Wise Words (RLE Folklore)

Essays on the Proverb

Wolfgang Mieder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317549239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The twenty essays that comprise this book, which was first published in 1994, were written by leading paremiologists and folklorists from Africa, Canada, Great Britain, Germany and the US. They represent the best scholarship on proverbs in the English language, and together they give an impressive overview of the fascinating advances in the field of paremiology.

The Pragmatics of Proverb Performances in New Mexican Spanish

Charles L. Briggs*

While field researchers used to collect proverbs primarily as texts with little attention to their function and context, modern scholars trained in the theoretical aspects of speech acts or performance look at proverbs as part of active verbal communication. E. Ojo Arewa and Alan Dundes began this type of work with a study on “Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking Folklore,” American Anthropologist, 66, part 2, no. 6 (1964), 70–85. Similar studies also dealing with African proverbs are by Tshimpaka Yanga, “Inside the Proverbs: A Sociolinguistic Approach,” African Languages, 3 (1977), 130–157; Kwesi Yankah, “Toward a Performance-Centered Theory of the Proverb,” Critical Arts, 3 (1983), 29–43; and Johannes Fabian, Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire (Madison/Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

The article by Charles Briggs is an anthropological study of oral proverb performance based on field research carried out in Córdova, a community of about 700 inhabitants located in the mountains of northern New Mexico in the United States. Briggs registers two proverb performances by transcribing his recorded conversations in Spanish with English translations. He then analyzes eight features of the actual proverb use: tying phrase, identity of owner, quotation-framing verb, proverb text, special association, general meaning or hypothetical situation, relevance of context, and validation of the performance. Two major sections interpreting the function of the proverbs in their contextualization in actual speech acts are also part of this significant study. See also Stanley H. Brandes, “The Selection Process in Proverb Use: A Spanish Example,” Southern Folklore Quarterly, 38 (1974), 167–186.

W.M.

The proverb has presented something of an enigma for researchers. All of us have encountered proverbs in conversation, and proverbs have figured in the literatures of the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, the Talmud and Bible, the Renaissance Commonplace Books, and that of recent decades. Such intimacy leads us to believe that we know what proverbs are and how to identify them. This sense of familiarity has not translated into scholarly success in defining the proverb. The kernel of the contradiction emerges in the classic work in the field, Archer Taylor’s The Proverb:

The definition of a proverb is too difficult to repay the undertaking; and should we fortunately combine in a single definition all the essential elements and give each the proper emphasis, we should not even then have a touchstone. An incommunicable quality tells us that this sentence is proverbial and that one is not. [Taylor 1931:3]

This position uses an admission of defeat in justifying a remarkably powerful claim: that researchers can use a priori and intuitive criteria in the identification and analysis of proverbs.

The intervening decades have produced two basic types of research on proverbs. One group of scholars, drawn mainly from the continent and Russia, have focused on the formal properties of proverb texts, their semantic content, and/or the logical relations between the component terms (e.g., Barley 1972; Giovannini 1978; Holbeck 1970; Krikmann 1974a, 1974b; Kussi 1969, 1972; Milner 1969; Permyakov 1979; Zolkovskij 1978). Another group, centered in Great Britain and the United States, has concentrated on the role of proverbs in communication and social life (e.g., Abrahams 1967, 1968, 1972; Arewa and Dundes 1964; Bird and Shopen 1979; Burke 1941:293–304; Evans-Pritchard 1962; Firth 1926; Gossen 1973, 1974; Herzog and Blooah 1936; Jason 1971; Loeb 1952; Messenger 1959). The majority of studies have followed Taylor’s advice, providing neither a taxonomic (cross-cultural) nor a generic definition of the proverb or an explanation of their procedures for identifying proverbs.

There are exceptions (e.g., Barley 1972; Burke 1941:293–304; Holbeck 1970; Milner 1969; Permyakov 1979:20, 28). Nearly all of these attempts have, nevertheless, encountered three types of difficulties. First, a given study generally emphasizes rhetorical or strategic functions of proverb usage, formal structure, semantic content, or the logical relations between terms. By overemphasizing one set of components, such definitions fail to distinguish proverbs from formally, semantically, or functionally similar forms. A second problem is the conflation of analytic types and culture-specific genres as the focus of definitions (cf. Ben-Amos 1976 [1969]). In other words, researchers often fail to distinguish attempts to devise a cross-cultural classificatory schema from ethnographic investigations of a particular type of form in a given society. Third, all but a few of the definitions that have been offered are tautologous: researchers analyzed a given body of proverbs for common features and presented the summary as a definition of the proverb. The problem is that the same a priori and intuitive grounds guide identification of the initial corpus of proverbs.

Note that this sense of “an incommunicable quality” informs the differentiation of proverbs from unmarked or “ordinary” uses of language, examples of other genres, and from the discourse that surrounds the proverb “text.” The last assumption has failed to receive the critical attention that it so badly needs. My data suggest that a number of linguistic features regularly accompany the “text” itself in performance. Previous research has, however, singled out the “textual” core alone for preservation and analysis. This element is most closely aligned with the referential biases of literacy-oriented cultures, and it has thus been identified as “the proverb.” But, as a host of studies have shown, the text itself seldom provides a clear statement of the rhetorical intent of the performer (e.g., Abrahams 1967; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1973; Krikmann 1974a, 1974b).

Research on the social context of proverb performances has demonstrated the importance of contextual information in discerning the meaning of proverbs. Unfortunately, such analyses have been based primarily on consultants’ attempts to match texts with judgments as to their correlative hypothetical situations (e.g., Arewa and Dundes 1964). Even the best studies, such as Seitel’s (1972, 1977) research on the Haya, are based on the assu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• Introduction
• The Perception of Proverbiality
• Foundations of Semiotic Proverb Study
• The Linguistic Status of the Proverb
• Analogic Ambiguity: A Paradox of Proverb Usage
• Do Proverbs Contradict?
• Proverbial Perlocutions: How to Do Things with Proverbs
• Psychological Approaches to Proverbs: A Treatise on the Import of Context
• Slurs International: Folk Comparisons of Ethnicity and National Character
• Proverbs and Social History
• Bruegel’s Proverb Painting: Renaissance Art for a Humanist Audience
• Paremiological Minimum and Cultural Literacy
• The Pragmatics of Proverb Performances in New Mexican Spanish
• Chamula Tzotzil Proverbs: Neither Fish nor Fowl
• Proverb Performance in the Hebrew Bible
• The Literary Use of Proverbs
• Telling It Slant: Emily Dickinson and the Proverb
• The Fable and the Proverb: Intertexts and Reception
• “When Adam Delved …”: Contexts of an Historic Proverb
• “The Grass Is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence”: An American Proverb of Discontent
• Proverbs in Graffiti: Taunting Traditional Wisdom
• Suggestions for Further Reading