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--- tetela [2020/04/03 00:36] – Ryan Schram (admin)
+++ tetela [2024/09/08 21:06] (current) – Ryan Schram (admin)
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 # Tetela
-In Auhelawa, //tetela// refers to a historical narrative, and as a verb it can mean both to recite such a narrative or to use this kind of narrative to explain something. The first thing people think of when they think of a tetela is a story of the origin a //susu// (matrilineage) as a narrative of its mumuga (founding ancestor), her migration from an original place, followed by several other places where she may have settled, and then her arrival in Auhelawa, the relations she formed with people living there, and then a recitation of her descendants to the present day. Yet anything can have a tetela and can be explained by its tetela. The tetela of lineage migrations are also windows onto the past. For instance, many tetela of susu say that founders fled because of famine or from cannibal raids on other islands, and this has led Auhelawa people to conclude that there was a severe drought in the precolonial past that sparked intergroup warfare and cannibalism.
+In Auhelawa, //tetela// refers to a historical narrative, and as a verb it can mean both to recite such a narrative or to use this kind of narrative to explain something. The first thing people think of when they think of a tetela is a story of the origin a //susu// (matrilineage) as a narrative of its //mumuga// (founding ancestor), her migration from an original place, followed by several other places where she may have settled, and then her arrival in Auhelawa, the relations she formed with people living there, and then a recitation of her descendants to the present day. Yet anything can have a tetela and can be explained by its tetela. The tetela of lineage migrations are also windows onto the past. For instance, many tetela of susu say that founders fled because of famine or from cannibal raids on other islands, and this has led Auhelawa people to conclude that there was a severe drought in the precolonial past that sparked intergroup warfare and cannibalism.
 Tetela stories are distinguished from other stories about the past, particularly //vedevedede//, which are stories based on features of the landscape like rocky outcrops in the bush or standing stones. These stories explain these landscape features as the traces of heroes, witches, and monsters. People say that they "don't know" whether vedevedede are true, but they do know that tetela are true because people of different branches of the same susu will have similar stories about their common origins.
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 Schram, Ryan. 2018. Harvests, Feasts, and Graves: Postcultural Consciousness in Contemporary Papua New Guinea. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
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+<WRAP box similar>~~SIMILAR~~</WRAP>