Tag: 35ii

The Village Chronotope in the Genre of Iraqi Yezidi Wedding Songs

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):103-18 Introduction Among the world’s roughly one million Yezidis, adherents of a monotheistic faith that does not accept converts or allow marriage with outsiders, as many as half are living in exile, with the highest concentration of refugees outside the homeland living in Germany. Yezidis, originally from parts of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, […]

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The Yezidi Religious Music

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):119-40  1. Introduction: Types of Performances and Learning Techniques While the Yezidi religious textual tradition, including its collection, translation, and analysis, has already become a separate subject of investigation in the field of Yezidi Studies,1 its religious music remains largely unstudied. Based on the analysis of Yezidi religious vocal performances, this contribution […]

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Singing the Pain: Yezidi Oral Tradition and Sinjari Laments after ISIS1

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):77-102  Our girls fell into the hands of the kafirThey sold our girls to strange countriesThis girl ran to the mountain to flee the kafir and she fellHadiya escaped the kafir, but she fell, she threw herselfIt is a Great Holiday,2 but those in the hands of the kafir have no oneThe […]

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On the Problems of Studying Modern Zoroastrianism

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):61-76  Arguably, the problems of studying modern Zoroastrianism are not dissimilar to those associated with the study of Zoroastrianism in the ancient world. In both cases, the idea of orality and how to deal with it is an issue that demands attention. And in both cases, one of the problems concerns exegesis; […]

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On the Edge between Literacy and Orality

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):21-60  1. Today’s Performance of the Long Liturgy The Long Liturgy (later LL) is the main Zoroastrian ritual. The central part1 consists of the recitation of the Gāϑās and the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, a series of texts in Old Avestan, an Iranian language older than the one of the rest of the liturgy. […]

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Early Zoroastrianism and Orality

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):9-20  Most readers of Oral Tradition may not be overly concerned with the oral transmission of premodern compositions. Those who study the religious texts of the ancient Zoroastrian religion, however, must now take the long period of oral transmission of these texts, and its implications for our understanding of its contents, very […]

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Editors’ Column

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):1-2  The contribution that various branches of “Oral Studies” could make to the study of non Western scriptural religions is as yet largely unexplored. In the Iranian cultural sphere—where languages are spoken that belong to the Iranian branch of Indo-European, such as Persian and Kurdish—we find a number of religious traditions that […]

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The Religious Textual Heritage of the Yārsān (Ahl-e Haqq)

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):141-50  The Yārsān This paper will discuss the complex “textual” heritage of the Yārsān of western Iran and northern Iraq, which is mainly transmitted orally but has partly been made available in writing in recent decades. The Yārsān (“Group of Friends”), also known as Ahl-e Haqq (“People of Truth”), and in Iraq […]

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Religious Musical Knowledge and Modes of Transmission among the Kurdish Ahl-e Haqq of Gurān1

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Introduction The great astronomer and social commentator Adam Frank says: “We are fundamentally storytellers . . . . Every society . . . has had a system of myths, a constellation of stories that provide a basic sense of meaning and context” (2018:8). So what is this constellation of stories for the Ahl-e Haqq (AH) […]

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Introduction

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):3-8 Whilst the study of “oral verbal art” in the literary sphere is now receiving a certain amount of academic interest, much less attention has so far been paid to the dynamics of orality in the sphere of religion, not least in non-Western traditions.1 Many specialists in such fields as religious studies and […]

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Mîrza Mihemed / Mirza Pamat

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):419-40 The field studies of Neo-Aramaic dialects that have proliferated recently have yielded many folklore texts.1 During the author’s fieldwork (together with Christina Benyaminova) with one speaker of Neo-Aramaic, the sophisticated plot of a folk story with a hero named Mirza Pamat attracted his attention. A comparison of this story with other […]

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Men of Speech

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):407-18 A group of dervishes known as ʿAjam belonged originally to the dervishes without an order (bi-selsele). They are closely related to the Khāksāriyya and are considered as one lineage of this order today. The Khāksār order, as one of the three Shiʿi dervish orders of today’s Iran, used to have three […]

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