Frontiers Of Folklore

William R Bascom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429727313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Frontiers of Folklore explores some of the avenues of research that are exciting young folklorists today. In the introduction, William Bascom reviews briefly the development of folklore theories and suggests three frontiers of folklore that remain to he explored. Alan Bundes asks the question? "Who are the folk? Pointing out that folklore exists

1
Frontiers of Folklore: An Introduction

William R. Bascom

In recent years there have been new developments in the study of folklore, and it is in the belief that many of our colleagues in other fields may not be aware of them that this symposium has been arranged. In part it grows out of a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore in 1971 which was reprinted in 1972 as a book, Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, edited by Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman. Four of the participants in our symposium, Roger D. Abrahams, Richard Bauman, Dan Ben-Amos, and Alan Dundes, contributed papers to that volume.

One of the new developments raises a basic question about the field of folklore: who are the folk? Another involves the shift from the study of the texts of myths and folktales to the study of their contexts and to folklore as performance and enactment. These new developments will be explored in the discussions that follow.

A third and probably even more important development, in terms of the future, is that the study of folklore has matured to the point where there are now Ph.D. programs in folklore in three American Universities: Indiana University at Bloomington, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas at Austin. Formerly folklorists took thėir degrees and taught in Departments of Anthropology, Sociology, Linguistics, History, Language and Literature (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Classics), etc. Folklore has interested scholars and students from a wide variety of disciplines and in many distinguished universities, but formerly there were no Ph.D. programs in which students could be trained as professional folklorists. Today they must often still teach in these other departments, but there are increasing numbers of scholars who have been trained specifically in folklore. Two of these are participants in this symposium, Alan Dundes and Dan Ben-Amos, both of whom received their degrees from the senior Ph.D. program in folklore at Indiana University.

In order to appreciate the new developments in folklore that we will be discussing, it will be helpful to understand what has been done in the field in the past. For the introduction that I have been asked to prepare, I will give a review of the earlier scholarship. I hope that the participants and other folklorists will bear with me in reviewing what they may know so well. Obviously such a brief review cannot do justice to all of the contributions of earlier scholars, or analyze all of their shortcomings. It is meant only to provide a historical background for the new developments that will be discussed.

In my view there have been two basic questions in folklore theory, one or the other, or both of which have concerned earlier scholars and which are still important today. The first question is, how are we to explain the similar tales that are found in different societies, sometimes separated by great distances? Some of the answers that have been proposed are suggested by the following questions. Are these similar tales to be explained in terms of extreme antiquity; that is, did they spread with man from the cradle of mankind? Are they to be explained in terms of the psychological unity of mankind, or the principle of limited possibilities, or in terms of historical accident? Are they to be explained by diffusion or borrowing, or by migration, or by independent invention, perhaps inspired by common sources in nature?

The second question is, for me, far more intriguing. How do we explain those startling and even shocking events in myths and folktales which are completely at variance with the accepted cultural norms, and which would be condemned as sins or punished as crimes if they were actually committed in the society in which the narratives are told? How do we explain the acts of brutality and bestiality in narratives? Are these survivals of an early stage of savagery when such acts were acceptable? How do we explain stories about men who have several wives that are told in a society which enforces strict monogamy on its members? Are these retentions from an earlier period when polygyny was permitted? Are they the result of diffusion, having been borrowed from another society that has different cultural norms? Are they simply the products of fantasy or creative imagination? Are these forbidden acts the psychological result of repressed desires and aggressions? Myths and folktales are full of acts of this kind, including theft, rape, patricide, fratricide, matricide, cannibalism, and incest; and again there have been conflicting explanations of them.

The recording of folktales goes back several centuries, at least; but the beginnings of modern folklore studies is generally credited to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm who not only began systematically collecting German folktales from living informants early in the last century, but also proposed a theory about their origins. This theory, developed particularly by Jacob Grimm, was primarily concerned with the first of these two questions. It held that the folktales of Europe had been created by the Aryan people and had been carried by them as they moved into Europe from their place of origin. Thus their answer to the first question was migration, the physical movement of a population. They held that the original mythology had dis-integrated as the Aryans spread to different parts of the continent, but that by piecing together these broken down narratives, the original Aryan mythology could be reconstructed and their true meaning could be understood.

