Folktales of Mizoram is a translated collection of sixty-six short stories from northeast India taken up for a critical evaluation. The stories depict a typical Mizo culture in spirit and practice. This study focuses on the transformation of oral literature into written narratives. Folk practices, folk medicine, folk narratives, traditional songs, and received wisdom dominate these stories. A more insightful approach into folk narratives and songs emphasizes the world of new hermeneutics. The land, the culture, the language, the traditions have been remarkably explored through an elegant reading and evaluation of this collection. Antiquity speaks through the folk tales. The spirit of folktales becomes one of unique exploration of hermeneutics in the end.

Relating to clothes is a fundamental experience in the lives of most Western women. Even when choice is fraught with ambivalence, clothing matters. From considerations about dressing for success, to worries about weight, through to investing particular articles of clothing with meaning bordering on the sacred, what we wear speaks volumes about personal identity - what is revealed, what is concealed, what is created.
This book fills a gap in the existing literature on the ambivalence of fashion and dress by drawing on a wide range of women's experiences with their wardrobes and providing empirical data noticeably absent from other studies of women and dress. Navigating what is clearly a contested realm in feminist scholarship, contributors provide rich case studies of the reality of women's relationships with clothing. While on the surface concerns about fashion or dress may appear to reflect gendered patterns, in fact clothing may be used to challenge ascribed meanings about femininity.

A pioneer in the strange art and ambiguous science of zo phagy-that is, of studying animals by eating them-British natural historian FRANCIS TREVELYAN BUCKLAND (1826-1880) was a wildly popular speaker and writer of the Victorian era. In his classic four-volume Curiosities of Natural History, published between 1857 and 1872, he shared his love of creatures exotic and mysterious with readers who devoured his charming and erudite essays much in the same way he devoured his animal subjects. "If there is one person that I would have expected to have captured a sea serpent in the 19th century for the sole purpose of eating it, it would be Frank Buckland," writes cryptozoologist Loren Coleman in his new introduction to Buckland's series. One of the founding grandfathers of cryptozoology, the discipline that investigates animal mysteries, Buckland was not "a wild-eyed 'true believer' in anything strange," insists Coleman, but brought, instead, "a skeptical, open-minded approach" to his work. Indeed, here, in the "fourth series" of Curiosities of Natural History, Buckland's erudition is clear in his animated discussions of, among many other things, measuring a French giant, the "woolly woman of Hayti," performing fleas, six thousand parakeets, the intemperance of salmon, and fossil pork. This new edition, a replica of the 1888 "Popular Edition," is part of Cosimo's Loren Coleman Presents series. LOREN COLEMAN is author of numerous books of cryptozoology, including Bigfoot : The True Story of Apes in America and Mothman and Other Curious Encounters.

This is an examination of human encounter with death in Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the rise of Pietism. The Protestant Reformation transformed the funeral more profoundly than any other ritual of the traditional church. Luther's doctrine of salvation by faith alone made the foundation of the traditional funeral, intercession for the dead in Purgatory, obsolete. By drawing on anthropological interpretations of death ritual, this study explores the changing relationships between the body, the soul, the living and the dead in the daily life of early modern Germany.

From the mysterious disappearance of hijacker D.B. Cooper to persistent rumors of bigfoot, this selection of thirteen stories from Oregon's past explores some of the Beaver State's most compelling mysteries and debunks some of its most famous myths. Read about the mysterious disappearances of several people over the years around Mount Emily, relive the gruesome discovery of three murdered trappers near the Deschutes River, and learn why many people believe an eleven-ton meteorite might be hidden in the mountains of southwestern Oregon.

