By Giovanna D. Preda Robertti
The most important thing I learned was that I talk a lot. In all seriousness, I had never worked on a group project like this one with people from other cultural backgrounds, and the stark contrast between my contributions and my teammates' (particularly Siyu and Yang) made me realize how deeply Paraguayan and Latin American culture shape who I am. I would talk all the time, and mention small and insignificant things that might be helpful, but retract full statements after analyzing things deeper. Meanwhile, I could tell my teammates thought things over very thoroughly before contributing, and while Siyu and Yang spoke much less than me their contributions were also much richer and denser than mine. Think before you speak vs make up your mind along the way.
This can be extrapolated, then, to the folktales; there is a certain universality to human narratives, yet the only thing that is true and undebatably universal is subjectiveness itself. As long as we are constrained to the human condition we will never achieve objectivity, so why try? That is the true value of analyzing folktales; even if they had the same narrative, the meaning would be different for every reader, and every narrator would create their version of the story by simply using different words, subconsciously inputting their subjective morality into it. The most interesting part about analyzing folktales is not the folktale itself, but analyzing the way they are told and what this meant for the people who came up with it, their descendants, and yourself. While existing within a society is inherently performative, the way we perform culture is much less curated, and thus much more loyal to the culture itself, than the contents of said performance.
It is often the most inconspicuous actions that showcase the true depths of one's cultural assumptions, and by analyzing them we get a much more nuanced and layered understanding of culture and history; Urashima Taro's shame contrasted with Oisin's simple lack of understanding, Siyu and Yang's scarce yet complex contributions contrasted with my frequent yet simple ones. Because a folktale's influence is only as powerful as one's subjectivity, and while they showcase important aspects of culture the most telling aspects are the ones living in the shadow of our inflection, our word choice, and our contribution to team projects, as this is the realm in which performance takes a break and culture can be observed at its rawest.