The boy who became a muni bird

The boy who became a muni bird is the protagonist of the charter myth at the heart of Kaluli expressive culture. A boy fishing with his elder sister asks her again and again for the crayfish she has caught, and each time she refuses, worsening the breach until she tells him the catch is reserved for an older brother. Abandoned, the boy's hands turn to wings and his skin to the purple-and-grey plumage of the muni, the beautiful fruitdove; his begging becomes a falling, weeping call. The story fixes the Kaluli conviction that a refused plea is a form of abandonment, that birds are the voices of those who have gone, and that human weeping comes closest to birdsong. The boy is not given a personal name in the tale, being known only by his transformation.

Domains

• weeping and song
• abandonment and sorrow

Powers

• weeps in the voice of a bird

Sources

• A boy repeatedly begs his elder sister for the crayfish she is eating and is refused; abandoned, he becomes a muni fruitdove and weeps in the voice of a bird, a transformation that grounds Kaluli aesthetics of weeping and song.: Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982; 2nd ed. 1990). (secondary); Edward L. Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers (1976). (secondary)