Talking to Strangers: The Use of Stories as Guides to Intercultural Encounters by the Archaic Greeks and the Hudson’s Bay Cree
Date
2014-07-21
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Abstract
The Archaic Greeks and Hudson’s Bay Cree alike lived in a world without writing, sharing and maintaining social memory through oral storytelling. Since both were enterprising, well-travelled peoples, they became involved in meetings with other groups of completely unfamiliar language and culture: strange others. To manage these intercultural encounters, the Archaic Greeks and Hudson’s Bay Cree each used their own ideas of appropriate behaviour between guests and hosts, drawing on stories shared within their communities. They used the level of conformity with their own hospitality protocols that they observed in the strange other as an index of “us-ness,” a measure of the possibility of ongoing social relationship with them. Despite this common measure of “us-ness,” the Hudson’s Bay Cree and Archaic Greeks differed in how they used it, as shown by the lessons encoded in their traditional stories about the unfamiliar other.
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Language--Ancient, Literature--Classical, Native American Studies
Citation
Osborne, C. (2014). Talking to Strangers: The Use of Stories as Guides to Intercultural Encounters by the Archaic Greeks and the Hudson’s Bay Cree (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27974