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Reviewed by:
  • Ten Traditional Tellers
  • Elizabeth Matson, Independent Folklorist
Ten Traditional Tellers. By Margaret Read MacDonald . (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 213, preface, acknowledgments, 10 photographs, notes, bibliographies, index.)

In Ten Traditional Tellers, Margaret Read MacDonald provides a very accessible overview of the thoughts and perspectives of a small selection of tradition bearers regarding the transmission and preservation of their people's stories. MacDonald's interest in tellers with traditional [End Page 234] backgrounds grew out of her work in her mother's hometown, published as Scipio Storytelling: Talk in a Southern Indiana Community (University Press of America, 1996). She found these particular tellers through the storytelling circuit in Seattle, Washington, including the Traditional Tellers Retreat, and her travels abroad, including a Fulbright scholarship in Thailand. Based on interviews conducted by the author from 1986 through 1998, each teller's views are presented primarily in his or her own words, albeit shaped, selected, and edited by MacDonald. Indeed, the greatest value of this work is that it allows each teller to speak with the barest patina of outsider or academic interpretation.

Each of the first ten chapters presents one of the tellers through a very brief cultural, geographical, and biographical introduction and then proceeds to the teller's own words, wrapping up with one or two of the teller's stories. The bulk of each chapter focuses on the aspects of the stories or tradition that the teller deems most important. An easy-to-read ethnopoetic format is used to present the stories and is occasionally employed as well for the interview material at MacDonald's discretion. The tellers include Vi Hilbert of the Upper Skagit people in Washington State; Rinjing Dorje from Tibet, now living in America; Roberto Carlos Ramos of Brazil; Phra Inta Kaweewong, a Buddhist monk in Thailand; Makia Malo, a Hawaiian who grew up in the then-quarantined community of Kalaupapa, which was reserved for people with Hansen's disease (leprosy); Won-Ldy Paye from Liberia, now living in America; Leonard Sam of New Caledonia; Lela Kiana Oman of the Inupiat people in Alaska; Peter Pipim from Ghana, now living in America; and Curtis DuPuis of the Chehalis people in Washington State. Though these tellers all derive from different cultural groups, the oral traditions they bear are not solely based in culture or ethnicity. For instance, Curtis DuPuis's stories, while of the Chehalis people, are more specifically rooted within the Hazel Pete family tradition; Makia Malo does tell some Hawaiian legends, but much of his identity as a traditional teller stems from his repertoire of stories based on personal and community experiences in the once medically quarantined Kalaupapa.

In the last two chapters, MacDonald briefly addresses why these tellers tell stories and what makes them traditional. Of particular interest is the nonjudgmental manner in which Mac-Donald demonstrates how the tellers that she has profiled fit into a spectrum of tradition; she identifies ten gradations along that spectrum, extending from the purely traditional to the exclusively revivalist teller. The differences that she identifies here are important to consider when theorizing about oral narrative. These ten tellers that she discusses variously learn their tales from field recordings of their ancestors, written texts (as a traditional method and as a revival method), and oral tales told by their elders. They preserve their stories both by telling them and writing them down and by actively teaching and encouraging young tellers from both within and beyond their cultural group. Some tell their stories almost exclusively within their traditional setting; all at least occasionally share their stories with outsiders, some as full-fledged platform tellers. Though MacDonald does no more than elucidate this spectrum, clearly drawing from the tellers' own words as well as her own experiences as a storyteller and folklorist, she sets the stage for more thorough consideration of it in oral narrative studies.

While the survey approach taken in this volume may frustrate some readers because of its brevity, MacDonald does offer bibliographies on each teller (with the exception of Peter Pipim, whose papers in Ghana are currently inaccessible). In keeping with the focus on the tellers' views of their work and traditions, the...

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