Like other scholars of their day, the Grimm brothers were excited by the discovery that the languages of Europe were related. Jacob Grimm had contributed to this discovery by his formulation of the regularities of phonetic change which became known as “Grimm’s law”. And he used the etymological technique in attempting to identify words in German narratives with reconstructed words of the proto-European language. By this method he believed it would be possible to determine the original nature of characters and objects in the narratives, and thus reconcile the differences between existing European variants, and perhaps to explain some of the deviations in narratives from cultural norms.

Max Möller elaborated this theory by attempting to show that the original Aryan religion and mythology was based on sun worship. A linguist like the Grimm brothers, Möller was a brilliant Sanskrit scholar who edited the Rig-Veda and who traced German to a reconstructed Aryan language. He accepted the Grimm brothers’ premise of the Aryan origin of European narratives, but he insisted that Aryan was a linguistic term and not a racial one. Like the Grimm brothers, he explained the shocking incidents in European narratives as the result of the misinterpretation of an originally reasonable language. He looked on these narratives as broken down myths whose meanings were further obscured by the mangling of words as a result of what he called the “disease of language”. Their true meaning, he believed, could only be understood by reconstructing the original Aryan words, using the etymological technique. In all these broken down myths, however, Müller saw corruptions of descriptions of the sun in its triumphs over darkness, cold and storms, the chaste dawn, or the progress of the equinoxes. The birth and death of a hero symbolized day and night; the arrows with which warriors fought were the rays of the sun.

The Indianist or Diffusionist theory, which is concerned only with the first of the two basic questions, was put forward by Theodor Benfey in his edition of the Panchatantra (1859). Benfey, who like Müller was a German Sanskrit scholar and philologist, traced the course of Indian stories in both Eastern and Western literature and advanced the theory that folktales had originated in India and had spread westward into Europe by diffusion. He conceded that folk-tales can be spread through the migrations of people, but he pointed out that they had spread orally to Europe, China, and Tibet.

Emmanuel Cosquin, who had originally been encouraged by the Grimm brothers, became a follower of Benfey. He argued that since tales similar to those in India are found outside the Indo-European linguistic area -- in Tibet, Siam, and Cambodia -- one cannot hold to the theory of a uniform Aryan physical type or to migration as the only means of dissemination of myths and tales. Instead, one must look to the dissemination of narratives by diffusion across racial and linguistic boundaries. In 1878 when his idea that folktales could be borrowed was challenged, Cosquin could answer by citing a Finnish story-teller who had told Lönnrot that he had learned the tale he was telling while visiting in another district. Less than a century ago, it was necessary to prove that folktales could spread by diffusion! The discovery of Egyptian folktales that Cosquin admitted were too early to have been borrowed from India eventually convinced him that India was not the point of origin of all folktales; but like many folklorists today he saw India as the source from which many folktales have spread. The major contribution of Benfey and Cosquin was that they drew attention to the important process of diffusion.

Nevertheless, the seed that Max Müller had planted continued to grow, leading to what has been called the Nature Allegorical School. Its members held that myths and folktales were derived from allegories about various natural phenomena. Similar narratives in different societies were not due to migration or diffusion; they were the result of independent invention, having been derived from common sources in nature. The shocking elements in narratives were not the result of a disease of language, nor were they really shocking; when their true meanings were understood, the narratives were simply pleasant allegories about nature. Thus they simply denied the existence of the second basic question.

Adalbert Kuhn continued to use the etymological technique, but where Mul1 er saw only the sun and the chaste dawn in the tales, Kuhn saw violent phenomena: fire, storms, clouds, and lightning. Other Nature Allegorists rejected the etymological technique as unsound, and offered no supporting evidence. The idea that myths and folktales were allegories about nature became simply a dogma, and the method was basically introspective. Where Leo Frobenius and George William Cox continued to see aspects of the sun in narratives, Paul Ehrenreich saw eclipses and the phases of the moon. In large part the interpretations of the Nature Allegorical School self-destructed, because they were so contradictory and because so often there was no supporting evidence.

