Suchergebnisse

Mother tongues and language competence: The shifting politics of linguistic belonging in the Himalayas

The Digital Himalaya Project is a collection, storage and dissemination portal for scholarly content and research findings about the Himalayan region. The project website connects a worldwide user community to a vast corpus of digital resources from or about India, Nepal, Bhutan and
the Tibetan plateau for free and easy download - without payment, subscription or password.
While Digital Himalaya began as a strategy for collecting and protecting the products of colonial-era ethnographic collections on the Himalayas - for posterity and for access by source communities
- the project has now become a collaborative digital publishing environment, bringing a new collection online every month, with close to half a million web visitors since its establishment in 2000.
Almost all of our digitization and scanning is now conducted in Nepal, dramatically reducing
operating costs and increasing productivity. Our funding no longer comes from research councils in the United Kingdom and the United States, but through web referrals and from individual or institutional donations around the world. The project is now supported by people and organizations that
recognize the work and want to contribute to it.
In short, what began as an academic research project a decade ago is now a vast online portal for hosting and disseminating knowledge about the Himalayas to a demanding, fast-growing and truly global user base.

The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France.

The author's innovation is to read ethnographic researches as play scripts—to see printed folktales as accounts of live performances. One storyteller after another comments symbolically on what it is like to be a formerly colonised population. Storytelling women, in particular, combine diverse plots and characters to create traditional-sounding stories, which could not have been predicted from the African, Malagasy, Indian, and European traditions coexisting in Mayotte. Haring's account shows them to be particularly skilled at irony and ambiguity, conveying both submissive and rebellious attitudes in their tales. He makes Mayotte storytelling accessible to a new, English-speaking audience and demonstrates that traditional storytellers in those years were preserving, but also critiquing, their inherited social order in a changing world. Their creative intentions, cultural influences and widely different narrative styles constitute Mayotte's system of the arts of the word.

Literary specialists, folklore enthusiasts, and people who like reading stories will find much to appreciate in this engaging and sophisticated book.

How to Read a Folktale offers the first English translation of Ibonia, a spellbinding tale of old Madagascar. Ibonia is a folktale on epic scale. Much of its plot sounds familiar: a powerful royal hero attempts to rescue his betrothed from an evil adversary and, after a series of tests and duels, he and his lover are joyfully united with a marriage that affirms the royal lineage. These fairytale elements link Ibonia with European folktales, but the tale is still very much a product of Madagascar. It contains African-style praise poetry for the hero; it presents Indonesian-style riddles and poems; and it inflates the form of folktale into epic proportions. Recorded when the Malagasy people were experiencing European contact for the first time, Ibonia proclaims the power of the ancestors against the foreigner. Through Ibonia, Lee Haring expertly helps readers to understand the very nature of folktales. His definitive translation, originally published in 1994, has now been fully revised to emphasize its poetic qualities, while his new introduction and detailed notes give insight into the fascinating imagination and symbols of the Malagasy. Haring's research connects this exotic narrative with fundamental questions not only of anthropology but also of literary criticism.

More than just a book, Storytelling in Northern Zambia lets you watch videos of the storytellers while you read. Storytelling plays an important part in the vibrant cultural life of Zambia and in many other communities across Africa. This innovative book provides a collection and analysis of oral narrative traditions as practiced by five Bemba-speaking ethnic groups in Zambia. The integration of newly digitalised audio and video recordings into the text enables the reader to encounter the storytellers themselves and hear their narratives as they were recounted during Robert Cancel's research trips to Zambia. Robert Cancel's thorough critical interpretation, combined with these newly digitalised audio and video materials, makes Storytelling in Northern Zambia a much needed addition to the slender corpus of African folklore studies that deal with storytelling performance. Cancel threads his way between the complex demands of African fieldwork studies, folklore theory, narrative modes, reflexive description and simple documentation and succeeds in bringing to the reader a set of performers and their performances that are vivid, varied and instructive. He illustrates this living narrative tradition with a wide range of examples, and highlights the social status of narrators and the complex local identities that are at play. Cancel's innovative study tells us not only about storytelling but sheds light on the study of oral literatures throughout Africa and beyond. Its innovative format, meanwhile, explores new directions in the integration of primary source material into scholarly texts. This book is part of our World Oral Literature Series in conjunction with the World Oral Literature Project.