Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (Contemporary Ethnography)

Contemporary Ethnography

by Kirin Narayan, Patrick Mullen (Editor)

Swamiji, a Hindu holy man, is the central character of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels. He reclines in a deck chair in his modern apartment in western India, telling subtle and entertaining folk narratives to his assorted gatherings. Among the listeners is Kirin Narayan, who knew Swamiji when she was a child in India and who has returned from America as an anthropologist. In her book Narayan builds on Swamiji's tales and his audiences' interpretations to ask why religious teachings the world over are so often couched in stories.



For centuries, religious teachers from many traditions have used stories to instruct their followers. When Swamiji tells a story, the local barber rocks in helpless laughter, and a sari-wearing French nurse looks on enrapt. Farmers make decisions based on the tales, and American psychotherapists take notes that link the storytelling to their own practices. Narayan herself is a key character in this ethnography. As both a local woman and a foreign academic, she is somewhere between participant and observer, reacting to the nuances of fieldwork with a sensitivity that only such a position can bring.

Each story s reproduced in its evocative performance setting. Narayan supplements eight folk narratives with discussions of audience participation and response as well as relevant Hindu themes. All these stories focus on the complex figure of the Hindu ascetic and so sharpen our understanding of renunciation and gurus in South Asia.

While Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels raises provocative theoretical issues, it is also a moving human document. Swamiji, with his droll characterizations, inventive mind, and generous spirit, is a memorable character. The book contributes to a growing interdisciplinary literature on narrative. It will be particularly valuable to students and scholars of anthropology, folklore, performance studies, religions, and South Asian studies.

Genres: Anthropology, India, Religion, Hinduism, Nonfiction, History, Ethnography

304 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1989

About the author

Kirin Narayan was born in India to an American mother and Indian father, and moved to the United States to attend college. As a graduate student, she studied cultural anthropology and folklore at the University of California—Berkeley, writing a dissertation on storytelling as a form of religious teaching through an ethnography of a Hindu holy man in Western India who often communicated teachings through vivid folk narratives. The book that resulted, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (1989), won the first Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association and was co-winner of the Elsie Clews Prize for Folklore from the American Folklore Society. She then wrote a novel, Love, Stars and All That (1994) that was included in the Barnes and Nobles Discover Great New Writers program. In the course of researching women’s oral traditions in Kangra, Northwest Himalayas, she collaborated with Urmila Devi Sood to bring together a book of tales in the local dialect with discussions of their meaning and ethnographic context in Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (1997). An interest in family stories and diasporic experience inspired her to write My Family and Other Saints<?i> (2007), a memoir about spiritual quests. Her most recent book is Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012).

Kirin Narayan has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the School of American Research, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. She received a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin in 2011. Since 2001, she has served as an editor for the Series in Contemporary Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania Press. She currently serves on the Committee of Selection for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

(from https://researchers.anu.edu.au/resear...)

Reviews

[Carlee Cannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very readable and engaging, especially to a scholarly and cultural outsider on the subject, such as myself. I wish she had kept the kind of organization and purpose she laid out in the introduction, I find that her methods devolve into a hodge-podge of themes and ideas loosely connected by stories rather than in in-depth focus of the stories themselves. Narayan was more prone to chase topics that came up as a result of a story or idea and follow those tangents rather than bringing it back to the story and claim itself, even though it did connect in the end. As a result, some sections were needlessly repetitive when they could have had more power in their designated chapters, such as the theme of self-serving gurus and the critique of westernization. I would have liked to see more comparative analysis. Overall, the conception and thesis of her book was well-founded and strong, but the execution failed to fully live up to the paradigm she set.

[Nadya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Narayan's work is quite readable (as far as the standard academic text goes) and it is interesting to learn about the Swamiji and his stories through the lens of Kirin's time doing her ethnographic work. I learned a lot about storytelling within Indian culture, and Narayan draws together some very enriching academic work through which she is able to discuss storytelling (and stories) in somewhat of a comparative light. It's an interesting read, but was not spectacular for me; a little slow at times.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very different style if you're used to the typical ethnography I throughly enjoyed this book, and the many stories within the story.

[Rachel Zibrat]

Broad and beautiful strokes without reductionism, and most importantly: wonderful writing in an ethnography.