But the real destruction of the Nature Allegorical School and the Aryan theory of the Grimm brothers and Max Muller came at the hands of the Cultural Evolutionists. This school was headed by the British anthropologist, Edward B. Tylor, and included Sir James G. Frazer, Andrew Lang, and many other scholars in England and Europe. Lang, in particular, carried on a very lengthy and lively debate in print with Muller, in which he criticized the etymological technique and the nature allegorical interpretations. Lang also led the attack on the Indianists, pointing to the Egyptian folktales dating from the thirteenth century B.C. which led Cosquin to modify his position.

The Cultural Evolutionists held that all cultures must in time pass through the stages of Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization. Similar tales are found in different societies, according to their theory, because these societies were once in a similar stage of development; in effect, the similar tales and the similar customs were held to have been invented independently. The absurdities and shocking elements in the narratives and the beliefs of European peasants were interpreted as survivals from a pre-Aryan savage stage, when they were neither absurd nor shocking. Their method involved the search in “primitive” societies in the early stages of evolution for parallels to the customs, beliefs, and incidents in the narratives of European peasants.

Because it held out the hope that our own history in the remote past could be discovered, this theory fired the imagination of the general public; and it came to dominate the thinking of the social sciences during the last decades of the last century. The theory is rejected by anthropologists today, but the Cultural Evolutionists made very important contributions to both folklore and anthropology. They stimulated ethnographic field research and the recording of myths and folktales in all parts of the world, extending the range of investigation far beyond the limits of the Indo-European languages; they founded cultural anthropology as a discipline; and they established important societies and journals of anthropology and folklore.

Sigmund Freud introduced a new dimension into the study of folklore. Drawing on the questionable reconstructions of the Cultural Evolutionists he argued, in his Totem and Taboo (1912), that the Australian aborigines were the survivors of the earliest stage of human culture, that their social organization and religion represented that of the stone age some twenty thousand or more years ago, and that they had actually practised cannibalism. Like animals, he said, humans once lived in hordes in which the eldest male controlled all of the females; but the young males banded together, killed their father, ate him, and lay with their mothers and sisters. In these hypothetical events Freud saw the origins of society (the prohibition of marriage within the clan), morality (the great tabu against mother incest), religion (totemism and the worship of the totem ancestor), and art (totemic ceremonies). In them he also saw the origin of the Oedipus complex, which he held is present in all human males at birth.

Freud and his followers have contributed many ideas and concepts that are widely accepted today and that are useful in interpreting myths and folktales. Among these are frustration, repression, aggression, identification, projection, sublimation, compensation, and wish-fulfilment. But they were never able to establish that the Oedipus complex is a human universal. Otto Rank made an impressive study of Oedipus type narratives, but found them only among Indo-European speaking peoples. Since then they have also been found in northern Africa, parts of China, and in parts of the Pacific. But if the Oedipus complex is innate and universal, as Freud held, the Oedipus tale should be found in all human societies around the world.

Bronislaw Malinowski accepted the concept of the Oedipus complex, but he found that it took a different form in the Trobriand Islands. Instead of a desire to kill the father and mate with the mother, there was a desire to kill the mother’s brother and marry the sister. He explained this as a result of the fact that Trobriand society is matrilineal rather than patrilineal. The father belongs to a different matrilineage and the father-son relationship is one of love and affection. The father has sexual access to the mother, but their son directs his aggression toward his mother’s brother because he resents his authority. The key factor, thus, is cultural, based on the social structure. It is learned rather than genetically transmitted, and Malinowski showed that the major deficiency of Classical Freudianism is that it is ethnocentric.

Trobriand narratives contain accounts of fratricide and conflicts between brothers, between sisters, and between grandmother and granddaughter. Malinowski explained these conflicts as the result of aggressions that must be repressed in order to maintain lineage solidarity, and saw them as accurately reflecting the matrilineal family and the drama happening within it. In the origin myths a woman emerges from a hole in the ground, accompanied by her brother or by a totemic animal, but never by her husband. In fact there was not a single origin myth in which a husband or a father is even mentioned, reflecting the fact that the husband belongs to a different matrilineage.

