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Opening with a brief tour of modern Hindu temples that feature increasingly monumental icons of Hanuman, this introductory chapter poses the question of why a deity of such apparent prominence in popular practice has generally been marginalized or overlooked in academic scholarship. It seeks the roots of this paradox in the Orientalism of Euro-American scholarship, especially during the period of the British Empire, which applied conceptual categories derived from Judeo-Christian discourse to the understanding of Indian religious traditions. Deities in animal-like forms were especially troubling to Western scholars, who invented labels like “theriomorph”, “fetish”, and “totem” to describe them, and created (e.g., in the folklore research of William Crooke) a false dichotomy between “major” and “minor” deities. After describing the present study's remedial approach and outlining the material to be presented in subsequent chapters, the chapter concludes with an explanation of the most common names and epithets by which Hanuman is known in various regions of India.

This chapter provides annotations for each of the forty tales recounted in the previous chapter. These notes trace, when possible, the literary history of each story, examine significant interpretations and variants on it, and provide relevant contextual information, e.g., on the Hindu time scheme of cyclically recurring epochs or yugas. A final section proposes that the complete “biographical” corpus of Hanuman tales may be understood, in part, as an idealized human life-narrative.

In this chapter, Bhat caste history and identity are presented, with particular attention paid to these bards’ claims to be “traditional” puppeteers. It is shown that such a claim, like many others made by members of this caste of professional story-tellers, is a tactical lie used to reap profits in the Rajasthani tourist industry. The chapter takes readers on the same bewildering journey experienced by the author during his initial months of anthropological fieldwork in India, a period during which he was repeatedly and creatively lied to by his informants. In turning the chapter’s attention to these deceptions, as well as to Bhat tales that comment on the power of such deception, the book provides a colorful introduction to these bards’ caste identity, and especially to the manner that such an identity revolves around the ability to cunningly manipulate both stories and people. This introductory chapter, which is written in a manner reminiscent of a mystery novel and which delves deeply into Bhat oral histories and folklore, also provides an entertaining self-reflexive account of anthropological research and writing about other cultures.

This chapter examines how Native Americana, perceived as a source of profound ecological and spiritual wisdom, has contributed to the formation of the neo-shamanism community in the West. The controversy that sprang up from the use of Native American symbolism by American and European spiritual practitioners is discussed, along with attempts by members of the neo-shamanism community in the West to move away from the Native American dreamlands and toward their own European indigenous spirituality. The manner in which Carl Jung handled non-Western spirituality offers guidelines which many current spiritual seekers interested in the retrieval of pre-Christian European traditions find useful. Jung implied that Europeans concerned about their roots should look into their own indigenous spirituality and mythology; the alien tradition can be helpful to situate one's spiritual experiences, but the materials should be indigenous.

This chapter continues the examination of neglected stories and collectors of folk tales. It explores the significance of collections in Germany, France, Italy, and other European countries that led to a greater cultural interest in folklore. In England, after the foundation of the British Folklore Society, a great effort was also made by British and American folklorists to translate folk tales from other countries, such as India, China, Japan, and Africa. Yet their full impact has never been appreciated because the majority of the European folk-tale collections have not been translated or studied in English-speaking countries. For instance, until recently, one of the most exceptional of the great nineteenth-century European and American folklorists, Pitrè, was ignored. The chapter considers his life and works to demonstrate how he is an exemplary representative of those learned, dedicated folklorists who tried to make the past usable so that we might learn something about ourselves.

This chapter analyzes three examples of a single story about the founder: two written versions and an oral version. The comparison demonstrates two separate dynamics in the life of a narrative within an institution. The first shows how a speaker's position shapes the microstructure of the narrative: in particular, how a story about the founder is told either as an account of his management skills, or as an account of his care for his agents, and the skills and character traits which his agents still share with him. The comparison also shows the complex relation between written and oral narrative: the continuous movement of a narrative from oral form to written form back to oral form, which continues without a final fixed version. Thus, the process of transmission of folk tales and oral culture is shown to be alive in the American corporation.

