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The essays in this collection, developed from the forum presentations, defend diverse positions, but they largely accept the longstanding concentration in American folkloristics on the quotidian and local.

Folklore --- Folk beliefs --- Folk-lore --- Traditions --- Ethnology --- Manners and customs --- Material culture --- Mythology --- Oral tradition --- Storytelling --- Study and teaching --- Philosophy.

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Ethnology. Cultural anthropology --- African literature

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How to Read a FoIktale offers the first English translation of Ibonia, a spellbinding tale of old Madagascar. Much of its plot sounds familiar: a powerful royal hero attempts to rescue his betrothed from an evil adversary and, after a séries of tests and duels, he and his lover are joyfully united with a marriage that affirms the royal lineage. These fairytale elements link Ibonia with European folktales, but the taie is still very much a product of Madagascar. It contains African-style praise poetry for the hero; it presents Indonesian-style riddles and poems; and it inflates the form of folktale into epic proportions. Recorded when the Malagasy people were experiencing European contact for the first time, Ibonia proclaims the power of the ancestors against the foreigner. Through Ibonia, Lee Haring expertly helps readers to understand the very nature of folktales. His définitive translation, originally published in 1994, has now been fully revised to emphasize its poetic qualities, while his new introduction and detailed notes give insight into the fascinating imagination and symbols of the Malagasy. Haring's research connects this exotic narrative with fundamental questions not only of anthropology but also of literary criticism.

Tales --- Folklore --- Mythology, Malagasy. --- Malagasy mythology --- Folk beliefs --- Folk-lore --- Traditions --- Ethnology --- Manners and customs --- Material culture --- Mythology --- Oral tradition --- Storytelling --- folklore --- oral literature --- oral tradition --- African folklore studies --- Ibonia --- Madagascar --- folktales --- tales

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Legends --- Tales --- Folk tales --- Folktales --- Folk literature --- Traditions --- Urban legends --- Folklore --- Classification --- Contes populaires malgaches. --- Sprookjes van Madagascar.

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The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France. The author’s innovation is to read ethnographic researches as play scripts—to see printed folktales as accounts of live performances. One storyteller after another comments symbolically on what it is like to be a formerly colonised population. Storytelling women, in particular, combine diverse plots and characters to create traditional-sounding stories, which could not have been predicted from the African, Malagasy, Indian, and European traditions coexisting in Mayotte. Haring’s account shows them to be particularly skilled at irony and ambiguity, conveying both submissive and rebellious attitudes in their tales. He makes Mayotte storytelling accessible to a new, English-speaking audience and demonstrates that traditional storytellers in those years were preserving, but also critiquing, their inherited social order in a changing world. Their creative intentions, cultural influences and widely different narrative styles constitute Mayotte’s system of the arts of the word. Literary specialists, folklore enthusiasts, and people who like reading stories will find much to appreciate in this engaging and sophisticated book.