Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow
Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow

Author: Alan Dundes

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780847684571

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This provocative book by a leading folklorist offers a new analysis of caste in India, focusing on the rationale underlying the customs surrounding untouchability. Drawing on clues contained in two fascinating folktales, Alan Dundes goes beyond Dumont's classic Homo Hierarchicus in deconstructing the pervasive pollution complex that prevents millions of individuals from entering temples or drawing water from community wells. His graceful and erudite explanation of caste also illuminates the mysterious worship of the sacred cow as well as sati/suttee, or widow burning. The author concludes by relating caste to the theory of marginal survival, drawing on Gypsy concepts of pollution. This controversial book offers a fresh perspective for anyone interested in India, folklore, and psychoanlytic anthropology_a detailed case study documenting how folklore, as a source of native categories and symbols, can yield unique insights into the unconscious functioning of a culture through time. In this comprehensive textbook, renowned philosopher J. N. Mohanty examines the range of Indian philosophy from the Sutra period through the 17th century Navya Nyaya. Classical Indian Philosophy is divided into three parts that cover epistemology, metaphysics, and the attempt to transcend the distinction between subject and object. Mohanty focuses on the major concepts and problems dealt with in Indian philosophy, including ethics, social philosophy, law, and aesthetics. Students of Indian philosophy at every level will find this a rich and rewarding text.

Fables of the Ancients?
Fables of the Ancients?

Author: Alan Dundes

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 9780742526723

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Given the widespread consensus that the Qur'an was in oral tradition before being committed to written form, it should come as no surprise to learn that the Qur'an still bears the traces of its original oral form. The field of knowledge most concerned with oral tradition is folkloristics, the study of folklore. Folklorist Alan Dundes has carefully and respectfully documented some of these unmistakable traces. These traces include numerous oral formulas repeated throughout the Qur'an as well as several traditional folktales. Just as Jesus effectively used parables to get His message across, so similar means are to be found in the Qur'an. The scholarly identification of formulas and folktales in the Qur'an represents an entirely new approach to this world-famous religious text. Not only does it provide insight into the basic composition of this sacred document, but for readers not previously familiar with the Qur'an, it pinpoints and makes accessible many of the principal themes contained therein.

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

Author: Alex Tickell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-05-07

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1134245041

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On publication Arundhati Roy's first novel The God of Small Things (1997) rapidly became an international bestseller, winning the Booker Prize and creating a new space for Indian literature and culture within the arts, even as it courted controversy and divided critical opinion. This guide to Roy’s ground-breaking novel offers: an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of The God of Small Things a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present a selection of new essays and reprinted critical essays by Padmini Mongia, Aijaz Ahmad, Brinda Bose, Anna Clarke, Émilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas and Alex Tickell on The God of Small Things, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of The God of Small Things and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Roy's text.

Tradition in the Twenty-First Century
Tradition in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Trevor J. Blank

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2013-05-15

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0874219000

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In Tradition in the Twenty-First Century, eight diverse contributors explore the role of tradition in contemporary folkloristics. For more than a century, folklorists have been interested in locating sources of tradition and accounting for the conceptual boundaries of tradition, but in the modern era, expanded means of communication, research, and travel, along with globalized cultural and economic interdependence, have complicated these pursuits. Tradition is thoroughly embedded in both modern life and at the center of folklore studies, and a modern understanding of tradition cannot be fully realized without a thoughtful consideration of the past’s role in shaping the present. Emphasizing how tradition adapts, survives, thrives, and either mutates or remains stable in today’s modern world, the contributors pay specific attention to how traditions now resist or expedite dissemination and adoption by individuals and communities. This complex and intimate portrayal of tradition in the twenty-first century offers a comprehensive overview of the folkloristic and popular conceptualizations of tradition from the past to present and presents a thoughtful assessment and projection of how “tradition” will fare in years to come. The book will be useful to advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in folklore and will contribute significantly to the scholarly literature on tradition within the folklore discipline. Additional Contributors: Simon Bronner, Stephen Olbrys Gencarella, Merrill Kaplan, Lynne S. McNeill, Elliott Oring, Casey R. Schmitt, and Tok Thompson

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth
Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth

Author: Daniel Merkur

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-07-05

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1135575274

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This book surveys the history of psychoanalytic treatments of myths variously as symptoms of psychopathology, as cultural defense mechanisms, and as metaphoric expressions of ideas that may include therapeutic insights.

