Author Description

Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology was held near Ravenstein, the Netherlands, 19-21 August 2008. The 19 chapters are divided over five parts: (1) Introduction (2) The Mythology of Death and Dying, (3) Mythological Continuities between Africa and Other Continents, (4) Theoretical and Methodological Advances, (5) Work-in-Progress. This volume demonstrates that comparative mythology is no longer over-specialised antiquarian scholarship, but (with a wide range of auxiliary fields - from genetics to linguistics, ethnography, archaeology, statistics, and classics) has become an exciting, rapidly expanding domain of theoretical and methodological reflection, and an ever widening window on humankind's remoter cultural history. Increasingly transcontinental in subject matter and in scholarly participation, new growth points are: (a) death as a mythical domain (b) Africa's place in the wider cultural history of humankind as a whole.