Turku
(Åbo) Castle as a Narrative
Tellervo
Aarnipuu
The Turku (Åbo)
Castle served as a defensive structure and as a residential palace between the
1280's and the early 17th century, when it began to fall in decline.
Between the late 19th and the mid-20th century it was
gradually restored. Nowadays the Turku Castle counts as one of the cornerstones
of Finnish built heritage. There are, naturally, lots of narratives about the Turku
Castle. In this paper, however, I want to consider the castle itself as a
narrative. To achieve this, I will look at the building through the analytical
framework of frame, schema, plan, and script, which Robert de Beaugrande has
introduced in his book Text, Discourse, and Process. Toward a
Multidisciplinary Science of Texts (1980). My starting point for the
analysis is the simple notion that all buildings are made by people. For the
Turku Castle, the restoration in 1944-1961 was a turning point in this respect.
I feel safe to say that in its current form, the Castle is a narrative of the
restoration architects. This narrative is based on the general level frame of
'a castle', which as a prototypical image refers to history, romance, and
warfare. In the restoration process, these aspects were sequenced into a schema
through the concrete architectural choices made by the restorers. The
structures of the castle are partly traces from the past, but there are also
features that have been reconstructed according to the architectural plan of
what the walls are supposed to tell. Later on, a more detailed script was made
of the tour around the castle. The dominating narrative of the Turku Castle
tells about the past. It is the narrative of a museum and a monument, written
by the restorers and voiced by the tour guides, but visualized in the forms of
the castle itself.
Elka Agoston-Nikolova
Groningen,
Netherlands
The emergence of
nation states in the 19th century Balkan Peninsula influenced the
appreciation of folklore. The construction of a monolith Bulgarian folklore had
as an ideal an artistically and stylistically pure folk music and poetry.
Recognized and unrecognized ethnic minorities and their folklore traditions
were either neglected or subjected to pressure to adhere to the norm. Was the
Bulgarian national folklore tradition as homogeneous as presented in music
recordings and folklore collections? Recent publications of individual
folklorists and ethnomusicologists' unpublished material display a dynamic folk
tradition combining different cultural elements - Bulgarian, Jewish, Turkish,
Roma etc. Since the 1990s in a climate of a decentralized consumer economy, new
cross-genres exemplify a new energy for crossing the borders. The present paper
will consider on the basis of a case study (the folklore traditions of three
generations of female singers in a Bulgarian speaking Muslim community) how the
other, exotic, foreign, oriental mingle into the enjoyment of songs and music.
New forms pose new questions for the folklorist. The consumer market has
introduced other rules for what is popular. Is this a new development or has it
been present, although subversively, under a strictly centralized censored and
artistically improved folklore tradition under communism? To what an extent do
these other uses of the folklore tradition challenge the cultural and political
hierarchies of the nation state?
Katrin
Alekand
The research material
consists of a selection of ordinary Setu folktales from the Estonian Folklore
Archives collection. The Setu region is located in Southeastern Estonia; some
former Setumaa regions are now part of the Russian Federation. Setus are of the
Russian Orthodox denomination, they speak their own dialect and culturally
constitute a distinctive borderline people, which is also strongly reflected in
their folklore - they consider neither Estonians nor Russians their own kin. I
draw on Bengt Holbek, Yuri Lotman, Mikhail Bakhtin, Vladimir Propp, Laura
Stark, Eleazar Meletinsky, etc. for the theoretical basis for my presentation.
Folktales - they are stories unbelieved, taking place never and nowhere, in an
imagined time and space. Stories meant for entertainment, they have no pretence
to seriousness or credibility. What sort of a world-view is provided by Setu
folk-tales? What exactly is described by stories that are often retracted by
their final formula - "...thus the story ends, and I can lie no
more"? What does such a text actually describe and how adequate is this
description - physical surroundings are seldom depicted in these stories. Why
are stories once believed to be untrue, and which for a while were part of
children's literature, now used as possible role models? How does one's own and
alien, the commonplace and the fabled intermingle in ordinary Setu folktales
and how does this reflect in their world-view? Is the category of
"credibility" the same in all folktales? Another aspect I would like
to treat briefly is the structure and framework of classification in
Aarne-Thompson's type-catalogue. If you look at the way the stories are ranked
from the perspective of who is allowed to speak, a peculiar model describing
the changing of the world-view emerges, which curiously reflects contemporary
approaches in historiography. Initially, the stories present a world in which
everything speaks - birds, animals, insects, sometimes even plants - nature is
alive and animate and humans are secondary; from there on, the picture of the
world turns more and more anthropocentric. Natural artefacts still allowed to
speak in tales of magic are in the status of things - they are resources for
solving a problem. All non-human characters are also marginalized or even
opposed to humans and their environments.
Escorting the Dead with Song and
Dance: Funeral Poetics among the Abanyole of Western Province, Kenya
Ezekiel
Alembi
Nairobi,
Kenya
Song and
dance pervades the life world of the Abanyole. For example, when they are sad,
they sing; when they are happy, they sing; when a child is born, they sing and
dance and when one dies, they also sing and dance. So strong is the singing and
dancing tradition in this community that it can be described as lubricating oil
that the Abanyole use on their wheel of life as they transact different facets
of their being. In this paper, I examine the role of song and dance in a
funeral context among the Abanyole of the Western Province of Kenya. The
discussion is focused on traditional Abanyole songs. I make this distinction
because Christian songs are also sung in funerals in Bunyore. Specifically, I
discuss performances by individual mourners and night performances at funerals.
This discussion is guided by the following questions: Who performs? When are
the performances done? What is the structure of the performance? What is the
meaning of the performances within the context of a funeral? I have utilized
the "Infracultural Model in Folklore Analysis" as the
conceptual-analytical framework for this paper. This model emphasises the
interpretation of words and actions within specific cultural contexts. This
essentially means that the meanings of the words and actions can only be
located within the perceptions of the study community. Underlying this model is
a key concern that researchers should enter into the rhythm of life of the
communities, as a sound basis for learning, experiencing and documenting the
beliefs, expectations, fears and perceptions of the communities studied.
Ekaterina
Anastasova
Sofia,
Bulgaria
The paper discusses
the relation power - community in the transitional period on the grounds of the
data from a multiethnic settlement (Russian Old-Believers and Ukrainians) from
the District of Odessa, Ukraine. The work presents the specific communication
network formed on the basis of the interaction between the leader and the
society. It settles the paradigms of the existence of the small local socium
on all the levels: the explanation of the geo-political changes in the region
and in the world, the place of the settlement in the new situation, the
economic priorities, family relations, moral values, etc. The principal
communicative unit is the narrative. It describes and explains, thus providing
the specific model of the community world. The narrative is shaped by a system
of oppositions (East - West; before - now; self - alien, etc.) that have their
origin in the major motifs of socialist and post-socialist folklore in the
so-called post-Soviet area. The text was prepared on the grounds of field
surveys by the author and continues her series of works dealing with
"power and transition" in Eastern and Southeastern Europe.
Epp
Annus
Philosophy,
fictional writing, and painting - these three are generally considered to be
absolutely different ways of accessing the world. Philosophy is about
argumenting, not about telling stories. Yet why is it that philosophers so
often turn towards art? Why do they tell a story about an artwork in order to
illustrate their philosophical argumentation? It seems that philosophy needs
something other than itself, it needs the experience of art and through it one
often creates a story to tell. This paper reads an essay by Martin Heidegger
"Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" [The Origin of the Work of Art], first
drafted in 1931/1932, presented in 1935 and 1936, revised and published in
1949. The paper focuses on Heidegger's reading of Vincent van Gogh's painting
of peasant shoes and on the ways how Heidegger narrativises the simple
painting.
Päivikki
Antola
Key words:
anthropology of communication, mass sermon, audience, verbal/non-verbal
behaviour of the Finnish priest. This paper looks into the mass sermon in the
Finnish Lutheran Church around the turn of the millennium. The material
consists of day services documented by using participant observation. Day
services are nowadays called a mass, if communion is served. A mass sermon can
be characterised as persuasive communication encompassing three processes:
1) a
process that shapes a person's world view;
2) a
process that strengthens the world view, or
3) a
process that changes the world view.
The paper discusses
the principles of communication in the mass sermon. By familiarisation the speaker
tries to introduce a new subject with events or narratives that are familiar to
the listener. Through emphatic behaviour the priest can appear as either honest
or superficial. Trustworthy behaviour is manifested through encouraging words.
The principle of self-confidence raises the priest's own self-esteem. The
principle of personification helps the preacher to project the main character
of a religious narrative to the listener' reality in many different ways. In
the principle of opposites, the narration follows the antonym setting God -
man, good - evil. When the preacher refers to common interest, he emphasises
the social responsibility of Christians. In the authoritarian principle, the
listeners are controlled by the priest's supreme leadership. When the preacher
assigns blame, he uses sin and death to wake up a bad conscience. In the
principle of winning time, the preacher uses delay or speeding things up as a
wisdom by claiming that "this is the right time / this is not the right
time". Building obstacles is based on evasion: "We in the
congregation are willing to help people, but few are interested." From the
listener's point of view, the mass sermon answers the question what the
listener has to know to be able to interpret the sermon through his own world
view. Important schemata for the listener are: terminal, transitional,
temporal, spatial and associative features, holy authorities in the sermon,
opposites, linguistic routine models and redundancy. Finally, the mass sermon
also reflects the life and personality of its producer.
Pertti
J. Anttonen
The Christian churches
in Finland celebrate the year 2005 as the 850th anniversary of the
permanent settlement of Western Christianity in Finland. The dating is based on
the commonly held notion that in 1155 an English-born bishop named Henrik (or
Henry) arrived in the country and began to convert local heathen people into
Christianity. According to earlier conceptions by church historians, this
conversion took place in the form of a crusade, which Bishop Henrik allegedly
made with the Swedish king Erik. More recent views emphasize that the country
had for centuries been under Christian influence, but it was thanks to Bishop
Henrik that the new vernacular religion was established on an institutional
level. The narrative construction of this historical account becomes evident
when one takes into consideration that there are no historical records of
Bishop Henrik, except for a couple of liturgical legends dating from the end of
the 13th century and a ballad-like text first documented from oral
circulation in the late 17th century. Despite this fact, however,
Bishop Henrik's canonical status as the culture hero of Finnish Christianity and
the patron saint of Finland has mainly gone unquestioned. The reformation did
not change his public fame, although it did end the saint's cult established by
the medieval (Catholic) church. The practices to be halted included the
pilgrimages to the site where the bishop was martyred. In recent years the
Lutheran Church has expressed a growing interest in ecumenical relations across
doctrinal differences, and Bishop Henrik has been adopted as a key symbolic
figure in this process. Accordingly, the Church in Finland 850 Years
celebrations in 2005 make Henrik one of the focal points of public attention.
This paper deals with the narrative legacy of Bishop Henrik by mapping out the
various competing arenas of discourse in which the narrated event has received value
as symbolic capital. Yet, instead of focusing merely on heritage politics and
questions of cultural ownership, the paper aims at discussing one of the
fundamental concerns of folkloristic research: the dissemination and
transmission of narratives. The methodological tool to be used in this is
argumentation analysis.
Veikko
Anttonen
Turku,
Finland
In exploring mythico-religious
representations in specific oral accounts, genre analysis has provided a major
scholarly device by which vernacular systems of belief and practice have been
systematized for description, comparison, and classification. Establishing a
genre and distinguishing criteria for the inclusion of a specific oral account
within its domain is dependent on the methodology by which 'folklore' is
conceptualized. In the paper both realistic and nominal (or stipulative)
definitions are discussed. Drawing conceptual understanding from the study of
religion, "folklore" is approached as a nominal category, the
contents of which are not determined by any single property inherent in the
verbal or non-verbal expression. Instead, its conceptual contents derive from
the context-dependent discourse in which 'folklore' is used. Ethical discourses
on forests are employed to serve as a case in point. In Finnish as well as in
any cultural setting in which forests play an important socio-economic role,
the flora and the fauna of wilderness areas provides mythico-geographic
landscape par excellence and narrative topoi for expressions of vernacular
religiosity or vernacular sacrality. One can discern two levels of ethical
discourse on forests in present-day Finland. Discourse by experts is strongly
biased towards values placed on biodiversity and social sustainability of
forests as a response to the forest industry, while lay discourse places value
on the forest as a source of personal experience and recreation. The paper draws
its empirical evidence of ethical discourses on forests from interviews carried
out among private forest owners in the Lieksa province in Northern Karelia.
Satu
Apo
I am
conducting research on the appearance of four classic fairy tales (Cinderella,
Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White) in the 16th-19th-century
literature and in the 19th-20th-century folk narration. I
have chosen these "feminine" fairy tales to examine the continuities
and changes in the models of the ideal womanhood contained within them. As
source material of folk fairy tales I have used texts recorded in Finland and
Karelia.
The questions
associated with my comparison between the literary and oral versions of the
aforementioned classic fairy tales are linked to a number of theoretical
discussions
1. Research
history: How has the relationship between literary and oral traditions been
addressed within the most important paradigms and theoretical debates of
folkloristics in the 20th century?
2. Cultural
history: How have political and ideological factors impacted the ways in which
folk fairy tales became literary works in different centuries?
3. Perspectives
from literary studies and media history, particularly the ethnography of
reading and writing, as well as the history of books: How did written fairy
tales spread to folk narrators? What was the nature of reading and writing
abilities among the Finnish and Karelian masses?
4.
Textualization and poetics: Some of my source materials are written recordings
of oral presentations, while others were written down by the narrator
him/herself, and still others were recorded on audiotape. Oral tradition also includes
texts based on a literary fairy tale. Texts belonging to the literary fairy
tale tradition can be the writer's own invention, a new written version of a
literary fairy tale, or a written fairy tale based on oral narration. What
sorts of different poetics appear in different textualization types?
5. Gender-related
questions: the gender models and representations of the fairy tale texts, the
influence of the narrators' gender.
I examine some of
these questions using examples from the fairy tale "Beauty and the
Beast".
Alexandra
Arkhipova & Artem Kozmin
Moscow,
Russia
The goal of research
is to show dependences between a plot of a fairy tale and the social
environment. The study is based on a plot of the fairy tale "The kind and
unkind girls" (listed as Type 480 in Aarne-Thompson). It is most
frequently called "Frau Holle" (printed by Grimm brothers, 1812,
"Morozko" in Russia). We are studying the cross- cultural
correlations between variants of this tale type (the whole list is 900
variants, decribed by Warren Roberts) and "Ethnographic Atlas"
(compiled by George Murdock et al), the atlas describes more 1200 ethnic groups
with 99 variables. Data on 51 groups (type of settlement, marriage, a role of
agriculture, etc.) have been considered. Features of variants of the plot
belonging to different ethnic groups were checked on correlations with the
different social facts of these ethnic groups. It is revealed that such
correlations are not numerous. There is a strong negative correlation between
an element of a plot "physical transformation of the hero as reward"
and type of religion. In strong monotheistic cultures physical transformation
as reward is preferred. The second interesting result refers to the punishment
of the false hero. He may be killed, on his head horns appear, from his mouth
toads fall, he is covered by ulcers, etc. There is a strong enough (0,472)
negative correlation between the cruelty of a punishment of the false hero and
a role of gathering in a culture. No significant correlation was revealed. The
received results show that social facts determine a termination of a fairy tale
only. The fairy tale semantics is almost absolutely "impenetrable"
for the social environment - everywhere, except for the end of a fairy tale,
which is adopted on the contrary to the social reality.
Madis
Arukask
Viljandi,
Estonia
The topic of this
article is the interaction or dialogue of the traditional and individual in
publicist and folkloristic works by Oskar Loorits, one of the most outstanding
Estonian folklorists and national ideologists in the 20th century.
First of all, it is a good example of the creation and systematic dissemination
of the specific selection of signs from the nation's past, in order to build up
the nation and support the national identity. The most significant scientific
contribution of O. Loorits as a researcher and promoter was in the
following subject areas: diachronic knowledge, myth creation through a detailed
knowledge and understanding, as well as examination of history and heritage,
unlike the signals in the present-day Estonian society, either coming from 'above'
or 'scientifically' presented and being (or pretending to be) of strategic
importance. As expected, O. Loorits diverts more or less consciously from
professional concerns towards becoming an ideologist. Such a comprehensive
reconstruction of 'sacred history' is a relatively rare phenomenon in the
modern, so-called 'knowledge-based' society. We can say that the endeavours of
O. Loorits at popular imaginations, both in the 20th century
and present-day Estonia, have been successful. The continued self-determination
of Estonians through nature worship and the concept of forest people among
certain groups and debates would play central role in it.
Cristina
Bacchilega
Honolulu,
Havaii, USA
Angela
Carter's narrative triptych 'Ashputtle, or the Mother's Ghost' is a mise en
abîme of the transformative magic of storytelling, in that it enacts
the strategy of stepping right into a dead or worn fiction (the fairy tale as
genre) to know it anew and to journey away from its popular topoi. Especially
when cultures converge, such transformations can open up new paths. Nalo
Hopkinson is a contemporary Caribbean Canadian author who rewrites folk and
fairy tales in her 2001 short-story collection Skin Folk to
denaturalizing and insightful effects. This presentation will focus on
(a) how
Hopkinson's representations of gender, sexuality, and race work to regenerative
effects by drawing on multiple folkloric traditions; and
(b) how her
speculative fiction can be mapped in relation to the proliferation of fairy
tales in contemporary media and literature.
Mehri
Bagheri
Woman has permanently
appeared as an eminent and essential element in forming the structure of
Persian literature in past and present. For this investigation the literary
sources could be divided into four categories: mythical, epic, classic, and
folkloric. The mythical evidence indicates the extensive appearance and
activeness of the Persian Goddesses alongside the masculine divine entities.
The references signify their important roles and activities in creation as aids
of the lord and their collaboration in both management and maintenance of the
secular world and eternal existence. E.g. Sepandarmad is the goddess of earth
and when the Premier Man, who is mankind's origin was put to death, Sepandarmad
entrusted his seed. This particular function of the Goddess has introduced the
term "mother earth" to Persian literature. In Persian national epic,
the responsibilities of outstanding women are highly emphasized, such as:
heroism, athleticism, attentiveness, conceptualism, advice giving, faithfulness
and modesty. The women's images that appeared in Persian classical literary
sources are notably different and mostly appeared as a beautiful entity who has
the ability to stimulate desires and romantic sentiments. In this manner, their
feminine characteristics are hired by the mystic writers as symbols to express
their concepts to convey their messages to their followers, and explain their
beliefs concerning the facts, reality, and love of the eternal divinity. Women
have always had a vivid role in the field of folklore, both in producing as well
as preserving and transmitting folkloric materials. Storytelling was a task of
women and part of mothers' duty. Therefore, the image of women in Persian
literature starts with the mythical features in the abode of heaven moving
around in the chariot of sun; in classical literary sources, women are likened
to the moon and in folklore, as bright and beautiful as the moon and as kind
and sturdy as the earth.
