and the Caucasus 22 (2018) 419-422

Book Reviews

Mélanges d’ethnographie et de dialectologie Irano-Aryennes à la mémoire de Charles-Martin Kieffer (Studia Iranica, Cahier 61), edited by Matteo De Chiara, Adriano V. Rossi, and Daniel Septfonds, Leuven: “Peeters”, 2018.— 413 pp. + map.

The volume is dedicated to the memory of Charles-Martin Kieffer, the prominent French linguist and ethnographer on matters Afghanica. Kief- fer’s fundamental contribution to the Atlas Linguistique de l’Afghanistan, the description of two critically endangered (Ōrmuṛi of Baraki-Barak and Parāči), as well as data on language taboos in Afghan countryside, remain crucial for the research on Afghan ethnography and socio-linguistic situation in Afghanistan. The range of the topics of sixteen articles collected in Kieffer’s homage is wide enough to include contributions on Ossetic funeral rites and Balo- chi war-ballads, influence of on Dardic languages of Afghanistan and prefixes in , etc. L. Arys in “Les Rites Funéraires Ossètes”, highlights the archaic charac- ter of the funerary customs among the Iranian-speaking Ossetes in the Caucasus and shows how this tradition is still important for a contempo- rary Ossete family. S. Badalkhan (“A Balochi Ballad on the Brāhō-Jadgāl Wars and the formation of Brāhōī Tribes”) presents a piece from the rich Balochi oral tradition, a 17th century ballad recounting the tribal confrontation and clashes between multilingual (Balochi, Jadgali, Brahoi) units in Kalat and Khuzdar districts, which led to the formation of Brahoi tribes based on heterogenous elements. H. Borjian’s , “The Dialect of Khur”, is a skectch of the grammar of a largely understudied dialect of Biabanak district at the southern bor- der of Dasht-e Kavir desert in Iran. It is based on texts collected by both the author and published materials.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 DOI: 10.1163/1573384X-20180408 420 Book Reviews / Iran and the Caucasus 22 (2018) 419-422

Matteo De Chiara’s piece, “Les Noms des Saisons, des Mois et des Jours de la Semaine à Swāt, Pakistan”, deals with the names of the seasons, the months and the days of the week in Pakistan’s Pashto-speaking district of Swat. He distinguishes the origin of those names as Iranian and Indian, and presents their usage in different parts of the district. R. Dor in his article “De la Parole Épique au Discours Idéologique chez les Turkophones d’Ultrapotamie (Maveraünnehr)” examines the transi- tion from the individual memory expressed in orature to the collective memory expressed in literature in the Turkic world. “The Gums of the Teeth in the Iranian Languages”, the article by E. Filippone, is a part of a broader onomasiological research project on the body part terms in New Iranian. The author individuates different cogni- tive patters of denominations for this body part in the Iranian language continuum making an attempt to establish the areal distribution of single words or sets of cognate words. A. Fiorentini (“Être Bacha Posh en Afghanistan. Masculinité Féminine: Subversion ou Renforcement de l’Hégémonie Masculine?”) analyses the cultural practice called bacha posh in the Afghan local context. Though this practice is seen as a social form and cultural growth of agency for Af- ghan women, on the author’s view, it is not necessarily a sign of subver- sion of hegemonic masculinity. In the article “One Country, Two (Official) Languages: Remarks on Pashto- Coexistence in Afghanistan and Tajik-Russian Coexistence in Tajikistan (20th-21th Centuries)”, E. Grassi touches on the language poli- cies in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Some aspects, such as the degree of standardisation of Pashto, Dari and Tajik languages, the mutual influence, bilingualism, etc. are being examined. The author argues that the above mentioned languages open a challenging field for comparative research in the field of Iranian studies. V. Hachard’s contribution “Configurations Actancielles: l’Exemple des Langues Irano-Aryennes”, deals with the actancy configuration in three languages—Persian, Kurdish, and Munji. The author describes the mechanisms active in a contradictory way in these languages (accusative, mixing ergative, disjunct, etc.). A joint article “Personal-Directional Prefixes in Logar Ormuri”, by J. Hawbaker and J. L. Baart, presents a preliminary description of the use of