Asian Folklore Studies articles from April 1996

Asian Folklore Studies archives from April 1996

Tagore's 'Lokashahitya': the oral tradition in Bengali children's rhymes. (Rabindranath Tagore)
April 1, 1996... This article presents a translation and critical discussion of "Chhelebhulano Chharha," the first in a collection of essays on Bengali folklore entitled Lokashahitya [Folklore], published in 1907 by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).(1) Tagore's...

The festival of the Nine Emperor Gods in Malaysia: myth, ritual, and symbol.
April 1, 1996... The Festival of the Nine Emperor Gods (Jiuhuangye) in Malaysia is a form of temple fair celebrated only at temples dedicated to these gods. In a 1984 survey I found thirty-nine such temples in Peninsular Malaysia and none in the states of Sabah...

Legends by the numbers: the symbolism of numbers in the 'Secret History of the Mongols.' (13th-century text)
April 1, 1996... INTRODUCTION: NUMBER PATTERNS IN THE SECRET HISTORY Oral histories that have made the transition to a standardized literary form often retain a variety of mechanisms that originally served as aids in the processes of memorization and...

"Suan the guesser": a Filipino doctor know-all (AT 1641).
April 1, 1996... Someone asked [Swamiji] what [the myth] meant. "He said, 'You should never assign a meaning to a myth because if you assign a meaning, the mind clamps onto just that one meaning. Then it's no longer active, because when a story is active it...

Female mountain spirits in Korea: a neglected tradition.
April 1, 1996... The worship of mountain spirits in Korea is one of the most ubiquitous aspects of the nation's folk religion. While the mountain-spirit cult is often described in the literature as focused on a grandfather-like primary spirit called San-sin,(1)...

The folklore of geckos: ethnographic data from South and West Asia.
April 1, 1996... The Gekkonidae form a very large group of lizards, with at least 73 genera, 668 species, and 257 subspecies.(1) Geckos are typically small, with flat bodies and a total length of under forty centimeters. They regularly shed their skin, and can...

ARV: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, 1993.
April 1, 1996... The two volumes of ARV (which means "heritage") open a new chapter in the history of this seasoned, representative yearbook of Nordic folklore scholarship. Focused on Scandinavian philology and folklore, the yearbook was originally confined to...

The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol.
April 1, 1996... One of my first purchases in Japan was a map of Kamakura. Freshly immersed in the study of Japanese, I thought that a good way to make use of my weekly Thursday holiday would be to visit the area's temples and shrines. However, when I opened the...

Chusei o kangaeru: Shokunin to geino.
April 1, 1996... The publisher advertises the Chusei o kangaeru series as a "series of introductions aimed at the construction of a new image of history." The books are more than mere introductions, however, possessing as they do a magical attraction for their...

Japan: A View from the Bath.
April 1, 1996... Last summer I accompanied a group of volunteer workers from Japan, the U.S.A., and Canada to the countryside of Northeast Thailand. At the end of a hard day's labor under the relentless tropical sun the American, Canadian, and Thai workers either...

Geist und Geschichte der Theorien japanischer Teekunst.
April 1, 1996... Chanoyu - there is probably no other art form in Japan that has had such a lasting influence on such a wide range of cultural activities: flower arrangement, ceramics, arts and crafts, landscape, architecture, aesthetics, and human erudition (in...

Onkai to Nihonjin: Wakayama-ken no warabe uta kenkyu.
April 1, 1996... Few countries in the world have outpaced Japan in the collection and publication of children's songs (warabe uta). Time and again Japanese scholars, educators, musicians, and poets have turned to this genre to learn more about what they believed...

Die einheimische Religion Japans. Teil 2: Synkretistische Lehren und religiose Entwicklungen von der Kamakura - bis zum Beginn der Edo-Zeit.
April 1, 1996... Let the reader be warned: this review is written by a nonspecialist in the history of Japan's "native religion." I will, therefore, leave it to others to judge the accuracy of the historical details and textual interpretations with which the book...

Marchen aus der Mandschurei.
April 1, 1996... On the desk in front of me is, of course, the volume under review. However, also on my desk just now is another book, Malaiische Marchen, edited by Paul Hambruch in Jena and printed in Gothic type in the year 1922. Both of these beautiful volumes...

A God's Own Tale: The Book of Transformations of Wenchang, the Divine Lord of Zitong.
April 1, 1996... Wenchang, the Divine Lord of Zitong (Zitong dijun), originated as the Viper (ezi), a local nature spirit of northern Sichuan Province, where his cult may have existed from as early as Neolithic times (1). Terry Kleeman shows how over the...

