1998
367 pp.
English-German and German-French keyword index
Text language: German
This dictionary of terms is aimed at a broad audience. It wants to provide a fast access to the wide field of African oral cultures. Primarily the book wants to help students who work in the field of African orality, but it is also useful for anyone not specialized in this field of study but interested in getting a first impression of it by means of short articles / miscellanea. Within the last four decades there has been a continuously rising interest in comparative, socioanthropological and literary-esthetic analysis of texts in African languages. The cultures of Africa are rapidly changing and in a transition from orality to recorded writing. Anyone who is interested in Africa’s spiritual and social institutions and in Africans’ mentality and way of life, their poetry and music, has to refer to orally transmitted sources which have been set down in writing.
Oral Literature in Africa by Ruth Finnegan, published back in 1970, is the only methodologically related work which sums up the different methods of research in oral literature. Every keyword has its English and French equivalent given in an English and a French subject index at the end of the volume. An extensive and detailed bibliography gives all sources that are quoted in the articles.
Under these links you will find further contributions to the methodology of oral literature research:
