Ben-Amos, Dan
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Publication Review of Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual(1970-04-01) Ben-Amos, DanThe ten essays that comprise this volume deal with the ritual symbols of the Ndembu people of Zambia, south-central Africa. All except one were previously published within the last ten years. Most of them excel in analytical rigor, detailed ethnographic description, and provide stimulating theoretical suggestions. Now that these essays have been assembled in a single volume, Victor Turner's approach emerges as a fruitful research method. It could well be one of the most significant contributions any anthropologist has made to folklore studies in the past decade.Publication Story Telling in Benin(1967) Ben-Amos, DanOne of the most significant traditions of African artists is that of the storyteller. This traditional figure remembers the legends and history of the tribe and village and passes them on to later generations in a linking of oral continuity. Modern phenomena are destroying the social cohesion in which this art form flourished, and although linguists and anthropologists are now endeavoring to record as many stories as possible, many, it is feared, have already been lost.Publication Meditation on a Russian Proverb in Israel(1995) Ben-Amos, DanMy father spoke in proverbs, but for many years I did not notice. Only after I completed my graduate studies in folklore and began teaching, did I become aware of the idioms in his conversation. Without being a religious person he interlaced his anecdotes and narratives with proverbs, biblical verses, and parables from the talmuds. I began to pay attention. A few years later, when I visited my parents in Israel, my father, who was a construction worker, told me that in retirement he tried to make a business deal but failed. Yet in spite of his naiveté in such matters, he came through that experience unscathed. "The Lord protects the simple [minded]" (Psalms 116:6). He concluded his story with a touch of self-irony, and then explained, "why 'the simple [minded]'? Because smart people can take care of themselves." When my mother's health declined, he tended to her at home, and at the same time struggled to maintain his regular busy schedule of volunteer activities in several local organizations. Not one to complain openly, he wrote me in a letter the following parable, hardly realizing its history. "A Jew has complained before God about his share of troubles. He complained so much until God got tired of him and showed him the troubles other people in the world had, and told him to select out of these any trouble that would suit him best. After observing all these afflictions the Jew chose his own old troubles—at least with those, he felt, he was familiar."1Publication "A Performer-Centered Study of Narration: A Review Article", Review of Linda Dégh, Narratives in Society: A Performer-Centered Study of Narration(1998) Ben-Amos, DanAn Hungarian in America, Linda Dégh lives the ideal of a Malinowskian fieldworker. After immigrating to the United States and joining the faculty of the famous Folklore Institute at Indiana University in the 60s, she has become a participant in and an observer of American life, conducting research among native Midwesterners and Hungarian immigrants in towns like Bloomington, Evansville, Indiana, as well as the highly industrial Calumet Region, particularly in Gary, Indiana. Dégh arrived in the United States as a mature and accomplished scholar, after conducting extensive field research in her native Hungary, and winning the coveted Pitré Prize in 1963. Her books from that period are among the classics of ethnographic folklore (Dégh 1962, 1969, 1995a). In the United States she has extended her method and observed and analyzed her storytelling immigrants as they negotiate their social and narrative worlds between their old and new countries, between their rural beliefs and practices and their homes that are filled with electronic devices, telephones, and television sets. At the same time Dégh has been a major contributor to and a commentator on the changing trends in folkloristics, and in the last thirty years she has emerged as the leading Europeanist in American folklore studies.Publication Jewish Folklore as Counterculture(2014-01-01) Ben-Amos, DanA literacy divide runs deep in Jewish society. The scribes, the priests, and the prophets who wrote the Bible referred to the folk on the other side of the divide as ha-'am (the people), and the sages, who taught the books that followed, called them 'olam (the world population). Both terms resonate in subsequent Jewish languages. The Yiddish word 'amkha (all the people), and its