Taiwan no dokyo to minkan shinko.
April 1, 1996... In contrast to what the title would lead one to expect, this book covers many aspects of traditional Chinese religion, not only on Taiwan but in mainland China as well. Author Liu Chih-Wan draws both on his own research data and on an extensive...

Studies on Vietnamese Language and Literature: A Preliminary Bibliography.
April 1, 1996... During the Vietnam War, tens of millions of dollars were spent by the U.S. government on surveys, interviews, field studies, and documentary translations, all designed to inform the higher government echelons about the Vietnamese enemy and the...

Being Kammu: My Village, My Life.
April 1, 1996... This is the second book by Damrong Tayanin on aspects of his native Kammu culture, following Hunting and Fishing in a Kammu Village (1991). (The Kammu [Khmu] are a highland minority group that inhabits the mountainous area of northwestern Laos...

Berinareu: The Religious Epic of the Tirurais.
April 1, 1996... The religious epic Berinareu is known by all Tirurais and is regarded by them as one of their most precious traditions. The text published here is the transcription of a ten-hour performance by a Tiruray singer that was tape-recorded by the...

The Magic Crocodile and Other Folktales from Indonesia.
April 1, 1996... This is a book of twenty-nine Indonesian folktales selected from areas as widely separated as Aceh in northern Sumatra in the west to Irian Jaya in the east. They were gathered together to give young people "an understanding of the Indonesian...

Geister und Menschen. Mythen, Marchen und neue Geschichten.
April 1, 1996... Geister und Menschen represents the result of a lifetime of work among the Wampar. Hans Fischer reports that he made his first contact with the Warnpar people nearly forty years ago, in 1958. Since then he has made seven return visits of varying...

Oralitat und Schriftlichkeit mongolischer Spielmannsdichtung.
April 1, 1996... Stimulated by Lauri Honko's question concerning the genetic relationship between oral epics and written texts, Heissig sets out in this volume to analyze a number of stories (particularly bensen uliger [Heftgeschichten]) collected from Mongol...

Heldenmarchen versus Heldenepos? Strukturelle Fragen zur Entwicklung altaischer Heldenmarchen.
April 1, 1996... Walther Heissig's aim in this volume is to give an argued answer to the question of whether marchen that are about heroes derive from heroic epics, or vice versa. He analyzes seven narratives collected among the western Mongols of Sinkiang,...

Schamanen auf dem Dach der Welt: Trance, Heilung und Initiation in Kleintibet.
April 1, 1996... Although the traditions of the Buddhist lamas have attracted more attention, there are in Tibet traditions of spirit-mediums that form an important feature of the living folk religion and that have strongly influenced Tibetan Buddhism as well. In...

Ghosts: Life and Death in North India.
April 1, 1996... This is the ninth volume in a series of monographs based on the authors' fieldwork in Shanti Nagar, a village in the Union Territory of Delhi, North India. In their earlier monographs the authors discussed social organization, economics, rites of...

Drama and Ritual in Early Hinduism.
April 1, 1996... This interesting book, translated from the Russian, explores the origin of classical Sanskrit theater in ritual practice, especially those rituals associated with puja ceremonies. Based on an extensive analysis of ancient Vedic and Sanskrit...

Folk Traditions of the Arab World: A Guide to Motif Classification, 2 vols.
April 1, 1996... The efforts of Prof. El-Shamy are more than welcome - the publication of a folktale index for Arabic cultures is long overdue. The discipline is grateful to both the Bloomington Folklore Institute and the Indiana University Press for promoting...

Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights.
April 1, 1996... This handsome volume presents a thoughtful, carefully structured, and well-documented study based on the author's doctoral dissertation (which bears the more representative title, "Stylistic Features in Selected Tales from the Thousand and One...

Medieval Agriculture and Islamic Science: The Almanac of a Yemeni Sultan.
April 1, 1996... This book is the sixth in the University of Washington's series on the Near East. The main section comprises a text of 256 pages, preceded by a foreword and followed by a detailed bibliography, an index, a gazetteer of place-names, and a general...

The Dragon Boat Festival.
April 1, 1996... This videotape is a documentary on the rituals of a Dragon Boat Race held in June 1989 in Heyang Village, a Han community on the Min River in southeastern Fujian Province. For some time now it has been extremely difficult to conduct fieldwork on...