Book Review


Tomas Huanca L. Tsimane Oral Tradition, Landscape, and Identity in Tropical Forest. La Paz, Bolivia: SEPHIS – South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development. 2006. Pp. iii+279, color and black and white photos, line drawings, and designs, color and black and white maps, index., glossary of indigenous terms.

Fredericka Schmadel
Indiana University

Tomas Huanca L., who lived with the Tsimane in Amazonian Bolivia for nine years, documented their traditions, oral history, and myths, retreating now in the face of outside pressure. He includes helpful chapter summaries, many photographs, maps, and charts, a glossary of Tsimane terms, a pronunciation guide, and a bibliography with extensive oral archival as well as scholarly sources. However, once the reader has found a useful section on a topic — a trickster figure, the use of tobacco and/or beer in healing ceremonies, or the Masters of the Game — compare-contrast material will be lacking. It is almost as if the Tsimane, alone among indigenous groups, incorporated tricksters, beer customs, and the like into their world view. This is most decidedly not the case. For this reason, readers who are familiar with other Amazonian indigenous communities will benefit from this ethnography more than readers looking for an introduction to the field.

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Mary Noailles Murfree. Ed. Bill Hardwig. In the Tennessee Mountains. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008. Pp. xlviii +167. $24.95 paper.

Danielle Quales
Indiana University

The main body of this text was originally published in 1884 by Mary Noailles Murfree under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock.  This collection of eight tales in the popular American local-color style of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is well known to scholars interested in regional studies of the United States, most specifically in the Appalachian region that is treated in Murfree’s sketches.  Murfree came from a wealthy, flatland Tennessee family and spent summers in the mountains interacting with the locals and becoming familiar with Appalachian culture, which was the alleged inspiration for this collection of stories.  Even though these stories were popular with her middle-class readership at the time of publication, In the Tennessee Mountains has come to be regarded as an unfair, stereotypical portrayal of mountain people by the vast majority of scholars in more recent years.  This new edition, though, provides an intriguing introduction to the collection written by Egbert Craddock that makes the book more appropriately contextualized and thus more informative.  Hardwig firmly places Murfree in the social and academic milieu of her time, thus showing both the value of her scholarship in its time period and its shortcomings.  Hardwig gives the reader important biographical information on the writer that give the modern reader a deeper understanding of her reasons for writing about mountain culture. (more…)

William Schneider, ed. Living With Stories: Telling, Re-telling, and Remembering. Logan: Utah State Press, 2008. pp. 175 pages. ISBN: 978-0-87421-689-9 (cloth) $27.95 cloth, $23.00 e-book.

Kristiana Willsey
Indiana University

Living With Stories grew out of a panel at the 2004 U.S. Oral History Association meeting, and its structure consciously echoes that of a conference session—each chapter is deepened and developed by a following interview between the chapter’s author and a notable scholar whose own, related research makes them uniquely able to expand upon the original paper. These “conversation” chapters extend to the reader a sense of privileged participation, a vicarious presence at an especially coherent and insightful conference discussion. The transcribed conversations are more engaging, and more truly dialogic, than the usual “response” essays in similar volumes. (more…)

Lindsay Hale.  Hearing the Mermaids Song: The Umbanda Religion in Rio De Janeiro.  Albuquerque:  University of New Mexico Press, 2009.  6 x 9 pp208.  $26.95 paperback.

Taylor Schlichter
Indiana University

Umbanda is a complex and unique religion popular in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It involves mediums who summon spirits of old slaves, Indians, saints, and even young children through trance. It is a mixture of traditional African religious practices brought over by slaves, Catholicism, and sometimes the writings of Allen Kardec; full of African rituals and magic, it still manages to tie in Catholic ideas.  Many Afro-Brazilians particularly identify with this religion because of its undeniable African roots.  Recently, however, Brazilian people of European descent have begun to practice Umbanda. The spirits talk to members of Umbanda centers through the mediums and help them work through issues and problems they are experiencing.  Mediums take on the full mannerisms of the spirit they are channeling during the trances. They talk, sing, move, and even eat like the spirit. There are multiple kinds of spirits that serve different purposes. Old slaves, or pretos velhos, are kind, gentle spirits who are wise and patient.  Indian spirits, or Caboclos, are arrogant and brave.   All spirits, however, serve the Orixas, or gods, and console people about how to live the right way. (more…)

Thomas Hart.  The Ancient Spirituality of the Modern Maya.  Albuquerque:  University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Pp 290.  $45.00 hardcover.

 Kristina Downs
Indiana University

The Ancient Spirituality of the Modern Maya by Thomas Hart profiles the persistence of traditional Mayan religion in contemporary society.  Hart, who has lived and worked in Guatemala since 1993, conducted most of his fieldwork in Guatemala among the K’iche’ Maya, but argues that many of the concepts he discusses are relevant to the Maya more generally.  Although the title stresses the endurance of Mayan Spirituality, the central theme of the work seems to be change, which is often framed as a detrimental decline of the old ways.  His collaborators repeatedly mention that because of social changes, things are not seen the way they should be, the way they once were. (more…)

Sandra L. Beckett. Red Riding Hood for All Ages: A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Pp. ix+244, color prints, index. $29.95, paper.

