CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

When approaching the study of the astronomies of predominantly oral cultures, it is very common the analysis of mythical tales that involve the sky. But these stories are usually analyzed without taking into account their conditions of production, use and circulation. Nor are the psychodynamics and narrative structures characteristic of orality usually included in these analysis. Mythical stories, in these cultures, do not function as watertight compartments, nor do they imply a set of perfectly defined episodes and characters. These stories and their connections with other stories do not respond to a predetermined pattern of roles and correspondences, but rather, within a semantic field of possibilities provided by the common socio-cultural experience of the narrators and their listeners, the narrators creatively build from -more or less stable- "blocks". The bridges that they draw are not capricious, but are dictated by analogies, formal similarities, similarities of characters, common or relatable elements or episodes, reactions or questions from the audience, context conditions, etc. The recurrence of elements or identifications in different situations and in the mouths of different narrators places them in a wide spectrum from idiosyncratic and sporadic mentions to very stable ones, which almost all narrators mention and give rise to a series of stories that are usually linked. Narrator and audience mutually condition each other and are immersed in a field of interpretive possibilities that exceeds them. There are no "official versions" but people with "authorized word" who build at the time of narration, appealing to a set of elements and meanings that enjoy a certain social consensus.Thus, taking up the contributions of decades of studies on oral discourse and using South American indigenous groups as an example, we propose to discuss the methodologies of mythical discourse analysis in cultural astronomy and their implications.

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