Margaret Mills

W HILE ORAL narrative traditions generally include both male
main characters and female main characters, their distribution within
the tradition may not be symmetrical. Analysis of my collection of
contemporary oral narratives from Afghanistan in Dari Persian lan-
guage suggests that men tend to tell stories about men, whereas
women tell stories about women and men. In a sample of 450 fictional
prose narratives (folktales and romances), 86 percent ( 249 ) of those
told by men have male main characters. An additional 3 percent have
two main characters, one of each sex. Only 11 percent ( 31 ) of men's

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