Copyright

Lee Haring

Published On

2023-07-13

Page Range

pp. 3–8

Language

  • English

Print Length

6 pages

Preface

  • Lee Haring (author)
The Preface introduces Mayotte (Comoros) and describes the work of the three French ethnographers who collected the tales. It proposes that the tellers used their skills at entertaining their audiences to deal critically with issues like marriage, the family, domination, power, and the need for secrecy.

Contributors

Lee Haring

(author)
Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College

Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He has taught in graduate folklore programs at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Connecticut. He has conducted folklore fieldwork in Kenya, Madagascar (as Fulbright Senior Lecturer), and Mauritius (as Fulbright researcher). His book Stars and Keys: Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean translates and comments on a hundred stories from Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, the Comoros, and Seychelles. He has also published Malagasy Tale Index, a comprehensive analysis of folktales; the English translation of Ibonia, Epic of Madagascar, available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0034; Verbal Arts in Madagascar, a study of four genres of oral literature; the bilingual field manual Collecting Folklore in Mauritius, in English and Kreol, two tale collections; and numerous journal articles. In 2013 he was given a Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award by the American Folklore Society.