A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY17 start with D start with D
The Dall Sheep Dinner Guest includes a new version of the Qayaq cycle, one of the best-known legends from the region, as well as stories such as “The Fast Runner.” A major contribution to the Native literature of Alaska, this collection includes two introductory essays by Wanni W. Anderson that provide historical background and a foundation for understanding gender, age, and regional differences and the narrative context of storytelling. Stories include The Girl Who Had No Wish to Marry by Willie Goodwin, Sr., The Goose Maiden by Nora Norton, The Last War with the Indians by Wesley Woods, The Orphan with No Clothes by Emma Skin, The Qayaq Cycle by Nora Norton, and Raven Who Brought Back the Land by Robert Cleveland (selected Iñupiaq Storyteller by the Inupiat of Northwest Alaska).
Additional storytellers include John Brown, Leslie Burnett, Flora Cleveland, Lois Cleveland, Maude Cleveland, Kitty Foster, Sarah Goode, Minnie Gray, Beatrice Mouse, Nellie Russell, and Andrew Skin.
Candace Slater examines these stories in Dance of the Dolphin, both as folk narratives and as representations of culture and conflict in Amazonia. Her engaging study discusses the tales from the viewpoints of genre, performance, and gender, but centers on them as responses to the great changes sweeping the Amazon today. According to Slater, these surprisingly widespread tales reflect Amazonians' own mixed reactions to the ongoing destruction of the rainforest and the resulting transformations in the social as well as physical landscape. Offering an informed view of Brazilian culture, this book crosses the boundaries of folklore, literature, anthropology, and Latin American studies. It is one of the very few studies to offer an overview of the changes taking place in Amazonia through the eyes of ordinary people.
"This book is a rich collection of stories about the transformation of dolphins in the city of enchantment. . . . The joy in this book is not just its vibrant analysis and careful relating of tradition and lore, but also its uncanny accurateness in capturing the very essence of Amazonia."-Darrell Posey, Journal of Latin American Studies
"Slater's fluid prose reads like a novel for those interested in Amazonian culture and folklore, while her integrated approach makes this a must read for those interested in innovative methodology."-Lisa Gabbert, Western Folklore
Combining shrewd applications of current cultural theory with compelling autobiography and elegant prose, José E. Limón works at the intersection of anthropology, folklore, popular culture, history, and literary criticism. A native of South Texas, he renders a historical and ethnographic account of its rich Mexican-American folk culture. This folk culture, he shows—whether expressed through male joking rituals, ballroom polka dances, folk healing, or eating and drinking traditions—metaphorically dances with the devil, both resisting and accommodating the dominant culture of Texas.
Critiquing the work of his precursors— John Gregory Bourke, J. Frank Dobie, Jovita Gonzalez, and Americo Paredes—Limón deftly demonstrates that their accounts of Mexican-Americans in South Texas contain race, class, and gender contradictions, revealed most clearly in their accounts of the folkloric figure of the devil. Limón's own field-based ethnography follows, and again the devil appears as a recurrent motif, signaling the ideological contradictions of folk practices in a South Texas on the verge of postmodernity.
Slave owners believed Christianity would instill docility and obedience, but the slaves discovered in the Bible a different message, sharing among themselves the “dark symbols and obscure signs” that escaped the notice of their captors. Finding a sense of liberation rather than submission in their conversion experience, slaves discovered their own self-worth and their values as children of God.
Originally published in 1993, Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs traces the legacy of slaves’ embrace of Christianity both during and after the slavery era. In a new introduction, the author places the book within the context of contemporary scholarship on the roots of the African American cultural experience. He argues that any interpretation of this experience must begin with a foundational study of the theological and ethical constructs that have shaped the way blacks understand themselves in relationship to God, their oppressors, and each other.
The Author: Riggins R. Earl Jr. teaches at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.
Pilipino Cultural Nights at American campuses have been a rite of passage for youth culture and a source of local community pride since the 1980s. Through performances—and parodies of them—these celebrations of national identity through music, dance, and theatrical narratives reemphasize what it means to be Filipino American. In The Day the Dancers Stayed, scholar and performer Theodore Gonzalves uses interviews and participant observer techniques to consider the relationship between the invention of performance repertoire and the development of diasporic identification.
Gonzalves traces a genealogy of performance repertoire from the 1930s to the present. Culture nights serve several functions: as exercises in nostalgia, celebrations of rigid community entertainment, and occasionally forums for political intervention. Taking up more recent parodies of Pilipino Cultural Nights, Gonzalves discusses how the rebellious spirit that enlivened the original seditious performances has been stifled.
Decoding Andean Mythology is a comprehensive analysis of Native Andean oral tradition spanning five centuries. Based on twenty years of research and a wide range of scholarship, this book departs from the Cuzco-centered focus of many published Andean narratives and includes myths, stories, and folktales from diverse regions and ethnic groups. Among them are full translations of thirty-two ancient and modern Native Andean stories. Colorful illustrations and a comprehensive glossary of Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish loan words supplement the text.