Teresa
Bairos
Lisbon,
Portugal
This paper
will draw heavily on Stanley Cavell's incursions into film and literature,
particularly his studies on classic Hollywood remarriage comedies and
Shakespearean comedies. One striking aspect about these that is pointed out by
this philosopher is the fact that in the course of the protagonists'
"pursuits of happiness", they are temporarily drawn out of their
everyday environments and familiar conditions of existence into unknown
parallel worlds, only to come back from them with a renewed wisdom or vision
that confers upon them an increased awareness and lucidity regarding their
habitual realms of existence. I would like to relate this to Vladimir Propp's
notion that fairy tales involve a cyclical journey between the otherworld and
this one - a continuous alternation between the natural and the supernatural,
death and rejuvenation - in order to enquire into the persistence of underlying
fairy tale structures in contemporary popular culture.
Anneli
Baran
We talk, communicate,
chat, speak, and make utterances - all these synonymous verbs signify verbal
communication and mark the same action. The action may also be expressed by
means of set expressions, or more precisely, phrases or idioms. Words, phrases
and syntactic units, or the so-called microtexts are at our disposal. The issue
may be also considered at another angle - namely, how short can a phrase be for
it to preserve its contents? Compared to other short forms (proverbs, riddles),
phrases are generally characterised as being shorter. It has been determined
that the minimum length of a phrase is a combination of at least two fully
semantic words. According to a common claim a phrase characterises a specific
situation. Therefore, a phrase can only exist as a set expression in a context.
Conceptualising phraseologisms, however, prompts the question of the 'obligatory'
and 'facultative' constituents of a phraseologism, i.e. the issue of its form
and, more importantly, of its defining. While discussing the motivation of
phrasal expressions, scholars often refer to their opacity vs. transparency.
But what would the ideal form be for which people possess sufficient background
knowledge, including phraseological competence, which is required for
understanding a given expression? What is the smallest number of words
necessary for understanding an expression? Whether and to what extent can we
find help in metalanguage framing a set phrase? The most serious disadvantage
of the recording of Estonian phrases is the laconic accompanying comments or a
lack of these. A comment may not even provide an answer as to why a phrase was
used, since during the time of recording it was considered unnecessary to write
it down. Another unavoidable question that may remain unanswered concerns the
function of an expression. In the presentation I will discuss the issues
related to the study of phrasal semantics on the example of set phrases
connected with the image of talking, narration, words, etc. The discussion will
rely on material from the database of Estonian phrases.
Shuli
Jerusalem
One of the distinctive
features of "Bluebeard" tales is a party. The party or festive
celebration may take place at any point in the tale and, sometimes, there may
even be a succession of parties. In Perrault's "The Bluebeard", for
instance, an extravagant week-long party serves to seduce a young woman into
accepting the proposal of a wealthy gentleman despite his ill-omened beard and
the mysterious disappearance of his previous wives. Subsequently, another party
serves to punctuate the discourteously impetuous behaviour of the bride, who
leaves her guests and rushes off to open the forbidden door. In the Grimms'
"The Robber Bridegroom", by contrast, a wedding celebration held at
the end of the tale provides the occasion for the public exposure of the
villain. However, whether the convocation of guests be arranged to inaugurate,
celebrate, or terminate a marriage, the bride of Bluebeard is often a hostess.
Although the party motif has elicited little, if any, critical attention -
perhaps because it is so patently an instrumental feature of the plot -
Margaret Atwood is one close reader who has not overlooked it. Her rewriting of
"Bluebeard" not only culminates in a social gathering but also
absorbs and transforms several intertexts in which some party takes place. This
intersection between Atwood's "Bluebeard's Egg" and its precursor
texts is remarkable for two reasons. First, unlike the ever-popular
"Cinderella" with its multiple balls, "Bluebeard" has
acquired, mainly via its German literary inflections, an association with
murderous assault in a closed familial setting rather than communal festivity.
Second, the recurrence of the party motif is also unexpected given the wide
variety of texts interpolated into Atwood's story. Her intertextual references
range from classical Bluebeard Märchen to a little-known Canadian
folk version and from Alan Alexander Milne's beloved children's book, Winnie-the-Pooh,
to the modernism of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Katherine
Mansfield's "Bliss." Nevertheless, what brings all of these diverse
"guests" together on this narrative occasion, as I propose to show,
is a party consciousness.
Karen
Bek-Pedersen
Edinburgh,
Scotland, United Kingdom
In this talk
I want to take a closer look at the nornir, who represent a notion of
fate in Old Norse tradition, and some of the ways in which they compare to
certain other supernatural female beings, notably the Old Norse goddess Frigg
and the mother of Grendel in the Old English poem "Beowulf". Focusing
on some of the most dominant features of these beings (their double-sided
nature, combining a sinister aspect with a benign one) as well as some of the
most widely accepted representations of the concept of fate (the idea that the nornir
spin and that they lay down laws), I want to explore why it is so common to
represent fate in feminine guise.
Baiba
Bela-Kr¬mi‡a
Riga ,
Latvia
This research
began in the field of oral history. The rebirth of Latvia's independence in
1990/1991 created a need to revise the history of 20th century
Latvia and to construct new cultural identities - a more complete history needs
to make a room for a personal voice. But the oral life stories are much more
than a unique and very individual personal experience or subjective
representation of objective reality. Tellers include various events of their
lives in a single story, making use of fairly significant variety of culture-based
models, finding support in stable forms of genre - either in written sources or
in oral culture (Tonkin 1992, Skultans 1998). The combination of nontraditional
content - the teller's unique experience - and traditional aspects of form,
style and function will be at the focus of analysis in this paper. At first,
the paper outlines the theoretical and methodological principles of research.
Secondly, it explores narrative genres in the personal experience stories about
the Soviet period told in contemporary Latvia. The principles of narrative
analysis are used. Narratives are analyzed as verbal structures, organized by
rules of discourse, rooted in culturally defined modes of communication and
closely tied with culturally available narratives and dominating discourses in
the community. In telling one's own story, there is a need to move beyond
personal life into the shared life of culture (Freeman 2002). In life-stories
about the Soviet period we can see various genres: tragedy, anecdote, testimony,
heroic saga, tale of adventure or humoresque. Examples of each genre will be
provided, and the explanation of the cultural context which supports these
personal choices of representation of experience will be given.
Dan
Ben-Amos
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, USA
For the last
fifteen years, together with Professor Dov Noy, I have been working on an
anthology of selected tales from the Israel Folktale Archives that by now
includes more than 20,000 narrative texts. The encounter with such a quantity
of tales, recorded from immigrants from Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Near
East, and North Africa reveals anew the centrality of storytelling, and
requires once again that we seek to explain the importance of narrative beyond
the functional, symbolic, and biological models that have been used for this
purpose in the past.
Since the
second half of the 20th century, new media of disseminating
narration - such as records, cassette tapes and CDs - bring into much stronger
focus the vital role played by narrators' voices in shaping narrative content
and listening pleasure. The paper first assembles a brief history of narrative
scholarships' (lack of) attention to the voice as medium of narration, drawing
1) from
largely German tale and legend collectors' book prefaces and notes since the 19th
century and
2) from
the more recent ethnopoetic and performance centred scholarship (largely
drawing on American material).
The paper then argues
for the theoretical potential inherent in documenting the role of voice both in
shaping or producing and appreciating the message. This difficult-to-describe
medium with its gendered and age-based specificity opens connections to the
ethnography of the senses, to questions of technology and narrative
preservation and dissemination, as well as to the marketing of narrative and
narrators.
Yuri
E. Berezkin
St.
Petersburg, Russia
Tales about
the struggle between dwarfs and birds are widespread across Eurasia and the
Americas. About half of them were known to Yrjö Toivonen (1937), but a
large part of the American and some of the Asian materials remained beyond the
scope of his research. The southernmost Eurasian version is from Nagaland. The
closest parallels are between Ancient Greek, Fennoscandian, Chinese, Lower Amur
and North American tales. In Eastern South America (Upper Xingu) dwarfs at the
edge of the earth are replaced with the souls of the dead in the sky. Among
35,000 texts included into the author's electronic database, about 100
Eurasian, North and South American cases are relevant to the theme. Several
motifs, partially overlapped and variously combined, reflect a unique set of
cosmological ideas. Creatures different from (normal) human beings who live in
a distant land fight with non-human enemies (birds, crabs, hares, etc.); man
readily helps these creatures because for him their enemies are not dangerous;
birds attack man who comes to the other world; migratory birds fly from our
world to another one; at the boundary, sky is constantly moving in respect to
earth or the opening leading to other world is narrow, many birds perish; there
is a person at the passage to the other world who feeds on birds; the mistress
of birds lives on the other side of the moving obstacle. The spread of this
complex across all the New World allows us to date the corresponding ideas to
the time of the initial peopling of the Americas (about 14,000 b.p.). The
complex had taken its final shape in Northern Eurasia. The existence of South
American versions and the absence of parallels in Australia and most of South
and Southeast Asia (African materials are not still processed) is evidence in
favor of historic connections between all known cases. Ecological factors are
not sufficient to explain their independent emergence.
Håkan
Berglund-Lake
After the Second World
War an intense period of modern housing construction started up in Sweden,
which suddenly changed the circumstances of everyday life for a great number of
the Swedish population. The tenants were offered flats equipped with central
heating, kitchen with fridge and electric cooker, and bathroom with bathtub.
These dwellings implied new experiences for everyone moving in. By ordering
their things and forming new everyday routines and habits, people appropriated
this new and unfamiliar space and made it one with their ongoing life. In this
process of spatial organisation and routinisation new borderlines were drawn
and new meanings were given to categories such as private-public,
indoor-outdoor, home-outer world, male-female, work- leisure, us-other. Based
on life story interviews with people who experienced these modern flats in
their capacity as the first tenants, I will in this paper examine the
spatiality of dwelling in everyday practice, with a focus on how private and
public realms were created. At the mundane level of everyday life, people
understand themselves as the centre of the world, which they group around the
self in layers of various degrees of intimacy and anonymity. In this
perspective, with influences from phenomenology, I will discuss how people
through their own bodies in interaction with things and consociates both
delimited and positioned themselves in connection with a wider world, how they
established a relationship between private and public domains.
Sanita
Berzina-Reinsone
Losing one's way as an
emotional event remains in one's active memory for a long while. People may
brightly remember the tiniest details even decades after the event. On one hand
such experiences are individual and unique; on the other hand despite the
individuality and uniqueness these narratives are obviously similar to Latvian
legends of the demonic spirit called vad@t@js 'the one who misleads
people'. The role of the forest was absolutely significant in the rural society
since its resources shaped a considerable proportion of the peasants' menu.
Furthermore, it was used for pasture, firewood and as a walkway to get from one
village to another, thus people needed to visit the forest frequently and in
all seasons. Despite the fact that the significance of the forest has been lessened
in modern society since the largest part of the population lives in urban
areas, stories about persons lost in the forest/swamp/city are still a current
issue and are frequently narrated. The research is based on two types of
material - firstly, legends about people misled by the demonic spirit vad@t@js written down from the
end of the 19th century till the middle of the 20th
century and, secondly, field recordings done in recent years in Latvia. The
research shows that contemporary stories about people lost in the forest/swamp
have a great similarity to legends about vad@t@js in spite of many of
them being told as personal experience stories. In this paper the most
frequently met concepts and interpretations in Latvian stories of losing one's
way are analyzed, and both types of materials are compared outlining the
similarities and differences between them.
Jürgen
Beyer
Tartu,
Estonia
Josephus
Flavius (37/38 - c. 100) tells about the prodigies occurring before the
destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. A star resembling a sword was seen, a comet
appeared, a bright light shone in the temple, a massive temple door opened by
itself, armies were seen in the skies and a voice was heard in the temple,
speaking about leaving the city. A man ran like mad through Jerusalem,
constantly crying "Woe to Jerusalem!", until he was killed by a Roman
projectile (The Jewish War, VI, 5, 3). Josephus' work was known during
the Middle Ages, but the episodes in question gained a much wider circulation
after the Reformation by being included in an appendix to Johannes Bugenhagen's
diatesseron which was printed very frequently from 1524 onwards. The appendix (Die
Verstörung Jerusalem vnd der Jüden) was first added in 1534 and
was included in most of later editions. It came to be translated into
practically all languages used in Lutheran churches. Also many editions of
hymnals and other Lutheran handbooks contained Bugenhagen's diatesseron and the
appendix. In many territories, the appendix was read regularly in church,
normally on the tenth Sunday after Trinity - a rare honour for a non-biblical
text. The appendix thus quickly gained authoritative status as the
extra-biblical example par excellence of God's warnings to His unrepentant
people before pouring out His wrath. Given the wide dissemination of the text,
it comes as no surprise that it was among the first to be translated into
Estonian and Latvian. Despite the common source, however, the versions used in
the different Lutheran countries were not uniform. My presentation will study
some variants of this folklore spread through reading and the pulpit.
Anil
Kumar Boro
Guwahati,
Assam, India
The Bodos, like other
ethnic groups of North-east India, have retained a good stock of mythical
narratives about the creation of the world, of the origin of living beings, of
the origin of forms of worship and related rituals and the presiding deities of
their traditional religion. These mythical narratives can be considered as
strategies for negotiating any possible threat of disintegration in the context
of culture contact besides providing strong support as the authority of tradition.
These narratives extant in the oral tradition have, however, been influenced
and some times nourished by pan-Indian written tradition, very often identified
as 'great' or classical tradition. Many gods and goddesses of Bodo native
religion and mythical narratives have been linked to Hindu gods and goddesses,
revealing intercultural communication of these Indo-mongoloid people with the
other groups of people. While many of these narratives reveal features of
intercultural communication, there are other narratives which contain rejection
of the dominant Hindu culture and contest. The mythical narratives in the oral
tradition are now being reshaped and invented to fit into ethnicity discourse
of the tribal movement.
Ruth
B. Bottigheimer
New York,
USA
In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, a set of "laws" governing the
genesis and transmission of folk narra tive was formulated. These laws made no
distinction between the many small genres traditionally included in folk
narrative. Instead, they claimed that all folk narratives - whether fairy
tales, tales about fairies, etiologies, riddles, folk tales, or any one of
their many narrative relatives - were subject to the same laws. In contrast, it
is my contention that fairy tales and tales about fairies have a non-oral
history; that these genres were created for and disseminated to a literate
audience beginning in the age of print; that we can chart their emergence in the
Renaissance and can identify their late Renaissance reshaping by the Venetian
Giovanfrancesco Straparola, their narrative expansion by the
seventeenth-century Neapolitan Giambattista Basile, their re-use and refinement
by late seventeenth-century French authors, their transportation from France to
Germany in three waves (as documented by Manfred Grätz), and their
incorporation into the Grimm collection from 1807 to 1857. Absences and
presences provide the basis for asserting that fairy tales and tales about
fairies have a unique print and not oral history within the corpus of folk
narrative:
1) the
absence of unambiguous documentation of fairy tales in a purely oral context;
2) the
evident formation of the genre from the 1470s onward;
3) the
genre's early seventeenth-century insertion of Ovidian elements;
4) evidence
of Perrault's and others' direct utilization of Straparola's and Basile's books
in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century;
5) the
obvious eighteenth-century textual genealogy of many of the Grimms' fairy tales
and tales about fairies.
Together these
observations suggest that fairy tales and tales about fairies stand outside the
laws of folk narrative. Those laws may well explain the genesis and
dissemination of other genres within folk narrative, but they do not apply to
fairy tales and tales about fairies. The logical conclusion is that the laws of
folk narrative are improperly used when they are applied to theoretical
treatments and analyses of fairy tales and tales about fairies.
Marion
Bowman
Milton
Keynes, United Kingdom
This paper
explores the role of Celtic myth - and myths about 'Celticity' - in vernacular religion
and contemporary spirituality in Glastonbury, in the southwest of England.
Glastonbury, best known in the 20th century as a centre of
contemporary spirituality and religious experimentation, has long been connected
in vernacular tradition and religion with Celtic myth. Some claim that
Glastonbury is Avalon, where King Arthur was taken for healing after his last
battle, and where he lies sleeping until some time of great national emergency.
Some regard Glastonbury as a bastion of Celtic Christianity, connected in
legend with saints such as David, Patrick, and Bridget. Between the 1970s and
the 1990s, the Celts (variously envisaged and defined) increasingly became
regarded as Britain's noble savages in alternative circles, and 'Celtic
spirituality' (understood in myriad ways) was hailed as Britain's 'indigenous
religion'. Glastonbury's Celtic connections were exploited in relation to
alternative spirituality in a variety of ways, perhaps most noticeably in the elevation
of Arthur as the quintessential New Age hero, the icon of the individual
spiritual quest. However, Arthur's position has been undermined in recent years
by the increased confidence and profile of Goddess Spirituality in Glastonbury,
and the promotion of another Celt, St. Bridget - widely regarded as a
Christianised form of the Goddess Bridie. The ways in which Celtic myth has
been utilised in relation to different forms of historical and contemporary
religion, and the manner in which Arthur has been eclipsed by Bridget in
Glastonbury in recent years, provide striking examples of changing trends in
contemporary spirituality and the importance of vernacular culture and religion
in our understanding of 21st century religiosity.
Carsten
Bregenh;j
One of the lesser
supernatural beings in the traditional Danish belief system is the Ghost Horse,
often called in Danish "Helhesten". The Ghost Horse is often sighted
at night in a village cemetery foreboding someone's death. Apart from its
ghostlike appearance it may have as a special trait that it has only three legs
or that it has glowing eyes. In the Danish tradition, however, Christmas
mumming has also taken the form of a horse-like creature, a covered up person
carrying a stick with some kind of horse head on one end. For some intriguing
reason a number of references to this "Hobbyhorse" takes on
characteristics known from the Ghost Horse. In the recordings on masking the
horse-like figure is never called a Helhest. But on the other side the
way it attracts a supernatural horse seems to indicate a connection. Is it
better to regard the recordings as folk life description or to see them as folk
belief legends? The paper will investigate this polymorph tradition from a
number of viewpoints.
Charles
L. Briggs
Berkeley,
California, USA
This paper explores
the traditionalization of narrative vis-à-vis a new theory that analyzes
the power of ideologies of communication-situated ideas about how knowledge is
produced, turned into discourse (entextualized), transported between contexts
(de/recontextualized), and received. These imaginations produce subjectivities,
organize them hierarchically, and recruit people to occupy them. Hegemonic
ideologies often envision the communication of "modern" discourse as
a unilinear, unidirectional process in which messages are produced by experts;
circulated by newspapers, the Internet, etc.; and received by "the
public". Although discursive practices are too complex to be adequately
characterized by them, these ideologies exert crucial political-economic and
social effects. Modernity and the status of the modern subject have been
defined since the seventeenth century both in terms of "modern"
spheres of communicability and by projecting its opposite -
"traditional" communication. One way that cultural forms,
populations, sites, epistemologies, and social relations get branded as being
premodern is by projecting traditional spheres of communicability that
purportedly operate in an anti-modern fashion: generated by an anonymous
public, orally transmitted, and sent in unilinear fashion to experts, such as
folklorists. By way of illustration, indigenous Venezuelans used traditional
narrative forms in making sense of a cholera epidemic that killed some 500
people. Public health officials, politicians, and reporters constructed
"modern" narratives that blamed the epidemic on indigenous culture, placing
their narratives within a modern, scientific sphere of communicability, and
characterizing indigenous stories as operating within a sphere of
communicability organized by ignorance, superstition, and irrationality.