This article discusses the place of southeast Europe in the crystallization of Mircea Eliade’s conception of the history of religions. Since the mid-1930s, Eliade regarded the Balkans as a region of exceptional folkloric and prehistoric survivals at the crossroads between the Orient and the Occident. Through his reflection about the privileged links between the history of religions and the folkloric sources seen as vehicles for myths, Eliade’s vision of the Balkans’ cultural uniqueness inspired his conception about the particularity of the study of religion, as well as his idea of the history of religions as a new kind of universal history.

This chapter discusses the folktales that attest the recurring story-pattern contained in the Helen myth. The comparison between the texts under discussion and the ancient Greek myth of Helen requires that they be described typologically. Hence the chapter first provides an overview of typology in folklore studies and the various concepts and approaches to be taken with the Abduction story. It then embarks on a more detailed analysis of “The Abduction of the Beautiful Wife,” breaking it down piece by piece and discussing recurring motifs, typologies, characters, variations across similar stories or stories which fall under the same type as the Abduction, and other such elements that repeat or break from the pattern.

The period 1830-1880 was one of comparative calm in the language controversy. Yet it was at this time that the controversy came to be seen as a contest between two varieties: katharevousa and demotic. The sections of this chapter alternate their focus between the development of written language use in Athens, and the literary production and the language debate in the British-protected Ionian Islands. Special emphasis is placed on the cultural and linguistic repercussions of the historically crucial decade of the 1850s. More is said about the relationship between Greek-speakers and the speakers of other languages at this time. Then attention turns to the continuing arguments in favour of the written use of the spoken language in the 1870s, and finally to the outburst of publications on national history, national folklore, and the history of Greek language and literature that paved the way for the demoticist movement.

This chapter attempts to clarify the importance of the connections between witches and fairies coupled with their deep roots in pagan and Greco-Roman beliefs by moving away from western Europe to look at the great witch Baba Yaga of Slavic countries. It cites three reasons for concentrating on Baba Yaga and Slavic fairy tales. The first one regards neglect. For the most part, the focus of folklore and fairy-tale studies in the United States and western Europe has been on the works of the Brothers Grimm and other notable western European writers and folklorist. The second is to understand the relationship between goddesses, witches, and fairies. The third reason is that a brief analysis of Baba Yaga tales with a focus on the neglected work Russian Folk Tales (1873), translated and edited by W.R.S. Ralston (1828–89), might assist us in grasping how oral and literary traditions work together to reinforce the memetic replication of fairy tales.

This chapter reviews approaches to the empirical documentation of music as found in comparative musicology, folklore studies, and through the fifty-year history of ethnomusicology. Means of gathering and measuring research data are shown to be linked to available technology as well as to prevailing intellectual paradigms. The central part of the chapter focuses on empirical aspects of participant-observation, including the keeping of field notes, interviewing, photography, and audio- and video-recording. Good practice conventions for data preservation are explained and illustrated. The chapter's coda emphasizes the importance of ethics in research that documents the voices of live people.

The ongoing discussions about the Homeric Question and about orality and literacy in the language arts resonate to such a degree with parallel questions as regards the history of music. These discussions are considered by way of a review of two recent books about the subject: The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology by John Miles Foley and Oral-Formulaic Theory: A Folklore Casebook, edited by John Miles Foley.

This introductory chapter describes the corpus of folk and fairy tales that the Brothers Grimm had passed on to the German people. It then asks what legacy means in this context, more specifically in how the Brothers Grimm had attempted to pass on a wealth of cultural legacy and memory which have, in the process, become so universally international. The Brothers were aware from the very beginning that they were bequeathing their collected tales to a growing literate Germanic public; they endeavored to make these people more aware of popular culture in the German principalities. By doing this—bequeathing a legacy that was not really theirs to bequeath—they helped to create a new tradition of folklore that had a nationalist tinge to it.

This chapter considers Edgar Taylor's (1793–1839) adaptation of the Grimms' German Popular Stories (1823, 1826), which radically changed the destiny of what we today call the “fairy tales” of the Brothers Grimm. It recounts and analyzes the Grimms' intentions in collecting and publishing the two volumes of the first edition of their tales in 1812 and 1815 as well as the second edition of 1819. Then the chapter reviews the history of how Taylor came upon their tales in the early 1820s and why he decided to “translate” them into English. This chapter concludes by discussing how Taylor participated in the romantic antiquarian movement, what we would today call folklore, to recapture neglected relics of the past, and to defend the imagination against rationalism.