Asian Folklore Studies articles from October 1994

Asian Folklore Studies archives from October 1994

Fifteen years of folk song collection in Japan: reports and recordings of the "Emergency Folk Song Survey."
October 1, 1994... Over the last fifteen years a major effort to collect and preserve Japanese folk songs (min'yo) has been made by the Japanese Ministry of Culture in conjunction with regional boards of education. This "emergency survey" includes tapes of some...

The Cultural Properties Protection Law and Japan's folk performing arts.
October 1, 1994... The Cultural Properties Protection Law (Bunkazai hogoho), and in particular its provision for designating important intangible folk cultural properties, has influenced Japan's folk performing arts in three important ways. The law establishes...

Tracing some Mongol oral motifs in a Chinese prosimetric Ming novel of 1478.
October 1, 1994... Certain narrative motifs present in the Hua guan suo zhuan, a recently rediscovered Chinese novel first printed in 1478, are also found in present-day orally transmitted chivalric epics sung by east Mongolian minstrels. This paper examines...

An ethnobotanical folktale of the Ao Naga in India.
October 1, 1994... The Ao Naga of Nagaland in India have a rich store of orally transmitted wisdom. Reproduced here is the legend of Champichanglangba, a man with great magical powers, who married the daughter of the god Lichaba. Lichaba wished to determine the...

The songs of Tij: a genre of critical commentary for women in Nepal. (includes appendix of song lyrics)
October 1, 1994... The Tij festival in Nepal has been analyzed primarily for Hindu high caste women's performance of rituals that reaffirm patrilineal principles. However, the songs that women, and sometimes men, compose anew each year for this annual festival...

Folk narrative literature in Chinese Nushu: an amazing new discovery.
October 1, 1994... A unique type of writing used exclusively by local women is found in the mountainous areas of Hunan Province in central China. This form of writing, referred to as Nushu by the local people, is used for correspondence between the women of the...

Les grands traites de Huainan zi.
October 1, 1994... THE Huainan zi [Book of the master of Huainan] is a philosophical and narrative text of twenty-one chapters that dates back to the court of Liu An (179--122 B.C.E.), grandson of Liu Bang and prince of Huainan. A comprehensive volume, the work...

Mythe et philosophie a l'aube de la Chine imperiale: Etudes sur le Huainan zi.
October 1, 1994... THE Huainan zi [Book of the master of Huainan] is a philosophical and narrative text of twenty-one chapters that dates back to the court of Liu An (179--122 B.C.E.), grandson of Liu Bang and prince of Huainan. A comprehensive volume, the work...

Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought: Chapters Three, Four and Five of the Huainanzi.
October 1, 1994... THE Huainan zi [Book of the master of Huainan] is a philosophical and narrative text of twenty-one chapters that dates back to the court of Liu An (179--122 B.C.E.), grandson of Liu Bang and prince of Huainan. A comprehensive volume, the work...

The Textual History of the Huainan Tzu.
October 1, 1994... THE Huainan zi [Book of the master of Huainan] is a philosophical and narrative text of twenty-one chapters that dates back to the court of Liu An (179--122 B.C.E.), grandson of Liu Bang and prince of Huainan. A comprehensive volume, the work...

Shinto shrines or Shinto temples?
October 1, 1994... DIFFERENT words are used in the Japanese language to refer to places of Shinto worship. The type and status of the worship facility determine the particular word used. In the English language, however, all such facilities, regardless of type or...

Asian Mythologies.
October 1, 1994... In 1981 Yves BONNEFOY, professor of comparative poetics at the College des France, published his two-volume Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des societes traditionnelles et du monde antique, with entries primarily by Francophone...

Asia's Cultural Mosaic: An Anthropological introduction.
October 1, 1994... Every now and then a textbook crosses one's desk that is so good that the reviewer wonders if he can possibly do it justice. Asia's Cultural Mosaic: An Anthropological Introduction is such a book. Designed as a core text for undergraduate...

Proverbs Are Never out of Season: Popular Wisdom in the Modern Age.
October 1, 1994... Publishers are hesitant about producing collections of essays, saying that whole books sell better. Personally, I like collections of essays, particularly those that result from a lifetime's interest in a subject. I feel that the articles...

Japanese Social Organization.
October 1, 1994... T. Sugiyama LEBRA, already well known for her editorship of Japanese Culture and Behavior: Selected Readings (1974) and her comprehensive work Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment (1984), has now produced another reader on Japanese...

Rice as Self: Japanese Identities Through Time.
October 1, 1994... Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's book on the significance of rice in Japanese culture could not have come at a better time, given that the 1993 rice crop was the worst in postwar Japan, and given that the Hosokawa government's historic decision to open...