Alternative narratives that drew attention to institutional racism, global
commerce, and environmental degradation were thereby systematically excluded
from public spheres that defined themselves on the basis of dominant spheres of
communicability.
Oleksandra
Britsyna
The comparative study
of repeated performances of prose narratives in traditional occupations
provides good evidence of the mode of life of prose tradition. A century ago, a
large number of folk prose narrative transcriptions was collected in the
Ukrainian village Ploske, and published by O. Malynka in 1902 (Sbornik
Materialov po Malorusskomu fol'kloru). This collection was the starting
point for contemporary fieldwork in Ploske from 1994 to 2004. Transcriptions of
video and audio recordings of numerous performances were published by O.
Britsyna and I. Golovakha-Hicks (Prose Folklore of Ploske, a Village in
Chernihivshchyna (Texts and Research), 2004). A lot of repeated
performances were also recorded in other traditional occupations in the
different regions of Ukraine during the last 25 years. The same narrator's
repeated performances were recorded within different intervals and in different
communicative contexts. These transcriptions were compared with the recorded
performances of their "pupils" - bearers who inherited their
traditional knowledge from their "teachers". The repeated
performances are usually marked by textual dependence, mirroring the memory of
tradition and its chronological depth. Transcribed oral texts have a lot of
common features. The comparative study of these recordings leads to some
conclusions about the nature of the oral prose tradition, which is a
fundamental basis for the narrator's activity. Contemporary performers
re-create texts relying upon traditional knowledge's demands and limits, and
upon the communicative context. Special attention in the paper is paid keywords
accompanied by more-or-less stable nonverbal elements of the orally performed
text. They manifest them selves variably, and may be regarded as concepts.
Keywords are an essential part of traditional performer's competence, which has
verbal, non-verbal and semantic dimensions.
Lina B¬gienP
Vilnius,
Lithuania
By "negative
legends" we mean here those numerous folk narratives, which employ the
typical features and narrative strategies used by traditional belief legends,
yet are told in order to discredit the contents of such legends. Such stories
would initially seem to be depicting certain supernormal experiences; the
legend-like qualities of special time, place, etc. seem to be even more
pronounced here than in some "true" legends, creating an impression
of something extraordinary about to happen. But usually there is some overly
simple or even absurd and comical explanation of the situation attached to the
end (e.g. the depicted events take place at night, in the proximity of the
graveyard; the human being encounters certain mysterious, supernatural
phenomena, gets scared and takes flight etc., only to discover afterwards that
there was some stump of tree or one's own shadow that one mistook for a ghost;
the deceased seen at the cemetery chapel appears to be a late traveller seeking
shelter from the rain or a local prankster attempting to scare and make fun of
others, and so on). These stories closely resemble belief legends, except for a
distinctive "negative sign" added in the end. Some researchers define
them as negative legends or anti-legends; others do not consider them to
qualify as belief legends at all. Closer scrutiny of the archived data revealed
that almost all the popular types of Lithuanian belief legends have their
"opposites", told in the negative vein. Moreover, these stories
clearly enjoy extreme popularity, reflecting the actual folk belief situation
in the community at the time of recording, the changes and shifts taking place
in the folk worldview and mentality (sometimes even allowing us to catch the
very moment when the formerly well-established belief in the supernatural
phenomena is shaken in the human mind). In our view, these texts present the
results of the natural development of the belief legends, at the same time
testifying to the vitality of the genre itself. Many of the Lithuanian negative
legends clearly gravitate towards didactical stories, anecdotes, and so on. In
some cases, the same event is told from different perspectives (including both
the haunted and the "ghost"), thus questioning the veracity of the
belief itself.
Dace
Bula
Riga,
Latvia
The paper is based on
fieldwork carried out among the suburban fishing community of Mangaïsala
in 1992-2000. It deals with oral history from a folklorist's perspective and
emphasizes the narrator's role in creating a story during performance. The
narrative repertoires of Mangaïsala inhabitants contain a story about the
first 19 landowners of the village. The knowledge of local history is a common
resource for all members of the community, yet it is exploited differently. It
can be either included in storytelling repertoire or left aside. The stories
vary in length and plot; they contain different facts. Past events are
interpreted from diverse perspectives and receive competing evaluations when
people try link their own lives to the history of the place. Some informants
present their knowledge in a form of a legend, some remember and use only a
local saying which is believed to be handed down from the mouths of the
legendary first landowners.
Jenny
Butler
Cork,
Ireland
Ethnographic
interviewing as part of research into Irish Neo-Paganism has resulted in a
corpus of personal spiritual experience narratives. This paper involves an
examination of these narratives as a means of gaining insight into 'lived
experience' of Neo-Paganism. During interviews, informants expressed subjective
experiences or explained something by way of an example of some significant
event that occurred. Many informants hold strong beliefs in magical or
spiritual energies and analysis of their narratives reveal that, for some
individuals, perception of reality may be guided by a magical worldview such
that certain events may be interpreted as having mystical or supernatural
foundations. It must be kept in mind that spiritual experience is quite
difficult to express by verbal means. However, the language of Neo-Paganism
contains common motifs and shared significance and analysing the verbal
narratives can give us some insight Neo-Pagan belief-systems. It must also be
stated that spiritual life and the interpretation of it remains in the domain
of individual experience and that the analysis of select extracts of personal
spiritual experience narrative is an endeavour to provide an understanding of
Neo-Pagan worldview and is not an attempt to either verify or repudiate the
events under discussion. In this paper I also explore psychologist Stanley
Krippner's notion of "personal mythology" and how individuals map
their inner world and make sense of personal life events and circumstances by
recourse to personal myths. "Personal myth" is evident in examination
of personal narratives and aids in gaining an understanding of the identities
of individual Neo-Pagans and of establishing the kind of "foundation
myths" that inform the Irish Neo-Pagan community.
Lada
ButuroviD
Sarajevo,
Bosnia & Hertsogovina
This paper deals with
the identification of the style of oral magic tales through the process of
narration in three Bosnian tales - a style that can be identified as compressed
narration. Two of the tales were recorded on tape in the 1960s in Zepa near
Rogatica; the third was dictated in the late 19th or early 20th
century and apparently somewhat edited by the note-taker. The process of
compressed narration (in the story) follows the rules of oral literature, relying
on memory; memory retains that which is symbolic and significant, and as such
is captured in the compressed version. Static images are remembered, and are
transmissible because of their mythic content, in the shape of fantasies
forming the fabric of the narrative. This is the precise subject of analysis in
the selected examples. Mythic content derives from myths and, studies to date
indicate, is expressed as images located in the mind of and interpreted by
individuals. The structure of these three magic tales, determined by the
poetics of orality, thus comprises predictable elements, which transmit in
static images what is expected of them, in line with the norms of tradition.
The magic of the narrator's words leads one into another world, an anti-universe.
The narrator, structurally imitating the hero's long quest, lives through the
duration with him, finally to return where they belong. My purpose is to
indicate differences and similarities in compression as a stylistic
compositional constant of orality, both in the domain of oral tales in general
and in the recitation of these three tales. My attention will focus on the
relationship between the tales authentically recorded on tape and the tale
edited in the late 19th or early 20th century.
Biplab
Chakraborty
Calcutta,
India
The changing patterns
of Indian proverbs are very much reflected in various literary creations,
especially in modern Indian poetry. Indeed, it is mostly expressed in a style of
poetic narration called 'Lokaabharan'. The central message of a proverb
is often conveyed with a subtle touch of poetic imagination in a different
linguistic device. The changing pattern of the proverbs in relation to their
language used and central message needs to be examined from the view-point of
folk-narrative research. The present paper examines some major Indian proverbs
used in modern Bengali poetry as expressed in a definite and creative style of 'Lokaabharan'.
It also compares and contrasts Indian proverbs and their poetic usages in
modern poetry. It further highlights how and why folk-wisdom plays a central
role in the creative imagination of a modern poet.
Anastasia
Christou
Athens,
Greece
Key words:
Return migration and biographical methods, qualitative research, oral history,
life stories, oral and written narratives, interdisciplinarity, positionality
and ethics, critical ethnography and interpretative human geography.
This paper will focus
primarily on the epistemological-interdisciplinary perspectives, ethical
considerations and methodological difficulties encountered during the fieldwork
study for my PhD thesis. The issues that emerged throughout the research design
and implementation (data collection and analysis) will be addressed, assessed,
analyzed and interpreted. I intend to draw on my own experiences in the field
and reflect on the research process and outcome. In addition to offering some
insight into the research process, the epistemologies and methodologies
employed as well as the debates surrounding interdisciplinarity, I hope through
these examples to engage the complexity of everyday life and to deconstruct
meaning from that. In highlighting those contexts of everyday life, we can draw
means of utilizing prevailing paradigms as a means of understanding reality.
Additionally, I will explore the 'insider'-'outsider' issue in social science
research and the substance of methodological approaches that are collaborative
and non-exploitative, those seeking to diminish unequal power relations between
researchers and researched. Subsequently the paper will seek to address ethical
questions and moral considerations in research and the politics of knowledge
construction. I hope to open up a dialogue between researchers and researched
both about the challenges faced in interpreting the lives of others and about
the responsibilities of the researcher in doing so. Primarily because the
production of situated knowledge is shared knowledge, open to further critique
and questioning. The use of biographical methods and life history in human
geography and migration studies is a multi-faceted channel of challenging
boundaries, redefining reflexivity and illuminating the interplay of structure
and agency. The cross-fertilization of such methods provides the necessary
tools to focus on social and cultural transformations of both collectivities as
well as individuals which are conceived as subjective meaning framed by
historical, social, political and cultural factors. Thus, a multiplicity of
boundary challenges emerges: cross-inter-multi-disciplinary considerations,
illuminations of self and other, homeland and hostland, identity and memory,
longing and belonging, place and space, home-ness and alienation, ethnicity and
nationalism, gender and power, class and culture.
Amer
Dahamshe
Cana of
Galille, Israel
The goal of
this presentation is to expound the concept of place-names as reflected in the
tradition of the Galilee Arabs, in an attempt to deduce their spatial
perceptions. Researchers in the fields of Geography (Miller 2000,
Berleant-Shiler 1991), anthropology and folklore (Basso 1988, Slyomovics 1998)
have extolled the value of studying indigenous names and traditions. These
researchers and others agree that this research method produces hypotheses in
the field of toponomy (the discipline of geographical names), sheds light on
the meaning of the name and the way in which it was given, and exposes the
spatial perceptions of the indigenous society. Based on these approaches, it
would be possible to assume that reading the folklore stories could lead to:
A. Cultural
interpretation of the names and the motives that have structured them.
B. Knowledge
about the manner and circumstances in which these names were given.
C. Knowledge
about the sense of territoriality.
These assumptions will
be examined through the meanings underlying the names of two villages as they
emerge from four stories. The method of analysis focuses on two levels: the
reasons for the name (as suggested by Steawart 1970) and the structure of the
place (as suggested by Daraze 1993). The spatial areas will be examined, based
on Jason's typology (1975). However, beyond the taxonomy, I intend to discuss
the inter-spatial relationships and their role at the narrative level. Space is
also a cultural product (Parmenter 1994, Azariaho 2000), and accordingly the
structured and designed space, as reflected by names, will be examined. This
discussion might lead to a suggestion favouring the spatial split in legend as
a result of a cultural position, not only as a purely geographical aspect. The
discussed names are supported, in part, with more than a story. Presentation of
the texts on a paradigmatic axis (based on Jakobson) allows us to see the
"named" village as a place composed of a fabric of places, in which
the establishment of each place imparts to the village a unique spatial-Semitic
identity. In addition, I intend to discuss the literary characters appearing in
the name formation, their types (similar to Noy's method with Jewish legends,
1967), and their characterization according to Rimmon-Kenan (1984).
Manuel
T. Dannemann
Santiago,
Chile
This communication
proceeds from my experience as auditor of the folktales in narration events,
occasions when oral stories of reciprocate property and strong animical and
social cohesion are practiced. In these narrative sessions, I have
distinguished eight classes of folktales: joke tales, riddle tales, of animals,
of advice, of formula, fairy tales, roguish tales and religious tales. The
wonderfulness is known by their tellers as magic, performing to adventure and
even lies. It can be said that in all these classes there is a major or minor
grade of wonderfulness, understood as a condition that allows to evade and
obtain an effect of fascination. Together with wonderfulness, there are two
other factors in all the classes: the first is functionality and the second,
narrativity. These constitute three instruments for researching in folktales.
The first is mainly qualitative, showing general didactical and entertaining
purposes in all the classes; on the other hand the particulars of satirical,
ludic or religious character. The factor of narrativity is more quantitative
than qualitative, concerned with the structure of the story development; it can
exist in an upper, medium, or low grade. Wonderfulness is likewise more
quantitative than qualitative and can also answer to these three grades. It
must be recognized that the class of the denominated wonderfulness tale is the
most complex and rich in its fabulous quality with the participation of magic
characters and objects that more intensively oppose fiction to verisimilitude.
The wonderfulness, that culminates in this class, appears in all classes of
tales of Stith Thompson Index. The folktales enter into other times, and other
spaces, into the world of wonderfulness. Without this step perhaps the folk
narrative would not exist at least as we know it now, because the future of
culture is still unpredictable.
Umesh
Deka & Geeta Deka
Guwahati,
Asam, India
North-East India is
comprised of such large varieties of human population that one just cannot help
wondering at the structure of such a complex and diverse demography. From this
point of view this area could be considered as an anthropological as well as
cultural museum. The most prominent feature of this museum is that it is a
cultural repertoire of the Indo-Mongoloid stock. And it is in this tract of
India that Indo-Mongoloid elements are present in their largest numbers. The
ethnic variety of the area is most complex in India. There are over two hundred
recorded tribes here, and its non-tribal population contains a rich variety of
ethnic groups as well. The cultural landscape of North-East India is
characterised by several ethnic groups whose social response, with varying
degrees of differences emanates from an ethnic value system. If the people of
these diverse cultural and ethnic groups along with their festivals and rituals
which they practiced are studied properly, one can easily realise their
interpersonal relationships as well as their integral attitude. The North-East
culture has been found to be varied in nature and broad in perspectives.
Different ethnic groups lead different ways of life, while keeping their own
identity. Assam is the central part of the NE India and the inhabitants of the
area have been formed by the variety of tribes. Among them Assamese, Boro,
Rabha, Karbi, Missing, Deuri-Chutia, Dimacha etc. These tribal groups have
their own ethnic identity and different agricultural and religious festivals.
It may be noted that though the diverse elements have been noticed among these
festivals, common and integral characteristics played a dominant role in regard
to the songs, dances and rituals. Among these festivals Bihu, Baisagu,
Samankan, Ali-ai-lrigang, and Fat-Bihu etc. are most prominent. These festivals
are considered national, and the songs and dances connected with these marked
the harmony and integrity as well as it expressed emotional feelings, hopes and
aspirations, love and affections. On the other hand, socio-cultural and
socio-economic aspects of those tribal societies have been reflected very
nicely through their festivals. The main objectives of this paper are to go
through the various agricultural and religious festivals observed by the
different Northeastern Tribal groups and to show their interwoven cultural
relations, which lead to integration among the diverse groups in the North-East
India.
Mariann
Domokos
Veszprém,
Hungary
The
presentation intends to investigate mobile communication as a medium of
conveying folklore texts, as well as the folklore-like features of the messages
(SMS) sent via mobile communication. Mobile phones in Hungary emerged in the
1990s, at first as symbols of prestige; later they have become widespread
practical mass products. Short message sending service belongs to secondary or
electronic literacy, which in contemporary practice of communication is almost
as popular as e-mail correspondence. In Hungarian practice three levels of SMS
can be distinguished:
(1) It
can be interpreted as a service, in this case it signifies the device of
communication
(2) In
Hungarian SMS also means the sent or received message itself, thus SMS stands
for texts sent via mobile phones
(3) Certain
SMS texts occasionally constitute folklore genres as well.
The preliminary issues
and problems of a related textual analysis from a folkloristic aspect are as
follows: What well-known folklore genres emerge in SMS texts? What is the
relationship of these genres to traditional folklore genres? What sort of
changes do traditional genres undergo when emerging in this new form and
medium? Are there any new genres, and in case of an affirmative answer, in what
respect do these genres differ from traditional ones? The corpus of texts on
which the research project is based consists of three types of text
collections. The first collection is made up of actually sent messages. In the
past four years I have recorded more than one hundred folklore-like SMS texts.
The second collection is constituted of such handwritten collections of SMS
texts that Hungarian pupils of secondary schools use as diaries or keepsake
albums. The third part of the corpus was collected among pupils of secondary
schools in the framework of a sociological research, which eventually provided
almost two hundred folklore-like SMS texts. As the analysis has pointed out, in
practice SMS does not signify one genre, since the practically used SMS corpus
is constituted by heterogeneous texts, among which folklore-like and
non-folklore texts can also be found. Some of the SMS texts can be assigned to
the traditional types of folklore genres (e.g. jokes, proverbs, greetings in
rhyme related to festive occasions), whereas other texts such as funny-tricky
texts or reduced chain letters comprising only the initial and closure units
seem to refer to new genres.
Baolin
Duan
Beijing,
China
Folk
literature is different from written literature, for written literature is a
kind of art of written language. Folk literature is a kind of living literature
with the character of being stereoscopic. The stereoscopic character of folk
literature is represented in four aspects:
1. Folk
literature is a kind of performance. While telling stories, the narrators'
facial expressions, body movements and hand gestures are also part of the
story-telling. The music of folk songs, the body movements of games, the
rituals of ceremonies are also very important. Thus we should concentrate not
only on the texts, but also on the performance.
2. Folk
literature is a kind of practical art. It has many social functions. While
collecting texts, we should also pay attention to their social functions.
3. One
of the characters of folk literature is that it has variants. We should collect
all the variants of a text, and then we can study it as a whole.
4. We should also
pay attention to the aesthetics of folk literature. One of the main characters
of folk literature is its aesthetics.
Pasi
Enges
Pori,
Finland
Memorate is a
genre-analytical term, which in recent decades has been established to mean a
narrative about a supernatural experience of the narrator him/herself, or a
person that he/she knows. In research into popular beliefs that have benefited
from folkloristic materials, the memorate has been considered to be of
particular value in getting a grip on the "living core" of popular
religion. My argument, however, is that the purpose of telling about one's own
or other people's supernatural experiences is not always to prove the real
existence of the supernatural world. There may be several functions in the
community for relating stories genre-analytically defined as memorates.
