Climbing a Mountain without a Ladder

Abstract

Local oral traditions do not provide the chronologies and verified facts that are characteristic of literate traditions. Oral historians either treat local traditions as reflections of culture and/or social structure or they concentrate on isolating facts from fiction. But people create their pasts and generate their futures from their own ideas of time, space, and causality so it is also important to understand indigenous `stories' in these terms. In Unea Island, three narrative types, each focusing on a different area of space-time, provide some understanding of basic orientations that underlie decisions which islanders make.