Hidden Paradigms: Comparing Epic Themes, Characters, and Plot Structures

Understanding an epic story’s key belief patterns can reveal community-level values, the nature of familial bonds, and how divine and human concerns jockey for power and influence. These foundational motifs remain understudied as they relate to South Asian folk legends, but are nonetheless crucial in shaping the values exemplified by such stories’ central heroes and heroines.

In Hidden Paradigms, anthropologist Brenda E.F. Beck describes The Legend of Ponnivala, an oral epic from rural Sout...