The Man-eating Myth
In: Philosophy of the social sciences: an international journal = Philosophie des sciences sociales, Band 12, Heft 1, S. 106-111
ISSN: 1552-7441
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In: Philosophy of the social sciences: an international journal = Philosophie des sciences sociales, Band 12, Heft 1, S. 106-111
ISSN: 1552-7441
In: American anthropologist: AA, Band 78, Heft 2, S. 397-397
ISSN: 1548-1433
In: American anthropologist: AA, Band 74, Heft 5, S. 1085-1106
ISSN: 1548-1433
This paper attempts to discover the criteria by which a listener accepts or rejects an item of oral narrative as being a story. The hypotheses are: (1) such criteria relate to structure rather than content, although the listener does not consciously distinguish structure from content; (2) the structure must have a certain minimal and maximal degree of complexity and be of a certain kind; (3) the criteria will hold cross‐culturally. Information gathered from ethnographies and folklore literature is inadequate to confirm the hypotheses, but it does not contradict them. An experiment to test hypotheses (1) and (2) produced a certain degree of negative confirmation: listeners rejected as a story any narrative item which did not conform to the structural criteria regarded as minimal by myself; however, they also rejected items which I regarded as well structured but which were bizarre or nonsensical in content. The confusion of structure and content tended to confirm hypothesis (1).
In: International migration review: IMR, Band 7, Heft 2, S. 206
ISSN: 1747-7379, 0197-9183