Asian Folklore Studies articles from April 1994

Asian Folklore Studies archives from April 1994

Omocha: things to play (or not play) with. (folk toys in Japan)
April 1, 1994... Abstract How closely does the English term and Western notion of "toy" match the Japanese concept of omocha? Leaving out of consideration playthings currently in use among Japanese children - predominantly of modern industrial...

From protean ape to handsome saint: the Monkey King. (Chinese folkloric character)
April 1, 1994... Abstract The novel Monkey or Journey to the West tells of a simian's revolt against Heaven, of its defeat by the Buddha, and of its later being recruited as a pilgrim to protect the monk Tripitaka on his quest for scriptures in India....

Shamans and mountain spirits in Hunza. (northen Pakistan)
April 1, 1994... Abstract The Hunzakut, a high-mountain people in the western Karakoram mountains of northern Pakistan, possess a shamanistic tradition centered around religious specialists known as bitan. These practitioners inhale the smoke of burning...

Folklore and folklorism in Kazakhstan.
April 1, 1994... Abstract In the sphere of traditional Kazakh folk art we can identify the following subspheres: a) the oral tradition itself, i.e., the traditional musical and poetical art of the Kazakhs; b) folklorism "from above," i.e., ideological...

A collection of Jaffna Tamil riddles from oral tradition.
April 1, 1994... Abstract This paper presents, for the first time, a collection of nearly fifty orally transmitted Tamil riddles from Jaffna, Sri Lanka, with English translation. It also provides comparative material from Tamil Nadu, India, drawn from...

Recent PCR scholarship on Chinese myths. (People's Republic of China)
April 1, 1994... The first volume of Zhongguo shenhua, a journal of research on the myths of China, was published in Beijing in 1987 under the editorship of Yuan Ke, the leading scholar on the subject in the People's Republic of China. The volume, which is...

Amanita muscaria: the gorgeous mushroom. (appearance of a Japanese mushroom in folklore)
April 1, 1994... The Amanita muscaria is one of the most gorgeous mushrooms of the fungal world, and a delight for the eye if not for the palate of most. It has a broad scarlet cap - speckled with tiny soft conical white patches arranged concentrically -...

The Playful Revolution: Theatre and Liberation in Asia.
April 1, 1994... GENERAL Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new type of political theatre has emerged in Asia. Known as "people's theatre," "popular theatre for social change," or "theatre of liberation," it developed as a way to help the poor and...

Lamas, Princes, and Brigands: Joseph Rock's Photographs of the Tibetan Borderlands of China.
April 1, 1994... CHINA In order to appreciate the significance of Lamas, Princes, and Brigands, it is necessary first to know something of the man behind this remarkable collection of photographs: Joseph Rock (1884-1962), one of the most interesting...

Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature.
April 1, 1994... In a comprehensive overview of Chinese literature published in 1966, Liu Wu-chi traced the origins of Chinese literature to two sources: the Shih ching [Character no conversion] [Classic of poetry], an anthology of poems - said to have been...

Domesticated Deities and Auspicious Emblems: The Iconography of Everyday Life in Village China.
April 1, 1994... In 1991 Professor Po of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, arranged a colorful exhibition of wood-block prints and paper cuts from the collection he had assembled over a forty-year period. He was at the time a senior residential fellow...

T'ien-fei hsien-sheng lu: Die Aufzeichnungen von der manifestireten Heiligkeit der Himmelsprinzessin. Einleitung, Uberesetzung, Kommentar.
April 1, 1994... This book, the dissertation of a young German sinologist, presents a translation and discussion of a Qing-dynasty hagiographic document known as the Tianfei xiansheng lu [Records of the manifest sageliness of the heavenly princess]. This...

Matsuri: Festivals of a Japanese Town.
April 1, 1994... "In order to understand a culture, one has to know how people in that culture celebrate." Native scholars of Japanese culture and religion seem never to have felt any difficulty in accepting this "golden rule." From the time of such pioneers as...

Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, Volume 9: Text, Context and Performance in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
April 1, 1994... Although ethnomusicologists often claim that their field encompasses all the world's musics, a look at current publications shows that several specific areas of the globe are receiving by far the greatest portion of ethnomusicological...

Himalayan Dialogue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal.
April 1, 1994... This remarkable book is the result of two and a half years of anthropological research in the northern Nepalese village of Tshap between 1981 and 1983. Tshap is one of the villages in the Gyasumdo region established more than a hundred years...

Sumatran Politics and Poetics: Gayo History, 1900-1989.
April 1, 1994... When the culture-historical school in the German-speaking area came to an end during the first half of our century, it was French sociology, British social anthropology, and American cultural anthropology that took over, led sometimes by an...

Purana Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts.
April 1, 1994... The essays in this volume were originally presented at a conference on the Puranas held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in August 1985. The authors offer insightful and informative commentaries on some of the basic themes of Indian...

A Carnival of Parting: The Tale of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand as Sung and Told by Madhu Natisar Nath of Ghatiyali, Rajasthan.
April 1, 1994... Ann Gold has provided us with sensitive commentaries on Rajasthani culture in the past (Gold 1988). In this volume she presents a critical study and translation of two interrelated epic narratives, providing a reflexive discussion of the...

And Thus Became Man and World.
April 1, 1994... In the good old days when anthropologists lacked sufficient field data concerning the diverse cultures of mankind, one of the main tasks of the anthropologist was to visit unknown "primitive" peoples in remote areas of the world and collect as...

Women's Voices in Hawaii.
April 1, 1994... Women's Voices in Hawaii is a collection of oral history interviews with older women living in Hawaii. The editor/interviewer herself, a specialist in Asian history who now teaches at a university on the North American mainland, was brought up...