Murukan as Metaphor:
Text in the Society and Society in the Text
Theoretical Understanding of the Tamil ballad Vallippatam

As folk narratives are constructed and screened through the gamut of the narrator's personal, socio-cultural and cognitive filters, this study would explain how people conceptualize their society, and social aspects, especially their cognitive world which includes idiosyncratic knowledge, belief, and values which are the result of their unique experiences are understood when we study their narratives.

In people's everyday language-use we can find enormous field of metaphorical activities. These metaphors are, used conventionally and unconsciously as a part of their everyday language-use, claimed to be a part of the very basis of our thought and by them people's experiences are systematically conceptualized in terms of other domains of experiences. As far as the conception of language and thought is concerned, metaphor reflects the relationship between world, mind, and language.

Our study of the ballad is focused on the nature of the cultural knowledge- a shared presuppositions about the world which plays major role in human understanding, its organization, and its role in other cognitive performance. It is important to mention here the fact that when some scholars who made an adventure to know the need of cultural knowledge of the people in order to behave as a functioning member of one's society, they found "culture as shared knowledge - not a people's customs and artifacts and oral traditions, but what they must know in order to act as they do, make the things they make, and interpret their experience in the distinctive way they do" (Quinn and Holland,1987,p.4).

In fact, culture is manifested through language and it is meaningful to study the linguistic discourses or narratives to understand the culture or cultural system. We need an attempt to understand how the cognitive nature of human beings is manifested through their linguistic expressions, especially ballad like narrative discourses. Studies on narratives (on its cognitive elements), have proved that cognitive study of narratives, whether folk or literary, will contribute to our understanding of culture and its functioning in human society. We can say our study would help us to understand the role of the culturally constructed people in the culturally constituted world through their narratives.

Our study will help us to reveal the interaction between narrative discourses and culture, and the relationship between culture and cognition through narrative analysis. It is a new attempt to understand the cognitive nature of language and culture through narratives. This narrative study which will be helpful to know how the people construct, perceive and understand any social phenomenon, and social events which happen around them.

For this study we have taken Tamil ballad, Vallipatham as our primary source. This ballad is collected from Kattunaikkar community of Puthuppatti village (which comes under Nilakottai Taluk of Dindigul District) during 1991-1992 by Joseph D.Raj, one of the authors of this article. According to their custom they live in their village only for six months in year and six months they go to other villages to do soothsay. This ballad is sung by the women when they go for soothsay in other villages, and sometime village people ask them to sing the ballad.

These scholars may be contacted at:

P. Joseph Dhairia Raj
Research scholar in Folkloristics
Folklore Resource and Research Centre
St. Xavier's College
Palayamkottai, Tamil Nadu 627 002

M. Ramakrishnan
Research Scholars in Semiotics
Centre of Linguistics and English
School of Languages
Jawahalal Nehru University
New Delhi 110 067
Ph. 6107676-Ext 2793 (or Jhelum)
E-mail: murugan@novalink.stpn.soft.net