Bøger af Sadhana Naithani

This book is a study of selected texts of British writings on Indian wildlife published between 1860 and 1960.

Explores the role of folklore, folklore archives, and folklore studies in the contemporary history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Sadhana Naithani combines the study of written works, archival documents, life-stories, and conversations with folklorists, ethnologists, archivists, and historians in Tartu, Riga, and Vilnius.

Can the study of folklore survive brutal wars and nationalized misappropriations? Does folklore make sense in an age of fearsome technology? These are two of several questions this book addresses with specific and profound reference to the history of folklore studies in Germany. There in the early nineteenth century in the ideological context of romantic nationalism, the works of the Brothers Grimm pioneered the discipline. The sublimation of folklore studies with the nation's political history reached a peak in the 1930s under the Nazi regime. This book takes a full look at what happened to folklore after the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazis. A special focus on Lutz Rhrich (1923-2006), whose work spans the decades from 1955 to 2006, makes this book a unique window into a monumental reclamation. In 1945 Rhrich returned from the warfront at the age of twenty-three, a wounded amputee. Resuming his education, he published his seminal Mrchen und Wirklichkeit (Folktale and Reality) in 1956. Naithani argues that through this and a huge body of scholarship on folktale, folksong, proverbs, and riddles over the next decades, Rhrich transformed folklore scholarship by critically challenging the legacies of Romanticism and Nazism in German folklore work. Sadhana Naithani's book is the first full-length treatment of this extraordinary German scholar written in English.

Examines folklore collections compiled by British colonial administrators, military men, missionaries, and women in the British colonies of Africa, Asia, and Australia between 1860 and 1950. Naithani analyzes the role of folklore scholarship in the construction of colonial cultural politics as well as in the conception of international folklore studies.