Supernatural experiences can be narrated purely for the sake of passing the
time, or from a pedagogical or strictly humorous point of view. Memorates can
also be used as a means of testing the listener's gullibility, commenting on
social relations, or displaying the narrator's creative skills in traditional
storytelling. This fact does not exclude the possibility of firm belief in the
supernatural. In the context of the River Sámi narrative tradition these
different uses of memorate-form narratives are evident. Two indigenous
narrative genres, muihtalus (reminiscence, true story) and máinnas
(legend, tale, amusing story) both to some degree fit to the scholarly
definition of memorate. Yet, in many cases there is a quite clear contradiction
between the form of the narratives, on the one hand, and the functions and uses
of them, on the other hand. In my presentation, taking examples from the River
Sámi tradition of the upper Teno River on the border between Finland and
Norway, I will demonstrate how realistic and fantastic elements are utilized in
narratives about supernatural experiences. Skilful narrators may creatively mix
up traditional narrative motifs and motifs invented by themselves, report true
as well as made-up events, and quite freely expand the boundaries of the
realistic world. Thus, in narrating and listening to stories about encountering
the supernatural, there is often an interplay going on between fact and
fiction.
Larisa
Fialkova & Maria N. Yelenevskaya
Haifa,
Israel
Citizens of the former
Soviet Union, although brought up in a totalitarian state, were not law-abiding
by conviction. For Russians justice is more important than truth. The law is
seen as an instrument, often immoral at that, used by the state against an
individual. So juggling it was considered to be both moral and appropriate.
Ries, who studied contemporary Russian speech genres, identifies a genre of
male mischief stories. These can be divided into two groups: stories aimed at
depicting the narrator's boldness, courage, and wit, examples of what is known
in Russia as "hussar behaviour" and trickster stories. In our opinion
mischief stories are popular among males and females alike, though dominant
themes differ in their narratives: while males brag about drinking, womanizing,
and fighting adventures, female stories deal with seduction and taming of
husbands and mothers-in-law. In addition, both sexes excel in telling stories
about outwitting "the system" and circumventing the law. Immigration
produced new types of mischief stories, first of all about faking documents,
deceiving customs and emigrating without obtaining close relatives' consent.
Thus in our sample mischief stories are of the trickster type. The change of
the country has not led to a change of strategies. Stories about white collar
crimes remain popular and have entered the repertoire of immigrants' folklore.
The material of this presentation has been drawn from face-to-face interviews
with immigrants to Israel from the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Outi
Fingerroos
Turku,
Finland
Karelia has always
been a place of utopias and dreams in Finland. The images that we have of this
area tend to originate in national projects and Karelianism. Therefore the word
Karelia without any further specification creates homogeneity. Karelia was
divided between the two states, Finland and the Soviet Union since Finland
gained independence in 1917. The Karelian Isthmus belonged to Finland until
1939. After World War II a total of 430,000 evacuees, 407,000 of whom were
Karelians, were resettled in different parts of Finland. In the presentation
the researcher notes that there is a need for a critical analysis within
comparative religion and cultural studies in general, because Karelianism has
left a permanent mark in the collections of Finnish folklore archives and in
research on Karelia. We are currently living in a kind of revival of
Karelianism, and, in addition to this, the images and memories of Karelia have
undergone constant change in the course of the past 80 years. Karelia as a
Place of Memories and Utopias is a project that studies the memories of the
Karelian Isthmus that Finns who evacuated the area during World War II have.
The project concentrates particularly on those memories that evacuees who have
come from the Karelian Isthmus possess. The aim of my presentation in Tartu is
to find, construct and analyse the different ways in which the past is
remembered and ritualised, the experiences of different generations of Karelia,
and the phenomenon of "new Karelianism". Karelia is not just an
abstraction but a place of memories and utopias for Karelian evacuees. Their
utopias are different from those of supporters of Karelianism because of their
misery and dreams about going back to a home that exists only in their
memories. Karelia is also a meaningful place for the construction of identity
within different generations. It is a place where Karelian refugees and their
children and children's children as well as the cohabitants in the new
hometowns of the evacuees (ritually) visit again and again.
Brigitte
Frizzoni
If we take a close
look at representations of the male body in popular culture since the 1990s,
the famous phrase by John Berger "Men look at women, and women watch
themselves being looked at" doesn't seem quite right anymore. For not only
in the visual media, but also in popular literature, male bodies are presented
in increasingly eroticised ways, which extend them to female gaze and female
desire. This shift, this "disruption of conventional patterns of
looking," as Rosalind Gill puts it, and the representation of maleness in
popular culture and everyday life in general, has attracted much scholarly
attention in the last years. While comics, magazines, films, adverts, romances
etc. have already been taken into consideration, women's crime novels - which
have been booming on the international book market for the last two decades
(and which are defined by disruptions of conventional patterns, among other
things) - are still to be examined closely in this respect. In my paper, I
shall argue that eroticised representations of the male body are not only a striking
feature of many women's crime novels, but that erotic fantasies, triggered by
those representations, build the very backbone of the genre’s
constitutive suspense in some of the best-selling texts.
Haya
Gavish
Jerusalem,
Israel
How does the move from
a Diaspora community to Israel influence the status of women? Does religious attachment
to the ancestral homeland enhance or weaken their standing? I shall touch upon
these questions by referring to the condition of Jewish women in various
communities outside of Israel, while focusing on that of women in the Jewish
community of Zakho, Kurdistan. Most of the information has been gleaned from
personal narratives. The community of Zakho served as a spiritual and religious
centre for Jewish communities in the northern mountain region of Kurdistan.
Observance of tradition was characteristic of the lifestyle of the community,
which underwent very few changes. The family structure was patriarchal, with
the entire extended family living under the same roof, whereas the women were
housekeepers and responsible for the education of the girls and the male
children until a certain age. Changes in the status of women came about when
they fully identified with collective communal values, such as religious
attachment to Eretz Israel, in general, and to Jerusalem, in particular. Such
values were particularly characteristic of male society and the religious
leadership of the community, and were acquired through prayer and the study of
homiletic interpretations of the Bible. Zakho's Jewish women, who were not
present during the prayers, absorbed these values in a roundabout way. In
certain cases they even took the lead in their realization, perhaps as a means
of self-expression or out of a covert hope to better their condition. Examples
of such changes in the status of women in Zakho can be found in stories of
pilgrimages to holy sites in Kurdistan, which served as a substitute for Eretz
Israel. The women played leading roles in these pilgrimages, at times forcing
their participation upon the menfolk. Feminine leadership in Zakho is also
reflected as they took care of the funds collected in charity boxes; They
influenced the decision to emigrate to Eretz Israel and there were those who
took matters in hand and solved problems when convoys of immigrants ran into
difficulties on the way. Personal narratives of the absorption of Kurdistani
immigrants in Israel, after the establishment of the state in 1948, bring to
light stories of women who fought for the right to advance themselves by means
of education. Thus, the change in status of Kurdistani Jewish women began prior
to their immigration to Eretz Israel, while in the State of Israel they
gradually consolidated their status on an equal standing with men.
Inna
Golovakha-Hicks
Kiev,
Ukraine
Demonological legends
are one of Ukrainian folklore's most common and ancient prosaic genres. Today,
this tradition is as alive and active as a century ago. Our research in the
village Ploske in Chernihivshyna, for example, showed that more demonological
plots are involved in oral transmission today than a century ago in the same
village. Active bearers of this tradition are present in both traditional
agricultural communities and contemporary urban communities. At the same time,
this is a genre which Ukrainian folklorists have not analyzed deeply enough.
First epic genres and then tales took attention away from demonological
legends, over the last 140 years. But regardless of this relative lack of
research, demonological legends endured and have been inherited by the newest
generation, our contemporaries. As a result, we have in our hands unique
material for comparative analyses of demonological narrative life over the last
century. In the contemporary world, even among the most educated and
technically minded humans, the ancient beliefs in witches, witchcraft, ghosts,
dead souls, sorcery, and their influence on human life are as important as they
were in the lives of our ancestors. This is why demonological legends allow us
not only to analyze the life of certain narrations but also to understand the
traditional world view of their bearers. Texts themselves become a bridge to
the traditionally-oriented minds of the people who live in contemporary folk
communities. The widespread of demonological beliefs among urbanized people
tells us that, in contemporary Ukraine, the spiritual, cultural and economical
connections between city and village are very tight, and that traditional
agricultural life influences urban life more efficiently then urbanization
influences traditional communities.
Judit
Gulyás
Velence,
Hungary
In Hungarian variants
of some folk fairy tale types (especially AaTh 315, 707, 725) the operation of
a peculiar dream narrative can be observed: the characters of the tale
purposefully use an embedded dream narrative to communicate information. The
agent of knowledge conveys information to a mediating person and in doing so
(s)he also orders/governs that when the mediator conveys information to the
actual addressee (recipient), the mediator must explain the origin of the
conveyed knowledge to the recipient by referring to a fictional dream vision:
as if the mediator had had a dream and would have gained information in dream.
The mediator in these tales always accepts this proposal and when telling the
information to the recipient, (s)he conceals the real source of information and
substitutes it with a generally available and uncontrollable source of
knowledge as (s)he claims that it has been provided for him/her in a dream. The
recipient, having understood the information conveyed in this manner, sets out
to perform an action as these sets of information in most cases are about some
absent or missing objects or persons, which/whom the recipient should obtain.
The presentation intends to investigate these as-if (emphatically fictional)
dream narratives and tries to answer a very simple question: why is it
necessary (if it is necessary at all) to use these as-if dream narratives in
these fairy tales? According to my presumption these special dream narratives
belong to the Proppian category of those auxiliary elements that link
morphological functions, because their basic narrative role is to distribute
information in the frame narrative, which information makes it possible for the
characters to act. As is well-known, distribution of information as an
essential condition to induce action is of crucial importance in any narrative
(and especially in those classical narrative genres in which these two are very
strongly interrelated, i.e in folk fairy tales and e.g. in detective stories).
Since Vladimir Propp enlists several variants of the category of auxiliary
elements linking functions (e.g. speaking animals, overhearing of a chat,
letter, slander, boasting, acoustic and visual information/signs), the
examination of narrative solutions that are functionally equivalent with
embedded as-if dream narratives may promote another answer to the
abovementioned question.
Terry
Gunnell
Reykjavík,
Iceland
The central theme of
the present conference is Narrative Theories and Modern Practices. One might
say that one of the key developments in our approach to the narrative over the
last one hundred years has been to move from the examination of a narrative as
a series of written words printed on a page, isolated from their context like a
stuffed exhibit in a museum. Aside from the eternal questions of genre and type
classification, most people nowadays see the folk narrative as a living social
phenomenon, something with a historical and social context, that is both
uttered and received, passed on and developed, as a series of images, symbols,
sounds and textures. In short, the text has gained "thickness". It
has begun to be seen as occupying a greater degree of "space" than it
had in the time of the Grimms. In this lecture, I would like to examine a
variety of different spatial aspects connected with different types of folk
narrative, ranging from the way that a spoken narrative creates a marked-off
area of space, to the way that the space surrounding this space affects the
understanding of the narrative (like the set of a play affects the
understanding of the play itself); and the way that the narrative adds temporal
and geographical space to the lives of the listeners, at the same time
temporarily transforming the immediate space in which they exist. As has been
argued by earlier scholars, there can even be a shamanistic healing element
within the performance of a narrative. In many ways, it might be argued that
the often ignored spatial element of the spoken text is something that
differentiates it radically from the photocopied or e-mailed text, or even the
data-base entries that many of us are at present dealing with. These new forms
would thus appear to call for very different approaches to those we have
adopted in recent years. Or do they?
Terry
Gunnell
Reykjavík,
Iceland
One of the main
problems with researching "traditional" Icelandic legends (apart from
the fact that only about 3% of them are available to people who cannot read
Icelandic) is that up until very recently there has been no archive of folk
legend material in Iceland. This has meant that the only way to find material
on legends of a particular type, gender and job-related distribution of
storytellers, distribution of legends, local beliefs and so on has been to
plough through all the various collections, and listen to all of the tapes in
the Arnamagnean Institute in Reykjavík, a task daunting enough to put
even the most dogged researcher off. Matters, however, are beginning to change
in Iceland. Over the last five years, we have been working on two large
databases of printed and recorded legendary material, each containing over
10,000 entries. The plan is that these databases will eventually be linked, and
connected to a mapping programme allowing immediate distribution analysis. In
this lecture, the situation in Iceland past and present will be analysed, and
the draft form of the database of printed material (Sagnagrunnur)
presented, along with a review of the possibilities that this will open up for
scholars both in Iceland and abroad. At the same time as outlining the
advantages of such an approach, some discussion will be made of the
difficulties that such a database presents, and the potential weaknesses that
need to be considered.
Aleksandr
Gura
Moscow,
Russia
The comparative
analysis of Slavic formulas and narratives which interpret dark figures on the
moon shows an opportunity of decomposition of the text on morphological various
elements: characters, subjects, attributives, temporatives, functions and
predicates. In different traditions the same elements enter different
combinations with each other, creating dialectal variants of the text and
forming a semantic field of interpretation of lunar spots. The analysis allows
one to establish interrelations of elements, to show how the text is designed
from them in different local traditions, to see the general
"grammatic" structure of the mythological text, to reveal inclusion
of some elements of the text in other semantic models.
Anders
Gustavsson
Oslo,
Norway
The life of every
human being extends from birth to death. No-one can escape this fate even if
death has often been said to have become subject to taboo in recent years, and
marginalized in people's social lives and as a topic of conversation. What
happens if death occurs at some earlier phase of life than that more normally
expected, and not at a far distant time in people's everyday lives? This will
most often be a sudden and unexpected death. How do the deceased's nearest
family, friends and acquaintances manage to cope with this? Can different forms
of ritual help to mitigate the shock and ease the process of grief? These are
questions that will be discussed in this essay, based on a number of cases in
which death has occurred suddenly and, usually, without prior warning. The
emphasis is on the present day, but the study also considers the question of
variation over time as illustrated by conditions in the early 1900s. How are
new rituals created, and how are they spread, and what meaning do they have for
those people thrust into difficult situations? Ritual presupposes the
performance of actions and that these actions are carried out in a public,
social context. The fieldwork for this study was carried out in south-eastern
Norway and western Sweden.
Robin
Gwyndaf
Cardiff,
Wales, United Kingdom
Since the
days of the poets Aneirin and Taliesin in the 6th century, few
nations in Europe have accorded the poet greater status than Wales, and no
meaningful statement can be made about the nature of Welsh identity without a
proper understanding of the central role played by national and local poets.
This paper concentrates mainly on the rich vein of informal, unofficial poetry,
composed by numerous bards and rhymesters in Wales and inspired by everyday
events and incidents. The central questions considered are: why and how did
people make such constant use of a variety of verse forms as a vital means of
communication in their daily lives? Why do they continue to do so in the 21st
century? Why verse and not prose? Also, why many of these forms seem to be
non-crystallized? Is it poetry or prose? What is the value of symbolism and
images? Is the prose often poetry? What is the function of cante fable?
Whatever form used, is that form primarily a means to an end, that is, the use
of the most appropriate form to communicate a message in the most effective
manner at a certain place and moment in time? In an attempt to address these
questions, reference is made to what I consider to be seven of the main
characteristics of folk poetry.
1. It is
a social activity, especially reflective of small, closely-knit communities,
and specific social groups, in both rural and urban areas, and relating to both
adults and children alike.
2. It is
an activity which belongs to all classes of people.
3. It is
a means of communication in all aspects of life and circumstances.
4. The
forms of folk poetry are very numerous and wide-ranging. They are non-static
and adaptable, depending on context and function.
5. Folk
poetry, in essence, is oral poetry: cerdd dafod, 'the art or craft of
the tongue'. It is power poetry and poetry of inspiration. It is memorable and
repeatable.
6. Folk
poetry is poetry in action. It visualizes the invisible; the abstract becomes
concrete. It communicates a message in a direct and colourful manner. It is a
drama and a performance, a story and anecdote in verse, with the emphasis on
spontaneity, immediacy and creativity.
7. Folk poetry is
functional, applied poetry. It is poetry for everyday use. Those uses are
innumerable and reflect the complexities of society and the human experience,
past and present.
Riina
Haanpää
The oral tradition of
my family has preserved plenty of stories about fights, knifings and other
crimes. One prominent character of these stories is Veikko Haanpää,
my grandfather's brother, and the subject of my presentation. Veikko
Haanpää has the characteristics of a typical fighter: On one hand, he
is presented as a vicious killer who was eager to fight, on the other, he was a
loving and handsome as well as a musical man. Veikko Haanpää was also
an actual killer, who stabbed his own brother to death with a knife. In this
presentation I study Veikko Haanpää and his image as pictured in
stories and official historical sources. For the research material of my study
I use interviews I conducted on Veikko Haanpää in 2000-2002 and also
for official and historical sources I use church registers and court
statements. I also consider newspapers and their stories about the killing
incident and about Veikko Haanpää. Studying these quite different
sources I concentrate on the question of how the picture of the man from South
Ostrobothnia is presented: why and how are stories about Veikko Haanpää
told in different periods and in different generations? What sort of
interpretations and community values - also family values - are those of Veikko
Haanpää? I also analyse South Ostrobothnian society, especially the
socio-historical background of violence and crime in South Ostrobothnia, which
has influenced the stories about Veikko Haanpää. As the starting
point for my study I use oral history theories which reflect the narrators' own
views and interpretations of the past. It also shows the values, attitudes and
social norms which exist in a community.
Donald
Haase
This paper explores the
framing, presentation, and textual constitution of folktales and fairy tales in
popular print and electronic editions. The study proceeds from the premise that
simultaneous changes occurring over the last three decades in fairy-tale
scholarship, literary studies, and technology have generated notable changes in
the production and reception of texts. In particular, a new understanding of
the printed folktale's textual complexity and intertextuality emerged
simultaneously with the phenomenon of hypertextuality. Against this background,
the paper examines selected texts representing children's picture books,
trade-book anthologies, and collections on CD-ROM and the Internet. Ultimately
I assess what these new editions mean for the contemporary reception of the
folktale and fairy tale and the degree to which the production and
re-production of texts in new media and in new formats represent actual
innovation, especially in light of the democratization of fairy-tale studies,
the popularization of scholarship, and Internet's challenge to traditional
authority.
