Lindell Collection

: Folk Tales from Kammu I-VII; This series of Kammu folklore is based on an extensive set of material collected from Kammu people living in northern Thailand and Laos. The material was recorded on open-reel tape mainly during the summers of 1974 and 1976. The ultimate goal of the project was to preserve as many Kammu stories as possible. This goal appealed to the Kammu, and they assisted in arranging story-teller seesions, keenly aware that the most of the stories would be gone in one or two decades. As a result of their enthusiasm, over 320 stories were collected. The recordings presented here are reunited with the original publications, which were mainly in English. Efforts are being made to include the original transcriptions and accompanying illustrations.

: Kammu Narratives; A collection of recordings and transcriptions of folktales and other narratives that were not published in the Folktales from Kammu series.

: Lexica

: Rituals

: Songs

: Video

In collections

Lund Project

Description

In the early 1970s folklorist Kristina Lindell (1928–2005) had a chance meeting with Kammu speakers at the then Scandinavian Institute of Southeast Asian Studies’ field station at Lampang, Thailand. Thus began The Kammu Language and Folklore Project. This documentation project grew into a unique collaborative venture with an interdisciplinary team of linguists, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, ethnographers, and botanists, and resulted in a four-decade-long research programme that produced a breadth and depth of documentation of a minority language that remains unparalleled in Southeast Asia.

Most significantly, this programme came to centre on the efforts of the late Kàm Ràw (aka Damrong Tayanin) (1938–2011), a Kammu speaker, whose work on his people’s language and culture provides a unique perspective into a very personal documentation programme. Through his endeavour to document his language and culture, Kàm became a leading figure and cultural advocate in the Kammu diaspora.