Books by Walter E.A. van Beek

As one of their great figures, the Dogon of Mali honor Abire, a singer and prophet from the nineteenth century who composed the principal mourning songs. This book examines how these prophecies and songs form a poignant expression of ethnic Dogon philosophy.

This study on Kapsiki-Higi tales compares two corpuses of stories collected over two generations. These dynamics affect some types of tales more than others, reflect social change and intergroup contact, but also depend on characteristics of the tales themselves.