Margret Causemann

Margret Causemann (* 1944 in Wipperfürth ) is a German ethnologist and Tibetologist . She appeared as a collector of Tibetan folk literature ( fairy tales , songs , riddles , stories ), which she publishes in German.

Life

After completing her university studies in 1983, she decided to study an East Tibetan dialect from Kham on -site (for political reasons not in Tibet , but in Nepal and India ) . In Kathmandu , she met the nomad woman Djangden (* 1953) from Nangchen ( Qinghai Province ) by chance. As a result of this meeting, she made the Nangchen dialect the object of her investigation. Her dissertation, which she presented at the University of Bonn in 1988, was dedicated to this topic . In addition to this academic work, she published three collections of East Tibetan folk literature.

Tibetan fairy tales

The band Foxes of the Morning (or fairy tales of Tibetan nomad women ) owes its creation to the happy coincidence, a meeting of Margaret Causemann with Djangden. She turned out to be an excellent storyteller and singer. Motivated by Causemann's interest and her own joy in telling stories, she gradually remembered some of the almost forgotten stories. She could only hear them until she was 13 years old. Later, fairy telling was banned by the Chinese occupiers. With an excellent memory and musical talent, Djangden had ideal prerequisites for preserving and transmitting the traditions of her homeland, and most of the fairy tales in the volume come from her. It contains 25 fairy tales, which are divided into three groups: song, storytelling and erotic fairy tales. Many of the fairy tales, especially song tales, deal with the real problems of women in traditional Tibetan society. The fairy tales in turn contain ostensibly ritual stories from Buddhist and pre-Buddhist times: of mermaids and demons of the underworld , gods and fairies of the upper world and their battles in the midst of people. The volume includes 52 drawings by Wangdjal.

Works

• Foxes of the morning. Fairy tale of a Tibetan nomad woman. Diederichs , Cologne 1986, ISBN 3-424-00870-2 .
  • 2nd edition: Fairy tales of Tibetan nomad women. Diederichs, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-424-01203-3 .
• Tibetan songs. Insel-Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-458-19039-2 .
• Dialect and stories of the Nangchenpas. (= Contributions to Tibetan narrative research. 11). VGH-Wissenschafts-Verlag, Sankt Augustin 1989, ISBN 3-88280-037-2 . (Dissertation at the University of Bonn, 1988)
• Folk literature by Tibetan nomads. Songs and stories. Harrassowitz , Wiesbaden 1993, ISBN 3-447-03390-8 .

source

• Margret Causemann: Fairy tales of Tibetan nomad women . Diederichs, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-424-01203-3 , dust jacket and foreword.