Moni'm
Haddad
Peqi'n,
Israel
156,000 Palestinians
continued to live in their homeland when Israel was founded in 1948, and became
Israeli citizens. (Currently they are 1,300,000). Their heritage, folklore,
culture and civilization have never been researched or studied as they should
be. In the 1990s, the Ministry of Education and Culture, accepted our request
to compose a curriculum for teaching Palestinian heritage in Palestinian
schools in Israel. I was asked to prepare a draft for this curriculum. This
draft considered the heritage, folklore and civilization of the Palestinians in
Israel as an integral part of the Palestinian heritage, and at the same time an
integral part of the Israeli heritage, and that both these basic connections
should be emphasized. The main goals of this curriculum were to enable the
Palestinian pupils in Israel to get acquainted with their heritage, at least as
well as they know the Israeli (Jewish) heritage, and to emphasize the humane
aspects of the Palestinian heritage, stressing the common attributes between
the Palestinian and Israeli heritage. The curriculum also strives to stress the
common ground that can be found in the heritage of other nations. There is also
a clear aim to enhance coexistence between the two nations living in Israel and
in Palestine and throughout the entire Middle East, and to serve as an example
of tolerance to all the nations and countries in the world. The curriculum
includes the major definitions of heritage, folklore, culture and civilization,
their main attributes, their development, and their interrelations with the
heritage of other nations. This draft was discussed in dozens of meetings by a
committee of experts appointed by the Ministry of Education and Culture whose
members were of the best educational and academic minds of the country. This
committee recommended doing the utmost in turning this curriculum into educational
material (books, multimedia, etc). Funds and teaching hours were to be made
available so that this program could be implemented immediately for teaching
heritage for the Palestinian pupils in Israel. The complete curriculum and the
appropriate recommendations were handed in to the Ministry of Education and
Culture in 2001. To date there has been no final approval by the ministry and
consequently no implementation of the curriculum, and committee's
recommendations.
Valdimar
Tr. Hafstein
Reykjavík,
Iceland
In 2003, UNESCO's
member states adopted a new instrument - the Convention for the Safeguarding of
the Intangible Cultural Heritage - that extends the scope of international
heritage policy from immovable objects to the realm of the
"intangible": storytelling, craftsmanship, rituals, dramas, and
festivals. The convention aims to assure the transmission and reproduction of
traditional practices. In this paper, I argue that the concept of intangible
cultural heritage is in this sense a tool of intervention - a normative rather
than descriptive concept. The objectives of intangible heritage policy comprise
the structuring of communities and the orchestration of differences within and
across states. Drawing on Foucault-inspired theories of governmentality, I
contend that intangible heritage permits a re-location of culture in
communities and of communities in a multicultural matrix of organized
diversity. According to the convention, intangible cultural heritage is
appointed and interpreted in part by or in consultation with the practicing
communities to whom it is attributed and whose identities are intertwined in
its representation. By enfranchising communities, it attempts to fix particular
sets of relations as relatively stable units that speak with one voice. Thus,
the concept of intangible heritage of fers tools and techniques to subnational
and transnational communities to organize themselves as spaces of identification.
In societies increasingly characterized by cultural differences - diaspora,
indigeneity, localisms, etc. - liberal governments tend to delegate more and
more of the tasks of social governance to the community level. If intangible
heritage invests capacities in cultural communities, I suggest that this is
best understood in the context of the increasing communalization of government.
The convention, in fact, contributes to the organization of communities as
self-governing and semi-autonomous social units with a strong but not exclusive
claim to allegiance from community members, giving each community a voice
within the orchestrated polyphony of a pluralistic society.
Pekka
Hakamies
Joensuu,
Finland
The topic of my paper
is the stories that the Soviet settlers of the former Finnish Karelia, ceded to
the Soviet Union in World War II, tell about the places they have created on
the empty territory which they occupied in 1945, initially sometimes even as
early as 1940. Peculiar to the area and the telling related to the places is
the lack of the distant past - Soviet people settled there half a century ago,
without any knowledge of the area in advance. New settlers had to start the
construction of the places as accumulations of life experiences and tradition
connected with them from zero. Main topography and place names were initially
acquired from the Finns, but the inhabitants soon developed their own
additional toponyms. There were both in the Ladoga Karelia and on the Karelian
isthmus two separate toponymic systems in use, one Soviet Russian, the other
Finnish. Narration about the places usually seems not to have established forms
and contents. One reason for this is the relatively short period of time for
the formation of narratives; another is rapid changes in the development of
patterns of dwelling: small villages have been abandoned due to the
concentration of agriculture and people in large main villages; thus many
places have disappeared both physically and as points of accumulation of
tradition. Finnish Lutheran churches are the only places of
tradition-attraction. Another topic, attached to the so-called khutor
houses but usually not in any concrete place, are stories about encounters of
the dwellers with the former Finnish inhabitants of the house, told in the
Ladoga Karelia.
Jawaharlal
Handoo
Mysore,
India
"Knowledge no
longer requires application to reality; knowledge is what gets passed on silently
without comment, from one text to another. Ideas are propagated and
disseminated anonymously; they are repeated without attribution; they have
literally become idées reçues: what matters is that they
are there to be repeated, echoed, and re-echoed uncritically" (Edward W.
Said, Orientalism, p. 116). In this brief paper my endeavour is to focus
on the status of discourse - both oral and written - in India. The paper argues
against the strict confinement of discourse in verbal behaviour. The real
picture of discourse in India emerges only when its complex dimensions are
captured holistically in both the verbal and non-verbal behaviour of Indian
society. In other words I argue that folklore be viewed as discourse - the real
discourse. It hardly needs to be emphasized that folklore theory has remained
chained in formalism and formalistic methodology for more than a century that
might have defeated the very purpose tradition studies stood far. The paper
will attempt to put this argument to test in the existing conditions of
discourse in India, more importantly the discourse associated with historical
space. The traditional paradigm of historical discourse (I prefer to call it
palace paradigm) and the weaknesses of this paradigm which include the issues
of representation, ideology and the blurred status of the historical discourse
seem to be the source of most of the formal discourse in India. This hegemonic
paradigm in both its dimensions - diachronic and synchronic - has not only
misled generations, but has also obscured the story, the real story, of mankind
and to a great extent perpetuated the dangerous ideology of power politics the
paradigm is raised on. The discovery of the writing systems might have helped
mankind in many ways, but it certainly has harmed mankind in many other ways.
Historical discourse has completely depended upon the written metaphor and as
such has added to the idiosyncratic expressions of the writing system. That is
why the paradigms of writing history and writing literature have not only
coexisted, but have remained in free variation and more often than not
interchangeable. One could also add the dimensions of distance both in time and
space that written systems create between the speaker - subject and the writer;
between the historian and the human being.
Kirsi
Hänninen
When studying the
narrative construction of an experience, the narrative is seen as a method of
restructuring the past, a process involving interpretations of events and
meaning-making. The world that a narrator constructs is not a replica of
pre-existing reality but a representation. When people narrate experiences,
they are conveying meanings, producing states of affairs and constructing
subjects and identities. Thus storytelling plays an important role when
validating experiences, and especially when validating competing experiences,
such as supernatural experiences. In this paper I study how Finnish people
living in the 21st century construct and interpret the supernatural
experiences in personal experience narratives. The overall research material
consists of over 470 written responses to my inquiries regarding personal
encounters with supernatural beings, such as angels, extraterrestrials, demons
and ghosts. In my presentation I will concentrate on some ghost stories and
examine what narrators tell about the encounters with the supernatural: What do
they tell about themselves, the supernatural beings and other story characters?
How do they involve the recipient participation? What kinds of emotions are
attached to the supernatural experiences? Focusing on the structural features
of the stories, I will suggest that storytelling is the narrator's means to
argue for the reality of the supernatural experiences.
Lauri
Harvilahti
Cultural dynamics
denotes here the means of cultural activities that enable reactions to new sociocultural
processes and challenges. Ethnopoetic research has traditionally analysed
different narrative patterns, ranging from line/clause level to broad overall
structures. The school of ethnopoetics has striven to illustrate
culture-specific characteristics, taking into consideration the
linguistic-poetic system and worldview of the peoples it studies and the
interaction of form and meaning, or it has focused on the systems for
transcribing recorded performances in order to bring out such meaningful "paralinguistic"
features as pitch, quality of voice, loudness, or pause. Using this approach it
has been possible to reconstruct and reinterpret features that are not visible
in the materials of earlier researchers of indigenous cultures (such as Franz
Boas and Edward Sapir). Influenced by the "Ethnography of Speaking"
school, these approaches have sought to establish an alternative to the
stereotyped Western concepts of text and textualisation. Rather than trying to
reconstruct poetic systems, my aim is at creating a broader ethnopoetic theory,
taking in not only the poetic traditional systems in their natural
environments, but also the manifold processes of textualisation in literary
cultures, including the use of traditional meanings in new, global settings. In
this sense the elements of traditional texts are not static, but dynamic and
processual.
Galit
Hasan-Rokem
Jerusalem,
Israel
When we study
narratives in ancient texts, it is often hard to pinpoint exactly the
subjectivity or subjectivities underlying the text, especially when the texts
are canonical in the culture to which they belong. One interpretative strategy
that has been applied is the use of the term "voice" as a supposedly
distinct category independent of the authority of the dominant textual
establishment (national, religious or class). Very often voice thus emerges in
the textual analysis as a socially relatively unprivileged subjectivity, such as
women, children, poor or uneducated people. But the voice may also be geared to
retrieving the subject positions of individuals in textual corpora that are
attributed to a collective authorship or editorship. The paper critiques the
former usage of the term "voice" by this author and others in the
study of late antique Rabbinic texts in Hebrew and Aramaic, especially from a
feminist theoretical perspective. It will be demonstrated through examples of
textual analysis that whereas the attribution of voice may serve to reinforce
subjectivity it may also completely erase it due to the metaphorical quality of
the interpretative strategy.
Abd-El-Hameed
Hawwas
Cairo,
Egypt
The "Tale of Sayf
al-Muluk and Badi'at al-Jamal" stands out in contrast to other tales in
the Arabian Nights. It starts with a long prologue, which unfolds on Nights
756-758 (in Bulaq edition), narrating the quest journey for the
"Well-Constructed Tale and the Strange Discourse Unheard of Before"
which turns out to be "The Tale of Sayf al-Muluk." The sought tale
gets written down when it is found. Sequentially this prologue leads to the
"Tale of Sayf al-Muluk" but it can be read as an autonomous narrative.
In the prologue, the "Beautiful Tale" is the object of desire and the
feeling of a "lack" moves the events precisely to compensate for this
lack. However, from the epistemic point of view and taking into consideration
the narrative objective, the tale of the prologue narrates the very process of
narration, its conditions, and its social status. Thus, it is a narrative
representation of story-telling and a testimony to the self-reflexivity of the
Arabian Nights - its consciousness of itself as a collection of tales. From this
perspective, the prologue does not simply introduce the "Tale of Sayf
al-Muluk" but functions as a manifesto of story-telling and the social
role and status of narratives. This prologue, then, draws attention to its
novelty and specificity. This new type of tale/prologue develops elements from
earlier Arabic narrative traditions and particularly the ways books were
introduced and ideas were exposed in oral literary séances. The best
example of this is to be found in the introductory prologue of Kalila wa-Dimna.
This mode of induction has left its imprint on modern fiction even in the
European tradition as we can see in the second part of Don Quixote. This
narrative prologue, thus, features a sophisticated fictional form which we can
call the Manifesto-Tale.
Anne
Heimo
Turku, Finland
The memories of
witnesses, survivors, or victims of war are commonly believed to be not only
more authentic than other forms of knowledge, but also more reliable. However,
memory is never only private and internal, but always draws on knowledge and
information from the surrounding culture and is inserted into larger cultural
narratives. If at times people lay claim to memories of what evidently never
happened or to a version different from reality, this does not mean that these
memories are to be rejected as false or invalid, but that different questions
need to be asked. Official history does not necessarily have to be in written
form; instead it is the version which has achieved the most established
position in society. Until the 1990s, when a local amateur historian published
the first-ever article on the subject, nearly all information concerning the
1918 Finnish Civil War in Sammatti - a small rural town of approx. 1000
inhabitants in Southern Finland - was passed on in oral form. For many locals
the Civil War and especially its severe aftermath are considered the most
significant historical event in the history of their home commune. Though their
history was mainly in oral form, in literate societies oral history is always
influenced by written forms of discourse and public representations of history.
In my paper I will examine how oral narratives are shaped into factual accounts
and used in the constructing of the official version of the 1918 Finnish Civil
War in Sammatti. I will show by means of rhetoric discourse analysis that this
has as much to do with who is speaking than with what is actually being said.
Blanka
Henriksson
In my paper I would
like to touch upon some of the difficulties with making and using databases of
folklore material. What are the problems you would come across, and how could
you solve these? My point of departure will be my own research, where to get a
better grasp of my material, I have created a database. This database is made
for my own research purposes, but could also be used by other scholars for
other aims. I want to discuss how the making of the database with creating data
entry forms will affect the material. The way I categorize my material will
always be fixed in this database. I also reflect upon the representation of the
material, always limited by the format of the records in the database. The
design of the records might not be the best or most informative, and contain
the most useful fields, for other researchers than the creator of the database.
What information do we want people to get access to in our folklore databases?
And when it comes to using the material of a folklore database there are also
all sorts of methodological questions. To what extent is it possible to use
only the material in the database - should I as a researcher always go to the
source material, in case this is accessible? The advantages with a database, of
course, are the possibilities of treating large volumes and quantities of
materials and, as in my case for example, to make combined searches and compare
large amounts of records with speed and efficiency.
Ágnes
Hesz
Nagykovácsi,
Hungary
Based on a seven-month
fieldwork conducted in a Hungarian village in Romania, the present paper aims to
analyse the formulation of the bewitchment narrative of one peasant family.
Certain types of bewitchment- narratives are primarily the construction of at
least two people, the unbewitcher and the bewitched. During the interactive
process of diagnosis and healing, the witch-doctor offers several possible
interpretations concerning the type of the bewitchment and its underlying
conflicts, from which the bewitched constructs his/her own version. This
process of interpretation - often also influenced by relatives and friends of
the bewitched - goes beyond the diagnostic and healing sessions of the
unbewitcher, and the resulting narrative, being subject to constant
reinterpretations, is highly unstable and open-ended. While closely following
the formulation of a particular narrative, the paper has two main focuses. In
the studied community, misfortune is seen as the result either of the
bewitching activity of a witch, or the curse of the orthodox priest or
laypeople. Since the different bewitchment types put the unfortunate into
different positions, being either a victim or a sinner, and because both types
of bewitchments are believed to be accidentally transferable from one person to
another, the number of interpretations is numerous. Taking this conceptual framework
and the social relation ships of the bewitched family as its background, the
paper focuses on the motives and interpretational strategies determining the
process of constructing the narrative. Doing so, it tries to reveal why certain
elements are accepted or not accepted by the bewitched, and how they relate
themselves to the (supposed) conflict leading to bewitchment. On the other
hand, it also tries to investigate the way people use the resulting narrative,
that is, how the distribution of the narrative is managed (to whom, how, and
why it is told), and what psychological and social effects it has.
Mihály
Hoppál
Budapest,
Hungary
Shamans have
different tasks in their communities. One of them is to preserve an oral
tradition. They are singers of traditional shamanic songs and they recite
shamanic myths, legends. The shaman(ness) is the person who performs the
sacrificial rituals for the benefit of the community. Having all these functions
they carry a quite complex role since they need to remember texts of mythic
narratives, prayers, invocations, hymns, etc. This means that they have a
special relationship to language since the shamanic use of language is a poetic
one with its own rules. Shamanic narratives of different kinds represent the
main body of their sacred knowledge.
The second
part of the paper quotes some personal narratives told by shamans that are
mainly family histories but contain also important information concerning
sacred rituals. Furthermore, shamanic songs and prayers can be labelled as
speech acts within the context of shamanic rituals that genuinely contribute to
the effectiveness of séances.
Taking into account
all the above features of shamanic narratives, it seems reasonable to declare
all of them to be important elements of the intangible cultural (and oral)
heritage of mankind.
Viktoriya
Hryaban Widholm
Vienna,
Austria
Numerous narratives
about fire are widely spread around the Carpathian mountain area of the
Bukowina region in Ukraine. In the worldview of the local inhabitants, this
element is regarded as a holy substance that constitutes soul and appears in
different shapes, as in celestial-, earthly- and subterranean (hell) form.
These meanings of the strength of fire and the relics of its implementation in
mediation, protection, and for purifying purposes can be traced throughout calendar,
family and everyday-life traditions, in household and medical magic. The
consolidation of objective reality with mythological metaphorisation of
perceptions created the phenomenon of religious syncretism that combines the
spiritual culture of the local people with Christian tradition. Based on such
an ethnological approach I would like to proceed to focus on the following
questions: Why are the relics of fire so prominent in the traditions of the
Ukrainians and a preferred subject of contemporary cultural sciences? What role
do they play in modern society? Do the "irrational and dysfunctional"
rituals and narratives have any function within a society that explains their
perseveration and popularity? Since the independence of Ukraine in 1991,
Ukrainian politicians and leaders continuously reinforce the use of traditional
cultural codes and stress the necessity of their application within the ongoing
construction of Ukrainian identity. The popularization of folk culture and its
narratives are used as an auxiliary instrument in the service of the inner and
outer legitimation of a new state. Narratives like the ones centred on fire and
its relics are preferred objects in this discourse and play an important role
in transferring their symbolic coherence onto the concepts of regional and
national identity.
Robert
Hughes
Newark,
Ohio, USA
One of the primary
formal distinctions made in literary studies is between prose and poetry. For
several hundred years, this distinction has been commonly figured in terms of
time: thus, prose extends through time to tell a story or to report happenings
in some kind of sequence, whereas poetry, archetypically lyric poetry, presents
but a crystallized moment, whose depth extends less temporally than
psychologically or emotionally. Certainly, there have been challenges to this
schematization, but among the more interesting is the theory of poetry
propounded by the nineteenth-century American romantic thinker, Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803-1882). In his essays and in his poetic practice, Emerson
describes a theory of poetry in which even the most temporally compact poem is,
at heart, the telling of an experience. Emerson imagines this all in ethical
terms. He holds that the fundamental obligation of every human being is first
to engage with his or her existence and then to articulate that experience in
language. Poetry, in the view of Emerson, is the privileged means of that
existential expression. The present paper will present Emerson's theory of
poetry as an existential ethics and will read several of Emerson's own poems to
show how these poems, despite their seeming temporal compactness, are
essentially a telling of the poet's experience in almost a narrative, except
with some distinctive features (which will be discussed). The poems chosen tell
Emerson's experience of mourning his young son's death.
