Building on a South Asian oral folk legend, Hidden Paradigms identifies the important symbolic patterns that well-known epic stories while also suggesting fresh strategies for further discovery.
Understanding an epic story's key belief patterns can reveal community-level values, the nature of familial bonds, and how divine and human concerns jockey for power and influence. These foundational motifs remain understudied as they relate to South Asian folk legends, but are nonetheless crucial in shaping the values exemplified by such stories' central heroes and heroines.
In Hidden Paradigms, anthropologist Brenda E.F. Beck describes The Legend of Ponnivala, an oral epic from rural South India. Recorded in 1965, this story was sung to a group of village enthusiasts by a respected pair of local bards. This grand legend took more than 38 hours to complete over 18 nights. Bringing this unique example of Tamil culture to the attention of an international audience, Beck compares this virtually unknown South Indian epic to five other culturally significant works - the Ojibwa Nanabush cycle, the Mahabharata, an Icelandic Saga, the Bible, and the Epic of Gilgamesh - establishing this foundational Tamil story as one that engages with the same universal human struggles and themes present throughout the world. Copiously illustrated, Hidden Paradigms provides a fresh example of the power of comparative thinking, offering a humanistic complement to scientific reasoning.
Show moreBuilding on a South Asian oral folk legend, Hidden Paradigms identifies the important symbolic patterns that well-known epic stories while also suggesting fresh strategies for further discovery.
Understanding an epic story's key belief patterns can reveal community-level values, the nature of familial bonds, and how divine and human concerns jockey for power and influence. These foundational motifs remain understudied as they relate to South Asian folk legends, but are nonetheless crucial in shaping the values exemplified by such stories' central heroes and heroines.
In Hidden Paradigms, anthropologist Brenda E.F. Beck describes The Legend of Ponnivala, an oral epic from rural South India. Recorded in 1965, this story was sung to a group of village enthusiasts by a respected pair of local bards. This grand legend took more than 38 hours to complete over 18 nights. Bringing this unique example of Tamil culture to the attention of an international audience, Beck compares this virtually unknown South Indian epic to five other culturally significant works - the Ojibwa Nanabush cycle, the Mahabharata, an Icelandic Saga, the Bible, and the Epic of Gilgamesh - establishing this foundational Tamil story as one that engages with the same universal human struggles and themes present throughout the world. Copiously illustrated, Hidden Paradigms provides a fresh example of the power of comparative thinking, offering a humanistic complement to scientific reasoning.
Show moreIntroduction
1. Summarizing an Epic Legend, The Legend of Ponnivala Nadu
2. Character and Plot Structures, The Mahabharata
3. Human Life as a Balancing Act, The Epic of Gilgamesh
4. Seven Great Phases of History, The Bible’s Old and New Testament
Stories
5. Landscapes and Identity Formation, The Vatsendaela Saga
6. Human versus Extra-Human Powers, The Nanabush Legend Cycle
7. Hidden Paradigms, Additional Themes and Some Overview
Theories
8. The Story Told by the Stars, Babylonian Star-lore and the Hindu
Nakshatras
9. An Epic Story Visualized as a Lotus Plant, The Lotus Plant in
Barabudur, Central Java Conclusion
Annotated Bibliography Listing Sources for Specific Epics
Discussed
General Bibliography
Brenda E.F. Beck is an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
"Everyone with an interest in epic or, indeed, in narrative or
mythology generally should read this book by an internationally
respected authority. Taking an innovative comparative approach
likely to deeply affect this field of scholarship, it is full of
mind-opening insights that will delight the expert and the general
reader alike." --Ruth Finnegan, Emeritus Professor of Social
Sciences, The Open University
"Brenda Beck shows in this book that the oral folk epic Annanmar
katai 'the story of twin brothers' is not local or vernacular in
its reach. It is in essence a story of the emergence of a farming
culture superseding a hunting culture. This sets the ground for the
comparative study of five other legends from around the world.
Relating the local to the global is new in anthropology. The book
ends up showing that all humans journeyed through comparable paths
and that they have similar ways of telling that story."--E.
Annamalai, formerly of the Department of South Asian Languages and
Civilizations, University of Chicago
"By setting the Land of the Golden River in conversation with the
Mahabharata, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, Icelandic saga, and
North American Indigenous legends, Brenda Beck explores how epic
narratives address perennial questions at the core of our humanity.
In the process, she reveals to the English-speaking world the
anthropological, psychological, and symbolic complexity of a
hitherto little-known masterpiece of world literature."--Jo Ann
Cavallo, Professor of Italian, Columbia University
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