Kitawa Literary Fragments

The Nowau oral texts here collected had been recorded by Scoditti during the several years of field-research on Kitawa Is. (Papua New Guinea) devoted mainly to understanding the mental mechanisms followed by the image creators , that is the makers of the kula ceremonial canoes (Scoditti 1990), the poets, the magicians, the female and male singers who perform a poetic text orally written by a poet upon an oral score composed by a musician (Scoditti 1996). With these early works, Scoditti identified within Kitawa culture a clear distinction between author and performer - interpreter of a given oral text, be it a verbal and a non-verbal one, a distinction that has called into question the hypothesis that within a culture that does not know, or does not use, any form of phonetic writing , a text would be composed at the time of its performance, so composition and performance would coincide.

Auteur
Giancarlo M. G. Scoditti, Univeristy of Urbino, Italy.