These twenty-one animal tales from the Colombian Caribbean coast represent a sampling of the traditional stories that are told during all-night funerary wakes. The tales are told in the semi-sacred space of the patio (backyard) of homes as part of the funerary ritual that includes other aesthetic and expressive practices such as jokes, song games, board games, and prayer. In this volume these stories are situated within their performance contexts and represent a highly ritualized corpus of oral knowledge that for centuries has been preserved and cultivated by African-descendant populations in the Americas. Ethnomusicologist George List collected these tales throughout his decades-long fieldwork amongst the rural costenos, a chiefly African-descendent population, in the mid-20th century and, with the help of a research team, transcribed and translated them into English before his death in 2008. In this volume, John Holmes McDowell and Juan Sebastian Rojas E. have worked to bring this previously unpublished manuscript to light, providing commentary on the transcriptions and translations, additional cultural context through a new introduction, and further typological and cultural analysis by Hasan M. El-Shamy. Supplementing the transcribed and translated texts are links to the original Spanish recordings of the stories, allowing readers to follow along and experience the traditional telling of the tales for themselves.

In this book Hasan M. El-Shamy has gathered the first authentic new collection of modern Egyptian folk narratives to appear in nearly a century. El-Shamy's English translations of these orally presented stories not only preserve their spirit, but give Middle Eastern lore the scholarly attention it has long deserved.
"This collection of seventy recently collected Egyptian tales is a major contribution to African studies and to international distribution studies of folktales. In the face of the recent anthropological trend to use folkloric materials for extra-folkloric purposes, the preeminence of the text must be asserted once more, and these are obviously authentic, straightforwardly translated, fully documented as to date of collection and social category of informant, and for all that . . . readable."--Daniel J. Crowley, "Research in African Literatures"
"Western knowledge of virtually all facets of contemporary Egyptian culture, much less the roots of that culture, is woefully inadequate. By providing an interesting, varied, and readable collection of Egyptian folktales and offering clear and sensible accounts of their background and meaning, this book renders a valuable service indeed."--Kenneth J. Perkins, "International Journal of Oral History"

These twenty-one animal tales from the Colombian Caribbean coast represent a sampling of the traditional stories that are told during all-night funerary wakes. The tales are told in the semi-sacred space of the patio (backyard) of homes as part of the funerary ritual that includes other aesthetic and expressive practices such as jokes, song games, board games, and prayer. In this volume these stories are situated within their performance contexts and represent a highly ritualized corpus of oral knowledge that for centuries has been preserved and cultivated by African-descendant populations in the Americas. Ethnomusicologist George List collected these tales throughout his decades-long fieldwork amongst the rural costenos, a chiefly African-descendent population, in the mid-20th century and, with the help of a research team, transcribed and translated them into English before his death in 2008. In this volume, John Holmes McDowell and Juan Sebastian Rojas E. have worked to bring this previously unpublished manuscript to light, providing commentary on the transcriptions and translations, additional cultural context through a new introduction, and further typological and cultural analysis by Hasan M. El-Shamy. Supplementing the transcribed and translated texts are links to the original Spanish recordings of the stories, allowing readers to follow along and experience the traditional telling of the tales for themselves.

..". a cross-cultural consideration of kinship and family relations as captured in traditional folktales and other lore genres.... This valuable contribution in the areas of anthropology and folk literature will be a treasured acquisition... " Library Journal

..". rare, intriguing, and highly readable... presents tales from the Arab world in a fluent and attractive way." Ulrich Marzolph

This cross-cultural examination of kinship and affinal relations as expressed in traditional folktales is based on field data compiled by the author. The gender factor and its impact on the form, structure, and contents of each item are explored in conjunction with the concepts of multiple role-playing, role transition, and role-strain."

"Religion among the Folk in Egypt" seeks to structure the entire field of supernatural beliefs and related practices in the folk communities of Egypt. These beliefs constitute a cognitive system on the one hand and represent behavioral experiences felt, thought, and lived by individuals and social groups on the other. The systemic qualities of the beliefs involved are represented by the fact that the components are interconnected; even a peripheral belief is connected to others and, ultimately, attributed to a central component. The individual 'believer' is aware of the systeM's components and of the interrelationships among these components. Individuals and social groups manifest the behavioristic nature of a belief or a piece of knowledge within the system through actions. These actions, or rituals are motivated by these beliefs and are made in response to, and within the confines of, the beliefs.

A major component of a belief is its affective quality. From the viewpoint of the believer, a religious belief is associated with a certain type of sentiment: awe, reverence, fear, love, hate, and so forth. Such feelings are learned and lead the individual to act in a certain manner and direction congruent with his feelings. In the present inquiry the sentiments involved are predominantly of a religious nature. The folk system only partially overlaps with the formal religion. Folk beliefs and practices, however, represent real behavioral patterns which influence the thoughts, feelings, and actions of individuals and tradition bound groups in daily living; in many respects it is the real religious culture, while formal religion represents the ideal or the supposed form of that culture.

In 1704 the French Orientalist Antoin Galland introduced to the Western world a translation of The Thousand and One Nights. Over the course of two subsequent centuries, numerous editions followed. Many of these, like Galland s, included texts of stories not found in the indigenous manuscripts of the Nights but selected by the European editors from other literary and oral collections of ordinary folktales and legends. Thus, the original work acquired a Western designation as The Arabian Nights, a title unknown among the masses in Arab lands. Now, three centuries later, original publication of The Thousand and One Nights is being celebrated with widespread, renewed interest in the work. Hasan El-Shamy s motif-index, based on an authentic folk edition of Alf laylah wa laylah, provides scholars of various fields accurate information about the content of this classic piece of Arabic folk tradition."

Makes available a difficult-to-find folkloric scholarship classic and illuminates it with contemporary commentary from a preeminent authority on Egyptian folktales. Gaston Maspero is a towering figure in Egyptology. Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt offers a wealth of primary data and authoritative commentaries on ancient Egyptian culture, language, history, society, and ethnic groups as depicted in Egyptian and Greek–Egyptian narratives. The work provides the contextual data necessary for understanding the tale-texts and reflects Maspero's deep knowledge of many fields, from the classics to life in modern Egypt. This new edition includes a contemporary foreword, which introduces Maspero and describes his scholarship. It also provides, for the first time, extensive identification of the ancient stories in terms of international tale-types and motifs. The new information places the anthology in a broader academic context and is a valuable resource for students of Egyptology, folklore, literature, history, and social and cultural anthropology.