Rosanna Sirignano: Popular wisdom and marriage customs in a Palestinian village

Estratto da Studi Interculturali n. 2 del 2014

I am fully convinced that if we tried to look at reality with the eyes of the humble and uneducated then we would better understand our world. What is referred to as popular wisdom – proverbs, expressions, accounts, legends – provides us with invaluable teachings, advice and food for thought.

In this article I present an aspect of social life in Artas, a little village in the Palestinian West Bank, through an exploration of a key aspect of the local folk cultural heritage: proverbs and sayings. These modes of communication play an important role in social interaction; in transmitting knowledge, wisdom and beliefs, and in explaining traditional practices from generation to generation. In general, in all Arab societies people use prov- erbs every day in social interaction, so they constitute an important lens through which the people’s culture and worldview can be understood.

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