著者

友枝 啓泰 トモエダ ヒロヤス Hiroyasu Tomoeda

出版者

国立民族学博物館

雑誌

国立民族学博物館研究報告 = Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology (ISSN:0385180X)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.5, no.1, pp.240-300, 1980-03-30

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In the southern part of the Central Andes there are numerousversions of a popular fox-tale, in which the fox hero travels to theheavens and crashes to the ground on his return. Some versionsend with the origin of cultivated plants which spill from the stomachof the gluttonous hero who devoured them at a celestial banquet.Dispersion after disjunction (high/low) is an invariant featurewhich characterizes story-formation (combination and functioningof tale elements) of all the versions. And this pattern recurs inthe cortamonte,o ne of the popular carnival activities in the northernpart of the Central Andes. In this activity numerous participantsin the festival fell a tall tree erected in an open square (disjunction)and rush to possess the objects with which it was decorated(dispersion).Although information on the magico-religious motive or symbolicmeaning of the Andean cortamonteis lacking, its formation is quasiidenticalwith the story of some upper Amazonian (montana) myths,which relate that humans obtained various cultivated plants fromthe fruits of an original tree which they had felled. Andeanfox-tales and the Amazonian myths thus coincide in their messageand pattern.The Amazonian myths treat not only cultivated plants but alsohuman mortality, which originates as if it were forced on those who"Chiwaco the Liar," a transformation of the fox-tale.In these versions the thrush hero, acting as spiteful mediatorbetween the celestial God and terrestial humans, is the source ofvarious aspects of human life, such as agriculture, herding, orcooking and eating. Here, man's mortality is treated indirectlyor in a reduce of form because human beings are forced to laborhard to obtain foodstuffs and their teeth, which wear-out, representman's mortality.When man participates actively in the origin process of cultivatedplants, as in the Amazonian cases, he experiences deathsimultaneously. Participating passively in the same process only asthe recipient of messages from the God, as in the chiwaco-tale,lessens his mortal experiences to a degree of labor and pains, whichgives a certain negative value to the plants derived. When he doesnot participate in the process, as in the fox-tale, only the dispersiveaspect of the origin process remains constant and seems to bestressed.Our final observation on an Andean children's play, sachatiray(cutting tree), validates these arguments.felled the miraculous tree. In the Central Andes the message ofthis simultaneous origin of cultivated plants and man's mortality istransmitted in a more attenuated form by another popular tale,