Marjut
Huuskonen
The idea that narrators
and listeners can draw attention to the communal meanings of the narration by
using the local genre terms is the standpoint of the interpetation in the
examples of this paper: The fact that the way people classify oral tradition is
incoherent and sometimes even contradictory, indicates variation of meanings
and local classification principles. My examples are from the River Sámi
narrative tradition. Geographically the investigation area is situated along
the River Deatnu in the Finnish and Norwegian Lappland. People living in that
area call themselves by two names: cáhcegátti olbmot,
meaning people living on the borderline of the water and badjeolbmot,
meaning upland people. These local names highlight the environment that is the
most important to each group. The viewpoint here is that of the cáhcegátti
olbmot. I concentrate on the narratives concerning environment, especially
the great trees. The interview materials used were mainly collected in the
1960s and 1970s and represent a fraction of the Sámi Folklore Research
project of the University of Turku. Genre terms found in the interview material
are máinnas, muitalus, and cuvccas. The use of
these terms in the River Sami discussions have several local meanings. For
example the border between terms máinnas and muitalus is
traced by assessing the stylistic devices used in narration, whether the
narrative is based on personal experience, and the narrator's attitude to what
he or she is narrating. Some of the narrators stress the aesthetic objectives of
the mainnas narratives and the narrator's ability to use hyberbole,
metaphor and repetition as stylistic devices and to carry the narrative
forward. Sometimes the terms máinnas, muitalus and cuvccas
indicate the narrator's personal attitude to the events in the narrative and
their foundation in reality. The narrative genre system of the River
Sámi tradition provides a means for narrators to evaluate what has been
heard and said. The system is in practice flexible, and the narrators can
utilise it in many ways. The narrative context and the character of the
narrator determine the criteria by which a narrative is evaluated. Drawing the
line between the possible and the impossible and evaluation of the narrative
means are recurring topics in the used interview material. They create a
picture of the way the community negotiates what is true, false, erroneous and
imaginary.
Jouni
Hyvönen
The status of the Kalevala
in Finnish cultural history is usually formulated from a bird's-eye
perspective; the common view emphasizes how immediately from its publication
the work was defined as the canonized national epic. The rising of the Old
Kalevala to the status of a celebrated national epic was neither immediate
nor uncomplicated; from the point of view of the ordinary reading public, Kalevala
had to achieve its status in the field of other literary works and make its own
breakthrough. The print run of the first edition of Old Kalevala was
only 500, and this was sufficient for 12 years after its publication. How was
it possible that this quite small edition lasted for so long, and who were
those who decided to purchase this literary work for private use? Research material
and the perspectives chosen try to answer to following question: What new
perspective do the contemporary private discussions reveal about the reception
of Kalevala; how was the private interpretation formed and how wide did
the hegemonic national rhetoric guide private readings and individual
interpretations? The viewpoint of my research is to examine the Old Kalevala
(1835-1836) as textual artifact; its aim is to scrutinize, how the marketing
and distribution of the Old Kalevala contributed the process of
nationalizing Lönnrot's source material, Karelian oral poems. The micro-
historical perspective will provide new insights to the distribution of
national epic and the circulating of folklore materials. The formation of the
reading public also exemplifies an important perspective concerning the
textualization process of the Old Kalevala. Elias Lönnrot, the
compiler of the epic, was aware of the potential audience of his forthcoming
work; thus he was aware of what his readers expected.
Barbara
IvanFiF Kutin
Every folklore
storytelling event which occurs spontaneously in an authentic domestic
environment is unique and singular, because it develops in an unrepeatable context
of time, place, space, and participants. Storytelling requires, in addition to
the narrator, the presence of at least one participant at whom the story is
aimed - a recipient. How the story develops is influenced by motivation,
personal characteristics; the mood and behaviour of all the participants, and
the relations between them are also very important, because they determine how
relaxed and effective the event is. The effectiveness of folklore storytelling
largely depends on the storyteller: his narrative power with and without words
determines how he will succeed in catching the attention of his audience and
what responses he will draw from it. This aim requires the narrator's
psychological, mental and physical engagement, resulting in creativity and
authority. The role of storyteller may be limited to a single person,
especially when there are a few participants, and in particular if the only
recipient is a researcher. If there are more participants, that is at least
three, several participants can alternate in the role of storyteller. The
participants who act as recipients respond to the story by listening, watching,
commenting, asking questions, calling and emotional reactions. The material
documented in our field research shows that the role of recipient can be
divided more accurately based on the forms of active intervention in the course
of the narration: 1) motivator, 2) assistant 3) inquirer
4) yea-sayer or nay-sayer (censor), 5) complementor,
6) commentator. Individual recipients may engage in several of these roles
and they all influence how the storyteller tells his story. A higher diversity
of roles is obvious in groups with three or more participants. Such a group
acts in co-operation, especially if one of them is very apt at motivating. The
roles of motivator, assistant, yea-sayer/nay-sayer and complementor prove that
the narration is a re-enactment of a version of the story the recipients are
familiar with.
Risto
Järv
Today's extensive
databases provide improved possibilities to study several areas of folklore
that hitherto have been relatively neglected. For instance, proverbs included
in folktales have not been registered systematically nor presented in the
academic edition of Estonian proverbs (EV). My observations pertain to the text
corpus of Estonian fairy tales (ATU 300-749) that is nearing completion. Using
such a tool it becomes possible to pay attention to the occurrence of a minor
genre within another genre - to proverbs included in fairy tales, also to
observe the context of using proverbs in the text corpus - something often not
mentioned in the Estonian recordings of proverbs. Of course, it has to be taken
into account that the text creation strategies used in the majority of the
fairy tale manuscripts that were often recorded towards the end of the 19th
century greatly differ from oral presentation - it can be presumed that the use
of proverbs in archived manuscripts can be more conscious and purpose-oriented
than using proverbs in oral presentation of fairy tales. This paper also
considers the proverbs included in voice recordings of fairy tales, but the
focus will be on proverbs found in manuscripts. A part of the proverbs included
in the fairy tale corpus have been noted while digitising the manuscript texts;
others have been found as the result of a special search, proceeding from the
text types included in the typology of Estonian proverbs. The presentation
analyses the positions of the proverbs in the story structure, observes
possible similarities between proverb users, and checks the validity of
tendencies that different researchers have noticed, both in the case of other
kinds of tales (animal tales, religious tales, realistic tales etc.) and fairy
tales. The proverb use of some correspondents/story-tellers who have employed
particularly numerous or striking proverbs will be analysed in more detail. An
attempt will be made to answer the question whether some proverbs are likely to
be used in specific tale types, or whether their use is determined by
idiosyncratic individual modes of expression.
Irma-Riitta
Järvinen
My focus of interest
in this paper is "religion as it is lived", as Leonard Primiano put
it when defining the concept "vernacular religion" (1995). I have
been studying, on the one hand, women's religious conceptions and practices in
the Republic of Karelia in the 1990s; on the other, archived texts of sacred
legends with mainly female narrators from an earlier period of time, the 1930s
and 1940s, in the same culture and language area. My view is that the earlier
oral tradition of sacred legends and religious songs forms part of the ethical
basis of the religious conceptions and practices of the present, although the
narrative tradition as such has ceased to exist. Karelian sacred legends dealt
with relations between humans and the supreme power, the Christian God,
functioning through his holy agents, and with the relations of humans with
their fellow men. The legends also mediated cognitive aspects of religion,
telling their versions and interpretations of some biblical stories, and
raising serious ethical questions. Nowadays, instead of sacred legends, dream
narratives and their interpretations have become the locus of interest in
women's lives. The dream narratives also deal with religious and ethical
ponderings over questions such as is there life after death, and what is it
like? How should people live in order to reach the good place after death? How
should death rituals be carried out in order to maintain peaceful relations
with the deceased?
Alvard
Jivanyan
"The step-daughter
went into the forests. Crying bitterly she wandered and looked for the lost
bread. She cried, cried and her tears turned into a river and flowed. The
waters of that river reached a shepherd. The shepherd drank of the river and
felt it was salty" (An Armenian Folk Tale). Yuri Lotman once commented on
the propensity of the Romantics to get rid of tropes. It is possible that this
tendency could be accounted for by their deep love of the fairy tale, for an
important stylistic feature of the fairy tale is its tendency to neutralize
tropes by animating them. New fairy tale devices, transformations, for
instance, appear at the expense of the intentional enlivening of the worn
semantics of some hackneyed tropes. For example, the tears from her eyes fell
like beads of pearl is animated into the tears she had shed had turned into
beads of pearl which he gathered and put into a box. Neutralized tropes should
be interpreted literally. In case of alternative, i.e. metaphoric
interpretation, the succeeding narrative stretch will be under threat of
logical and semantic collapse. Sometimes whole narratives are shaped at the ex
pense of a neutralized trope. A very similar phenomenon was observed by Zvetan
Todorov in the fantastic fiction. As distinct from fiction, the oral fairy tale
does not show the rhetorical figure and its extension in the same textual cut.
The hackneyed trope is mostly absent. Granted, it can be easily restored owing
to the fact that it is a phrase of which the listeners/readers are well aware.
Doubtless, we are far from claiming that any transformation appears as a
consequence of a rhetorical operation. Swinging between improbability and
impossibility, many neutralized tropes, (animated hyperboles, for example)
often glide into Nonsense, the boundary between them being rather indistinct.
Kirsti
Jõesalu
The aim of my
paper is to discuss the various themes in post-socialist biographical
narratives which deal with the socialist past, particularly with socialist
working life in Estonia. The main question is the role of ideology and the
"privatization" of working life in these stories. Work and working
life had a very strong political connotation in the Soviet Union; every citizen
had the right to work as well as an obligation to work. In the ideology of the
Communist Party and in the official or formal public sphere,1
working life enjoyed great attention and importance. The changes which took
place in the former socialist societies from the beginning of the 1990s onwards
- privatization, the fall of the old institutions and the rise of new ones -
have had a direct influence on people's everyday lives and on the ways they are
narrate their "lived past" under socialism. Many strategies learned
and habitualized in those years are useless in today's society, and the
understanding of time and social stratum has also changed considerably. From
this post-socialist point of view I have analyzed various biographical
narratives i.e. biographical interviews, answers to a written questionnaire
and, to a lesser extent, life-stories. The question I am asking is which themes
are important to people, and why? Which themes are "silenced"? What
has been the role of ideology and the public sphere in these biographies, and
what are the private themes connected to narrating about working life? A
biographical story is recreated every single time when being narrated or
written, from the moment of narrating or writing it. Therefore, experiences of
socialist working life are strongly linked to people's experience with
post-socialist everyday life.
1 Garcelon 1997 "The Shadow of the Leiviathan: Public
and Private in Communist and Post-Communist Society." - J. Weintraub
and K. Kumar (eds.) Public and private in thought and practice:
perspectives on a grand dichotomy. Chicago: Chicago University Press,
303-332. Zdravomyslova & Voronkov 2002 "The Informal Public in Soviet
Society: Double Morality at Work." In: Social Research. Vol 69, No
1. Spring. Privacy in Post-Communist Europe.
Carina
Johansson
This paper focuses on
narratives and visual representations in Visby tourism mindscapes. A key word
is "agency of display" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1997), where the
"display" in question is directed towards a viewing and listening
general public. Together with narratives about Visby, images engender different
gazes, perspectives, and mindscapes, thus highlighting specific objects. In
travel information guides about Visby, narratives and visual images compete in
an ongoing struggle about which representations count and are allowed to
represent the city of Visby. Narratives and images create and maintain
hierarchies, include and exclude people and position them. In her book Destination
Culture, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett identifies museums, historical
re-creations and ancient monuments as important settings for the displaying of
places and the production of destinations through the agency of cultural
heritage. This unmistakably is what has taken place in Visby. Within the same
city, we find several historical landscapes defined by ethnic groups, building
styles, prosperity or decline. In Visby, the Middle Ages hava become "the
Age" that determines the tourist's gaze. A common description of Visby is
found in the introduction to Bengt G. Söderbergs' book: "There is a
lingering poetical or romantic idea of Visby - the town of roses and ruins. The
romantic atmosphere comes from past greatness, a scattered wealth. And the
exaggerated romance of Visby has its origin in the Middle Ages." Numerous
paintings, photos and other visual images back up narratives like this one to
make Visby visible and well known in a very specific way - as a medieval theme
city. This is the dominant mindscape, but there certainly are other ones
battling for people's attention. Visby speaks with many tongues and displays
many kinds of images besides ruins and roses.
Jeana
Jorgensen
Bloomington,
Indiana, USA
In this paper, I shall
explore the image of the fairy godmother in contemporary American media. The
two prime examples that shall inform my study are a novel, The Fairy
Godmother by fantasy author Mercedes Lackey, and a movie, Shrek 2.
Both of these works prominently feature fairy godmother characters that depart
from traditional fairy-tale depictions. In the novel, the main character
becomes apprenticed to a fairy godmother, and in learning how to practice that
magical trade, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery that ultimately aids
in the salvation of her world. In the film, the fairy godmother character is
responsible for numerous plot twists due to her meddling nature and self-interest.
Both of these depictions are a departure from the traditional role of fairy
godmothers in folk narratives, where they are usually portrayed as selfless
donor figures that test heroes and heroines before meting out reward and
punishment alike. I would argue that the increased personification of fairy
godmothers in contemporary American media corresponds to an aspect of American
worldview that emphasizes "magical" quick fixes and solutions.
Moreover, I see a parallel between the work of fairy godmothers and the work of
folklorists in directing the acceptable outcomes of traditional materials. Just
as fairy godmothers shape the outcome of a story by recognizing and rewarding
traditionally good behavior, so do folklorists shape the presentation of their
materials by selecting traditional or authentic material over that which is
suspect. In addition to textual readings, my paper will draw on structuralist
and worldview studies.
The subject of my
presentation is the stories told about the Danish king Valdemar II, who died in
the year 1241. I intend to speak about the relations between the stories and
realities by focusing on an innovation of the tradition. King Valdemar got the
name "victorious" because he conquered a part of Germany and of
Estonia. The tellers figured him as a ruler representing a period of greatness
in the history of the kingdom. They also represented him as a role model in
stories about troublesome situations similar to those of the ordinary people.
These narratives continued to have both political and moral connections to the
time in which they were told, but their content and form changed. The
traditional stories expressed musings about what the king won and lost. He was
narrated as a complex character who had to choose between alternative norms and
moral values. The medieval storytellers told about the king's choice between
power on earth and a place in heaven. In the Renaissance this tradition was
renewed. 300 years after his death, some ballads were written in which the king
had to choose between his first and second wives, who were figured as the good
mother and the evil stepmother. I suggest that the use of the king gave the
ballads an official authorisation. Today, the ballads are referred to as
"a part of the cultural heritage of Denmark", and they draw
increasing interest - but they are retold in new ways. The functional aims of
the tellers have an important effect on the development of the tradition, but a
new thesis about the means of tradition and its relations to realities is
necessary. It is possible that a combination of role theory and narratology can
be used for this purpose.
Annikki
Kaivola-Bregenh;j
Turku,
Finland
I interviewed several
Ingrian Finns living in the region southwest of St Petersburg in 1992-1993. The
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 made it possible for researchers to carry
out fieldwork in the regions of Russia once inhabited by Finns. When asked to
tell me about their lives, very many of them began by talking about the war. 'The
outbreak of war' meant 22 June 1941, when the Germans began advancing on
Leningrad and the subsequent evacuation of the local population began. People
found it natural to speak about their lives. I was astonished to find that a
simple request "Can you tell me about your life?" should immediately
produce a narrative containing some intimate and sometimes very terrible
details of the major turning point in their lives. Many began their tale not
with the childhood or memories of school, but with the moment the war began for
them. The two women I wish to talk about here lived in two villages close to
each other. I chose them from a possible thirty or more because they had been
through rather similar experience but tell about them in different ways. Anna
tells about evacuation stressing the experience of the whole group, while Lena
looks at the flight from the advancing frontline as if she is following a film.
I call the memoirs of these women 'key narratives', by which I mean a report of
an experience that was exceptionally meaningful to its narrator and in which
the narrator interprets events in the past for the listener. The dominant
elements of their narratives are movement, being forced repeatedly to leave
home and settle in a new environment that was not of their choice.
Mare
Kalda
Tartu,
Estonia
There are no natural
gold resources in Estonia, which explains the absence of local discourse about
the gold-rush in the Estonian tradition. Regardless of this fact, a
considerable number of recorded texts about legends and reports of treasures
have been accumulated in the Estonian Folklore Archives over the past two
centuries or so. The materials contain widely-known and narrated lore about
treasures hidden during wars and in other circumstances. This versatile
narrative tradition enables posing hypotheses and drawing conclusions:
(1) The
theme is expressed only in narrative form; narratives tell about fictitious
action;
(2) A
certain part of the theme is expressed as a type of narrative that must have
been based on imminent experience, i.e. the narration took place after an
individual action (either a futile attempt to find a treasure, or a
serendipitous discovery);
(3) Information
included in the tales is applied in practical treasure-hunts. For this purpose,
legends of fictitious actions and tales based on true experience are used.
The theme of
buried treasures entails more aspects of action and more practice than students
of legend have bothered to consider. In different periods the proportion of
"narration only" and "narrating and action" has varied. In
Estonia today the emphasis is on search, i.e. action. Such outbreaks of hunting
buried treasures usually entail the following:
(1) reactivation
of a part of traditional treasure lore; tales are searched in archives and
legend collection, made available on personal homepages, local people are
questioned, etc.;
(2) new
experiences are gained through practice, and new personal experience stories
are created, some of which will make their way to the media (Internet, TV,
written press);
(3) problems arise with national heritage protection and archaeological
studies; this is only a step away from semipolitical demands to ban the
activities of amateur detectors and restrict access to old narrative reports
about possible treasure sites;
(4) these
instances cause a scholar studying treasure legends to question where the line
is drawn between folklore (narratives about treasures) and real life (action on
geographical landscape)? Can a treasure hunt based on lore information be
considered a special instance of performance?
Maria
Kaliambou
Munich,
Germany
Oral literature and
popular written literature require integrated study. My ethnographic material is
based on archive collections of Greek popular booklets of tales since the
middle/end of the 19th century. In Greece, these booklets of tales
followed parallel paths with popular novels. Several oral and written genres
(such as folktales, legends, narratives) are published in the booklets,
evidence which creates an unclear and diffused perception of the genre
"folktale". All the academic definitions of folktales do not fit in
this material, because they ignore the emic perspective of the collectors. For
this purpose, the concept Popularmärchen is coined to describe this
kind of material accurately. The "dialogue" (in the sense of Mikhail
Bakhtin) between Popularmärchen (folktales in popular booklets) and
popular novel will be examined. Through an interdisciplinary methodology based
on content analysis, significant similarities emerge between them. The
intergeneric dialogue can be demonstrated in two areas. First, on the language
level: the vernacular vocabulary, the use of adjectives, diminutives, metaphors,
etc. Secondly, on aesthetic stylistic features, such as specific sentimental or
moral utterances, dichotomies between good and bad, and the lengthening of the
stories with maxims and repetitions.
Andreas
Kalkun
There is no doubt that
the methodological term 'type' has had major influence on the collecting and
research of the Estonian songs in the Kalevalaic metre, the regilaul.
