Religion Among the Folk in Egypt

Hasan El-Shamy

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Religion among the Folk in Egypt seeks to structure the entire field of supernatural beliefs and related practices in the folk communities of Egypt. These beliefs constitute a cognitive system on the one hand and represent behavioral experiences felt, thought, and lived by individuals and social groups on the other. The systemic qualities of the beliefs involved are represented by the fact that the components are interconnected; even a peripheral belief is connected to others and, ultimately, attributed to a central component. The individual 'believer' is aware of the system's components and of the interrelationships among these components. Individuals and social groups manifest the behavioristic nature of a belief or a piece of knowledge within the system through actions. These actions, or rituals are motivated by these beliefs and are made in response to, and within the confines of, the beliefs. A major component of a belief is its affective quality. From the viewpoint of the believer, a religious belief is associated with a certain type of sentiment: awe, reverence, fear, love, hate, and so forth. Such feelings are learned and lead the individual to act in a certain manner and direction congruent with his feelings. In the present inquiry the sentiments involved are predominantly of a religious nature. The folk system only partially overlaps with the formal religion. Folk beliefs and practices, however, represent real behavioral patterns which influence the thoughts, feelings, and actions of individuals and tradition bound groups in daily living; in many respects it is "the real" religious culture, while formal religion represents the "ideal" or the supposed form of that culture.

Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative

Sandra K. Dolby

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HİKÂYE: Turkish Folk Romance as Performance Art

İlhan Başgöz

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In Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative, Sandra Dolby draws upon theories of folkloristic performance, deconstructive criticism, and reader response theory to examine personal narrative texts created in familiar and intimate contexts. Parsing each text into aurally or linguistically meaningful units, Dolby examines the details of the narratives as they inform a high-context reading of the content and allusions within each story. Rich understandings of each story emerge as personal and analytical perceptions build the structure and content of a listener’s text. That text grows in texture and meaning as the listener brings into play all connections and allusions shared with the teller. The task of the book is to describe how that cumulative listener’s text grows.

Dolby has written a new introductory preface contextualizing the book in relation to developments in the field of personal narrative studies in the years since its first publication. The author’s new preface and a foreword by Richard Bauman written especially for the reprint edition make this book an invaluable addition to the library of the personal narrative scholar.

The Folklore Institute and Indiana University Press are pleased to announce the publication of HİKÂYE: Turkish Folk Romance as Performance Art by İlhan Başgöz, Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. 

HİKÂYE is an engaging study of Turkish romance by its leading contemporary student. İlhan Başgöz presents vivid descriptions of the singers who perform these tales, the performance venues, interactions between singers and audiences, and the romance texts as artistic objects. Part of the fun is the playful interaction between the author and the seasoned characters who taught him their poetic craft. HİKÂYE will be the definitive work on this tradition, which has cognates in Persian and Arabic tale-telling, as well as links to European medieval romances. A valuable contribution to folklore studies, for scholars, students, and general readers alike.

“This is a truly important contribution to folklore and to Turkish studies. The interviews with the artists, the text of the romance, and the index of fifty romances make the work an essential contribution to folkloristics.”
Professor Henry Glassie

Special Publications of the Folklore Institute No. 7, Indiana University
John McDowell, editor
Distributed by Indiana University Press

The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India

Pravina Shukla

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Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai

Michael Dylan Foster

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Because clothing, food, and shelter are basic human needs, they provide excellent entries to cultural values and individual aesthetics. Everyone gets dressed every day, but body art has not received the attention it deserves as the most common and universal of material expressions of culture. The Grace of Four Moons aims to document the clothing decisions made by ordinary people in their everyday lives. Based on fieldwork conducted primarily in the city of Banaras, India, Pravina Shukla conceptualizes and realizes a total model for the study of body art - understood as all aesthetic modifications and supplementations to the body. Shukla urges the study of the entire process of body art, from the assembly of raw materials and the manufacture of objects, through their sale and the interactions between merchants and consumers, to the consumers' use of objects in creating personal decoration.

Water sprites, mountain goblins, shape-shifting animals, and the monsters known as the yôkai have long haunted the Japanese cultural landscape. This history of the strange and mysterious in Japan seeks out these creatures in folklore, encyclopedias, literature, art, science, games, manga, magazines, and movies, exploring their meanings in the Japanese cultural imagination and offering an abundance of valuable and, until now, understudied material. Michael Dylan Foster tracks yôkai over three centuries, from their appearance in seventeenth-century natural histories to their starring role in twentieth-century popular media.

African American Music: An Introduction

Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby

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Stars of Ballymenone

Doug Boyd and Henry Glassie

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African American Music: An Introduction is a collection of thirty essays by leading scholars which survey major African American musical genres, both sacred and secular, from slavery to the present. It is the most comprehensive study of African American music currently available, with sixteen essays on major genres of African American music, as well as lengthy sections on the music industry, gender, and music as resistance. The work brings together, in a single volume, treatments of African American music that have existed largely independent of each other. The research is based in large part on ethnographic fieldwork, which privileges the voices of the music-makers themselves, while interpreting their narratives through a richly textured mosaic of history and culture. The book is replete with references to seminal recordings and recording artists, musical transcriptions, photographs, and illustrations that bring the music to life as expressions of human beings. At the same time, it includes the kind of musical specificity that brings clarity to the structural, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics that both distinguish and unify the music of African Americans.

