The essays collected in this volume offer comparative perspectives on scholarship across a wide range of cultures and periods, from oral instruction by Yoruba diviners in West Africa to Renaissance humanism and nineteenth-century anthropology. The contributors address three prominent issues in cultural studies: the relation between oral and written transmission of knowledge; the nature of contacts between European scholars and the learned persons of other societies; and Western constructions of the culture and knowledge of non-Western peoples and of the "folk" in Europe.
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