Malinowski’s works led to the development of the Neo-Freudian approach, which takes cognizance of cultural differences and their effects on human behavior, including the myths and folktales that people tell and listen to. Although he lost interest in folklore in later years, he made a second major contribution to the field. He stressed the rðle of Trobriand myths as a sanction of religion and social institutions, showing how they reinforce traditional beliefs and rituals, and existing institutions and statuses, by ascribing their origins to an earlier period of great antiquity. Although they were not such original contributions, he also showed that the Trobriand Islanders distinguish myths, legends, and folktales by separate names, and how these three genres of narratives differ in terms of the contexts in which they are told, their style of delivery, and the attitudes of the Trobriand Islanders to them. Malinowski was almost totally unconcerned with the distribution of folktales or other elements of culture, although he did suggest that one Trobriand narrative might have originated in a patrilineal society.

American anthropologists, led by Franz Boas, were initially interested in reconstructing the history of folktales by analyzing their distribution. While admitting the possibility of independent invention, they considered diffusion as a far more likely explanation of similar tales in different societies, particularly where their distribution is continuous or where the narratives are complex.

In this connection it is noteworthy that William A. Lessa (1) has found a narrative in which a son unwittingly committed incest with his mother and then killed his father in the matrilineal society of Ulithi in Micronesia. This one example by no means proves the universality of the Oedipus myth or complex, but it does raise serious questions about Malinowski’s hypothesis that the social structure is the primary determinant of the aggressions expressed in narratives.

Lessa’s conclusion, with which I agree, is that this “Oedipus-type” tale originated in a patrilineal society somewhere between Europe and southeastern Asia -- an area where it has a fairly continuous distribution -- and then spread by diffusion to the other societies where it is known. It is thus apparent that social structure is only one facet of cultural learning that affects the narratives that people tell; another is the narratives that they hear others tell. We must look to the total learning configuration, and to the important process of diffusion of narratives, and eschew any simplistic explanations in terms of natural phenomena, sexual drives, social structure, or ritual.

Boas made two detailed studies of the manner in which the cultures of the Tsimshian and Kwakiutl are reflected in their narratives, and found that the narratives give a penetrating picture of their way of life. Boas recognized that some incidents in the tales are contradictory to every-day experience, such as the revival of the dead. He interpreted these incidents in terms of every-day wishes, but he does not seem to have been really aware of my second question. Ruth Benedict explained some of these contradictions in terms of cultural lag, but she viewed the violence, the abandonment of infants, and the recurrence of polygamy in the tales of the thoroughly monogamous Zuni as compensatory. In recent years American anthropologists interested in folklore have become increasingly influenced by Malinowski’s functionalism and his Neo-Freudian approach.

I myself have argued that the segment of folklore that is becoming known as verbal art has functions that go far beyond simple amusement, although amusement is certainly one of its functions. As Malinowski demonstrated, it is a sanction of culture, contributing to the stability of culture; but this can be a function of legends and proverbs as well as of myths. As many anthropologists have recognized, it is important in education, particularly in non-literate societies, contributing to the transmission of culture from generation to generation. It serves as a form of social control, providing a means of praising those who conform to the cultural norms and of criticizing those who deviate from them. And it provides a psychological release for those who resent the restrictions imposed by society on their behavior, as well as a release from their biological limitations. The functions of folklore undoubtedly vary from society to society to society and from genre to genre, but the combined effect of these five functions is to make verbal art a potent force for cultural conservatism, with amusement at least providing distraction from anxieties and discontent.

But we have since recognized that it can also be an effective mechanism for promoting social and political ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• About the Authors
• 1 Frontiers of Folklore: An Introduction
• 2 Who Are the Folk?
• 3 The Context of Folklore: Implications and Prospects
• 4 Performance of Oral Narrative
• 5 Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory of Folklore
• 6 Settlement Patterns on the Frontiers of Folklore
• Index