Editor's column (Oral Tradition, 17/1, 2002)

With this seventeenth volume Oral Tradition offers what has become its stock-in-trade: a cornucopia of articles on the natural diversity of the world's oral traditions and related forms. Indeed, the miscellaneous character of this issue, and of many of our collections over the past decade and one-half, is straightforwardly mimetic of the field itself.Not