Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
Following the digitization of archival records of ethnographic work conducted among Yemeni Jews in the early 1970s, we presented these findings to the same community at the same location, fifty years later. In this renegotiation, our interlocutors radi…
Why can the anthropologist be a writer but not an author? This essay reflects on the possibility of conveying anthropological knowledge through creative writing while reconsidering ethnographical authorship and its audience. The research material is a …
This latest issue of Oral Tradition arrives somewhat later than the editors had hoped. It took us some time to regroup after producing our last volume, a monumental special issue on the oral traditions of religious communities in the Iranian-speaking world. We hope, however, that the wait will prove to have been worth it, since […]
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Oral Tradition, 36/1 (2023):3-36 The Mahābhārata and Ramāyaṇa present us with eight primary and embedded narratives in which an archer (usually a royal member of the kṣatriya, or warrior, class) causes the unintended death of a person in animal form while hunting, and for which the killer generally pays an offspring-related penalty with profound and […]
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Oral Tradition, 36/1 (2023):63-90 Introduction Over the past two decades, it has become clear that culturally grounded stories, once uncritically dismissed as myth or legend, often contain information suggesting that they are informed by observations of memorable events, such as coastal inundation, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and meteorite falls (Nunn and Reid 2016; Nunn 2014; Masse […]
The post Driva Qele / Stealing Earth: Oral Accounts of the Volcanic Eruption of Nabukelevu (Mt. Washington), Kadavu Island (Fiji), ~2,500 Years Ago appeared first on Oral Tradition.
Oral Tradition, 36/1 (2023):37-62 The Queen’s Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts (Rukopisy královédvorský a zelenohorský, together abbreviated “RKZ” in Czech) present an unusually successful case of literary forgery. These pseudo-medieval Czech manuscripts, presenting folk lyrics, ballads, and epic songs seemingly recorded in the late-thirteenth and in the ninth to tenth centuries, respectively, were taken by […]
The post Type-Token Ratio and Entropy as Measures to Characterize a Forgery of Oral-Formulaic Epics appeared first on Oral Tradition.
Oral Tradition, 36/1 (2023):91-122 Introduction This article explores tense usage and tense-switching in the temporal structuring of Occitan and French oral narratives, drawing on theoretical frameworks in linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as perspectives from anthropology and folklore studies.1 It forms part of a larger project, ExpressioNarration, financed by a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship, incorporating […]
The post Temporal Patterning and “Degrees of Orality” in Occitan and French Oral Narrative appeared first on Oral Tradition.
Oral Tradition Volume 36, Number 1 Taniela Bolea Born and bred in Ravitaki Village on the main island of Kadavu, Taniela Bolea graduated in management studies and rose to become the founding publisher of Fiji’s Daily Post newspaper. He was later appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Fiji Audio Visual Commission and today remains interested in […]
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Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. Over the past few years, the term ‘toxic masculinity’ has entered public debate in Namibia as a way to describe apparently problematic forms of masculine behaviour, particularly in the light of high levels of gender-bas…
At the root of much of the deforestation, land rights violations, human rights abuses and ultimately the continuation of unequal, neocolonial North-South relations are the two-fold phenomena of global market pressures for extractivism and mass producti…
Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. This article examines the nature of labour exchange between A1 farmers with people in communal areas of origin based on kinship and friendship relations. While agrarian labour in Zimbabwe has attracted considerable inte…
Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print.
Book review of Adele Clarke, Donna Haraway, Making kin. Fare parentele, non popolazioni, edizione italiana e traduzione a cura di Angela Balzano, Antonia Ferrante, Federica Timeto, Roma, DeriveApprodi, 2022, pp. 234.
Oral Tradition, 36/1 (2023):123-48 Slam is a relatively young genre of poetry, created in 1985 by a Chicago construction worker named Marc Smith, who sought to challenge ivory tower ideas about creating and evaluating poetry (Woods 2008:18). Extant slam poetry scholarship is neither as prolific nor as comprehensive as that on some of its performance […]
The post Ethnopoetic Transcription and Multimodal Archives appeared first on Oral Tradition.
Museum of Contemporary Art 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL November 19, 2022–April 23, 2023 ICA Boston 25 Harbor Shore Drive Boston, MA 02210 October 5, 2023–February 24, 2024
Book review of Arnd Schneider, Expanded visions. A new anthropology of the moving image, London-New York, Routledge, 2021, pp. 212.
Book review of Jasmijn Rana, Punching back. Gender, religion and belonging in women-only kickboxing, New York-Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2022, pp. 180.
Book review of Valentina Porcellana, Antropologia del welfare. La cultura dei diritti sociali in Italia, Torino, Licosia, 2021, pp. 250.
Book review of Giulia Meli, Il dialetto degli shinte rosengre. Esame delle fonti e analisi della morfologia tra sincronia e diacronia, Prefazione di Andrea Scala, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2022, pp. 308.
Book review of Giulia Meli, Il dialetto degli shinte rosengre. Esame delle fonti e analisi della morfologia tra sincronia e diacronia, Prefazione di Andrea Scala, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2022, pp. 308.
Book review of Frederico Delgado Rosa, Han Vermeulen, eds, Ethnographers before Malinowski. Pioneers of anthropological fieldwork, 1870‒1922, New York-Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2022, pp. XVIII + 522.
Book review of Tobias Boos, Daniela Salvucci, eds, Cultures in mountain areas. Comparative perspectives / Culture in aree di montagna. Prospettive comparative / Kuturenin Gebirgsregionen. Vergleichende Perspectiven, Bozen-Bolzano, University Press…
Book review of Stefania Barca, Forces of reproduction. Notes for a counter-hegemonic anthropocene, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 88.
In Oak Tree, gum tree, a collaborative video work by award-winning filmmakers Catherine Gough-Brady and Christine Rogers, explores the way that audio-visual material can “embrace the complexity of the world” and “incorporate, within their structures an…
Tuo Dolphins takes place in both Aarhus, Denmark and in the Reef islands, the Solomon Islands. Moffat Bonunga, visits the Danish anthropologists Jens Pinholt and Peter I. Crawford in Aarhus to help them with their work on the film project. This include…