Asian Folklore Studies articles from October 1 1995

Asian Folklore Studies archives from October 1 1995

Traditional content and narrative structure in the Hindi commercial cinema.
October 1, 1995... For over eighty years the commercial cinema of India has formed one of the most dominant and distinctive features of the subcontinent's popular culture. The Indian motion picture industry is among the world's largest, with a combined output of...

The last tiger in East Java: symbolic continuity in ecological change.
October 1, 1995... The Javan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaicus) is for all practical purposes extinct, the last one having been shot, it is said, by either President Suharto of Indonesia, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, or the late Shah of Iran. In East Java,...

Mountain gods and trance mediums: a Qinghai Tibetan summer festival.
October 1, 1995... Zhangjia is a small village about eight kilometers from Rongwu (Tongren) in Huangnan (Malhu) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture(1) of Qinghai Province.(2) Situated between two mountains near the Gecha River, the community comprises 133 families and...

Restoring the 'Epic of Hou Yi.
October 1, 1995... Hou Yi, also known as I Yi or Ren Yi, is perhaps the best-known hero of Chinese mythology. A master archer, he is said to have lived in the age of the legendary Emperor Yao, when the Earth had ten suns. In what is perhaps his most fabled exploit,...

Yamato-takeru: an 'Arthurian' hero in Japanese tradition.
October 1, 1995... Of all the heroes in Japanese legendry, none is more "Arthurian" than Yamato-takeru, "The Brave of Yamato." Indeed, the tales of Yamato-takeru's strength, courage, leadership, feats of arms, love affairs, magical sword, and untimely death all...

The woman who married a horse: five ways of looking at a Chinese folktale.
October 1, 1995... This article is a self-conscious exercise in what has been called the "toolbox approach to the study of myth" (O'FLAHERTY 1980, 5), or the "polymethodic" approach as opposed to the "methodologically sectarian" approach (SHARPE 1987, 88). It...

A common nomenclature for traditional rhymes.(Issues)
October 1, 1995... There presently exist a number of names for the traditional oral rhymes most commonly referred to as "nursery rhymes" and "Mother Goose rhymes." In the present paper I would like to briefly review the history of these nomenclatures, then propose...

Folk Law: Essays in the Theory and Practice of 'Lex Non Scripta', 2 vols.
October 1, 1995... The field of the anthropology of law has been growing, with each stage of development marked by the opening of new areas of study, among them ancient law, primitive law, tribal law, and folk law in legal pluralism. Outstanding achievements have...

Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia.
October 1, 1995... This is an exceptionally useful work, likely to please all who are professionally involved with the study of modern Southeast and East Asian societies, but especially anthropologists and students of religion. Asian Visions of Authority...

Memory and Totalitarianism, International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, vol. 1.
October 1, 1995... This volume represents the joining of two journals, Life Stories/Recits de vie (Europe) and the International Journal of Oral History (North America), into a new yearbook that will be published by Oxford University Press. If subsequent volumes...

Shamanism, History and the State.
October 1, 1995... Based on a conference at King's College, Cambridge, that took place in October 1989, this volume presents nine essays that attempt new interpretations of shamanic activities in their historical and political contexts. The reader of these "case...

The Japanese New Year: Spirit and Symbol.
October 1, 1995... May it be said right away: this volume will be much welcomed by all those who have always heard how important a festival New Year is in Japan, but who have never had a chance to see more than the public side of it. Here such people are given the...

The Origin of Ethnography in Japan: Yanagita Kunio and his Times.
October 1, 1995... Although Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) remains well-known and often-read in Japan, this pioneer in ethnography has not come fully to the attention of readers in the West, largely due to the lack of good translations and evaluations of his work....

Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China.
October 1, 1995... During the period from 1984 to 1991, Kenneth Dean embarked on a well-designed course of fieldwork with the goal of discovering the state of the Daoist religion in Fujian Province. In preparation, Dean spent a year in Taiwan observing the Daoist...

