MOST STUDIES of the structure of folk tales are based on the assumption that in all cultures there are items of oral narrative that are recognized as tales or stories (these terms are used synonymously). Such items may be as short as a couple of sentences o r so long that they require several days to tell, but it seems that a listener can always identify such an item as a story, and that the criteria by which he does so are based o n structure rather than on content.This paper attempts to answer the question, "What is a story?" It examines the assumption that there exists universally in the human mind the concept of a certain structure that we call a story. I t poses two hypotheses which support the assumption. These are: (1) A listener will accept an item as a story only if it has a certain structure, and this structure has a certain minimal and maximal complexity. (2) The degree of complexity and the nature of such minimal and maximal structures' will be the same in all cultures.The hypotheses will be tested by (a) examining reports about oral narrative from ethnographers and folklorists in which there are statements by informants which show that story-tellers and their audiences have clear though not always explicit criteria by which a piece of oral narrative is judged t o be a story; and (b) by presenting oral items to a sample of adults and asking them t o accept o r reject each item as being a satisfactory story and to give reasons for their acceptance o r rejection.The idea that there is a "story-shaped structure" built into the human mind seems more plausible when we consider the work of recent linguists. The work of Lenneberg, especially that on language learning by children, and the work of Chomsky, especially his demonstration that the deep structure of all languages is much the same, suggest that a sense of grammar is built into the human mind. Linguists have found that a speaker can distinguish a grammatical from a non-grammatical sentence in his own language, although he may not be able to verbalize his grammatical knowledge. The sentence seems t o be a natural psychological unit.I hope t o demonstrate that the story is similarly a natural psychological unit. It is certainly easy t o show many instances of both conscious and unconscious knowledge of the requirements t o be met by a properly structured story. Rules for composing oral 1085
Opening ParagraphThe main purpose of this paper is to show how recent research into the process of urbanization in Africa and into the structure of African cities and nations compels us to rethink our theories of urbanization in general.The relationship between theory and research is a reciprocal one. New research compels the creation of new models, and new models suggest new subjects and methods of research. But both theory and research are affected by politics in the broadest sense of the term. Many African scholars consider the study of modern Africa by Westerners an extension of economic and political colonialism, especially when African cities are studied in terms of Western models. And many African governments, aware of the social problems involved in urbanization, seriously study the work of both African and non-African social scientists. The period since 1960 has been one of rapid development in the study of urbanization in Africa and the rest of the world, and the African material should throw new light on general theories of urbanization.
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