This new edition, published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding by Melville Herskovits of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, brings back into print one of the classics in scholarly analysis and translation, written by one of the cultural anthropology. When this book was first published in 1958, Melville luminaries of American Herskovits, with his wife and collaborator, Frances, had spent over Twenty years studying the social networks, language, and oral traditions of the peoples of West Africa and their descendants in the New World. Dahomey, the major site of their African work, is in the country now known as the Republic of Benin. This volume, had two goals: in its collection of 155 narratives, to provide basic texts of the analytical side, to provide a general theory of mythology using new oral narratives and looking at their tradition culminating in a survey of different prevailing Theories of myth. The result is a wide-ranging collection, culled from an entire narrative tradition, that remains unique among anthropological publications.

Collection of West African folktales drawn from prose narratives, proverbs, riddles, and songs.

This book, divided into two broad sections, examines the state in the Republic of Benin and the socio-political role of the Christian churches. The first looks at the remarkable pre-colonial kingdom of Danxomέ and its place in the imagining of the modern contrat social béninois. The second section looks at both the historical role of the mainline churches and the more recent development of a Christianisme béninois. The study concludes that the churches are above all a commentary upon the society in which they find themselves. Rather than an overt challenge to the state, they articulate social distress and the desire for a different future. In times of stress they may prove to be the only viable institutional buttress as well as the arbiter. This study seeks to make a contribution to the understanding of the public role of Christian churches in Africa.

Alan Dundes defines myth as a sacred narrative that explains how the world and humanity came to be in their present form. This new volume brings together classic statements on the theory of myth by the authors. The twenty-two essays by leading experts on myth represent comparative, functionalist, myth-ritual, Jungian, Freudian, and structuralist approaches to studying the genre.