Managing the "Boss": Epistemic Violence, Resistance, and Negotiations in Milman Parry's and Nikola Vujnović's <i>Pričanja</i> with Salih Ugljanin

Without a doubt, Albert B. Lord's seminal work The Singer of Tales owes much of its success to the series of pricanja ("conversations")1 conducted with the South Slavic singers in 1933-35 by his mentor, Milman Parry, and his native assistant, Nikola Vujnovic. This was an endeavor that Lord initially assisted in and benefited from as a student, and a practice he adopted during his own subsequent research trips to Yugoslavia in the 1950s. Along with the hands-on experience of listening to and recording performances of epic songs and other lore, these interviews proved crucial to the forming of the so-called "Oral-Formulaic Theory" inasmuch as they provided vital contextual information, as well as some basic interpretative tools for approaching the sizeable body of recorded epics.