STREAM 2 NARRATIVES AND ORAL TRADITIONS / Georgios Kouzas (Athens) & Marianthi Kaplanoglou (Athens)

This workshop introduces to a total study of the diversity of oral performance situations in Greek local communities, conceiving local narrators not as passive tradition bearers, but rather as active agents in the reappropriation of existing traditions. We will study how members of a given folk group negotiate their social relations and attitudes not only through actions but also through artistic oral communication, its genres, themes and symbols. Based on a comparative perspective, we will also see the circulation of certain of these themes and motifs in Europe and the Mediterranean. In a second level this workshop will focus on modern forms of orality in modern urban space like gossip and rumors. We will especially investigate how the issue of both public and private life, and how public events (even in the micro–level of the neighborhood or the macro–level of the city or the country where we live) pass to the private area through daily gossip.