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They relied on oral retellings memorised from generation to generation. It linked living people to the gods and the legendary heroes. By quoting appropriate genealogical lines, a narrator emphasised his or her connection with the characters whose deeds were being described, and that connection also proved that the narrator had the right to speak of them. Some appear to have been sacred or esoteric, but many of the legends were well-known stories told as entertainment in the long nights of winter. Nevertheless, they should not be regarded simply as fairy tales to be enjoyed only as stories. The Maui myth, for example, was important not only as entertainment but also because it embodied the beliefs of the people concerning such things as the origin of fire, of death, and of the land in which they lived. The ritual chants concerning firemaking, fishing, death, and so on made reference to Maui and derived their power from such reference. The lines are indicated by features of the music. The language of poetry tends to differ stylistically from prose. Typical features of poetic diction are the use of synonyms or contrastive opposites, and the repetition of key words.

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. The Maoris The Creation Myth

Hispanic American Historical Review 1 November ; 64 4 : — Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Uruguay was dominated by the latifundium, with its ill-defined boundaries and enormous herds of native cattle, from which only the hides were exported to Great Britain and part of the meat, as jerky, to Brazil and Cuba.

There was a shifting rural population that worked on the large estates and lived largely on the parts of beef carcasses that could not be marketed abroad. Often the landowners were also the caudillos of the Blanco or Colorado political parties, the protagonists of civil wars that a weak government was unable to prevent. When World War I erupted, vast properties still existed, but they had been fenced.

2. Cycles, Society, and the State

Sheep raising had The Maoris The Creation Myth established and had given rise to a middle class of tenants and landowners of relative strength. Although native cattle had survived, crosses with English strains predominated. Refrigeration plants owned by the Chicago Trust Mygh English companies had taken over the Uruguayan-owned salteries, frozen meat from jerky, and the European markets from the Latin American ones.

All parts of animal carcasses had taken on economic worth; and food had become a monopoly of the proprietors of the land and the owners of the livestock. The old floating population was read more to day laboring peonazgowas alienated in so-called rat towns, or was beginning to be driven to Montevideo or abroad.

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The state had The Maoris The Creation Myth its power and terminated the civil click here which were now opposed by the landowner-entrepreneurs. These changes and continuities were analyzed in our seven-volume study entitled Historia rural del Uruguay modernopublished between and The last of those volumes contains the general conclusions of our study, which we present, in essence, below. They are intended to give an overview of the most important characteristics of long-term Uruguayan rural history. All the bibliographical and statistical data have been eliminated. What remains is a synthesis, which we hope is suggestive and invites reflection.

Uruguayan society constructed a cattle-based civilization, as Fernand Braudel would say, which never betrayed itself and Cration remained faithful to the land and livestock and hostile to dirt farming. The varied interests of landowners as a whole did not prevent large estate holders Creattion maintaining economic, social, and political supremacy, despite the fact that the density of the rural population was among the lowest in the world and despite the diversification of exports within the livestock sector which exacerbated rather than alleviated the dependency that had arisen.

When Uruguay is analyzed in a perspective of years, that is, fromwhen it was born, towhen it affirmed its modernity, its unaltered structural characteristics stand out more than do innovations. This deeply rooted conservatism of Uruguayan history could not help but be reflected in the total life of the nation, from its economy to its politics Thr its culture. As in any agricultural society, it seems that the livestock producers passionately opposed any basic change in the political and economic life of the nation in the belief that such change would endanger their primary mission.

1. A Conservative Society and Dependent Economy: Relationship

Moreover, conservatism was entirely feasible: world demand would not necessitate any significant rejection of the traditional system. Discordant Creatin protesting elements, meanwhile, were driven from rural society to the cities or even abroad. The source of questioning of the established order—that is, social interaction—in rural Uruguay was weak and, as is generally the case in rural environments, the group that in other societies played the dynamic role of promoting change and altering the social and economic structures The Maoris The Creation Myth in rural Uruguay numerically weak and dispersed as a result of the dominance of extensive ranching.

The last, but by no means the least important, reason for the failure of the rural population to challenge the larger source was that they enjoyed an abundance of food, at least until refrigeration plants and British demand for beef placed that commodity beyond the reach of the depressed laboring class.

Uruguay, first as the Banda Oriental and later as an independent country though always externally orientedgrew, changed, or stagnated in response to the fluctuations of a world economy controlled by the source nations of Western Europe and the United States. For more than two centuries, it lived both sheltered and buffeted by these same nations, growing or stagnating as external forces dictated. When war came to the industrialized regions in the The Maoris The Creation Myth century—the Crimea, the Civil War in the United States—the country benefited from the momentary loosening of the invisible ties that the liberal economy had extended. It may have evinced particular patterns caused by brutal political occurrences, but the essence of its development came from abroad.

These responses, never automatic and unresisting, gave rise to the third structural characteristic—the The Maoris The Creation Myth of the combination of the Teh previously mentioned Creatio that of a country of cycles, of products that dominated for as long as the trading nations dictated, but that never disappeared from the economy.

This idea of a cycle seems to be related to another, namely, that the new replaces the old. This is in fact what happened in a majority of the Latin American countries: Peru had its cycles Maoriz silver and guano; Chile of wheat, nitrates, and copper; Brazil of wood and sugar, gold and diamonds, and coffee.]