Essential Questions:
- What are myths/legends/fairy tales?
- Why do they matter?
- What do they tell us?
Background for Teachers:
Myth v Legend v Religion: What is a myth? Myths generally answer very big, existential questions about life, the universe, and everything. They don’t have to be true to have truth; the lesson or moral at the end is the truth being passed to the listener- it does not matter if the events of the story are factually accurate. In fact, myths are often fantastical and part of a current or past religious tradition, and therefore likely to not be a historical account of the past.
While Freud believed that societies move from orality to literacy as they developed, like children growing into adults, this attitude betrays the colonizer mindset of his time. Many societies throughout history have lacked the written word and yet built complex societal laws, histoires, and mythologies. Before the invention of the printing press, most of the world was functionally illiterate, even if the elites were literate.
There is a strong connection between orality, remembering information across time through verbal transmission, and the use of song, rhythm, humor, and visuals to aid that memory. Examples in this unit include the songs about La Llorona and the Drinking Gourd; other examples include cultural practices like prayer beads used to keep track of specific parts of a cycle of prayers.
Orality v Written Stories: “Orality, by definition, deals with societies which do not use any form of phonetic writing… The relation between an individual and his society is acoustic, between himself and his tradition, his law, his government.”45 In an oral tradition culture, all cultural information must be passed down and remembered. “Such language has to be memorized. There is no other way of guaranteeing its survival. Ritualization becomes the means to memorization. The memories are personal, belonging to every man, woman, and child in the community, yet their content, the language preserved, is communal, something shared by the community as expressing its tradition and its historical identity.”46 This idea can lead into the discussion of students’ schema about cultural norms, etc.
Class Activities:
- Establish norms for discussing religious/spiritual beliefs other than one’s own with respect
- Connect to schema re: fairy tales/legends/bedtime stories from childhood, schoolyard rhymes, mysterious things we “just know” like the S symbol, Miss Mary Mack, etc.
