The Wormlips Scrapbook

Book description…

“This book is a brief but thorough introduction to folklore from South Asia, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. The volume begins with an overview of the cultural background of South Asia, and examines different types of folklore and the difficulties of defining and classifying folklore genres. It then provides a substantial selection of legends, tales, myths, riddles, jokes, and other pieces of folklore from South Asia. This is followed by a look at research on the subject, along with an exploration of South Asian folklore in literature and popular culture. The volume closes with a glossary and a bibliography of print and electronic resources”

My thoughts…

Why do so many academics insist on sucking the life out of their subject matter? I know that folklore is the new kid on the social science block and has a lot to prove, but really…

To be fair, the book is only doing its job: introducing readers to this area of scholarship. But I’m a woman on a mission, so I skipped the brainy stuff and plucked out only the first-person stories.

I read about a poetry game that would be fun to try at home. Called anmil in Urdu, it dates from the thirteenth century. The players have to string unrelated words into a single, cohesive idea.

Before: “Dog,” “pudding,” “spinning wheel” and “drum”

After: “Baked the pudding by burning the wood of a spinning wheel. A dog came and ate the pudding. Now you have nothing to do, but beat the drum.”

Well, that one is a bit of a stretch, but there’s entertainment potential here.

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Book description:

“Recently anthropology has turned to accounts of persons-in-history/ history-in-persons, focusing on how individuals and groups as agents both fashion and are fashioned by social, political, and cultural discourses and practices… The diversity of peoples, recent political transformations, and nation-building efforts make Nepal an especially rich locale to examine people’s struggles to define and position themselves… [T]his collection offers a richly textured and complex accounting of the mutual constitution of selves and society”

My thoughts…

Why did I think this sounded interesting? This gaggle of anthropologists succeeded in obscuring all the intriguing things about human cultures, thus obfuscating this gentle reader. Still, there was some worthwhile stuff buried among the scholarly rubble: stuff about marriage rites, definitions of madness, body image, materialism, origins of caste, and honor. There was one writer whose essay I really enjoyed: Sherry B. Oliver, writing about the disappearance of shamanism in Sherpa society. Two Nepali words kept popping up throughout the book: radi, which means “widow” but is commonly used as an insult; and dukha: hardship.

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A Photographic Record by John Claude White, 1883-1908. (July 2006)

My thoughts…

White was a British-Indian civil servant who lived in Nepal from 1883–4, one of only five Westerners allowed into the country that year. His sepia photos include the usual stunning mountain shots, along with a few Kathmandu scenes I’ll get to see in real life — like Pashupati Temple on the Baghmati River — except there’ll be globs more people.

There are lots of photos of Tibetan dzongs (fortresses), those surreal structures that sprout from the tops of rock masses, like this:

As Cheryl and I glanced through the book together, we came upon an image of a precipitous mountain path. At the exact same moment, we both spoke up. I said, “I hope we’re not going on a trail like that.” She said, “That trail’s pretty typical of where we’re going.”

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