Elements of Folk Psychology: Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of MankindWundt, Wilhelm Max
Science
Elements of Folk Psychology: Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
Wundt, Wilhelm Max
Ethnopsychology
game-animals while executing his dance about the arrow, the arrow is
without doubt regarded as a means of magic, and we may conjecture that
the game-animals that are struck by an arrow are supposed actually to
succumb as a result of this mimetic performance.
Among primitive peoples, the dance is not, as a rule, accompanied by
music. At most, means of producing noise are introduced, their purpose
being to indicate the rhythm. The simplest of these noise-instruments
consists of two wooden sticks that are beaten together. The drum is
also common at a very early time; yet it was probably introduced from
without. The real musical accompaniment of the dance is furnished by
the human voice in the _dance-song_. It would, of course, be wrong to
suppose that because the dance originally served purposes of magic,
the dance-song was a sort of primitive cult-song. Of such songs as the
latter no traces occur until later. The contents of the early songs
are derived from the most commonplace experiences of life. The songs
really consist of detached fragments of purely descriptive or narrative
prose, and have no inner connection with the motives of the dance.
That which characterizes them as songs is the refrain. One might say
without qualification that this poetic form of speech begins with the
refrain. The song has grown up out of selected natural sounds. Anything
that has been done or observed may serve as content of the song. After
such material has once been employed, it is continually repeated. Thus
it becomes a folk-song that is sung particularly during the dance. The
melody is of a very monotonous character; could it be translated into
our notes, we would find that in the songs of the Veddahs or of the
inland tribes of Malacca, the melody moves at most within the range
of a sixth. Moreover, there is an absence of harmonic intervals, so
that, not having been phonographically recorded, the songs cannot
be reproduced in our notes except with great uncertainty. Of their
content, the following illustrations may give us some idea. One, of the
songs of the Veddahs runs as follows:--
The doves of Taravelzita say kuturung.
Where the talagoya is roasted and eaten, there blew a wind,
Where the memmina is roasted and eaten, there blew a wind,
Where the deer is roasted and eaten, there blew a wind.
On a somewhat higher level stands the following song of the Semangs. It
refers to the ring-tailed lemur (macaco), a monkey species very common
in the forests of Malacca; by the Semangs it is called 'kra':--
He runs along the branches, the kra,
He carries the fruit with him, the kra,
He runs to and fro, the kra;
Over the living bamboo, the kra,
Over the dead bamboo, the kra;
He runs along the branches, the kra,
He leaps about and screams, the kra,
He permits glimpses of himself, the kra,
He shows his grinning teeth, the kra.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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