The Nowau oral texts here collected had been recorded by Scoditti during the several years of field-research on Kitawa Is. (Papua New Guinea) devoted mainly to understanding the mental mechanisms followed by the
image creators
, that is the makers of the
kula
ceremonial canoes (Scoditti 1990), the poets, the magicians, the female and male singers who perform a poetic text
orally written
by a poet upon an
oral score
composed by a musician (Scoditti 1996). With these early works, Scoditti identified within Kitawa culture a clear distinction between
author
and
performer
-
interpreter
of a given oral text, be it a
verbal
and a
non-verbal
one, a distinction that has called into question the hypothesis that within a culture that does not know, or does not use, any form of
phonetic writing
, a
text
would be composed at the time of its performance, so
composition
and
performance
would coincide.
