Anthropologist collaborates with study’s subjects

In a new book titled Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Folktales, cultural anthropologist Kirin Narayan contributes to a growing movement in anthropology to work out more equitable and collaborative relations with the people being studied.

Narayan is an associate professor of anthropology and South Asian studies at UW–Madison. In her new book, she brings together a collection of tales told in the Himalayan foothill region, where she has done field research since 1982. While most books on tales make no mention of storytellers or their insights, Narayan tries to right this imbalance.

The first hint of just how is on the cover, where Narayan’s name is followed by the phrase “in collaboration with Urmila Devi Sood.” Sood, called Urmilaji, is an accomplished woman storyteller who pointed out to Narayan in 1991 that with education and mass media, the region’s folktales were being forgotten. “The only way children of the future might come to know these stories is if someone like you writes them down,” said Sood.

Sood narrates 21 folktales in the book, including stories about a barren woman who adopts a frog and a girl transformed into a bird by her stepmother. These narratives serve as both moral instruction and entertainment. “There’s wisdom in these stories,” said Sood in the book’s introduction. “Television can’t teach you these things.”

The book also offers a dialogue between Urmilaji and Narayan about the stories’ meaning. “All too often scholars reduce other people’s stories to their own favorite theoretical frameworks,” said Narayan. “I wanted to ask Urmilaji herself what the stories mean and how they affect daily life.” “It’s not that I don’t use my training as an anthropologist and folklorist, but I try to show which are her interpretations and which are mine.”

Narayan’s notion of collaboration included something else rarely done by nonfiction authors: sharing early drafts with someone featured in the book. She consulted Sood on the tales’ arrangements and read aloud translated portions to her before sending it to the publisher, Oxford University Press.

Narayan gave Sood not only billing on the front cover, a voice inside and draft review privileges, but also her advance from the publisher, minus taxes. “She had generously shared her time, artistry and wisdom with me,” said Narayan. “It only seemed fair that I share the material outcome.”

By working with Sood, Narayan experienced the effect of orally told stories. “Stories are about human relationships,” said Narayan. “The telling of stories creates an intimacy between teller and listener. Urmilaji spoke of the people who told her these stories with great affection. Similarly, this project deepened our ties to each other.”

Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon, unlike most ethnographies, is intended for a general audience. That’s why Narayan shunned jargon, placed footnotes in the back of the book, and crafted the ethnography to frame the stories as a good read. “I wanted to make sure that the beauty of the stories shone through,” said Narayan. “I also believe it important for anthropologists to address more of their publications to wider audiences.”

Her first book, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching, won the 1991 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and was co-winner of the 1991 Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for Folklore. A former Guggenheim Fellowship winner, she also is author of Love, Stars and All That, a novel about South Asian Americans.