Hidden Paradigms: Comparing Epic Themes, Characters, and Plot Structures
Author:
Brenda E.F. Beck
ISBN:
9789395474658
Binding:
Hardcover
Year:
2025
Pages:
476 with numerous b/w figures
Size:
16 x 24 cm
Price:
INR
2995.00
FORTHCOMING
Understanding an epic story’s key belief patterns can reveal community-level values, the nature of familial bonds, and how divine and human concerns jockey for power and influence. These foundational motifs remain understudied as they relate to South Asian folk legends, but are nonetheless crucial in shaping the values exemplified by such stories’ central heroes and heroines.In Hidden Paradigms, anthropologist Brenda E.F. Beck describes The Legend of Ponnivala, an oral epic from rural South India. Recorded in 1965, this story was sung to a group of village enthusiasts by a respected pair of local bards. This grand legend took more than thirty-eight hours to complete over eighteen nights. Bringing this unique example of Tamil culture to the attention of an international audience, Beck compares this virtually unknown South Indian epic to five other culturally significant works – the Ojibwa Nanabush cycle, the Mahabharata, an Icelandic Saga, the Bible, and the Epic of Gilgamesh – establishing this foundational Tamil story as one that engages with the same universal human struggles and themes present throughout the world. Copiously illustrated, Hidden Paradigms provides a fresh example of the power of comparative thinking, offering a humanistic complement to scientific reasoning.
Brenda E.F. Beck
Brenda E.F. Beck is an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Editorial Reviews
“Everyone with an interest in epic or, indeed, in narrative or mythology generally should read this book by an internationally respected authority. Taking an innovative comparative approach likely to deeply affect this field of scholarship, it is full of mind-opening insights that will delight the expert and the general reader alike.”
—Ruth Finnegan, Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences, The Open University
“Brenda Beck shows in this book that the oral folk epic Annanmar katai ‘the story of twin brothers’ is not local or vernacular in its reach. It is in essence a story of the emergence of a farming culture superseding a hunting culture. This sets the ground for the comparative study of five other legends from around the world. Relating the local to the global is new in anthropology. The book ends up showing that all humans journeyed through comparable paths and that they have similar ways of telling that story.”
—E. Annamalai, formerly of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
“By setting the Land of the Golden River in conversation with the Mahabharata, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, Icelandic saga, and North American Indigenous legends, Brenda Beck explores how epic narratives address perennial questions at the core of our humanity. In the process, she reveals to the English-speaking world the anthropological, psychological, and symbolic complexity of a hitherto little-known masterpiece of world literature.”
—Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor of Italian, Columbia University