Daoistische Schriftmagie. Interpretation zu den Schriftamuletten 'Fu' im 'Daozang.'
October 1, 1995... The Chinese writing system, with its distinct characters, is both essentially pictorial and highly abstract; it shows a multiplicity of focus and meaning, yet is full of graphical inspiration. For this reason writing in China was, even from the...

The Three-Inch Golden Lotus: A Novel on Footbinding.
October 1, 1995... If a novel is itself improper, perhaps a reviewer is allowed to begin a review in a slightly improper way, that is to say without a single word of comment. Let us thus consider first this passage, lifted from the eleven-page preface of The...

Why Snails Have Shells: Minority and Han Folktales of China.
October 1, 1995... The body of this collection comprises three "Han Chinese" and seventeen "minority" folktales from China. Pages at the end of the volume provide information about each minority represented. Carolyn Han has retold the stories in admirable English -...

Fragen der mongolischen Heldendichtung, Teil 5. Vortrage des 6. Epensymposiums des Sonderforschungsbereichs 12, Bonn 1988.
October 1, 1995... The heroic epic of the Eurasian peoples is an ancient tradition, going back to the preliterate stages of each of the emergent pastoral nomadic tribes that arose in the distant reaches of Mongolia. Although written versions of almost all early...

The Teller of Seventy Lies and Other Mongolian Folktales.
October 1, 1995... More than one thousand Mongolian fairy tales collected among the Mongolian ethnic groups in the People's Republic of China have been published within the last twenty years. Roughly one hundred of these have been translated into Western languages,...

Hmong at the Turning Point.
October 1, 1995... Readers who feel more comfortable with English than with French will surely welcome this new English-language version of Dr. Yang's book Les Hmong du Laos face au developpement (1975), and will want to thank editor Jeanne Blake for her...

The Lan Na Twelve-Month Traditions.
October 1, 1995... This is a useful, though poorly edited, work on the annual ritual cycle of the Tai Yuan (Khon Muang), or Northern Thai, people, with special reference to the ritual observances within the city of Chiang Mai, and with some comparative materials...

Princess Kalabati and Other Tales.
October 1, 1995... Bengal folktales were already being collected and published long before Bengal was divided into Indian West Bengal and independent Bangladesh. The twelve folktales in this volume were selected by Niaz Zaman (associate professor of English at the...

Elder Brothers Story: An Oral Epic of Tamil.
October 1, 1995... To say it from the start: the reviewer congratulates The Institute of Asian Studies for making available to the scholar and connoisseur of fine literature a very interesting body of Tamil vernacular literature, part of which is orally...

The Warrior Code of India's Sacred Song.
October 1, 1995... In The Warrior Code of India's Sacred Song Mary Carroll Smith addresses a question that has long interested Indologists: What was the original epic story that formed the core of the Mahabharata? Her search was based on an examination of the...

The Raja's Magic Clothes: Re-Visioning Kingship and Divinity in England's India.
October 1, 1995... Pudukkottai, a South Indian principality of the Tondaiman Rajas, is fast accumulating a posthumous preeminence, albeit of an academic sort, that belies its tiny size and marginality to the British Empire. In 1987 Nicholas DIRKS published The...

Die Erzalungen der Masdi Galin Hanom / Qesseha-ye Mashdi Galin Khanom.
October 1, 1995... Folk narratives of the Islamic Middle East were first studied by Western scholars out of philological or dialectologial interest. Then, animated by patriotic sentiments, indigenous scholars joined in collecting and eventually established their...

Dastanha-ye-sirin: Funfzig persische Volksbuchlein aus der zweiten Halfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts.
October 1, 1995... Folk narratives of the Islamic Middle East were first studied by Western scholars out of philological or dialectologial interest. Then, animated by patriotic sentiments, indigenous scholars joined in collecting and eventually established their...

Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia I: The Poetry of ad-Dindan, Bedouin Bard in Southern Najd.
October 1, 1995... In 1989 P. Marcel Kurpershoek, a career diplomat in The Netherlands foreign service who had studied Arabic language and literature at the University of Leiden, was granted permission by Saudi Arabia to extend his stay in the country for the...