ABSTRACT
There’s something else that arguably combats the noise in a story’s oral transmission through time: those topoi long handed down and which the people often call “traditional”—precisely because they appear across so much lengthy oral poetry of yore. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, whom the people met briefly when discussing Star Wars, called these archetypes; and he did so because of these types’ cross-cultural omnipresence, which to him suggested that they were deeply embedded in collective unconscious. Of course, putting a protagonist on the road is also the best means by which to weave all the strands of an oral narrative together. One subject—documented as “Abdurakhm., age 37, from remote Kashgar village, illiterate”—was asked what kind of bears there were in Novaya Zemaya, which was in the Far North, he’d been told, where all bears were white.
