I am about to start a new blog featuring themes and insights I have culled from working with The Legend of Ponnivala Video series. This set of short essays will cover everything about the story I find interesting, starting with its ecology and extending to issues of social justice, shifting technologies, economic rivalries, local politics,

Over 750 participants registered for the 43rd Annual Conference on South Asia this year and there were more than 120 scholarly panels organized. The event took place in Madison, Wisconsin October 16th through 19th this year and the work of the Foundation was featured during three separate events. On both Friday and Saturday, during the

The Legend of Ponnivala This key foundation project which we have worked to develop over many years, is now beginning to gain traction in local Toronto-area schools. Our core idea is to introduce students to another time and place in ways will enrich cultural equity in a school’s curriculum offerings. By stressing historical parallels and

Brenda Beck was a guest speaker at a Tamilnadu Cultural Society of Canada. Members of the group gathered in Toronto on September 7th to celebrate the graduation of the first set of students trained in an experimental Tamil language-learning course the organization has recently sponsored. The topic of Dr. Beck’s talk was the beauty of the

Dr. Beck has just received the Prof. V. Chelvanayakan Memorial Award for outstanding Tamil scholarship in Anthropology and Folklore, announced in Toronto this July. The nomination and an associated presentation plaque were sponsored by the Chelvanayakam Trust and given to Dr. Beck in recognition of her eight years of work dedicated to animating the Tamil

Iceland is a place with many imaginaries. It is host to a great richness of oral and supernatural traditions. Although sorcery, prophecy and the like are found worldwide, there are clearly distinct Icelandic variants. Did you know that Iceland’s many sorcerers and witches are almost entirely male, for example, and that they never ride broomsticks?

Iceland’s amazing landscapes have fostered a rich culture of the imagination. As May and Hallberg Hallmundsson write in the introduction to their book on Icelandic Folk and Fairy Tales, Iceland’s humanity is fashioned by a deep experience of the land that has imprinted itself on the minds of its residents. Each feature of the land

Who would think that a country named for its vast expanses of glacial ice would also be the home of incredible underground heat. Steam literally pours out from the underground in many parts of this magical country. Lakes and rivers steam in the cold air. There are also abundant signs of volcanic activity, both from

On my way to Tallinn Estonia to give a paper on the Ponnivala Animation Project my husband and I stopped in Iceland for a week of camping and exploration. We planned to search for old Icelandic legends, known as Sagas. Could we find something resembling South India’s Legend of Ponnivala, that huge oral folk epic

I set out in late July with my husband Eric for a lovely week of exploration in Iceland. We were on our way to Estonia where I was scheduled to give a paper at a European Social Anthropology conference in Tallinn. We had heard that Iceland was an amazing country geologically and so we rented