Kitawa Literary Fragments: How Storytelling Shapes Spacetime in a Melanesian Matrilineal Culture

The Nowau oral texts here collected had been recorded by Scoditti during the several years of field-research on Kitawa Is. (Papua New Guinea) devoted mainly to understanding the mental mechanisms followed by the image creators, that is the makers of the kula ceremonial canoes (Scoditti 1990), the poets, the magicians, the female and male singers who perform a poetic text orally written by a poet upon an oral score composed by a musician (Scoditti 1996). With these early works, Scoditti identified within Kitawa culture a clear distinction between author and performer-interpreter of a given oral text, be it a verbal and a non-verbal one, a distinction that has called into question the hypothesis that within a culture that does not know, or does not use, any form of phonetic writing, a text would be composed at the time of its performance, so composition and performance would coincide.