analogue in Judeo-Spanish, povlacho, have their roots in the Bible where the concept of the "people" is ubiquitous. It occurs in a variety of forms as kol ha-'am (all the people), 'am ha-'arez (the people of the land)—a term which already in the Bible, and certainly later, had furthered its semantic scope—and in supplications to God as 'amkha Yisra'el (Your people Israel). In some dialects of Judeo-Arabic the terms that draw upon postbiblical usages are 'amah, 'olam, or 'al-'olam 'al-kul. In the Bible the term refers to mindless multitudes, immense crowds, or a general population mass. While the writers of these texts shaped Judaism as we know it, the 'am, the folk, experienced Jewish life in a way that we had—and still need—to discover.Publication Old Yiddish and Middle Yiddish Folktales(1992) Ben-Amos, DanHistory and Territorial Boundaries. The Yiddish language emerged around the tenth century among the Jewish communities in Lotharingia in the Rhine valley. From there it spread to Northern Italy, Northern France and Holland with newly established Ashkenazi colonies, and under the impact of the Crusades to Central Europe and then eastward, to Slavic countires.33 Old Yiddish (1250-1500), primarily a spoken language, functioned as the language of oral tales, songs, fables, and proverbs. From that period scattered glosses and phrases are extant, the earliest of them is a blessing inscribed in an illuminated prayer book of Worms dated from 1272. The earliest document of literary activity in Yiddish dates from 1382. It was discovered in a cachet of manuscripts (genizah) in Cairo, and now it is housed in Cambridge University library.Publication Review of Mabel H. Ross and Barbara K. Walker, "On Another Day..." Tales Told among the Nkundo of Zaire(1980-08-01) Ben-Amos, DanFrom the end of 1972 until the middle of 1974, Mrs. Mabel H. Ross, a missionary, traveled in Central Zaire among the Nkundo people, recording their oral narratives. The present volume includes the English translation of these tales, supplemented by two texts translated from the Flemish and one from Lonkundo that appeared in A. de Rop, De gesproken woordkunst van de Nkundo (Tervuren: Museé Royale du Congo Belge, 1956) and in G. Hulstaert and A. de Rop (eds.), Rechtspraakfabels van de Nkundo (Tervuren: La Commission de Linguistique Africaine, 1954), and by eighteen texts translated from Lonkundo that were first published in a school reader, Bekolo Bemo Bendemba Ba-Nkundo (1957), compiled by three anonymous(?) mission-school teachers.Publication Review of Phillip D. Curtin, Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of Slave Trade(1970-07-01) Ben-Amos, DanIt has long been evident that folklore research in literate societies cannot rely exclusively on oral tradition but must incorporate data found in written sources as well. Now, indirectly, Phillip Curtin illustrates the applicability of the same methodological principle to folklorisitc investigation in traditionally nonliterate societies.Publication Review of Joseph C. Miller, The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History(1981-05-01) Ben-Amos, DanThe African past certainly speaks, but in what language? Is it the language of testimonies and accounts, or is it the language of metaphors, of symbols, and of structures? And once identified, what and whose code will decipher the message and unveil the secrets oral tradition both reveals and conceals? Ten scholars—all historians, Vansina vintage—join in this volume to answer these and related questions, and to counter the critique anthropologists mounted against their mentor's historical method. The eleventh contributor is Vansina himself, who has the last word.Publication Review of Isidore Okpewho, The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance(1980) Ben-Amos, DanWhen Ruth Finnegan published her book Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970), out of five hundred and fifty-eight pages she devoted only two and half pages to the epic, and even these were negative. "All in all," she wrote, "epic poetry does not seem to be a typical African form. . . .Certain elements of epic also come into many other forms of poetry and prose. But in general terms and apart from Islamic influences, epic seems to be of remarkably little significance in African oral literature, and the a priori assumption that epic is the natural form for many non-literate peoples turns out here to have little support" (p.110). While Finnegan's book was in general well-received, it was her relatively minor "Notes on the Epic" (pp. 108-110) that actually stirred controversy and stimulated discussion. The present study by Isidore Okpewho is the first book length response to Finnegan's challenge.1