After a quarter-century of scholarship on South Indian folklore, print culture, and performance, and feeling “the need to study stories elsewhere” (p. 7), Stuart Blackburn has launched a new project on the oral traditions of a small tribal community nestled in one Himalayan valley in central Arunachal Pradesh. The copious results of nearly eight years of fieldwork have now been published as Himalayan Tribal Tales, alongside a number of scholarly essays and two other book-length works: a collection of archival and contemporary photographs, coauthored with Michael Aram Tarr (Through the Eye of Time: Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh 1859–2006 [Leiden: Brill, 2008]), and a forthcoming study of Apatani ritual culture (The Sun Rises: A Shaman's Chant and Ritual Sacrifice in the Apatani Valley [Leiden: Brill, 2010]). Blackburn's monograph paints a vivid portrait of a tribal group that few have studied since Verrier Elwin's folktale collections and Christoph von Führer-Haimendorf's ethnographic work in the mid-twentieth century. Not only does Blackburn collect tales, myths, oral histories, and ritual chants with great sensitivity to the social context of their performance, he also opens up meaningful new cross-border directions in Asian folklore studies. Blackburn's comparative work is sure to encourage further investigations into the complex patterns of migration, cultural diffusion, and economic exchange within the “extended eastern Himalayas,” stretching from northeast India through southwest China, the India–Burma border, and the uplands of Southeast Asia.

Himalayan Tribal Tales examines the oral traditions of the Apatani, a small Tibeto-Burman tribal community (approximately 35,000) living in one remote corner of this vast cultural area. Blackburn gives an in-depth introduction to Apatani history, society, and culture in two preliminary chapters of the book. The first poses the theoretical questions of his project, gives a snapshot of the Apatani system of oral narrative genres, and recounts Blackburn's own professional journey “from south India to the eastern Himalayas” (p. 7). The second chapter offers a historical and ethnographic overview of the Apatani and their encounters with the halyang (nontribal “outsiders”). With this groundwork, Blackburn then surveys the Apatani system of oral narrative genres, analyzing its recurring themes and motifs, including the particularly fascinating trickster Abo Tani, who embodies Apatani identity and whose story “is one that Apatanis tell themselves about themselves” (p. 248).

Chapter 3 is a collection of a dozen tales forming the Apatani repertoire of fictional prose narratives. Chapter 4 presents a set of creation, origin, and etiological myths along with accounts of more recent historical events. These “factual” oral narratives, more than any other material in the book, indicate how the Apatani have positioned themselves with respect to others—neighboring tribes, nontribal Indians, Tibetans, and the British. Especially compelling is an oral history of the most violent event in recent Apatani memory, a failed attempt to overthrow a British military outpost in 1948. Contradicting the colonial version of the event—that nothing actually happened—the Apatani tell a moving story of a self-assertion gone tragically wrong. Chapter 5 investigates chanted ritual texts and the institutions of sacrifice and gift giving on which Apatani religious belief and practice are based.

So as not to overburden his story collection with lengthy analytical digressions and footnotes, Blackburn usefully consolidates his contextual and theoretical discussion within the final chapter of the book. First is a folkloristic comparative study of parallel and cognate narratives among neighboring tribes, other communities across the extended eastern Himalayas, and even a few that are international tale types. Blackburn's use of the Aarne-Thompson tale-type system here makes this book especially useful for comparative folklore research, although an indexing of independent narrative motifs would have been welcome. Second, Blackburn identifies localized features that make these “Apatani” stories, including the prominent themes of alliance through exchange and ceremonial friendships. Finally, Blackburn discusses how this oral tradition participates in the formation of Apatani cultural identity by setting up clear boundaries between themselves and neighboring tribes as well as nontribal outsiders: Assamese, other Indians, foreigners. This elegantly printed book also features a series of full-color photographic plates, a valuable précis of comparative notes on each narrative, and a word-for-word transcription and translation of one tale in the original Apatani language.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Blackburn's work is a reversal of the usual Indian gaze toward its marginalized tribal communities, allowing the reader to experience a culture that actively regards most Indians as outsiders, as halyang. Tribal culture has long been a sensitive political issue in India, and Blackburn's discussion of the growing presence of Christianity, indigenous religious reform, and revivalist preservation movements speaks to both the fragility and resilience of the Apatani in the context of such dramatic change. Rather than the expected narrative of a tribal community vanishing at the fringes of “India Shining,” Blackburn writes optimistically of an Apatani oral tradition that is unlikely “any time soon to be overwritten on this palimpsest of change” (p. 248). No matter how the Apatani are to fare amid this change, the scholarly understanding of their oral traditions has been firmly cemented through the publication of Himalayan Tribal Tales.