Category: English

About the Authors

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition Volume 33, Number 1 Richard Hughes Gibson Richard Hughes Gibson is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College and the author of Forgiveness in Victorian Literature: Grammar, Narrative, and Community (2015). With the designer Jeremy Botts, he directs the Manibus Press, an occasional publisher of artists’ books. Shem Miller Shem Miller is Assistant Teaching Professor of Religion at […]

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Editors’ Column

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Volume 33 marks a major transition for Oral Tradition. After thirty-two fruitful years at the University of Missouri, the journal has now found a new home at Harvard University. In the “Editor’s Column” that prefaced the first issue of Oral Tradition in 1986, John Miles Foley justified the creation of the new journal by speaking of the need […]

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Magic Questions

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 33/1 (2019):51-88 People who pose questions and practitioners of magic have one thing in common: they claim power and authority over others. They lay their claim using language that positions them as speakers with access to, and control over, the unknown. Analyzing questions in multiple versions of “The Song of Bagdad,” a South Slavic epic, […]

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An Examination of the Poetics of Tibetan Secular Oratory

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 33/1 (2019):23-501  On an auspicious day, two families from Ne’u na Village, a small village along the Yellow River in Western China’s Qinghai Province, gather to celebrate a wedding. The day has been chosen specifically for this purpose. Midway through the wedding banquet, a man stands before the crowd already so drunk that his words are almost unintelligible, and he speaks. He […]

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The Myth of Milman Parry

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 33/1 (2019):115-142 The Myth of Milman Parry Oral traditions are creative: they romanticize and sensationalize otherwise mundane events. The memory of a historical but probably minor conflict between the Mycenaeans and Trojans over commercial interests—access to the straits of the Hellespont that connected the Black Sea to the Aegean—evolved over time into an […]

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Oral Tradition and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 33/1 (2019):3-22 The Dead Sea Scrolls are a cache of ancient manuscripts written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek discovered in eleven caves from 1947-1956. Most scholars associate the Dead Sea Scrolls with an ancient Jewish community who lived in a complex of ruins on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea known as […]

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Does Hector’s Helmet Flash?

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 33/1 (2019):89-114 The most important question raised by studies in oral tradition is “So what?” —John Miles Foley, “Oral Tradition and Its Implications” With the publication of his fine press Odyssey in view, the great American printer and typographer Bruce Rogers wrote in April 1931 to his translator, T. E. Lawrence, with a […]

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CAES Vol. 5, № 4

Alexander Akulov Published: Categories: English

Editor’s foreword Articles: Stone adzes and axes found by A. A. Inostrantsev on the southern coast of Lake Ladoga in the context of the stone industry of some other Neolithic sites in the neighborhood of Saint Petersburg Alexander Akulov Visiting the location where the New Syas and New Svir canals were being dug A. A. […]

WHY CAN HUNTER-GATHERER GROUPS BE ORGANIZED SIMLARLY FOR RESOURCE PROCUREMENT, BUT THEIR KINSHIP TERMINOLOGIES ARE STRIKINGLY DISSIMILAR: A CHALLENGE FOR FUTURE CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH

Recent imbs_socdyn_sdeas items Published: Categories: English

Cross-cultural research involves explanatory arguments framed at the meta-level of a cohort of societies, each with its own historical development as an internally structured and organized system. Historically, cross-cultural research on hunter-gathere…