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

The Nowau oral texts collected in this volume were recorded by Scoditti during the several years of fieldwork on Kitawa Island (Papua New Guinea) devoted mainly to understanding the mental mechanisms followed by the image creators, that are the makers of the kula ceremonial canoes, the poets, the magicians, the female and male singers who perform a poetic text orally written by a poet to an oral score composed by a musician. With these early works, Scoditti identifies within Kitawa culture a clear distinction between the author and the 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 in a culture that does not know, or use, any form of phonetic writing, a text is composed at the time of its performance, so that composition and performance would coincide.

A first result of his interpretation is Kitawa. A linguistic and aesthetic analysis of visual art in Melanesia (1990, De Gruyter Mouton), then by Kitawa oral poetry. An example from Melanesia (1996, ANU Press), Notes on the cognitive texture of an oral mind. Kitawa, a Melanesian culture (2012, Sean Kingston Publishing) and, now Kitawa Literary Fragments: How Storytelling Shapes Spacetime in a Melanesian Matrilineal Culture.