Let’s begin with a question, the kind anthropologists love: are any customs universal?  Found everywhere, in every culture, from frozen Nunavut to the blistering sands of the Sahara? 

Storytelling is a cultural universal. People snooze in classrooms and during religious services, but never when a spooky story is told around a campfire.  These are some of my favorite stories, collected by anthropologists.

Bibliography:

Grimble, Arthur, A Gilbertese Creation Myth, In Reader in Comparative Religion,
Lessa & Vogt, eds. Harper and Row, 1965.
Beals, Allan, Gopalpur: A South Indian Village. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962
Chagnon, Napolean, Yanomamo, The Fierce People. Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
3 rd edition. 1983
Pierce, Joe, Life in a Turkish Village. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.
John Middleton Hyena and Rabbit: A Kaguru Representation. In Myth and
Cosmos, John Middleton, ed. University of Texas Press, 1967

Shamans are the go-to people when a family member gets sick - but what happens when the shaman fails?




Bibliography: 

Wagley, Charles, Tapirabe Shamanism. 

In Readings in Anthropology, Vol 2, Holt,
Rinehart and Winston Holt, Morton Fried, ed. Thomas Y. Crowell Co, 1968.

Very few anthropologists were as brave, daring and groundbreaking as Zora Neal Thurston - the only social scientist , Guggenheim fellow and Columbia PhD to  photograph a real Zombie.

Bibliography:

Tell My Horse, Thurston, Zora Neal, HarperCollins, 2008.

Folklore, memoirs, and other writings, Thurston, Zora Neale, NY, Library of America, 1995.

Hitting a straight lick with a colored stick: stories from the Harlem Renaissance, Thurston, Zora Neale, NY, Harper Collins, 2020

Every tongue got to confess: Negro folktales from the Gulf States, NY, HarperCollins, 2001

Despite the austerity of their environment and their meagre possessions, these aboriginal people of central Australia produced as lavish a body of myth and ritual as can be found anywhere in the world.  It is a staggering cultural resource - but with the coming of the whitefella, everything changed.

Bibliography:

Gould, Richard, Yiwara, Foragers of the Australian Desert, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY

Moorehead, Alan, Cooper’s Creek, The Opening of Australia, The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987

Sharp, Lauriston, Technological Innovation and Culture Change: An Australian Case, in Cultural and Social Anthropology, Peter B. Hammond, The MacMillan Company

Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Dover Publications, NY

Everyone loves stories.  People snooze in classrooms and during religious services, but never when a spooky story is told around a campfire.  These are some of my favorites, collected by anthropologists during field research.




Bibliography:
Grimble, Arthur, A Gilbertese Creation Myth, In Reader in Comparative Religion, Lessa & Vogt, eds. Harper and Row, 1965.

Beals, Allan, Gopalpur: A South Indian Village. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962

Chagnon, Napolean, Yanomamo, The Fierce People. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 3rd edition. 1983

Pierce, Joe, Life in a Turkish Village. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

John Middleton Hyena and Rabbit: A Kaguru Representation. In Myth and Cosmos, John Middleton, ed. University of Texas Press, 1967

The word harem brings to mind classic tales like The 10001 Arabian Nights - but did you know that harems still exist in the 21st century?

Bibliography:

Dreams of Trespass. Mernissi, Fatima.  Perseus Books, 1994.

Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village. Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock, Doubleday, 1965.

People die. In the end, we all have to face the Grim Reaper. But what do we do, when the dead come back to haunt us? 

Bibliography:

Lee, Richard, The Dobe Kung, Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1984 

Middleton, John, The Lugbara of Uganda, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965

Opler, Morris, An Interpretation of Ambivalence of Two American Indian Tribes.  Reader in Comparative Religion, Lessa & Vogt, eds. Harper and Row, 1965.

In the Kathmandu Valley, young Newari girls called kumaris are worshipped as omnipotent deities.