In his award-winning Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Henry Glassie set out to write a comprehensive ethnography of the farming community of Ballymenone, beside Lough Erne in the County Fermanagh. Now, after decades of work in Asia, in Turkey and Bangladesh, in India and Japan, Glassie has returned to Ireland, using his skills as an observer, a listener, a writer, in an effort to understand how poor people in rural places suffer and laugh and carry on while history happens. Glassie’s task in The Stars of Ballymenone is to set the scene, to sketch the backdrop and clear the stage, so that Hugh Nolan and Michael Boyle, Peter Flanagan, Ellen Cutler, and their neighbors can tell their own tale.

The Stars of Ballymenone is an integrated analysis of the complete repertory of verbal art from a community where storytelling and singing of quality remained a part of daily life. The book includes a CD so the voices of Ballymenone can be heard at last.

Music in West Africa:
Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture

Ruth M. Stone

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Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them

Sandra K. Dolby

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Music in West Africa is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series.

Music in West Africa presents fundamental style concepts of West African music using a focused case study of performance in Liberia, West Africa, among the Kpelle people. The book discusses the diversity, motifs, and structure of West African music within the larger patterns of the region's culture, highlighting those aspects of Kpelle music that are common to many other West African traditions. It also describes how music and dance in West Africa are tied to the fabric of everyday social and political life.

Music in West Africa is enhanced by eyewitness accounts of local performances, interviews with key performers, and vivid illustrations. Packaged with a 70-minute CD containing examples of the music discussed in the book, it features guided listening and hands-on activities that encourage readers to engage actively and critically with the music.

A timely analysis aimed at understanding instead of lamenting the popularity of self-help books.

Based on a reading of more than three hundred self-help books, Sandra K. Dolby examines this remarkably popular genre to define "self-help" in a way that's compelling to academics and lay readers alike. Self-Help Books also offers an interpretation of why these books are so popular, arguing that they continue the well-established American penchant for self-education, they articulate problems of daily life and their supposed solutions, and that they present their content in a form and style that is accessible rather than arcane.

Using tools associated with folklore studies, Dolby then examines how the genre makes use of stories, aphorisms, and a worldview that is at once traditional and contemporary. The overarching premise of the study is that self-help books, much like fairy tales, take traditional materials, especially stories and ideas, and recast them into extended essays that people happily read, think about, try to apply, and then set aside when a new embodiment of the genre comes along.

Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Approach

Hasan El-Shamy

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Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature: A Handbook

Edited by: Jane Garry; Hasan El-Shamy

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The only demographically oriented tale-type index for folktales of the Arab world.

Types of the Folktale in the Arab World is an index and preliminary analysis of folktales told by the diverse ethnic groups that populate what is commonly called "the Arab World." It is also a comprehensive and interdisciplinary guide to tales told in related cultural spheres, from sub-Saharan Africa to Turkey and beyond. A folktale's emergence, spread, stability, change, continued presence, or disappearance among certain social groups depends on specific psychological, social, and cultural forces. While Hasan El-Shamy has adopted the familiar tale-type classification system employed by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, he also seeks to remedy the Eurocentric shortcomings of their system by addressing folklore as behavior, striving to bring the psychosocial foundation for the Arab renditions to this comprehensive and inclusive index. Types of the Folktale in the Arab World is destined to become an indispensable reference work for all who are interested in Arab culture and the folktale.

This is an authoritative presentation and discussion of the most basic thematic elements universally found in folklore and literature. The reference provides a detailed analysis of the most common archetypes or motifs found in the folklore of selected communities around the world. Each entry is written by a noted authority in the field, with accompanying reference citations. Entries are keyed to the Motif-Index of Folk Literature by Stith Thompson and grouped according to that Index's scheme. The reference includes an introductory essay on the concepts of archetypes and motifs and the scholarship associated with them.

This is the only book in English on motifs and themes that is completely folklore-oriented, deals with motif numbers, and is tied to the Thompson Motif-Index. It includes in-depth examination of such motifs as Bewitching, Chance and Fate, Choice of Roads, Death or Departure of the Gods, the Double, Ghosts and Other Revenants, the Hero Cycle, Journey to the Otherworld, Magic Invulnerability, Soothsayer, Transformation, Tricksters, and many more.

A World of Others' Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality

Richard Bauman

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Handbook of Classical Mythology

William Hansen

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Drawing on his work in Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, North America, Ghana, and Fiji, linguistic anthropologist and folklorist Richard Bauman presents a series of ethnographic case studies that offer a sparkling look at intertextuality as communicative practice.

• A fascinating perspective on intertextuality: the idea that written and spoken texts speak to one another, e.g. through genre or allusions.
• Presents a series of ethnographic case studies to illustrate the topic.
• Draws on a broad range of oral performances and literary records from across the world.
• The author’s introduction sets a framework for the analysis of genre, perform and intertextuality.
• Shows how performers blend genres, e.g., telling stories about riddles or legends about magical verses, or constructing sales pitches.

An introduction to the mythological world of the Greeks and the Romans, combined with a chronology of myths and a dictionary of key characters, objects, and events.

Handbook of Classical Mythology offers newcomers and long-time enthusiasts new ways to navigate the world of Greek and Roman myths. Written by a foremost mythologist, the book begins by exploring the sources and landscapes from which the myths emerged. It then provides a richly detailed timeline of mythic episodes from the creation of the cosmos to the end of the Heroic Age—plus an illustrated mythological dictionary listing every significant character, place, event, and object.

Whether exploring the world that gave rise to ancient mythology or researching a specific piece of the whole, the handbook is the best introduction available to the extraordinary cast of these tales (gods, nymphs, satyrs, monsters, heroes) and the natural and supernatural stages upon which their fates are played out.