Dartmoor Legends By Eva C. Roberts 296 pages Contents include: The magic mist - The vengeance of belus - The bards of the wood of Wistman - The story of the spinners rock - The golden maze - The legend of the grey wethers - The nymph Tamara - The wrath of Taranis - The pixies of Ockington wood - The legend of the Abbots way - The legend of Guile bridge Originally published in 1912. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Obscure Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Moralists have raged throughout history against various fashions for being too short, too long, too tight, too loose or too costly. Highlighting the times when choice of dress was a moral minefield, this enlightening and entertaining book looks at fashion extremes over the centuries, from the sexual display of the codpiece through to corsets, crinolines and decolletage. Providing a sharp and humorous look at the outright risque as well as the grotesquely exaggerated and even the repulsive, Ribeiro shows how dress has functioned variously as a vehicle of righteousness or turpitude and as an expression of sexuality, class or social status. In 747 St Boniface deemed wide stripes and scarlet borders to incite lust and ruination of the soul. Well over a millennium later immodest dress ranked high in Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan's book on the sins of society. Medical practitioners once labelled the v-necked top, now a standard style, 'the pneumonia neckline'. Was it the force of society or sheer vanity of fashion that drove women to wear sleeves the size of balloons? Are sexual boundaries between dress worn by men and women diminishing? What morals still bind us to our Judeo-Christian heritage and lead us to express ourselves through appearances?Lavishly illustrated and packed with countless thought-provoking quotes, Dress and Morality is an in-depth exploration of the comical vanities and social etiquettes associated with dress in the past. At last here is the much-anticipated updated edition of this classic book.

'Fascinating' Sunday Times 'Deeply sourced and rich with anecdotes' The Times 'Like a nonfiction version of The Devil Wears Prada' Elizabeth Day 'Odell's extensive reporting dredges up a wealth of delightful details' New York Times This definitive biography of Anna Wintour chronicles the steep climb of an ambitious young woman who would, with singular and legendary focus, become the most powerful woman in media. As a child, Anna Wintour was a tomboy with no apparent interest in clothing but, seduced by the miniskirts and bob haircuts of swinging 1960s London, she grew into a fashion-obsessed teenager. Her father, the influential editor of the Evening Standard, loomed large in her life, and once he decided she should become editor in chief of Vogue, she never looked back. Impatient to start her career, she left high school and got a job at a fashionable boutique in London - an experience that would be the first of many defeats. Undeterred, she found work in the competitive world of magazines, eventually moving to New York. Before long, Anna's journey to Vogue became a battle to ascend, no matter who or what stood in her way. Once she was crowned editor in chief - in one of the stormiest transitions in fashion magazine history - she continued the fight to retain her enviable position, ultimately rising to dominate all of Conde Nast. Based on extensive interviews with Anna Wintour's closest friends and collaborators, including some of the biggest names in fashion, journalist Amy Odell has crafted the most revealing portrait of Wintour ever published. Weaving Anna's personal story into a larger narrative about the hierarchical dynamics of the fashion industry and the complex world of Conde Nast, Anna charts the relentless ambition of the woman who would become an icon.

How much of what we know about the history of the Old West is true? In this new book, author Michael Rutter looks at the legend and lore behind such notorious figures as Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane and the stories of famous gun fights and battles, telling what really happened. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but these 12 legends stand up to scrutiny, and this book will be a must-read for all western history buffs.

Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians: First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-80, by J.W. Powell, Director, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnography.

Covering figures ranging from Catherine Monvoisin to Vlad the Impaler, and describing murders committed in ancient aristocracies to those attributed to vampires, witches, and werewolves, this book documents the historic reality of serial murder. The majority of serial murder studies support the consensus that serial murder is essentially an American crime-a flawed assumption, as the United States has existed for less than 250 years. What is far more likely is that the perverse urge to repeatedly and intentionally kill has existed throughout human history, and that a substantial percentage of serial murders throughout ancient times, the middle ages, and the pre-modern era were attributed to imaginative surrogate explanations: dragons, demons, vampires, werewolves, and witches. Legends, Monsters, or Serial Murderers? The Real Story Behind an Ancient Crime dispels the interrelated misconceptions that serial murder is an American crime and a relatively recent phenomenon, making the novel argument that serial murder is a historic reality-an unrecognized fact in ancient times. Noted serial murderers such as the Roman Locuta (The Poisoner); Gilles De Rais of France, a prolific serial killer of children; Andres Bichel of Bavaria; and Chinese aristocratic serial killer T'zu-Hsi are spotlighted. This book provides a unique perspective that integrates supernatural interpretations of serial killing with the history of true crime, reanimating mythic entities of horror stories and presenting them as real criminals.

