Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling - 9780812281996

Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional StorytellingAuthor(s): Margaret A. Mills\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, United States\nImprint: University of Pennsylvania Press\nISBN-13: 9780812281996, 978-0812281996\nSynopsis\nThis book presents an ethnopoetic translation and an interpretation of an evening of storytelling which took place in rural Afghanistan in 1975. Three years before the Marxist coup, two Muslim elders from Herat province were asked by a Marxist subgovernor to spend an evening telling traditional stories to an American woman.\n The storytellers wittily integrated themes of sense and nonsense, gender and sexuality, religion and public and private social control in thirteen recorded stories, here translated in full. In interpreting texts, Margaret A. Mills argues for a rhetorical sophistication among adept traditional performers which enables them to mount performances of traditional materials which are highly, and in this case slyly,.