The volume Celebrating indigenous voice investigates the linguistic and cultural facets of narratives from indigenous minorities in tropical regions and beyond. Language and culture intricately intertwine, and narratives serve as a medium for demonstrating the reality of indigenous people and preserving indigenous culture. Based on intensive fieldwork, the volume examines several significant concepts of narratives in tropical indigenous languages.
Chapter 2 by R. M. W. Dixon compares the person or narrator in Yidiñ and Dyirbal narratives. Storytellers in Yidiñ usually take on the identity of the main character, resulting in more complex syntactic structures compared to Dyirbal narratives. Chapter 3 by Alan Rumsey, John Mansfield, and Nicholas Evans explores how to identify quotation sources and distinguish between speech and thought. Clause chaining is the topic of chapters 4–7. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald in chapter 4 introduces the functions of medial clauses, a sequence of dependent clauses providing background information and facilitating coherent narratives. Robert L. Bradshaw in chapter 5 investigates clause-linking strategies such as switch-reference, which aids in tracking participants within discourse and indicating topic continuity. Hannah S. Sarvasy in chapter 6 examines the ‘verbatim narrative prompting’ practice in Nungon-speaking children's language development. In this practice, children are prompted by their mothers to repeat lengthy clause chains to acquire narrative ability. Pema Wangdi in chapter 7 explores varying syntactic and semantic strategies of clause linking in Brokpa. These four chapters demonstrate that clause chains are important pivots to keep stories flowing.
In chapter 8, Christoph Holz scrutinizes the discourse functions of demonstratives in Tiang, including exophoric and endophoric demonstratives, which denote visibility and distance values. In chapters 9 and 10, Gwendolyn Hyslop and Elena Skribnik explore mirativity, a grammatical marker indicating unexpected information. Hyslop explores the function of miratives in Kurtöp narratives. Skribnik defines the context that semantically presupposes mirative expressions as ‘pre-mirative context’ and explores its linkage to the ‘Hero's Journey’ in Siberian folklore. Chapter 11 by Francesca Merlan examines the uniqueness of trickster stories in Jawoyn. She shows that these stories often display no reflexivity of the tricksters and are predominantly narrated by males. Chapter 12 by Rosita Henry investigates autobiography, a new genre in Papua New Guinea. He finds that these narratives may not always feature the teller as a character within the story, thus challenging the traditional definition of autobiography, and argues for a distinction between ‘self’ and ‘person’. The final chapter by Michael Wood delineates the influence of ancestral narratives on Kamula's understanding of death and unveils the role narrative plays in renegotiating social and political dynamics.
From grammatical forms to discourse organization, the volume unfolds the uniqueness of polyphonous narratives in tropical regions and beyond. It enriches our comprehension of the intricate interplay between indigenous culture and distinctive narratives. Moreover, the volume adopts a post-colonial perspective, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding indigenous narratives, which are increasingly vulnerable to the influence of dominant languages and new communication technologies. Overall, this book inspires future research to look further into the narratives in indigenous languages.
