Daniel J. Crowley

Limba Stories and Storytelling

The Limba are rice farmers of northern Sierra Leone. This detailed study of their stories, collected and translated by Ruth Finnegan, emphasizes the importance of actual delivery in these orally transmitted tales, the part played by the story-teller, and the changing forms arising from the originality of individual narrators.

SONG AND DANCE IN ST. LUCIA

in the Lesser Antilles, 500 miles southeast of Puerto Rico. In the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries St. Lucia changed hands fourteen times between France and Britain. As a result, although her government has been that of the British Windward Islands since 1803, the 86,000 St. Lucians still speak French Creole patois and are largely Roman Catholics. This population, with the exception of a few hundred whites and a few thousand East Indians, is of West African ancestry with little European admixture. France, Africa, and Catholicism have combined in St. Lucia to produce a homogeneous culture unique in the West Indies. St. Lucias 233 square miles are covered by heavily forested volcanic mountains. In several narrow valleys between these peaks, sugar cane is extensively cultivated on large estates owned by the French Creole whites, and worked in season by landless Negro day-laborers. The hills around the sugar valleys and in the interior are divided into the small estates of the landed colored peasantry who raise bananas, cacao, and coconuts for export. The coast of the island is ringed by small towns and villages, the largest of which, Castries, has nearly a fourth of the islands population. The business and governmental administration in this capital city are largely in the hands of coloreds, many of them originating in other nearby islands. The coastal towns with their neatly-laid-out streets, large stone churches built by voluntary labor, and rows of gray, weatherbeaten houses, have changed little in the past century. In sharp contrast, Castries has suffered disastrous fires in 1927, 1948, and 1951, and is now a clean, concrete, model town.

The Assam Dragon: Folklore and Folkloristics in India's Long-Closed Northeast Frontier

attempt to survey folkloristic research in greater Assam, including major institutions, scholars, subjects, and theoretical approaches. But first, let me confess that the somewhat tired play on words in my title, originally the name of a World War II warplane in the Burma Theater of War, justly applies only to my own research predicament (and inability to resist a gag), and not the status of Assamese folklore research. In-