This thoroughly engaging encyclopedia considers the rich diversity of unfamiliar foods eaten around the world. The title They Eat That?: A Cultural Encyclopedia of Weird and Exotic Food from around the World says it all. This fun encyclopedia, organized A-Z, describes and offers cultural context for foodstuffs people eat today that might be described as "weird"-at least to the American palate. Entries also include American regional standards, such as scrapple and chitterlings, that other regions might find distasteful, as well as a few mainstream American foods, like honey, that are equally odd when one considers their derivation. A long narrative entry on insects, for example, discusses the fact that insects are enjoyed as a regular part of the diet in some Asian, South and Central American, and African countries. It then looks at the kinds of insects eaten, where and how they are eaten, cultural uses, nutrition, and preparation. Each of the encyclopedia's 100 entries includes a representative recipe or, for a food already prepared like maggoty cheese, describes how it is eaten. Each entry ends with suggested readings. Approximately 100 entries A representative recipe for each entry Photographs and drawings Suggested readings for each entry Alphabetical and geographical lists of entries A selected bibliography

Based on a series of lectures delivered by Rudolf Steiner in Paris, 1906 and transcribed by Eduard Schure, An Esoteric Cosmology is a concise but powerful book and essential reading for students of Steiner. A wide variety of topics are covered, including Intellect, the Mission of Christianity, Manicheism, God, Man and Nature, Involution and Evolution, History of Yoga, The Gospel of St. John, Christian Mysticism, The Astral World, The Devachanic World (Heaven), Dreams, The Evolution of Planets and Earth, Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Human Will, Redemption and Liberation and the Apocalypse.

In the final years of the Soviet Union and into the 1990s, Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel at an unprecedented rate, bringing about profound changes in Israeli society and the way immigrants understood their own identity. In this volume ex-Soviets in Israel reflect on their immigration experiences, allowing readers to explore this transitional cultural group directly through immigrants' thoughts, memories, and feelings, rather than physical artifacts like magazines, films, or books. Drawing on their fieldwork as well as on analyses of the Russian-language Israeli media and Internet forums, Larisa Fialkova and Maria N. Yelenevskaya present a collage of cultural and folk traditions--from Slavic to Soviet, Jewish, and Muslim--to demonstrate that the mythology of Soviet Jews in Israel is still in the making. The authors begin by discussing their research strategies, explaining the sources used as material for the study, and analyzing the demographic profile of the immigrants interviewed for the project. Chapters use immigrants' personal recollections to both find fragments of Jewish tradition that survived despite the assimilation policy in the USSR and show how traditional folk perception of the Other affected immigrants' interaction with members of their receiving society. The authors also investigate how immigrants' perception of time and space affected their integration, consider the mythology of Fate and Lucky Coincidences as a means of fighting immigrant stress, examine folk-linguistics and the role of the lay-person's view of languages in the life of the immigrant community, and analyze the transformation of folklore genres and images of the country of origin under new conditions. As the biggest immigration wave from a single country in Israel's history, the ex-Soviet Jews make a fascinating case study for a variety of disciplines. Ex-Soviets in Israel will be of interest to scholars who work in Jewish and immigration studies, modern folklore, anthropology, and sociolinguistics.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

First published in a Yiddish edition in 1958, Profiles of a Lost World is an incomparable source of information about Eastern Europe before World War II as well as an invaluable touchstone for understanding a rich and complex cultural environment. Hirsz Abramowicz (1881-1960), a prominent Jewish educator, writer, and cultural activist, knew that world and wrote about it, and his writings provide a rare eyewitness account of Jewish life during the first half of the twentieth century.

