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- Title
Story-telling, Women's Authority and the ‘Old Wife's Tale’: ‘The Story of the Bottle of Medicine’.
- Authors
Abrams, Lynn
- Abstract
The focus of this article is a single personal narrative – a Shetland woman’s telling of a story about two girls on a journey to fetch a cure for a sick relative from a wise woman. The story is treated as a cultural document which offers the historian a conduit to a past that is respectful of indigenous woman-centred interpretations of how that past was experienced and understood. The ‘story of the bottle of medicine’ is more than a skilful telling of a local tale; it is a memory practice that provides a path to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of a culture. Applying perspectives from anthropology, oral history and narrative analysis, three sets of questions are addressed: the issue of authenticity; the significance of the narrative structure and storytelling strategies employed; and the nature of the female performance. Ultimately the article asks what this story can tell us about women’s interpretation of their own history.
- Subjects
SHETLAND (Scotland); SCOTLAND; NARRATIVE inquiry (Research method); STORYTELLING; LITERATURE &; culture; SCOTTISH folklore; MANSON, Mary; WOMEN'S history; AUTHORITY; MODERN history
- Publication
History Workshop Journal, 2012, Vol 73, Issue 1, p95
- ISSN
1363-3554
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/hwj/dbr058