Abstract

Abstract:

The reader is invited to imagine one performance, as transcribed and reported by an ethnographer-folklorist. The performer runs a string of trickster episodes, linking together two international tale types with half a dozen or more seemingly unrelated motifs. For his final episode, he switches out of “normal” folktale style into the kind of melodrama familiar from film noir. His performance demonstrates the ways inherited and imported cultural elements get remodeled in creole cultures like Mayotte.

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