Asian Folklore Studies articles from October 1996

Asian Folklore Studies archives from October 1996

The looks of Laozi.
October 1, 1996... Your Excellency, I know it was the Archangel. He had one hundred and forty pairs of wings, and he was clothed in linen. He had an illuminated feminine silver head, a purple, slender neck, golden yellow radiant arms with huge biceps, a delicate...

Religious belief in a Buddhist merchant community, Nepal.
October 1, 1996... Scholars of religion have used the questionnaire and opinion poll to render richly nuanced portraits of religious belief in Judeo-Christian societies. Few attempts have been made, however, to apply these tools in studies of Muslim, Buddhist, and...

The thay: masters in Hue, Vietnam.
October 1, 1996... The people of Hue, the former capital of Annam, have preserved many traditions, cults, and ceremonies that attempt to explain and control the vagaries of fortune. When they wish to contact the world beyond and understand the reasons for sickness...

"Stone camels and clear springs": the Salar's Samarkand origins.
October 1, 1996... The Salar are a Turkic-speaking Islamic people who numbered 87,697 in 1990 (Han 1994, 40)(1) Most Salar reside in Xunhua(2) Salar Autonomous County in the eastern part of China's Northwestern Qinghai Province (Koko Nor), in adjacent Hualong...

Type- and motif-indices 1980-1995: an inventory.
October 1, 1996... In the past few years narrative research - which for decades was focused on content analysis and comparative studies of motifs - has turned to new issues. Interest is now being directed to processes of transmission and to the interdependence of...

Chinese Mythology: An Introduction.
October 1, 1996... Chinese mythology has recently been receiving increased attention, as reflected in the growing number of books on the subject. This is true even in the PRC, where, after decades of ideological neglect, the scholar Yuan K'o (who contributes a...

The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich.
October 1, 1996... VERGANGENHEITSBEWALTIGUNG, "coming to terms with the past," has been a controversial topic in Germany for many years as scholars, intellectuals, and public figures have faced the legacy of National Socialism. The issue gained particular...

Folklore and Fascism: The Reich Institute for German Volkskunde.
October 1, 1996... VERGANGENHEITSBEWALTIGUNG, "coming to terms with the past," has been a controversial topic in Germany for many years as scholars, intellectuals, and public figures have faced the legacy of National Socialism. The issue gained particular...

Volkische Wissenschaft. Gestalten und Tendenzen der deutschen un osterreichischen Volkskunde in der ersten Halfte des 20.Jahrhunderts.
October 1, 1996... VERGANGENHEITSBEWALTIGUNG, "coming to terms with the past," has been a controversial topic in Germany for many years as scholars, intellectuals, and public figures have faced the legacy of National Socialism. The issue gained particular...

In memoriam: Francisco Radaza Demetrio, 1920-1996.(Obituary)
October 1, 1996... A man who loves his fellow men, loves his art. Hippocrates, Precepts (adapted) Ignacio de Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, wrote that the type of person desired by the Society was a person of compassion. Francis Xavier, one of the...

Shaman: An International Journal for Shamanistic Research.
October 1, 1996... A new journal for shamanic studies has appeared: Shamanism: An International Journal for Shamanistic Research. Ake Hultkrantz (Sweden), honorary editor-in-chief, and editors Mihaly Hoppal and Adam Molnar (both Hungary) explain that the journal...

The Singer of Tales in Performance: Voices in Performance and Text.
October 1, 1996... Inaugurating a new series from Indiana University Press entitled "Voices in Performance and Text," Foley's most recent book is an ambitious attempt to devise a composite theory of Word-Power as derived from the performance itself on the one hand,...

Myth and Poetics Series: The Singer Resumes the Tale.
October 1, 1996... "This is Albert B. Lord's book," says its editor in the preface (xi). Most of it was written by Lord himself, and Mary Louise Lord made every attempt to bring it close to what her husband had planned. The book consists often chapters, two of...

Splendor of the Dragon: Costumes of the Ryukyu Kingdom.
October 1, 1996... Splendor of the Dragon is the catalogue for an exhibition of Okinawan costumes held at the Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles from November 1995 through January 1996. The beautifully illustrated volume introduces the cultural background of...

Namazu-e Shinsai to Nihon bunka (Namazu-e: Earthquakes and Japanese Culture).
October 1, 1996... In 1855, near the end of the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), a disastrous earthquake shook the city of Edo, now known as Tokyo. In the course of a couple of months the city was flooded with more than three hundred kinds of namazu-e (catfish prints),...

The Korean Singer of Tales.
October 1, 1996... Anyone who has ever been to Korea and attended a performance of the musical narrative known as p'ansori will probably never forget it. The art and vocal technique of singing p'ansori is unique and remarkable in that the music seems to come from...

Songs of the Shaman: The Ritual Chants of the Korean 'mudang.'
October 1, 1996... What are Korean shaman songs? The infinitely variable utterances of divinely inspired women? An ancient corpus, long frozen into text like The Nine Songs (CH'U 1973) or the Manchu Tale of the Nisan Shamaness (NOWAK and DURANT 1977)? The truth,...

