ErostrateDiscovering the world's cultures, one work at a time
My list 0

How the works were chosen

Canada / All works

Tale

Tsimshian Mythology

Henry Wellington Tate and Franz Boas · 1916

Synopsis

The collection opens with the cycle of Txamsem, the Raven, a glutton whom nothing satisfies: he steals the meat of Chief Echo, tricks a slave to take his food, steals the daylight and then fire. Next come the stories of the lineages, which tell how a given house received a given name and a given crest, and from whom it holds them. Each story belongs to a house, and only its members have the right to tell it.

Context

The collection appeared in Washington in 1916, in the thirty-first annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, with a long study by Boas on Tsimshian society: more than a thousand pages in all. It was reprinted in New York in 1970. In 1993, Ralph Maud published some of Tate's original texts, as he had written them. The potlatch, the feast at which these tales were told, was banned by a law of 1884, repealed in 1951.

Who it is for

A substantial volume in English; an ethnologist's work, to be read story by story, with Boas's study as a guide.

Prizes and reception

Long cited under the name of Boas alone; the BnF now counts Tate among the authors of the text, and Ralph Maud has published his manuscripts.

Sources for this page 15

The pages consulted to check this page.