These original essays study ritual language and parallelism (the strict ordering of words and phrases in alternative, duplicate form). The introduction puts the topic in historical perspective and what was once viewed as a composition form unique to ancient Hebrew is now seen as a feature common to literatures around the world. Here is the first book to compare in detail living traditions of parallel composition. Yet, despite the diversity of languages discussed by the contributors, their materials are drawn from a single cultural area still unknown to most specialists: Eastern Indonesia. All...

Based on intensive fieldwork in an urban American junior high school, this original study explores the relationship between oral and written texts in everyday life by analysing tellings and retellings of local events, diaries, writings and discussions.

Sir Raymond Firth is the most distinguished living British anthropologist, and one also internationally acclaimed. His latest work forms part of one of the fullest and most professional ethnographic accounts by any anthropologist of a nonindustrial people, an account which extends over many years. This book is about the songs of a Western Pacific people, the Tikopia, who until recently lived entirely on a small remote island of the Solomons. Their songs vary from lively dance chants to mournful funeral laments. All are novel to western ears. The book provides about 100 examples in text and in...

This book challenges conventional theories about literacy, and the practices which often arise from them. It attempts to provide a new perspective through which the variety of literacy practices across different cultures can be viewed and from which the practical issues that arise in specific literacy campaigns and programmes can be approached. Dr Street first examines the explicit theories developed about literacy within different academic disciplines, on the premise that these underlie statements about literacy within development campaigns and in everyday usage. He analyses in detail...

Based on a corpus of Texan oral narratives collected by the author over the past fifteen years, this study presents an analysis of the literary qualities or orally performed verbal art, focusing on the significance of its social context. Although the tales included are all from Texas, they are representative of oral storytelling traditions in other parts of the United States, including tall tales, hunting stories, local character anecdotes, accounts of practical jokes, and so on. They are also highly entertaining in their own right. Professor Bauman's main emphasis is on the act of...

Sir Raymond Firth is the most distinguished living British anthropologist, and one also internationally acclaimed. His latest work forms part of one of the fullest and most professional ethnographic accounts by any anthropologist of a nonindustrial people, an account which extends over many years. This book is about the songs of a Western Pacific people, the Tikopia, who until recently lived entirely on a small remote island of the Solomons. Their songs vary from lively dance chants to mournful funeral laments. All are novel to western ears. The book provides about 100 examples in text and in...

In central cases of switch-reference, a marker on the verb of one clause is used to indicate whether its subject has the same or different reference from the subject of an adjacent, syntactically-related clause. In central cases of logophoricity, a special pronoun form is used within a reported speech context to indicate coherence with the source of reported speech. Lesley Stirling argues that these types of anaphoric linkage across clause boundaries cannot be adequately accounted for by Binding Theory. Her detailed examination of the two phenomena, including a case study of the Papuan...

Ivan the Terrible has long been a controversial figure. Some historians regard him as a crazed and evil tyrant; while others (especially Soviet scholars of the Stalin period) have viewed him as a progressive and far-sighted statesman. The folklore about Ivan has played an important part in these debates. Was Ivan's depiction in folklore favourable or hostile? And how far can it be regarded as evidence of contemporary popular attitudes towards the tsar? In this unusual and far-ranging study, Maureen Perrie discusses the nature of Ivan's image in Russian folklore; its historical basis; its...

Brazil once enjoyed a near monopoly in rubber when that commodity was gathered in the wild. By 1913, however, cultivated rubber from Southeast Asia swept the Brazilian gathered product from the market. In this innovative study, Warren Dean demonstrates that environmental factors have played a key role in the many failed attempts to once again produce a significant rubber crop in Brazil. Dean traces the numerous attempts to plant rubber in Brazil, including the ill-fated Ford estates, and others established by the major multinational tire companies. He also analyzes the struggles of the...

When Western missionaries introduced modern chemistry to China in the 1860s, they called this discipline hua-hsueh, literally, "the study of change." In this first full-length work on science in modern China, James Reardon-Anderson describes the introduction and development of chemistry in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and examines the impact of the science on language reform, education, industry, research, culture, society, and politics. Throughout the book, Professor Reardon-Anderson sets the advance of chemistry in the broader context of the development of...