Due to the great number of regilaul preserved in the Estonian Folklore
Archives and the scarce contextual information, the categorisation applied to
these texts seemed useful and necessary at the time. The Vana Kannel
series started by Jakob Hurt (arranging texts collected by region) has been a continuing
research and publication project for over a century and it has strongly
influenced Estonian folkloristics. However, both this seemingly neutral
principle of organising texts and the term 'type' originate in the 19th
century comparative-historical ideology, according to which every folk song
text collected and preserved had a single original form. The primary aim of
comparing and juxtaposing different types has been to find the most perfect
text corresponding to that. In the context where the text has been more
important than its author, one can understand why Estonian folkloristics has
paid much less attention to those texts that are insistently contemporary,
connected to their author and a certain time period. One group of texts that do
not fit into the system and cannot be easily typologised are Seto women's
autobiographical songs. According to the type-ideology these texts are
improvisations that use different typical motives. Autobiographical songs are
texts where the author sings about her life and usually informs us in the
beginning or the end of the song that the text should be received as an
autobiographical one. Discarding the practice that observes folklore texts as
independent entities with weak connection to their authors, their gender or
environment, and applying a different approach to these songs should give us
important information about the people who performed them. Close reading of
Seto women's autobiographical songs gives us excellent insight into topics such
as mentality, religion, and family life of rural Orthodox Seto women at the
beginning of the 20th century. This microhistorical observation
foregrounds particularly how the women represent their life or how they use
traditional means for self-expression. At the beginning of the 20th
century, singing one's life story was not uncommon in Setomaa, but it remained
largely in the private sphere. These texts appear symptomatically in the
material collected by the local documenters of folklore while they are not
represented in the work of professional folklorists. These texts of oral
history existed for local collectors but remained invisible to strangers.
Oleg
Kavykin
Moscow,
Russia
The
development of contemporary "Slavic" mythologies is undergoing growth
in the conditions of Internet and telecommunications. The Neo-pagan movement
began in the late 1970s, but now the Internet is a very important aspect of
support for the Russian Neo-pagans' spiritual and intellectual trend. A great
number of pagans' sites can be found, with stocks of scientific, political,
philosophical and mythological literature and thematic forums for discussions.
Russian Neo-pagans use the Internet in three main directions: dissemination of
texts and propaganda, "theological" and philosophical polemic (which
means imagining of the united pagan community as opposed to other religious and
cultural groups), coordination of activities (organization of celebrations,
lectures, concerts and demonstrations against the violent actions of some
members of the Orthodox Church). The author asserts that electronic
infrastructure influences Neo-pagans' world-outlook the following ways:
1) the
model of imagining opposition between communities of "Us"
("pagans") and "Them" ("monotheists" and
"provocateurs") is similar to the mythological one;
2) Russian
neo-paganism is regarded a united cultural movement. However, it seems instead
to be a conglomeration of various non-state social networks. There is neither a
common center nor a unified hierarchy of priesthood. Ideological pluralism is
possible even at the level of a single community. Because of communities'
autonomy and anonymity, the exact number of Russian neo-pagans cannot be
determined. There is neither single ceremonial system nor a stable pantheon.
Wide spread of syncretism of different traditions (Russian, Indo-European,
Scandinavian and Finno-Ugric, Western or Oriental occultism, and fiction
literature) also takes place;
3) the relative
influence of some Neo-pagans is based on their fame. Proprietors and editors of
Neo-pagan sites are among them.
Marja-Liisa
Keinänen
The notion of
folk religion, popular religion and the religious constellations that scholars
have classified as such have been discussed from a wide range of perspectives
throughout the past decades. When one considers that in various geographical
regions popular religion has been, and still is, a predominately female realm,
it is somewhat surprising to find how little attention has been paid to the
issue of gender in folk religion outside specifically feminist research. I
intend to discuss some theoretical and methodological issues that have been
central to feminist scholars in their study of folk religion.
Some feminist
scholars have criticised the very notion of 'folk religion' at the outset
because of its implicit androcentric bias. The term creates the false
impression that women are not part of the "folk", "ordinary
people" or, "peasants" (e.g. King 1995). Feminist
anthropologists have pointed out that women's empirical invisibility has not
been a problem in anthropological studies of religion; anthropologists have
been quite meticulous in their documentation of women's practices within the
sphere of folk religion. Thus, the problem has not been a lack of recognition
of women's active role in folk religion, but rather that women's practices have
been ignored on an analytical plane. This analytical invisibility has made folk
religion to appear to be a totally male created system despite women's great
involvement. There has been a tendency to view women's religious ideas and
practices as personal and idiosyncratic, not as constitutive of general
religious patterns. One of the main tasks that the feminist scholars have set
themselves has been to establish women as producers of culture and to identify
and study the gender-specific traits in women's experiences and practices
within the sphere of folk religion.
The anthropologist
Susan S. Sered can be seen as one of the leading scholars in what we may
term the feminist phenomenology of religion. She has sought to identify typical
feminine patterns in what she calls "religions dominated by women."
Her pioneering study (1994), however, raises three major questions that I wish
to address in my paper:
1) Do
women's religious practices profoundly differ from the general pattern of folk
religion and if so, how?
2) Do women's
religious practices radically differ from those of men and if so, in what
sense?
3) Finally,
do women's religious practices in female-dominated religions differ markedly
from those in male-dominated religions and if so how?
I will present my arguments
mainly from within the context of my own area of research, the folk religion of
pre-modern Russian Karelia.
Bronislava
KerbelytP
More precise
comparison of analogous folk narratives and their elements is one of the
important tasks of folkloristics. Researchers realized this task approximately
a hundred years ago. Antti Aarne's classification system of folktales and his
efforts to distinguish the stable types of folktales have influenced a host of
comparative studies. A. Aarne and later Stith Thompson defined neither the
categories of types nor principles of selection. Hans-Jörg Uther, the
author of a huge recently published huge work "The Types of International
Folktales" outlines that the type is "understood to be flexible"
(ATU 1 p. 8). However, he does not explain how the new types are
selected or why some of AaTh types are joined. Our experience in systematizing
Lithuanian folktales according to the AaTh catalogue induced us to look for
more precise principles for distinguishing changing types of folk narratives
and for ways of describing their versions. We created the structural-semantic
method. It allows one to distinguish the structural-semantic types on the
abstract level. Concrete types of folktales or legends are selected and located
within abstract types. We have found universal rules for organizing the texts
of folk narratives on several levels. This is also why multilevel descriptions
of types are used. For attributing the text to certain structural-semantic type
and concrete type we use from 4 to 13 or 14 procedures of analysis and
description (The number of procedures depends on complicity of the text
structure; we intend to show them in our paper). This complicated method was
evoked by a complicity of phenomena. According to this method we have analysed
and grouped into types and versions more than 85,000 variants of Lithuanian
narratives. The elementary plots (EP) of Lithuanian narratives were ascribed to
152 types. The EPs of the same types form the folk narratives of several or
even all genres. The examples of descriptions of elementary plots and their
semantic interpretations as well as the example of type description will be
added, too. Only one or some procedures of our method may be used for research
of various problems. For example, in comparison of folk legends and folk
customs or beliefs, the descriptions of text structures sometimes are
sufficient. Mainly, attention is focused on descriptions of macrostructures in
efforts to reconstruct the theoretically possible means of development of
folktales. Research on peculiarities of certain genres and of interrelations of
several genres is more effective when elementary plots are analysed and
compared.
Katre
Kikas
Collected
folklore is indexical in nature - it is considered 'authentic' only when it is
able to indicate something real behind it (the narrator, narrating or
collecting situation etc). When collected folklore turns up not to have the
ability of indexicality, it is termed 'fake'. K. K. Ruthven has
written in the book Faking Literature that every kind of forgeries live
"two lives: first as a cultural intervention, and second as a symptom of
the culture into which it intervenes" (2001: 193). In this presentation I
analyze the works of Hans Anton Schults (1866-1905). He was a co-worker of
Jakob Hurt, and sent to Hurt over 2000 pages of writings. Most of these
writings are likely to be labeled 'fake'. Specifically I am focusing on two
themes:
1) the
framing mechanisms he is using to create the indexicality illusion, the most
important of which is his faith in the 'truth of the folk';
2) his
relationship to the broader framework of the Herderian Romantics which is
mainly characterized by synecdochal interpretation frames. Both of these themes
help to see H. A. Schults as a symptomatic representative of his era,
which was characterized by nation building and massive interest in folklore
collecting.
Gabriela
Kiliánová
Bratislava,
Slovakia
The paper will discuss
the structure and functions of storytelling communities in the conditions of
contemporary (post) modern society in Slovakia. The author will use the
empirical data from her fieldwork in a district town of northern Slovakia. It
is a region where the author conducted fieldwork for more than two decades.
Using a case study, the following research questions will be addressed in the
paper: what types of storytelling communities can be found in the contemporary
urban society? How do contemporary social networks in the town support the
existence and functioning of storytelling communities? What changes
(similarities and differences) can be noted if we compare the structure and
functions of storytelling communities in time? Thanks to published data and the
author's fieldwork, the period of comparison will include approximately the
last forty years. Further, the author will analyze the repertoire of
contemporary storytelling communities in the town. Special attention will be
paid to legends in current storytelling.
Kitula
King'ei
Proceeding from an
intertextual and historical perspective, the paper will discuss the
multi-textual and multi-meaning aspects in the recently published Kiswahili
play Kifo Kisimani by Kithaka wa Mberia. An attempt will be made to
portray the extent of intertextual relationship between this play and the
classical Swahili epic narrative: Utenzi wa Fumo Liyongo of the 14th
century. The historical and factual nature of the epic as recorded by such
linguists and Swahili scholars as Harries (1962), Allen (1971), Knappert (1979)
and Abdulaziz (1979), among others, will invoked in an effort to link up the
two texts in terms of the theme, language use, and characterization. In
conclusion, the importance of literary deconstruction and re-invention of
historical narrative as a method of re-interpreting and re-living social
realities in different historical era will be explored.
Pille
Kippar
Tallinn,
Estonia
1. Die
Bevölkerung Estlands hat vom Jahr 1939 an sehr grosse mechanische
Veränderungen überlebt: die baltischen Deutschen und estnischen
Schweden haben Estland verlassen und in ihr historisches Vaterland umgezohen.
Über 10 000 Esten - die führenden Personen der Estnischer Respublik
(1918-1940) - wurden von den Russen vernichtet (erschossen) oder samt ihren
Familien nach Sibirien versandt. Viele haben im II Weltkrieg ihr Leben verloren
- im Kampf an einer oder anderer Seite; sowie sind im Kriegswirbel und vom
Schreck vor dem Kommunismus nach Westen entflohen. Von dem 1940 an wurden aus
Russland neue Einsiedler eingeführt. Der Anteil der Russisch-sprechenden
Einwohner in Estland ist zum 1960. Jahr fast bis zur Hälfte gestiegen, in
vielen Städten (Paldiski, Narva, Sillamäe) haben die Esten
überhaupt kein Recht zu wohnen gehabt. Jetzt wohnt und studiert in Estland
die zweite oder dritte Generation der damaligen Einsiedler.
2. Die
Familienerinnerung als Seele, Illustration und Erklärung der Geschichte,
als Möglichkeit und Verpflichtung im Wenden an die Voreltern. Achtung auf
die Familienerinnerungen nach der Wiederherstellung der Estnischer Respublik
(1990-nden Jahre).
3. Die
Familienerinnerungen der gemischten Familien und nichtestnischen Studenten der
Tallinner Universität vermitteln die Beurteilungen auf der Ebene der
Familien und einzelnen Personen a) über die Gestaltung der
Gemischtfamilien b) über das Ankommen oder der Geraten der nichtestnischen
Familien und Geschlechter im Estland - die Zeit und die Motivierung (Ursachen).
c) Die Adaptationsfähigkeit oder Anpassungsunfähigkeit an Estland und
die Esten.
4. Das Leben der
dritten Generation in Estland anhand ihrer Familienerinnerungen.
Tiina
Kirss
Since 2000,
facilitating a weekly life-writing group of elderly Estonians in Toronto has
raised a range of questions about the place of stories of war and emigration as
foundational narratives for individual and diasporic group identity. Since the
25 member group includes Estonians who came to Toronto from the homeland during
the Soviet period, the memory of World War II evoked and retold both orally and
in the written texts can be said to be not only plurivocal but contestatory. In
my paper I will examine the structure, variability, and rhythm of elicitation
of narratives of World War II in the group's five year history to date,
focusing on ways the sacralized core story of fear, resistance and flight has
been commemorated, recycled, and challenged. Based on the metanarratives of
survivorship in the group's desktop-published collections, I will suggest that
the degree of drama and trauma in individual stories regulates their perceived
value or "weight," and comment on contrasting gender aspects of the
stories of civilians and combatants. Finally, I will set the war and emigration
narratives elicited in the Toronto group in two comparative contexts: my brief
experiment at leading a life writing group in Tartu in 2004/05, and texts
elicited two life histories competitions (on the German occupation 1941-1944,
and World War II in general) sponsored in 2004 and 2005 respectively by the
Estonian Life Histories Association and the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu.
Seppo
Knuuttila
The human experience
of the relationship with other nature is, for many reasons and influences and
aspirations, always ambivalent. The individual experiences change according to
age; women's and men's experiences also differ. The dwelling place affects what
nature signifies, as do profession, interests, even political affiliation.
Finns believe themselves to be a forest people more than most other forest
peoples of the world. In the rhetoric of constructing Finnishness, the forest
has been and still is the most important element of nature, the origin of whose
meaning cannot truly be attained nor wiped away. In this presentation I will
examine one phenomenon connected with the forest: the experiences and
interpretations of getting lost. A great number of writings from oral tradition
have been recorded about getting lost over a period of several generations, in
which the ambivalent relationship between culture and nature appears as a
generalization from the experiences of individuals. Over the last century,
direct beliefs connected with the forest, as with other elements of nature, as
explanations of experiences of the environment have dwindled, but they still
have a strong foothold in works of popular culture, especially in action and
horror films which personify nature and make the supernatural visible. Asking
students over several years for their experiences of getting lost, I heard,
apart from memories of the forest, stories of what it felt like to get lost as
a child in a library, a department store and other modern environments. Despite
the changes in setting, the feelings of getting lost and the reactions are of
the same sort as are found in the accounts of previous generations. The break
in communication with mother, father, friends, and the whole known human world
causes distress and a feeling of rejection. The internal messages and the
external codes are in conflict, knowledge and instinct fight against each
other. Fear of "disappearing for good" runs through the mind and ends
up taking over the whole person. Ultimately it is the type of disturbance in
communication that determines how the inexplicable or supernatural experiences
related to being lost are interpreted.
Fumihiko
Kobayashi
Studying the Animal
Wife tales in various cultures shows many interesting differences among them.
One very obvious example is found in the narrative structure: the revelation of
the wife's animal nature results in the termination of connubiality in Japanese
"Animal Wife" tales, whereas this revelation seldom leads to this
sort of termination in the tales of other cultures. Many factors explain this
structural difference. The most important one is theme, the focus of this
paper, as a basic conception of creating folktales. What kind of theme shapes
such a difference in the narrative structure of Japanese "Animal
Wife" tales? Addressing questions about the theme of the Japanese
"Animal Wife" tales often evokes important but endless discussions
from a wide range of scholarship. Scholars working on anthropology, folk
religions, and psychology have made many useful observations on this theme.
However, these observations mainly highlight the socio-cultural context and the
psychological behaviours peculiar to the Japanese, and therefore fail to
consider the narrative structure as a tool to understand the theme. In short,
the interrelation between the theme and the structure has not yet been
expounded. This paper attempts a new approach to exploring the theme by
analyzing the narrative structure of the Japanese "Animal Wife" tale.
This exploration demonstrates that the specific narrative structure is defined
by the theme, which ultimately reflects the Japanese perception of nature. From
this analysis, the theme of Japanese "Animal Wife" tales can be
understood as the forbidden assimilation between humans and nonhumans, whereas
the theme in the tales of other cultures can be as the acceptable assimilation
between the two. This contrast can ultimately lead us to a deeper understanding
of Japanese culture, one constituent element of which is an animistic view of
nature.
Mare
Kõiva
According to the
theory developed by Robert J. Sternberg, love represents a narrative that is
created on the basis of personal characteristics and the surrounding
environment (that we ourselves have part in creating, by the way). These
stories are attempted to be followed in real life as much as possible. Although
one creates his/her stories by himself, they are still based on life experience
- on stories heard in childhood, relations between parents and relatives,
media, the experiences and tales of other people, etc. Admittedly, some types
of narrative are culture specific, found more in one culture and less in
another. A love story expresses a certain characteristic way of thinking and
behaving. Having a narrative concept leads to specific expectations towards
what a love relationship is, in a way similar to the concept of automatic
thoughts. Can a person choose a love narrative he or she is not prepared for?
Researchers generally claim that one cannot. If people do, it is unsuccessful
in life and a fictive narrative. I will analyse in my presentation stories of X
(a literarily talented but poorly educated woman with a complicated fate and
background) using David K. Lewis, Mary-Lauren Ryan and
R. J. Sternberg's theories. In Soviet times, various strategies for
surviving and self-realisation were used. What kind of pragmatics of personal
fiction does X use? What kind of tactics does X use when she speaks about
reality; how and what is reflected in a specific story about the mechanisms of
the totalitarian regime? Why did X use the form of a love story to narrate her
life? What kinds of sub-narratives are used and what is the reason for using
such a complicated genre? This paper is an outcome of the ESF grant No. 5117.
Kristhne Konr@de
In a 1989
article Valdis Zeps claims, "The discussion of Latvian folk metre has long
been plagued by an initial false turn taken in the nineteenth century, namely
the attempt to explain Latvian folk metre in terms of classical (notably Greek)
metric theory (as understood by German scholars)." Indeed the Latvian folk
meters (trochee and dactyl) very often have been understood as regulating
stress and length. Valdis Zeps and Morris Halle suggest instead that the
features of the language that control the dainas meters are counting of
syllables and word-boundaries. In addition, a new account of metrical verse
developed by Morris Halle and Nigel Fabb offers a more precise formulation of
metrical structure. Within the new framework, I will analyze in this paper some
aspects that may be relevant to the discovery of the operating constraints:
a) the
role of some rules involving syllable length, for example, the so called rule
of the third and fourth syllable. I will argue that in fact it has little to do
with real length of syllables, but rather with line length;
b) the
"padding vowel". Following Zeps argument, I will show its central
role in relation to the above and to line length;
c) some
statistics will be given regarding the number of syllables in the dactyl lines
- some statistics.
