After the Reformation, England's Catholics were marginalised and excluded from using printed media for propagandist ends. Instead, they turned to oral media, such as ballads and stories, to plead ...their case and maintain contact with their community. Building on the growing interest in Catholic literature which has developed in early modern studies, Alison Shell examines the relationship between Catholicism and oral culture from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In order to recover the textual traces of this minority culture, she expands canonical boundaries, looking at anecdotes, spells and popular verse alongside more conventionally literary material. In her archival research she uncovers many important manuscript sources. This book is an important contribution to the rediscovery of the writings and culture of the Catholic community and will be of great interest to scholars of early modern literature, history and theology.
A unique analysis of the stories, conversations, gossip, public speeches, and other narratives that shape community and identity among peasant women of the Bolivian highlands.
This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national ...identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level.
The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators—those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a "genealogical nationalism" as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state.
Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written.
An especially comprehensive study of Brazilian Amazonian Indian history, The Last Cannibals is the first attempt to understand, through indigenous discourse, the emergence of Upper Xingú society.
Ecological spirituality encapsulates the relation between spirituality and nature. Situated within this context, this article offers a Christian response to contemporary ecological threats and draws ...from existing spiritual traditions to propose a Christian ecological spirituality as the basis of and the means to ecological conversion, reformation, healing and renewal. The Story of Creation in the Book of Genesis, is used in exploring the individual roles of God, nature and humans in creation, the initial harmonious balance between them and the loss of this balance due to sin. Environmental exploitation and devastation are then explained in terms of human sin, followed by the need for an ecological conversion. Finally, it posits how God can be rediscovered through ecological spiritual practices inherent in the covenantal, sacramental, ascetic and wisdom traditions, and how these ultimately enable restoration of the harmonious balance between Creator and creation.
From the Famine to political hunger strikes, from telling tales in the pub to Beckett's tortured utterances, the performance of Irish identity has always been deeply connected to the oral. Exploring ...how colonial modernity transformed the spaces that sustained Ireland's oral culture, this book explains why Irish culture has been both so creative and so resistant to modernization. David Lloyd brings together manifestations of oral culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how the survival of orality was central both to resistance against colonial rule and to Ireland's modern definition as a postcolonial culture. Specific to Ireland as these histories are, they resonate with postcolonial cultures globally. This study is an important and provocative new interpretation of Irish national culture and how it came into being.
Cigawiran is an Indonesian oral tradition that has Islamic religious values and messages. It is only found and developed in a limited location, namely Cigawir village. Regarding the limitation of ...Cigawiran spreading, this article examined its vitality and cultural values. Oral tradition and vitality research methodologies were utilized in this study. The concept of oral tradition vitality was derived from the theoretical frameworks proposed by Grimes, which shares similarities with the notion of language vitality and encompasses six distinct categories that assess the vitality level within oral traditions. The data was gathered through a questionnaire. The findings of the vitality study indicated that the Cigawiran is classified as stable yet facing threats. This suggests that the tradition is practiced by the entire local community, albeit selectively among specific generations. The study suggests that there is a need for the revival of the Cigawiran because this practice has been limited to a small number of generations up to the present time.
Slaves tell tales Forsdyke, Sara
2012., 20120722, 2012, 2012-07-22
eBook
Most studies of ancient Greek politics focus on formal institutions such as the political assembly and the law courts, and overlook the role that informal social practices played in the regulation of ...the political order. Sara Forsdyke argues, by contrast, that various forms of popular culture in ancient Greece--including festival revelry, oral storytelling, and popular forms of justice--were a vital medium for political expression and played an important role in the negotiation of relations between elites and masses, as well as masters and slaves, in the Greek city-states. Although these forms of social life are only poorly attested in the sources, Forsdyke suggests that Greek literature reveals traces of popular culture that can be further illuminated by comparison with later historical periods. By looking beyond institutional contexts, moreover, Forsdyke recovers the ways that groups that were excluded from the formal political sphere--especially women and slaves--participated in the process by which society was ordered.
Forsdyke begins each chapter with an apparently marginal incident in Greek history--the worship of a dead slave by masters on Chios, the naming of Sicyon's civic divisions after lowly animals such as pigs and asses, and the riding of an adulteress on a donkey through the streets of Cyme--and shows how these episodes demonstrate the significance of informal social practices and discourses in the regulation and reproduction of the social order. The result is an original, fascinating, and enlightening new perspective on politics and popular culture in ancient Greece.
