In the oral traditions of every culture one can find folk narratives which in deceptively simple and unassuming form, state nothing less than a basic philosophy of life. In these stories, fantasy is used not so much to create an escapist ideal world, where goodness triumphs over evil, poverty turns to riches, power is applied justly and beauty reigns supreme, but to make plain statements about the workings of the real world.
Things are presented as they are, not as they should be or might be if conditions were different. One finds no righteous indignation about hardships or injustice in them, no moralistic finger-pointing, neither pious complacency nor glee. Soberly, the world is faced head-on. These are not grand tall tales of heroic exertions, but short, concise stories populated with antiheros whose combined follies and wisdom amount to a commentary on the human condition that everybody can recognize, regardless of cultural background.
Unlike complex narratives, where messages about life often are coded, transformed and hidden behind symbols, these little stories can be taken at face value. In them, the rules for the struggle of daily existence is projected directly onto a plane where people and animals coexist by understanding each other, and everybody acts true to form, predictably, and stereotypically.
The stories' props and actors are, of course, rooted in their specific cultures, but knowledge of the cultural backgrounds only adds some color, it is not a prerequisite for comprehension. For this, little decoding is required and interpretation, even by an outsider, is largely a restatement of the obvious. The people who tell and retell those stories describe in their own voices, unencumbered by either wishful thinking or ideological demands for moral reassurance, the basic layout of their world for anyone who cares to listen.
Projective devices that they are, such simple folktales therefore are a direct, uncluttered source of insight into the philosophical fundamentals of a people's existence.
The following seven short folktales represent this genre. Actors and their concerns are down-to-earth, the setting is realistic (if one allows for talking animals), problems and their solutions are stated clearly, and right and wrong are not painted in the black and white mode of ideal time-space, but in fuzzy outlines of the here and now. As cultural peculiarities do not distract from the basic messages, there is little need or scope for explanation or translation in to our own cultural idiom.
The particular cultural background of these stores is that of a tribal group in southwest Iran, the Boir Ahmadi. Numbering about 150,000 people, the Boir Ahmadi have been living for centuries in the southern ridges, valleys and plains of the high Zagros mountains. Primarily shepherds, goatherders and small-scale farmers, they move their tents of black goat hair, their few belongings and their animals up and down the steep mountains, and north and south, with the changing seasons. For the past twenty years, their traditional way of life has been changing quickly, as their formerly largely autonomous area is being integrated into the bureaucratic networks of the state.
The present of the stories is the traditional time of Boir
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