Resumen:
This article invites the reader to revisit the ancient and universal genre of the lullaby. We start by pointing out that the lullaby has almost never been studied in its natural settings: instead, it is often approached exclusively as a heavily proofread literary text stripped from its context. Further, we focus on tendana, a lullaby from the island of Soqotra. The tendanas used for our analysis were collected from a largely preliterate, non-media-exposed culture and in natural settings. By running a comparison between tendanas and lullabies from a number of other cultures, we conclude that, although there are a number of similarities between them, tendanas also have several unique traits, among them a different sense of safety and danger, only sporadic use of onomatopoetic vocabulary, and an absence of cumulative and counting elements.