Sara Cleto
George Mason University

Sandra L Beckett’s book, Red Riding Hood for All Ages: A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts, provides an indepth and informative critique of retellings of a familiar fairy tale. This is Beckett’s second book on Little Red Riding Hood retellings; her first volume, Recycling Red Riding Hood, was devoted to contemporary revisions intended for children. Red Riding Hood for All Ages, however, has a wider scope, addressing retellings targeted at children, adolescents, and adults, as well as crossover works intended for more than one age group. (more…)

Patrick R. McNaughton.  A Bird Dance Near Saturday City: Sidi Ballo and the Art of West African MasqueradeBloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.  Pp. xvii+300, photographs, notes, index.  $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Nichole Tramel
Indiana University

Patrick McNaughton’s work, A Bird Dance Near Saturday City: Sidi Ballo and the Art of West African Masquerade, chronicles and investigates a particularly resonant masquerade performance of Sidi Ballo’s decades ago in a small town near Saturday City, Mali, as the text’s title implies.  For years, the author struggled with how to accurately and fairly depict this powerful experience, the product of Sidi Ballo’s genius and the other talented dancers, singers, and community members that contributed to the performance.  This book is the result of his journey.  Accordingly, A Bird Dance Near Saturday City devotes equal attention to Sidi Ballo’s virtuosity, elements of bird dance performance, the performance itself, and the forms and functions of aesthetics.  Examining both the particular and the general, McNaughton provides a useful and engaging account of Sidi Ballo’s June 1978 Dogoduman bird dance performance; in so doing, he examines its components and contributors, and Sidi Ballo as a performer and artist.  Additionally, the author discusses artistry, aesthetics, and performance theory, both philosophically and practically.  He looks at each of these in terms of the bird dance(s), Mande culture, and society in general. (more…)

Karen Dodge Tolstrup. “If Maine Had a Queen”: The Life of Brownie Schrumpf. Orono, ME: The Maine Folklife Center, 2008. Pp. 96, black and white photographs, appendix of recipes. $15.00 paper.

 Danielle Quales
Indiana University

Tolstrup’s very accessible and readable book chronicles the life of famous Mainer, Mildred Greeley Brown Schrumpf.  Schrumpf truly seemed to be a woman ahead of her time in the early to mid-twentieth century.  Known by her family, friends, and readers as simply “Brownie,” she was perhaps best known for her weekly newspaper column that ran from 1951 to 1994 in the Bangor Daily News.  Following her popular columns, her readers became familiar with her rural upbringing (to which many eagerly made connections with fond memories of their own childhoods).  They also received homemaking tips from her, and generally came to feel a real affinity for the writer.  Tolstrup shows how Brownie was a popular, relatable personality for so many women of her time because she was a role model for women successfully balancing domestic and professional or community interests. (more…)

Power, Natsu Onoda. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. University of Mississippi, 2009. Print. 208 pp, 6 x 9 inches, 53 b&w illustrations, filmography, bibliography, index. $50.00 unjacketed cloth; $25.00 paper

Jeremy Stoll
Indiana University

In God of Comics, Natsu Onoda Power uses the framework of intertextuality to analyze one of the most important figures in Japanese comics and his work within the form. In the Introduction, the author points out the divide between English and Japanese-language studies of manga as pivoting on understandings of manga as either culturally unique or an evolving art. Overcoming this tension serves as the focus of Power’s analysis of Osamu Tezuka’s unique genius in the context of manga’s evolution as a form. (more…)

Dorson, Richard. Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, 3rd edition, edited by James P. Leary. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008 [1952]. pp. 371, index.  Paper $24.95.

Jodine Perkins
Indiana University

Based on five months of fieldwork conducted in 1946, Richard Dorson brings together a collection of folklore from the diverse inhabitants of Michigan’s Upper Pennisula (U.P.): young and old, lumbermen and miner, Ojibwa, Finn, and French. He selected this place, in part, because it was relatively close to his home in Lansing, although still a ferry ride away. He also chose the U.P. because of its isolation from much of the U.S., its cultural distinctiveness, and because both American Indians and European immigrants of many nationalities lived there. Furthermore, the U.P. was still fairly rural and poor due to the decline of timber harvesting and mining. To Dorson, it seemed that all of these conditions made this area fertile ground for finding folklore, particularly oral narratives, and indeed he did discover a “storyteller’s paradise” (2). (more…)

Maryline Parca and Angeliki Tzanetou, eds. Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. 289 pp. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paperback.

Nichole Tramel
Indiana University

Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean sheds light on an oft-ignored issue in classical studies: women’s religious roles. Because of the stark division of male and female spheres of influence in the classical world, and the fact that the primary recorders of ancient ritual were men, the evidence for the religious lives of ancient women is scant. Finding Persephone is intended to fill this gap in scholarly literature. (more…)

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