donkey 113

Drifts from an initial meaning of ‘act of speech’ to ‘imaginary story’
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semantically set apart the Marathi katha or dantakatha from the San-
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skrit katha. Similarly, in Ancient Greece between the eighth and the
fourth century bc, muthos happened to be set apart from and opposed to
logos by philosophers and historians (Vernant 1988: 196–217). In both
cases the result is a notion of myth as ‘tale’ for entertainment, ‘legend’
for embellishment, a ‘fiction’ deprived of authenticity and truth value.
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Our duty as social scientists is to rescue our Indian dantakatha from
this logical wreckage perpetrated by a will to hegemony of modern
arrogant epistemologies. Forms of rationality are as multiple as the
various cognitive strategies devised by humans to explore, order and
rule over the different physical and social realms of reality. Oral nar-
rative as an act of speech is an act of cognition, one form among many
of human discursive rationality and symbolic communication.

Oral Narratives with Us as Pure Text

The main features of those traditional forms of symbolic exchange
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that we collect nowadays from Vadar communities in Maharashtra
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are the following.

1. Universal concrete. The narrative as a discursive form oper-
ates through concatenation of events which are always concrete
representations apprehended through sensibility and not intel-
lect. The narrative as act of cognition is, therefore, concretely
universal, as it constructs its logical operations with sensory
objects and incorporates its cognitive patterns in sequences of
events.
2. Cognitive discourse of a community. For a narrative to exist
as a myth, a community is needed to reappropriate, transform
and re-edit it to meet its general cognitive, ideological and
moral needs. Individuals utter stories, events, accounts, dreams,
fancies, etc., of which a few only are reshaped and turned in-
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to dantakatha , namely, those with an exemplary value for the
community; private, casual, inadequate and personal aspects are
levelled or erased. These narratives are community discourses
and not acts of speech by an individual projecting mental states,
feelings or worries. Our narratives have neither psychological