How oral traditions develop: a cautionary tale on cultural evolution from the Quechuan-speaking Andes

Matthias Urban ()
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Matthias Urban: National Centre for Scientific Research

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2025, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract While large-scale comparative and historical analysis of folktales has largely disappeared from anthropological inquiry after the wane of diffusionism in the early 20th century, such approaches are experiencing a revival in the framework of cultural evolution. In that context, questions asked include to what extent narrative traditions are transmitted horizontally from generation to generation; influenced by practices of neighbors; and form larger packages with other expressions of culture, prominently language. Here, I explore to what extent 41 versions of a widespread story told by Indigenous Andean storytellers in the Quechuan languages show signs of having developed according to evolutionary phylogenetic mechanisms, bringing data from the underrepresented New World into the purview of the literature. The story of Juan Oso (“John the Bear”), which tells of the origins and adventures of a half-bear, half-human boy, has European roots, meaning that variation in the Central Andes only had several centuries to develop. Analyses show that the story varies in ways that can neither be explained fully by where it is told (and hence by possible “diffusion” of characteristics from region to region), nor by the Quechuan variety in which it is told (“co-evolution of language and culture”), nor, most importantly, by historical mechanisms of an evolutionary nature according to which the story might change. With reference to the ethnographic literature, I suggest that these results can be explained by the ways in which Andean storytellers recombine narrative material from stories to imbue them with new meaning that comments on local and regional social and political circumstances, and that a “rhizotic” model of development, in addition to or instead of the phylogenetic ones tested by cultural evolutionists, might be more adequate to understand how the individual versions of this story came to be told the way they are.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-05335-4

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