In an accessible and engaging discussion suitable for students, the author explores a number of recurring themes and characters in Andean stories. These include shape-shifting animals, the inversion of time-space (pachacuti), anthropomorphic and supernatural beings, and conflicting attitudes toward sexuality. The text also presents a fresh perspective on traditional, non-Western concepts such as huacas (sacred objects and places), suggesting some act as portals or mediating spaces between the natural and supernatural worlds. Of particular significance for current events is a lengthy chapter on social protest, explaining the rise of indigenous movements in the Andes and highlighting the contemporary use of Native Andean folktales as an avenue for social and political dissent.
Winner of the 2018 Wayland D. Hand Prize by the American Folklore Society.
These first-person narratives offer insight into the challenges faced by Native and non-Native scholars to their academic and personal approaches during research with Indigenous communities. By addressing the ethical, political, intellectual, and practical meanings of collaboration with Indigenous peoples, A Deeper Sense of Place highlights the ways in which collaborative research can help Indigenous and settler communities find common ground through a shared commitment to land, people, and place.
A Deeper Sense of Place will inform students and academics engaged in research with Indigenous communities, as well as those interested in the challenges of employing critical, qualitative methodologies.
Striking, inexplicable stories circulate among the people of Nuevo León in northern Mexico. Stories of conversos (converted Jews) who fled the Inquisition in Spain and became fabulously wealthy in Mexico. Stories of women and children buried in walls and under houses. Stories of an entire, secret city hidden under modern-day Monterrey. All these stories have no place or corroboration in the official histories of Nuevo León.
In this pioneering ethnography, Marie Theresa Hernández explores how the folktales of Nuevo León encode aspects of Nuevolenese identity that have been lost, repressed, or fetishized in "legitimate" histories of the region. She focuses particularly on stories regarding three groups: the Sephardic Jews said to be the "original" settlers of the region, the "disappeared" indigenous population, and the supposed "barbaric" society that persists in modern Nuevo León. Hernández's explorations into these stories uncover the region's complicated history, as well as the problematic and often fascinating relationship between history and folklore, between officially accepted "facts" and "fictions" that many Nuevoleneses believe as truth.
Basket weaver, storyteller, and tribal elder, Frances Manuel is a living preserver of Tohono O’odham culture. Speaking in her own words from the heart of the Arizona desert, she now shares the story of her life. She tells of O’odham culture and society, and of the fortunes and misfortunes of Native Americans in the southwestern borderlands over the past century.
In Desert Indian Woman, Frances relates her life and her stories with the wit, humor, and insight that have endeared her to family and friends. She tells of her early childhood growing up in a mesquite brush house, her training in tribal traditions, her acquaintance with Mexican ways, and her education in an American boarding school. Through her recollections of births and deaths, heartache and happiness, we learn of her family’s migration from the reservation to the barrios and back again. In the details of her everyday life, we see how Frances has navigated between O’odham and American societies, always keeping her grandparents’ traditional teachings as her compass.
It is extraordinary to hear from a Native American woman like Frances, in her own words and her own point of view, to enter the complex and sensitive aspects of her life experience, her sorrows, and her dreams. We also become privy to her continuing search for her identity across the border, and the ways in which Frances and Deborah have attempted to make sense of their friendship over twenty-odd years. Throughout the book, Deborah captures the rhythms of Frances’s narrative style, conveying the connectedness of her dreams, songs, and legends with everyday life, bringing images and people from faraway times and places into the present.
Deborah Neff brings a breadth of experience in anthropology and Southwest Native American cultures to the task of placing Frances Manuel’s life in its broader historical context, illuminating how history works itself out in people’s everyday lives. Desert Indian Woman is the story of an individual life lived well and a major contribution to the understanding of history from a Native American point of view.
Since the 1950s, the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, Mexico, has drawn a strange assortment of visitors and pilgrims—schoolteachers and government workers, North American and European spelunkers exploring the region's vast cave system, and counterculturalists from hippies (John Lennon and other celebrities supposedly among them) to New Age seekers, all chasing a firsthand experience of transcendence and otherness through the ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms "in context" with a Mazatec shaman. Over time, this steady incursion of the outside world has significantly influenced the Mazatec sense of identity, giving rise to an ongoing discourse about what it means to be "us" and "them."
In this highly original ethnography, Benjamin Feinberg investigates how different understandings of Mazatec identity and culture emerge through talk that circulates within and among various groups, including Mazatec-speaking businessmen, curers, peasants, intellectuals, anthropologists, bureaucrats, cavers, and mushroom-seeking tourists. Specifically, he traces how these groups express their sense of culture and identity through narratives about three nearby yet strange discursive "worlds"—the "magic world" of psychedelic mushrooms and shamanic practices, the underground world of caves and its associated folklore of supernatural beings and magical wealth, and the world of the past or the past/present relationship. Feinberg's research refutes the notion of a static Mazatec identity now changed by contact with the outside world, showing instead that identity forms at the intersection of multiple transnational discourses.