Abramowicz was a witness to war, revolution, and major cultural transformations in the Jewish world. His essays, written and originally published in Yiddish between 1920 and 1955, document the local history of Lithuanian Jewry in rural and small-town settings, and in the city of Vilna -- the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" -- which was a major center of East European Jewish intellectual and cultural life. They shed important light on the daily life of Jews and the flourishing of modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe during the early twentieth century and offer a personal perspective on the rise of Jewish radical politics.

The collection incorporates local history of Lithuanian Jewry, shtetl folklore, observations on rural occupations, Jewish education, and life under German occupation during World War I. It also includes a series of profiles of leading social and intellectual Jewish personalities of the authors day, from traditional scholars to revolutionaries. Together the selections provide a unique blend of social and personal history and a window on a lost world.

This book by renowned anthropologist Harald Haarmann illuminates the acquisition of knowledge, and the meanings underlying forms of knowledge, in a broad temporal scope, ranging from the Neolithic through the modern era. Spiritual knowledge is at the heart of this work, which views myth and religion encoded in Neolithic female figurines and revived in the contemporary "primitive" artwork of artists such as Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore. Within such a framework, this study employs the knowledge and insights of the relatively new, and very important, interdisciplinary field of archaeomythology, which ties together information from archaeology, DNA studies, mythology, anthropology, classical studies, other ancient language studies, and linguistics. This study does so with a wealth of information in these fields, offering meaningful resolutions to many questions regarding antiquity, and shedding light upon several previously misunderstood phenomena, from the true function of Stonehenge (that its purpose was not astronomical), to the fact that there could not have been a mass movement of agriculturalists from Anatolia to Europe (this is a currently hotly contested issue), to important Eurasian religious beliefs and mythological motifs (with an excellent discussion of shamanism), to systems of writing (with a wonderful discourse upon ancient writing systems), religious expression, and mythology of the exceptionally significant cultures of Old Europe (Neolithic southeastern Europe). The book further discourses upon the legacy of this culture in Minoan and then Greek culture, Old European (pre-Indo-European) lexical items (that is, substrate vocabulary) in Greek, and finally the preservation of Neolithic spirituality in Modern Art. With this interdisciplinary approach, the study demonstrates that all of the subjects of this manuscript are interconnected, in a powerful wholeness. Ancient knowledge, Ancient know-how, Ancient reasoning is an unprecedented study that will appeal across many disciplines, including archaeology, mythology, anthropology, classical studies, ancient language studies, and linguistics. The book also includes many images that will prove helpful to the reader.

Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award 2000. Relationships between dress and the body have existed in European and Anatolian folk cultures well into the twentieth century. Traditional cultures have long held the belief that certain articles of dress could protect the body from harm by warding off the 'evil eye,' bring fertility to new brides, or assure human control of supernatural powers. Ritual fringes, archaic motifs, and colors such as black and red were believed to have powerful, magical effects. This absorbing and interdisciplinary book examines dress in a broad range of folk cultures - from Turkey, Greece, and Slovakia to Norway, Latvia, and Lithuania, to name but a few. Authors reveal the connection between folk dress and ancient myths, cults and rituals, as well as the communicative aspects of folk dress. How is an individual attired in a specific ensemble located within a community? Is the community the gendered one of women, the village of residence, the larger geographical region or the nation? The intriguing connections between dress and the supernatural beliefs of agrarian communities, as well as the reinvention of such beliefs as part of nationalism, are also discussed. This book represents a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on the cultural meanings of dress, as well as to material culture, anthropology, folklore, art history, ethnohistory, and linguistics. Nominated for Millia Davenport award