The narrators of the oral tradition: the gift imposed by divine spirits

Abstract

In the rural area of ​​the province of Carchi not all people are able to tell the legends of their community. Only a few can do it, namely, those who have seen the divine spirits, call them goblins, widows, aucas or cueches. It can be said, then, that the divine spirits are the ones who empower the narrators in the communities, granting them a gift to be executed by means of his speech. Raised the issue from this religious perspective, this article inquiries about the following issues: why these divine spirits want to be narrated?, by what linguistic statements the narrators give an account of the gift received?, and why it is useful to the community knowing those narrations about the divine spirits? The answers lead us to consider that the divine spirits give that gift to guarantee its existence in the collective memory of the community. But, at the same time, with the gift of that gift they allow the narrators to generate spaces to distribute a knowledge that controls and articulates the meanings that give significance to the community.