Peck argues that the story of the Slender Man is really a story about the changing nature of belief in the age of the internet. Widely adopted digital technologies, from smartphones to social media, offer vast potential for extending traditional and expressive social behaviors in new ways. As such, understanding the online landscape of contemporary folklore is crucial for grasping the formation and circulation of belief in the digital age. Ultimately, Peck argues that advancing our comprehension of legends online can help us better understand how similar belief genres—like fake news, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, rumors, meme culture, and anti-expert movements—are enabled by digital media.
During his decades living and teaching in Alabama, Brown followed his curiosity down myriad pathways about Alabama and the region, including the state’s majestic landscape, plants and animals found nowhere else, history, and rich folkways. In the tapestry of Alabama culture, Brown traces the threads of Native American, African slave, and European settler influences, woven over the centuries into novel patterns that surprise and fascinate.
Writing in the voice of a learned companion, Brown reveals insights and stories about unforgettable facets of Alabama culture, such as Sacred Harp singers and African American railroad callers, the use of handmade snares and stationary fishtraps to catch river redhorse and freshwater drum, white oak basketmaking and herbal medicine traditions, the evolution of the single-pen log cabin into the impressive two-story I-house, and a wealth of other engrossing stories.
An instant classic, Distracted by Alabama is a keepsake that readers who love, visit, or are curious about Alabama and Southern culture will return to again and again.
This book contains two volumes of African American folk tales collected by J. Mason Brewer.
The stories included in Dog Ghosts are as varied as the Texas landscape, as full of contrasts as Texas weather. Among them are tales that have their roots deeply imbedded in African, Irish, and Welsh mythology; others have parallels in pre-Columbian Mexican tradition, and a few have versions that can be traced back to Chaucer's England. All make delightful reading. The title Dog Ghosts is drawn from the unique stories of dog spirits which Dr. Brewer collected in the Red River bottoms and elsewhere in Texas.
The Word on the Brazos is a delightful collection of "preacher tales" from the Brazos River bottom in Texas. J. Mason Brewer worked side by side with field hands in the Brazos bottoms; he lived in their homes, worshipped in their churches, and shared the moments of relaxation in which laughter held full sway.
Many of the tales these people told were related to religion—both "good religion" and "bad religion." Some of them concerned preachers and their families, while others were stories told in pulpits. Mr. Brewer has set all of these stories down in authentic yet easily readable dialect. They will delight all who are interested in the historic culture of rural African-American Texans, as well as those who simply enjoy fine humorous stories skillfully told.
Montell organized his material according to the topics that dominated his tape-recorded conversations with residents of the area-farming, logging and rafting, steamboating, the Civil War-topics that the people themselves saw as important in their history. In reconstructing the past, the author also illuminates the relationship between geographic and economic factors in the region; the prolonged affects of a cataclysmic event, the Civil War, on the isolated area; and the impact of modernization, in the form of “hard” roads and cheap, TVA-supplied electricity, on the traditional ways of people.
First published in 1983, this book is now available in paperback for the first time. Included with this edition is a new foreword in which Montell and Mary Robbins, executive director of the Tennessee Upper Cumberland Tourism Association, describe changes in the area that have occured since the book’s initial appearance.
The Author: William Lynwood Montell, now retired, was coordinator of programs in folk and interculturual studies at Western Kentucky University. His numerous books include Ghosts along the Cumberland and The Saga of Coe Ridge.
Joyner recovers an entire lost society and way of life from the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the plantation whites and their guests, from quantitative analysis of census and probate records, and above all from the folklore and oral history of the enslaved Americans. His classic reconstruction of daily life in All Saints Parish is an inspiring testimony to the ingenuity and solidarity of a people.
This anniversary edition of Joyner's landmark study includes a new introduction in which the author recounts his process of writing the book, reflects on its critical and popular reception, and surveys the past three decades of scholarship on the history of enslaved people in the United States.
One of the most comprehensive and widely praised introductions to folklore ever written. Toelken's discussion of the history and meaning of folklore is delivered in straightforward language, easily understood definitions, and a wealth of insightful and entertaining examples.
Toelken emphasizes dynamism and variety in the vast array of folk expressions he examines, from "the biology of folklore," to occupational and ethnic lore, food ways, holidays, personal experience narratives, ballads, myths, proverbs, jokes, crafts, and others. Chapters are followed by bibliographical essays, and over 100 photographs illustrate the text. This new edition is accessible to all levels of folklore study and an essential text for classroom instruction.
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