Readers are taken on a trek through the beauty and violence of the forbidding American desert that exists south of Albuquerque, a region known as the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead, capturing the history of the area from the perspective of the travelers and natives who knew it best.

For the first time in paperback, an acclaimed look at the American South through the lenses of its most acclaimed storytellers and their tales. Rarely does a nonfiction work come along that is as original and refreshing as Sitting Up with the Dead. Here, take a ride with Pamela Petro as she embarks on a series of road trips through the states of the Old South to collect its stories and meet its tellers of traditional tales. Some of them are local celebrities, others national treasures. Among them are Ray Hicks, a National Heritage Fellow; Kathryn Windham, the “ghost lady”; Nancy Basket, a kudzu paper-maker; Colonel Rod, self-proclaimed “Florida cracker”; and Grammy Award-winner David Holt. You encounter plat-eyes and boo-hags, Jack the trickster and Brer Rabbit, mule eggs, singing turtles, talking corpses, and flying Africans from the sea islands of South Carolina. Stories provide the connective tissue of the South, linking the past with the present. They join communities as widespread as the coastal plains of the Carolinas and Georgia, the swamps of the Gulf Coast, and the mountains and valleys of Appalachia. As distinctly American as jazz, they blend cultures and oral traditions as diverse as those of southern England, Ireland, West Africa, and native America. They contain bits of lived history, both from before the Civil War and after. In Sitting Up with the Dead, Pamela Petro offers a paradoxical wake for the undying body of the Old South, to hear its truths and contemplate its robust afterlife in the tallest, “lyingest,” most fruitful, and most haunting of its tales.

This study of an oral tradition in northeast India is the first of its kind in this part of the eastern Himalayas. A comparative analysis reveals parallel stories in an area stretching from central Arunachal Pradesh into upland Southeast Asia and southwest China. The subject of the volume, the Apatanis, are a small population of Tibeto-Burman speakers who live in a narrow valley halfway between Tibet and Assam. Their origin myths, migration legends, oral histories, trickster tales and ritual chants, as well as performance contexts and genre system, reveal key cultural ideas and social practices, shifts in tribal identity and the reinvention of religion.

All around the world, myths address questions that humans have always posed about their origins, their environments, their ultimate destinies, and the meanings of their lives. This book examines 30 common motifs that thread their way through mythological tales across history and around the globe. The themes are presented in alphabetical order, moving from The Afterlife and Animals in Myth to The Underworld, World Tree, and Ymir Motif. Each thematic section defines and discusses a single recognizable motif, compares a number of different mythological traditions, and traces the repeated occurrences of one of these patterns through several different categories of narratives. The discussion of The Afterlife, for example, examines the theme's earliest known occurrences in ancient Mesopotamia and compares them with those in Greek, Aztec, Norse, and other ancient cultures, as well as with contemporary views from Innuit and Polynesian cultures. A glossary provides concise definitions of recurring terms. A list of suggested readings on these topics will further aid students who desire to deepen their knowledge of world mythology.