The book titled “Understanding Folk Culture: Enlivening Birbhum District” is a book which brings to the readers the various aspects of folk culture and folk-art forms from an area of west Bengal which has remained in obscurity for a long time. The red-soil district of Birbhum has a long and ancient tribal history which has rarely been in focus. The book brings to the readers not only a socio-cultural survey of the district but also focuses on how folk culture in the district has flourished over the ages in myriad forms despite the onslaught of official apathy, marginalization, curious stigmatization and the brutal costs of globalization.