The Middle East South Asia Folklore Newsletter

The authors cross the boundaries between anthropology, folklore, and history to cast new light on the relation between songs and stories, reality and realism, and rhythm and rhetoric in the expressive traditions of South Asia.

During the last two decades, the number of anthropologists conducting research in the Middle East has increased considerably. Together they have produced an abundance of valuable studies, often based on prolonged periods of ethnographic fieldwork. "Cultural Anthropology of the Middle East. A Bibliography" offers a comprehensive survey of their results. The first volume, published in 1992, covered publications which appeared between 1965 and 1987. The second volume brings the bibliography further up to date, listing publications between 1988 and 1992, and adds some 260 titles which were published up through 1987. As in the first volume, the majority of the titles are annotated.

Written by an international team of experts, this is the first work of its kind to offer comprehensive coverage of folklore throughout the African continent. Over 300 entries provide in-depth examinations of individual African countries, ethnic groups, religious practices, artistic genres, and numerous other concepts related to folklore. Featuring original field photographs, a comprehensive index, and thorough cross-references, African Folklore: An Encyclopedia is an indispensable resource for any library's folklore or African studies collection. Also includes seven maps.

"[This book] is a contribution of considerable substance because it takes a holistic view of the field of folk music and the scholarship that has dealt with it." -- Bruno Nettl "... a praiseworthy combination of solid scholarship, penetrating discussion, and global relevance." -- Asian Folklore Studies "... successfully ties the history and development of folk music scholarship with contemporary concepts, issues, and shifts, and which treats varied folk musics of the world cultures within the rubric of folklore and ethnomusicology with subtle generalizations making sense to serious minds... " -- Folklore Forum "... [this book] challenges many carefully-nurtured sacred cows. Bohlman has executed an intellectual challenge of major significance by successfully organizing a welter of unruly data and ideas into a single, appropriately complex but coherent, system." -- Folk Music Journal Bohlman examines folk music as a genre of folklore from a broadly cross-cultural perspective and espouses a more expansive view of folk music, stressing its vitality in non-Western cultures as well as Western, in the present as well as the past.