Sumo no uchuron: Juryoku wo hanatsu rikischitachi.
October 1, 1994... In Sumo no uchuron Sogawa Tsuneo of Waseda University has brought together six articles on the ever-popular subject of sumo wrestling. Taken together they illuminate a number of different aspects of this fascinating sport. Two articles in...

The Indigenous Religion and Theravada Buddhism in Ban Da Tiu: A Dai Lue Village in Yunnan, China.
October 1, 1994... It is still relatively rare to find modern anthropological studies, based on fieldwork and written in English, by scholars from the People's Republic of China. The present study is one of them. Guan Jian has given us an extraordinarily valuable...

Schamanen und Geisterbeschworer in der ostlichen Mongolei. Gesammelte Aufsatze.
October 1, 1994... In his lifelong study of Mongol culture, Walther Heissig has focused on two closely related areas: Mongol religion and Mongol epics/epic poetry. With regard to the former, he considered shamanism and popular religion to be of such importance...

Visayan Vignettes: Ethnographic Traces of a Philippine Island.
October 1, 1994... Visayan Vignettes begins with glimpses into the life of the Visayan people, then proceeds to an introduction of the island of Siquijor, south of Cebu Province in the Philippines. The description of the island is enlivened with quotations from...

The Maiden of Many Nations: The Skymaiden Who Married a Man from Earth.
October 1, 1994... The Maiden of Many Nations is a collection of narratives from a wide number of ethnic groups throughout the Philippines. The tales are all variations on a motif widely known in folklore studies as "the swanmaiden." The common narrative...

Hunting and Fishing in a Kammu Village.
October 1, 1994... The Kammu (Khmu) are a highland minority group that inhabits the mountainous borderland between northern Thailand and upper Laos. Speakers of a Mon-Khmer language, they are commonly regarded as members of the "autochthonous" population of...

Malaysian Shadow Play and Music: Continuity of an Oral Tradition.
October 1, 1994... Traditional shadow puppet theater is found in various forms in both insular and mainland Southeast Asia. These forms range from large-scale productions associated with classical court traditions to relatively small-sized folk-art productions in...

Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Opera.
October 1, 1994... Works written in the 1970s on the Malaysian musical-theatrical form known as bangsawan generally represent it as a type of "traditional" theater (MUSTAPHA 1974; RAHMAH 1975). These works suggest that bangsawan has been in existence for many...

L'Indonesie.
October 1, 1994... Travel stories, diaries of travel, guidebooks, and books describing other lands have gained a permanent place on the bookshelves of the so-called rich countries over the past few decades. Until recently the genre was the domain of novelists,...

In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place.
October 1, 1994... Writing an ethnography is never an easy matter, since it forces the author to select from the mounds of information collected in the field just those data that will reflect the understandings he or she gained of the people the book discusses....

Veda-Laksana Vedic Ancillary literature: A Descriptive Bibliography.
October 1, 1994... This masterly work, the fruit of extended research by a noted specialist in Indology, is in my opinion a "must" for any serious student of the Veda. An extensive manual of 755 pages, it includes a total of 1619 entries, together with an...

Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devi-Mahatmya and a Study of Its Interpretation.
October 1, 1994... Thomas Coburn, known for some time as a scholar of the Hindu goddess tradition, continues his study in Encountering the Goddess. The focus of Coburn's work is the Devi-Mahatmya, an approximately 1,500-year-old Sanskrit text exalting the...

The Pomegranate Princess and Other Tales from India.
October 1, 1994... This slim, elegant little book, attractively bound and illustrated, is tailor-made to flip through for a short trip to the Indian countryside. Reading this book, one goes into the ocean of the past--a past that is the present for the Indian...

Gods, Demons and Others.
October 1, 1994... "He is part and parcel of the Indian village community" (1). So begins the introductory essay, "The World of the Storyteller," in this new reprint of the author's 1964 classic. These words ring true even today, when cable TV and a wide...

The Jews of Kurdistan.
October 1, 1994... Erich BRAUER, the only trained ethnologist in what was the British mandate of Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s, produced his Yahude Kurdistan. Mehqar ethnologi [The Jews of Kurdistan. An ethnological study (1947)] as an "ethnography at a...

Initiation and Religion: A Case Study from the Wosera of Papua New Guinea.
October 1, 1994... Over a half-century has passed since the famous anthropologist Evans Pritchard published his now-classic Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (1937). This work, based on thoroughgoing fieldwork, provided us with a certain perspective...

Types and Motifs of the Judeo-Spanish Folktales.
October 1, 1994... Types and Motifs of the Judeo-Spanish Folktales, the book version of Haboucha's 1973 dissertation for John Hopkins University, is the first comprehensive description of the Judeo-Spanish oral folktale. Altogether it indexes 619 Judeo-Spanish...