The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice
The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice

Author: Kevin Trainor

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 689

ISBN-13: 0190632925

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"This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art exploration of several key dynamics in current studies of the Buddhist tradition with a focus on practice. Embodiment, materiality, emotion, and gender shape the way most Buddhists engage with their traditions, in contrast to popular representations of Buddhism as spiritual, disembodied, and largely devoid of ritual. This volume highlights how practice often represents a fluid, dynamic, and strategic means of defining identity and negotiating the challenges of everyday life. Essays explore the transformational aims of practices that require practitioners to move, gesture, and emote in prescribed ways, including the ways that scholars' own embodied practices are integral to their research methodology. The chapters are written by acknowledged experts in their respective subject areas and taken together offer an overview of current thinking in the field. The volume is of particular value to scholars who seek an orientation to current perspectives on important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological concerns that are shaping the field in areas outside their primary expertise. The inclusion of substantial, up-to-date bibliographies also makes the volume an important guide to current scholarship"--

Luxury Indian Fashion
Luxury Indian Fashion

Author: Tereza Kuldova

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-03-24

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1474220940

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This unique ethnographic investigation examines the role that fashion plays in the production of the contemporary Indian luxury aesthetic. Tracking luxury Indian fashion from its production in village craft workshops via upmarket design studios to fashion soirées, Kuldova investigates the Indian luxury fashion market's dependence on the production of thousands of artisans all over India, revealing a complex system of hierarchies and exploitation. In recent years, contemporary Indian design has dismissed the influence of the West and has focused on the opulent heritage luxury of the maharajas, Gulf monarchies and the Mughal Empire. Luxury Indian Fashion argues that the desire for a luxury aesthetic has become a significant force in the attempt to define contemporary Indian society. From the cultivation of erotic capital in businesswomen's dress to a discussion of masculinity and muscular neo-royals to staged designer funerals, Luxury Indian Fashion analyzes the production, consumption and aesthetics of luxury and power in India. Luxury Indian Fashion is essential reading for students of fashion history and theory, anthropology and visual culture.

Cleansing Pavam
Cleansing Pavam

Author: Damaris Lüthi

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 3643908059

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Environmental squalor is a salient feature of Indian cities, standing in surprising contrast to clean private settings. This study of ideas and practices relating to cleanliness in a South Indian town found that im/purity concepts pertaining to hygiene are closely related to so-called ritual ideas of purity and pollution and are nearer to orthodox beliefs than to germ theories. The danger of dirt is less its direct threat to health but its impact on social status and on the mood of deities, who penalize with misfortune. Cleanliness is crucial for private well-being; public pollution is obsolete. Dissertation. [Subject: South Asian Studies, Sociology]

"Proverbs Speak Louder Than Words"

Author: Wolfgang Mieder

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9781433103780

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"This book presents a composite picture of the richness of proverbs as significant expressions of folk wisdom as is manifest from their appearance in art, culture, folklore, history, literature, and the mass media. The book draws attention to the fact that proverbs as metaphorical signs continue to play an important role in oral and written communication. Proverbs as so-called monumenta humana are omnipresent in all facets of life, and while they are neither sacrosanct nor saccharine, they usually offer much common sense or wisdom based on recurrent experiences and observations."--BOOK JACKET.

The Mirth of Nations
The Mirth of Nations

Author: Christie Davies

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780765800961

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The Mirth of Nations is a social and historical study of jokes told in the principal English-speaking countries. It is based on use of archives and other primary sources, including old and rare joke books. Davies makes detailed comparisons between the humor of specific pairs of nations and ethnic and regional groups. In this way, he achieves an appreciation of the unique characteristics of the humor of each nation or group. A tightly argued book, The Mirth of Nations uses the comparative method to undermine existing theories of humor, which are rooted in notions of hostility, conflict, and superiority, and derive ultimately from Hobbes and Freud. Instead Davies argues that humor merely plays with aggression and with rule-breaking, and that the form this play takes is determined by social structures and intellectual traditions. It is not related to actual conflicts between groups. In particular, Davies convincingly argues that Jewish humor and jokes are neither uniquely nor overwhelmingly self-mocking as many writers since Freud have suggested. Rather Jewish jokes, like Scottish humor and jokes are the product of a strong cultural tradition of analytical thinking and intelligent self-awareness. The volume shows that the forty-year popularity of the Polish joke cycle in America was not a product of any special negative feeling towards Poles. Jokes are not serious and are not a form of determined aggression against others or against one's own group. The Mirth of Nations is readable as well as revisionist. It is written with great clarity and puts forward difficult and complex arguments without jargon in an accessible manner. Its rich use of examples of all kinds of humor entertains the reader, who will enjoy a great variety of jokes while being enlightened by the author's careful explanations of why particular sets of jokes exist and are immensely popular. The book will appeal to general readers as well as those in cultural studies.