Folk-lore in Borneo
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Students of folklore and anthropology who need early field records for reference
- Readers interested in Southeast Asian culture who want to learn about Bornean oral stories
- Scholars studying colonial-era ethnographic writing who focus on the period perspective of texts
- Self-learners with good English reading ability who are willing to consult background materials
Not a good fit for
- General leisure readers expecting modern popular retellings or story collections
- Readers with weak English who are unused to old-style academic English
- Researchers who need analysis within a contemporary anthropological ethical framework
Reading tips
- Read the introduction or table of contents first to understand the scope, then select chapters relevant to your research for close reading
- Prepare background material on Bornean geography and ethnic groups and consult it while reading to reduce obstacles from proper nouns
- Record the author's interpretations separately from the original stories to distinguish material from opinion
- If citing in academic work, verify edition information and publication date and avoid overgeneralization
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
FAQ
Is this book a complete story collection or an academic record?
What should I do if the old-style academic English is difficult?
Are the views in this book still reliable today?
Comments
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About the author
William Henry Furness (1866–1920) was an American physician and anthropologist, and the son of Horace Furness. His best-known work is Folk-lore in Borneo, which records local folklore and popular beliefs of Borneo in the manner of an ethnographic account. Judging from his surviving writings, he was concerned with the oral traditions and everyday customs of other cultures; his prose is notable for its documentary quality and has the plain style of early anthropological field notes, offering readers accessible primary material on Borneo folklore. Overall, public information is limited: details of his life are largely unknown, and scholarly attention to him centers on this folklore record rather than on systematic theoretical work.
