ABSTRACT
The missionaries converted the people of the village to Christianity. As a result of that influence, most of the families subscribing to Catholic Christian values, with their patriarchal orientation, and fearing that they would be perceived as hypocritical Christians, did not practise their traditional cultural ceremonies openly and freely. Marcel Jousse’s theory of oral style is important to this study because, as an oral genre, songs are performed in full view of an audience and involve the performers using their bodies while rendering the songs, thus enacting Jousse’s four ‘mnemonic laws’ that he identifies as characteristic of oral performance styles. Human beings, according to Jousse, are unique ‘mimismic’ beings able to live together by continually imitating the world around them, and replaying the movements of the outside world that they perceive through integrated body-mind expressions. According to Jousse, formulism is readily observable in traditional texts, such as proverbs, nursery rhymes, songs and stories.
