Information about Contributors

Erwan Dianteill is Associate Professor in the Centre d'Etudes Interdisciplinaires des Faits Religieux at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, where he teaches sociology of religion and cultural anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork in Cuba since 1993. His publications on Afro-Cuban religions include two books, Le Savant et le Santero—Naissance de l'étude scientifique des religions afro-cubaines (1995) and Des Dieux et des Signes—Initiation, écriture et divination dans les religions afro-cubaines (2000), and the edition (with Marion Aubrée) of a special issue of Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions on Afro-American religions (2002). He recently wrote the preface and supervised the French translation of El Monte by Lydia Cabrera. His current research focuses on a comparison between the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans, the Umbanda in the Nordeste of Brazil, Haitian Vaudou, and Cuban Santeria.

Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and director of the Program in Asian Studies at Emory University. She is currently completing a book about Amma, the focus of this essay, titled Amma: Healing and Islam at the Crossroads in South India. She has most recently conducted fieldwork on the Gangamma goddess tradition in the south Indian pilgrimage town of Tirupati, in which the focus of her research was the gendered experience of this village goddess, who both protects from disease and is the disease. Flueckiger's first book is titled Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India (1996); she is also the co-editor of Oral Epics in India (1989) and Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia (1991).

Christine Goldberg—an advocate of the comparative method of folklore research—has published Turandot's Sisters, a Study of the Folktale AT 851 (1993) and The Tale of the Three Oranges (1997). She contributes to the Enzyklopädie des Märchens and has taught courses in folklore and mythology at the University of California campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where he taught folklore and literary theory. He has lived in Kenya, France, Hungary, Madagascar, and Mauritius. The article in this issue reflects his research in the Indian Ocean islands, from which has come his book Indian Ocean Folktales (2002). His field manual, Collecting Folklore in Mauritius (2001), was recently published in a bilingual edition (English-Kreol).

Howard L. Sacks is National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor of Sociology and Associate Provost at Kenyon College. As director of Kenyon's Rural Life Center, Sacks conducts fieldwork and public projects on subjects including family farming, foodways, land use, and rural expressive culture. His book (with Judith Rose Sacks), Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem (1993), received a 1994 Ohioana Book Award from the Ohio Library Association and was a finalist for the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. His current research examines blackface minstrelsy in postwar America.

Martha Swearingen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of the District of Columbia. She has most recently conducted fieldwork in Latin America and East Africa on Bantu linguistic and cultural influences in Afro-Creoles. She has taught courses in linguistics, writing, and oral tradition at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of the District of Columbia. She is writing a book on language and oral traditions, and her current research concerns the linguistic analysis of oral traditions in the African diaspora.