Laughing at the Tao: Debates Among Buddhists and Taoists in Medieval China.
October 1, 1996... This new book by Professor Kohn is a fully annotated translation of a sixth-century anti-Taoist polemical text written by the official Zhen Luan during the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 560-78) of the Northern Zhou dynasty (556-81). The text, entitled...

South of the Clouds: Tales from Yunan.
October 1, 1996... Artist Ting Shao Kuang's cover illustration for this beautiful volume already provides the reader with an introduction to its contents. The graphic simplicity of the picture makes one hear the cries of the cicadas and the faint echo of the...

Introduction a l'alchimie interrieure taoiste: De l'unite et de la multiplicite.
October 1, 1996... This new volume on inner alchemy (neidan), the dominant mode of Taoist thought and practice since the Song dynasty, successfully collates and integrates the author's earlier studies. It consists of seven chapters and an appendix containing a full...

Imperfect Paradise: Twenty-four Stories.
October 1, 1996... "Welcome the revolution; beware the revolutionaries" might well be the epigraph for this wonderful collection of twenty-four short stories aptly titled Imperfect Paradise. Shen Congwen (1902-1988), greatly sympathetic to the sufferings of the...

Marriage and Mandatory Abortion Among the 17th-century Siraya.
October 1, 1996... This is an excellent piece of historical ethnography. Shepherd, an American anthropologist known for his remarkable book Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800 (1993), discusses here the interesting problem of...

The Dai or the Tai and Their Architecture and Customs in South China.
October 1, 1996... This sensitively written and lavishly illustrated volume is a most welcome addition to the English-language literature on the Tai-speaking peoples of Southwest China; it is likely to prove especially useful to scholars of traditional Southeast...

Mongolische Epen XII: Jula aldar Quyan un Uyan monggun qadayasun.
October 1, 1996... Among the epic traditions of the Mongolian peoples the less researched are those of the southern and eastern parts of Mongolia. As W. HEISSIG writes, In the end of the eighteenth century, after Burdukov and Vladimircov collected the major...

Studies in the History of Religions, vol. 55, The Deer Goddess of Ancient Siberia: A Study in the Ecology of Belief.
October 1, 1996... The Deer Goddess of Ancient Siberia will be of interest to all those who desire a deeper insight into the iconography of what is known as Scytho-Siberian art. During the second half of this century much archeological fieldwork has been carried...

The Iu-Mien: Tradition and Change.
October 1, 1996... Although there are at least 10,000 Iu Mien (or Yao) people from Southeast Asia now living in the United States, the literature on this group is meager in comparison with the voluminous writings on the Hmong, their fellow refugees and former...

A Free People: Our Stories, Our Voices, Our Dreams.
October 1, 1996... "It's pretty easy being a Hmong kid in America because I think life's easier here than in Thailand or Laos" (125). "For me it's pretty easy being a Hmong kid in America because I don't feel different from other people or cultures. I get pretty...

In the Land of Lady White Blood: Southern Thailand and the Meaning of History.
October 1, 1996... "This book is an attempt to uncover, through the examination of a group of manuscripts and the communities that preserved them, the historical sensibility of rural southern Thailand from the seventeenth century to the present," says Gesick, who...

Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India.
October 1, 1996... Listen to the Heron's Words not only offers elegant ethnographic descriptions and comprehensive analyses of women's speech genres in North India but also illustrates how South Asian oral tradition transcends cultural authority and transforms into...

Skazki i predanija altajskih tuvincev (Tales and Legends from the Tuva of the Altai Mountains).
October 1, 1996... Little is known in the West about the Turkic people known as the Tuva. Hidden in the Siberian East among many other Turkic and Mongolian peoples, the Tuva developed a rich oral literature. Some of it has been recorded and published, partly in the...

Tuvinskie narodnye skazki (Tuva Folktales).
October 1, 1996... Little is known in the West about the Turkic people known as the Tuva. Hidden in the Siberian East among many other Turkic and Mongolian peoples, the Tuva developed a rich oral literature. Some of it has been recorded and published, partly in the...

Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Isma'ili Muslim Saint, Pir Shams.
October 1, 1996... Very little research has been done on the narrative value of Islamic popular devotional literature. Analyses and translations of such Sunni or Shi'i texts from the vernacular languages are still rare, as scholarly attention has tended to focus on...

Typenverzeichnis der bulgarischen Volksmarchen.
October 1, 1996... This type-catalogue of Bulgarian folktales was produced and carefully introduced by Liliana Daskalova Perkowski, Doroteja Dobreva, Jordanka Koceva, and Evgenija Miceva, and has been provided with a German preface by the editors and translators....

Oedipe chasseur. Une mythologie du sujet en Nouvelle-Guinee (Oedipe the Hunter: A Mythology of the Subject in New Guinea).
October 1, 1996... The most common response from anthropologists regarding the psychoanalytic interpretation of myth is, "It may be so, but it may not be so." Such a more or less negative, noncommittal attitude is frustrating for those who advocate psychoanalytic...

A Creation Through Death or Deception.
October 1, 1996... The seventeen tales in this publication were selected from taped materials collected by Z'Graggen in Papua New Guinea, twelve from Madang Province and five from East Sepik Province. They were translated from Talk Pisin, the lingua franca of the...