Berezkin Analytical Catalogue · Motif
B39 — The narrow waist of an insect.
Source data for narratives and traditions is drawn from Berezkin’s Analytical Catalogue. If you use this data, please acknowledge and link to it: Ю.Е. Березкин, Е.Н. Дувакин. Тематическая классификация и распределение фольклорно-мифологических мотивов по ареалам. Аналитический каталог.
Summary of motif
OverviewAn insect or character, which later turns into an insect, knows where food (cultivated plants) or water is located, but refuses to share this knowledge. To find the valuables (usually to force the insect to reveal its secret), the first ancestors pull on a rope tied around the character's waist (the origin of the bridge between the abdominal and thoracic sections of insects).
Berezkin category: The Origins of the Characteristics of the environment
This is of motif type Cosmology and etiology and is part of group 7, Etiology of plants and animals and of their peculiar features, particular animals as protagonists of cosmological stories, metamorphoses, weather and calendar.
Top 10 motifs with similar dispersal patterns
Phylogeny| Motif | Similarity | Motif summary |
|---|---|---|
| A10 | 100.00% | The sun gets its sparkling eyes (eye) from an animal. |
| A11C | 100.00% | The Sun and Moon kill a monster whose eyes shine differently. At first, the Moon takes the brighter eye, but then swaps with the Sun. |
| B23 | 100.00% | The deity forbids the use of fire for cooking and punishes those who violate the prohibition. |
| G12 | 100.00% | A huge tree bearing various fruits and/or containing water in its trunk grows out of a human body or is a transformed human being. |
| G27 | 100.00% | Cultivated plants appear together with urine or in the place where the hero urinated. |
| J12A | 100.00% | A girl or two sisters come to an old woman who invites them to marry her son. In reality, he is a worm, a snake or a penis, which his mother hides in a vessel during the day. The girl (sisters) do not allow him to approach them and run away. See motif J12. |
| J33A | 100.00% | A boy, a young man, or two children live in an old woman's house. They kill her husband—a man or a large animal—and make a scarecrow out of him. Angry that her husband is not responding to her, the old woman beats the scarecrow and then discovers that her husband has been killed. See motif J33. |
| J51B | 100.00% | The moon has been eaten or has died and its body has decomposed. It is revived, but a small part (the bone) is missing. This determines the characteristics of the moon or the characteristics of human anatomy. |
| G3 | 99.75% | Cultivated plants or fertile soil for their cultivation are hidden inside the rock. Birds or thunder gods pierce a hole in the rock. |
| G16 | 99.41% | Ants are the first to find cultivated plants that are unknown to others and concentrated in one place. |
See the 100 most similar distributions →
Map of motif dispersal
DistributionDrag the map to pan, use the scroll wheel to zoom — choose a texture or projection below
Traditions
13 recordedThis motif has been recorded in 13 traditions: Nuba, Yoruba; incl Ife), Nupe, Bini (Edo), Engenni, Chamba, Dakka, Kukuruku, Upper Tanana (Nebesna), Tanacross, Koyukon, Sarsee (Tsuu T'ina), Aztec; Aztec and Teotihuacan iconography, Tojolabal, Chuj, Jacalteca, Kanjobal, Mocho (incl Tuzantec), Acatec, Mam, Ixil, Aguatec, Avakatec, Quiche, Achí, Cakchiquel, Pocomchi, Pocomam, Gulf Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Choco: Embera, Nonama (Waunana), XVI century Dabaiba, pre-Columbian iconography of Sinu, Napo (Quijo), Kanelo (“Jungle Kechua”)
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