Anu
Korb
The paper
analyzes biographical stories of Estonians repatriated from Russia, describing
their return to Estonia and adaptation to local life. The presentation is based
on interviews conducted during 2003-2004 with Estonians born in Russia, and on
written materials sent to a biographical stories collection competition
entitled "Emigration and Life in the New Homeland". Mass emigration
of the Estonians into sparsely settled parts of Russia began in the second half
of the 19th century and lasted until the first decades of the 20th
century. This was predominantly an economic emigration, which also served
agrarian purposes - the main incentive was greater freedom and the wish to
become a landowner. The first emigrants settled in Samara and the Crimea; later
migration led to central Russia; during the last decade of the century, it
already extended to Siberia. The majority of settlements were formed on the
basis of ethnic groups so that the core of inhabitants came from the same
region. The first shock to these rather well structured settlements was World
War I and Civil War in Russia, the aftermath of which was the interdiction of
any kind of religiosity, coerced collectivization, major repressions, and,
eventually, World War II. The interviewed informants had returned from the
Russian villages to the mother country after the annexation of the Republic of
Estonia; most of them during 1941-1986. The majority of the interviewed
repatriates were born before 1930, but the number of people born after 1950 was
relatively small. Therefore, we may look at repatriation as a venture of one
generation. The migration narratives of the Estonians in Russia follow certain
typical storylines:
1) stories
about the reasons for repatriation and about travelling back to Estonia, which
could be divided into forced repatriation and stories of those who came on
their own initiative;
2) stories
of adaptation, telling about cultural and linguistic misunderstandings;
3) stories
of successful adaptation, comparing life in Estonia with life in their village
in Russia.
While the stories of
successful adaptation are more or less similar - in the end the decision to
return to Estonia was perceived as the right one -, other stories about
returning to one's roots and attempts to adapt point to clear differences
between generations. The stories of repatriating teenagers or young men/women
depict the travels as a cheerful adventure, and the problems and failure in
adapting are regarded through the lens of humor. The stories of informants who
returned in middle or older age focus on life in their home villages in Russia,
on the difficulties in adapting in a new environment and problems in coping
with a new life.
Ene
Kõresaar
The end of the 1980s
and the first half of the 90s could be regarded as a time when 'everything was
politics', especially remembrance. In this particular context, 'the politics of
experience' (H. Arendt) on the individual level was simultaneously a 'big
politics' that, in its own turn, resulted in certain political scripts employed
both by 'public historians' and individuals to give meaning to 20th
century Estonian history. In this paper two conflicting post- Soviet life stories
of elderly Estonians will be discussed as classifiable with 'national' and 'soviet'
historical narrative templates, in order to demonstrate the politics of memory
in post-Soviet Estonia. Both life stories represent conflicting normative
experiences and narrative templates in post-Soviet Estonia. The focal point of
the 'national biography' is the discontinuance and decline of harmonious
national development, brought about by the occupation of Estonia by the USSR.
Through the prism of 'rupture', the pre-occupation period of independent
statehood was constructed as an ideal national society; fellow nationals are
described across different phases of history with reference to the stereotype
of "the ideal Estonian". National biography became the dominant 'type'
of life story during political developments in Estonia at the end of the 1980s
and beginning of the 1990s. Such an emergence was connected with the renovation
and rewriting of history and processes of nation-building that meant (public)
acknowledgement of 'national biography'. The so-called 'Soviet biography' has
an opposite valence, and follows the basic myths of Soviet ideology, among
them, the myths of the Great Patriotic War, the communist future, work and
constant enhancement of the Soviet economy, and the working class as the
leading power. This biography-'type' was dominant during the Soviet period, but
during the so-called second national awakening, its authors lost his/her 'right
to a biography' (Yuri Lotman). Another aim of this paper is to discuss the
common post-Soviet notion of collective memory. The research on the collective
memory of post- socialist space mostly takes into account those resources of
memory that fed the national version of memory; collective memory has been
treated as a counter-memory to the official Soviet interpretation of the past.
It is, however, necessary to consider the 'Soviet-type'-biography as a part of
the collective memory of Estonians. Furthermore, the influence of Soviet texts
as cultural resources for collective memory might be even more intensive than
is revealed on the basis of the life stories sent to public institutions in the
1990s. This paper is an outcome of the international project 'Memories and
Visions in the Baltic Sea Area' (University College of Visby) and the Estonian
Science Foundation Grant No. 5322.
Kaisu
Kortelainen
The concept of place
has been discussed widely during the last decades, especially in the field of
human geography, but in ethnology, anthropology and folklore studies as well.
As a result the sense of the concept has broadened out from geographic location
to experiential place, which is based for instance on dwellers' experiences and
memories. Because reminiscences of everyday life and special events are often
located in particular places, researchers of oral history (for example Portelli
and Skultans) have also discussed and developed viewpoints about the meanings
of places. In my paper I shall explore the process of defining places and
creating boundaries of places in reminiscences narrated by people who worked
and lived in the Penttilä sawmill factory district. The sawmill factory
was situated in town of Joensuu, in eastern Finland, and was in operation from
1871 to 1988. I shall discuss how the Penttilä district is defined, what
are the most meaningful places there, what are the meanings of places outside
it, and what kind of hierarchic structures and boundaries can be found inside
the community according to sawmill workers' reminiscences. I shall also address
some genre and age differences that have come up in my analysis. Furthermore,
as the time in memories is layered, I shall discuss how two levels of time,
past and present, are connected to the meanings of places. The factory
community and the district changed many times while the sawmill factory was
working, and especially after it was closed down. These changes and their
connection to experiential places are an important theme in the interviews and
other sources binding up the stories of past with the present. I will also
demonstrate some examples how the past effects narrators' conceptions of the
place today.
Kaarina
Koski
The focus of
my research is Finnish belief tradition concerning the power of death, archived
during years 1890-1960. In my paper, I will analyse the considerably wide
variation of this tradition in three aspects.
1) Conceptual:
What is the power of death? To what kinds of different features and motives is
the concept connected?
2) Normative:
How is this supernormal agent's relationship to man interpreted? How does its
assumed existence affect human activities?
3) Cognitive:
How is the concept constructed? Has there, practically, been any general
concept at all?
The power of death has
been understood either as an impersonal force or a crowd of beings. These
beings can be divided into black and white (good/bad), considered all bad or
all neutral. The image of this supernormal agent called churchyard-väki
is incoherent and continuum-like. The traditional strategy towards it can be
roughly divided into two major attitudes: to strictly avoid this dangerous
agent, or to actively manage with its both useful and harmful potential. The
latter attitude is found both in legends and ritual practices. Even though the
variation is partly geographical, considerable contradictions are present in
all core areas of the tradition. My point is that instead of a coherent view
and firm belief, folk belief is about different images and insights, which are
found useful in different contexts. Laymen who placed supernormal tradition in
the margins of their worldview, could occasionally find certain concepts or motives
useful in their life, but had no reason to try to fit them into a coherent
picture.
Violetta
Krawczyk-Wasilewska
{ód¸,
Poland
The paper deals with
the problem of globalization from the aspects of mass/popular culture and
oral/written/visual folklore. The author presents her approach to the problem
in the context of psycho-social awareness of global fears of 21st
century: terrorism, ecological disasters, and people's loneliness. She deals
with examples of social reactions post-September 11 as well as tsunami stories
and issues in dating-on line folklore. The paper is accompanied by
illustrations.
Arvo
Krikmann
The paper aims
to introduce and critically analyze some attempts of explaining conceptual
construal of (and liquidating the alleged paradoxes in) the figurative
expression "digging one's own grave" in cognitive linguistics - more
specifically, the blending-centred approach by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark
Turner, and application of George Lakoff's Metaphor of Divided Person suggested
by Ruiz de Mendoza. The main starting points of my criticism are:
(1) If
conceptual representation of any situation where somebody cannot predict the
consequences of his actions would require the building of the so-called blended
mental spaces and the projecting of the intentional structure of the target
space into the resulting blend, the most part of actualizations of proverbial
expressions - not only those including "broken" (i.e. nominal or
predicative), but also sentential metaphors - would turn out to be blends,
because such situations are the main stimuli for using proverbs in general.
(2) Co-participation
of metonymic operations in processing the expression in question makes its
allegedly inverted causal and event structure insignificant, i.e. whether the
dangerous action (e.g. the beating of the notorious coffin nail into the
coffin) is timed to the moment before or after the death of the eventual
victim.
(3) The source
domain can be enlarged from the scenarios of natural deaths and "civilized
funerals" to scenarios of violent deaths, e.g. various kinds of executions
or scenarios of hunting and trapping where 'grave' becomes the synonym of 'pit'
(e.g. in the famous biblical "He who digs a grave ~ pit for another falls
into it himself").
Arvo Krikmann
The paper will discuss the following subtopics:
1. Arthur Koestler’s bisociation theory of humour and its reception.
2. Victor Raskin’s script-based theory of jokes (SSTH) in his "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor".
3. The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) by Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo. The attempt of testing GTVH by Willibald Ruch.
4. Salvatore Attardo’s Linear Theory of Humor (IDM).
5. The analysis of puns by Attardo.
6. Humour and pragmatic maxims (Raskin, Attardo, etc.).
7. Attardo’s Setup-Incongruity-Resolution -model (SIR).
8. The further taxonomy of "logical mechanisms" (LM) of jokes by Attardo, Hempelmann, and Di Maio.
9. The "Anti-Festschrift" for Victor Raskin.
Monika
Kropej
Rapid
industrial development and the tendency to hinder private initiative in the
period after the Second World War greatly obstructed traditional culture in
socialistic countries. It has survived, however, since spiritual traditions are
not static and unchanging, but rather constantly adapt to current lifestyles.
In the early 1990s it became clear that folk tradition is indispensable for the
nation. Folk narrative in Slovenia today can be observed within five conceptual
frameworks:
1. Original
contexts and functions
2. Folklore
groups
3. Folk
narrative performers
4.
Application of folk narrative in art, theater, and literature
5.
Contemporary legends and narrative genres appearing also in electronic media.
Folk narratives in
original contexts and functions can hardly be recognised today, surviving
mostly in parts of Slovenia that are on the border and in remote areas. In 2001
the Štrekelj Award for outstanding achievement in the field of collecting
and preserving Slovene folk traditions was established. After the Second World
War the number of folklore groups rose steeply all the way to 336 registered
folklore groups in 1987. Contemporary folklore events are often linked with
tourist promotion and the entertainment industry. As a result, visitors are
sometimes exposed to rather trivial presentations of customs, songs, dances and
story-telling that often neglect temporal, social or local characteristics.
Folk story-telling and performing is today mostly part of the events organized
by individuals, communities or cultural associations. Most of these events take
place on specific occasions or celebrations, for instance on Assumption Day
(August 15) in Resia in Italy, or as part of a local event in town, such as
events at a village or local fairs. Story-telling performances are organised
each year in Ljubljana and Maribor by the central cultural organisation of the
city. There are also individuals or artistic groups, who narrate or enact folk
tales by telling local fairy tales and staging performances. Such organized
groups or single actors include Marica Globoènik from Kranjska Gora,
representing Pehtra, or the group from Radio Student that combines narration
with application of folk music and puppet theatre. Today's folk narrative lives
mostly in the form of contemporary legends, jokes, memorates, and gossip. Other
genres of narration are presented on the internet, in newspapers, radio,
television, tabloids, film, as well as elsewhere problems specific to
collecting and researching these hard-to-distinguish narrative genres will also
be discussed.
Hans
Kuhn
While in the Middle Ages,
saga-telling was the dominant and productive form of popular entertainment in
Iceland, it was gradually replaced by chanted epics in Early Modern Times.
These rímur incorporated some of the other literary traditions of
medieval Iceland, the skaldic poetry with its elaborate metric schemes and
alliteration, some of the didactic/reflective poetry found in the Elder Edda,
and the end rhyme that came to Iceland with the Latin Church hymn. On the whole
the subject matter was not original, but rather based on existing prose
narratives. It was not "folk literature" in the sense of anonymous,
orally translated literature, but the work of individuals, who usually also
were the performers. Each successive ríma, which would be of the
length of an evening's entertainment, was required to be in a different metre,
of which there were more than 2000. Until the end of the 19th
century, when the home textile industry was gradually replaced by industrially
produced goods, the wandering rímur singer was a familiar figure
on the farms, where he would entertain the locals at evening gatherings and
stay until at least one cycle of rímur (one "story")
was finished. The melodies were not attached to particular poems but to
particular metres, and sometimes the performer would change melodies within the
same ríma, probably to give listeners a jolt or make some
dramatic point. Unfortunately, no melodies were noted down until the end of the
19th century, and even then not many were collected, as the genre
was frowned upon by the literary establishment that demanded more
"contemporary" forms of poetic expression. The traditional convention
or pretence of the rímur poet was that rímur were
composed for a girl or woman, usually one in the audience; this gave the
opportunity to open each ríma with some stanzas of personal
reflection on himself or the state of the world before resuming his narrative.
The rímur as a living, productive genre did not survive the
urbanising process in Iceland; occasional attempts have been made to revive
them, but they have remained marginal in the context of modern entertainment.
Tarja
Kupiainen
My paper focuses on an
old folk poem called "Vellamon neidon onginta" (The Angling of the
Maid of Vellamo). The texts of the poem were originally collected in the 19th
century in Archangel Karelia, and belong to the corpus of poems that can be
found behind the Finnish national epic, Kalevala. I am particularly interested
in mythic models of thought, and my intention is to deconstruct representations
of hero/ine in the Kalevala-metre epic tradition. My methodological framework
will be feminist folklore studies. In addition, Luce Irigaray's so-called
mimetic strategy and her notions of jouissance provide useful conceptual
tools for the analysis of epic representations of female desire. In my paper I
will focus on the confrontation between a woman and the male hero: is it
possible for the male hero to recognize a woman in the sense Irigaray has suggested?
Helen
Kurss
Mouvance, the varying text
form, has been recognized as a general feature of medieval vernacular
textuality. As the forms of text production and text transmittance were
different for different genres (courtly lyric, romance, short couplet texts),
the forms of variability, too, are believed to be at least partly
genre-specific (Bumke, Holznagel). The Middle High German short couplet
narrative (Märe, Verserzählung) is commonly seen as a
"popular" and thus as a particularly "open" genre. Earlier
scholars (Fischer, Mihm) believed that the main reason for the particular
variability of Märe was the fact that it was carried by an oral tradition
that existed mainly in the form of performance, although its outcomes were
often fixed in writing. Some more recent works (Grubmüller) have
challenged this opinion for the lack of evidence to support it. They associate
the specific variability of the genre not so much with the (oral/written)
medium but rather with text structure (Holznagel), or even with a certain need
for combination and modification that constitutes the whole genre
(Grubmüller). In this paper, I will present some observations made on the
basis of a small set of texts, in order to discuss the following questions: Can
signs of orality (in the phase of text production, performance, or
transmittance) be observed in the texts, and can they be related to the variability
of these texts? In what ways, if at all, can the variability of the texts be
related to the specific structural features of the genre? The discussion of
these questions should eventually lead towards the answering of a third, more
complex one: Can we see any genre-specific forms of mouvance in
Märe, and how do these relate to the manifestations of variability that we
know from other epic genres?
Kristin
Kuutma
This presentation
combines the investigation of life narrative, life writing and disciplinary
history. The chosen approach proposes to follow the trends of inquiry prevalent
in recent reflexive disciplinary histories where the institutionalisation
process of museums, learned societies, research institutions, universities are
analysed by applying an examination of individual careers, scholarly networks,
and schools of thought by studying biographies and autobiographies. The
historical perspective focuses on a key figure in Estonian folkloristics and
folk narrative research, Matthias Johann Eisen. The massive amount of folklore
accumulated under his initiative reached about a hundred thousand pages and
formed one of the pillars upon which the Estonian Folklore Archives was
founded. M. J. Eisen was engaged in collecting various genres of
folklore, among which tale repertoire was most prominently represented.
M. J. Eisen's life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and
the first decades of the twentieth century correspond to the general period of
nation-building concurring with the gradual chiselling of disciplinary
boundaries in the academe and the establishment of professional folkloristics
around the Gulf of Finland. However, besides being a highly productive
collector of expressive culture, M. J. Eisen was also a prolific
author and published numerous books, many of those based on the collected
material. He likewise wrote memoirs and autobiographical notes, where he
reflected upon his almost fifty years of active participation in Estonian
intellectual life. I will take a look at M. J. Eisen's manuscripts of
life writing stored at the Estonian Archives of Cultural History and compare
them to published memoirs, but also to the festschrifts dedicated to him. My
aim is to examine the academic and personal representation constructed of a
folk narrative scholar while applying a reflexive historical approach to the
construction of narrative in life writing, but also to map the ontological
principles in the constitution of an academic discipline of narrative research.
Reimund
Kvideland
Paradis,
Norway
Legends are normally
told or referred to in a social setting where they are known. I addition they
can be performed on stage or in processions. The can also be acted out and
understood as a reference to the legends. Using mainly Scandinavian legend
tradition, this paper that not only rite descriptions but also migratory
legends can be carried out in action.
Liisi
Laineste
We are familiar with
the sad satire of Socialist regimes as well as the merciless
celebrity-battering of democratic systems. It can be said that different
political systems give rise to completely different humour. Democracy tends to
mock its leaders personally, stereotyping them with particular ludicrous
characteristics that may or may not have roots in reality. Authoritarian or
other undemocratic systems, on the other hand, focus on general societal
problems instead of the private and public life of politicians. Unless the
regime in question appeals to the nation, its humor stabs at the heart of the
system and its representatives. Under the rigidly pan-Arabist Nasser, for
example, jokes were usually about his regime, his socialism, his suppression,
but hardly ever about his person (Kishtainy 1985). Nevertheless, studying jokes
created under different political regimes reveals that jokes may travel also
across borders set by regimes. Jokes from Soviet Russia or communist Cuba live
a parallel life in democratic Finland or Great Britain, only with different
targets (although we cannot compare the popularity of the jokes in those
countries in this study). Is the separation between "true" and
"pseudo" jokes (a distinction made by Raskin in 1985 with regard to
ethnic humour) also possible in the genre of political jokes? That is, are
"true" political jokes only applicable to a certain country (a
certain regime), or can they live successfully under both sets of
circumstances? The presentation touches upon some more widespread types of
political jokes that are an exception to the generally holding rule of
regime-specific joking.
Katja
Laitinen
A community is always
a social structure; it consists of people who share the same habitat (a
village, household, a commune), a place to work or study (school, factory,
department store), hobbies (an acting club, dog trainers) or an internet
discussion group. However, all the people living in the same village or working
at the same factory are not necessarily in a communal relationship with the
others in the same situation. While they may share the place, they do not
always feel a sense of mutual togetherness. It is possible to study the
community as a social structure, but the cultural meanings lie beyond and
behind it. The meanings can be reconstructed through stories told about
togetherness; in the deeds that are done together. This is why humanistic
studies, especially cultural anthropology and folklore studies can provide a
point of departure for locating and defining the cultural sense of community or
commonality. The aim of my presentation is to focus on concepts and ideas of
community and cultural commonality within folklore studies. The focus has often
been on communities, e.g. villages, as a place of the tradition. When did the
study of contents and meanings become defining? My research material, the
stories about work related festivals and the Tori Amos-fan meetings both on-
and off-line holds elements of belonging to something and to someone. The
stories are not told so much about commonality than about doing and sharing
things. Thus the text, the written or told material, itself becomes a
construction of the community. The meanings within the material are the key to
finding the sense of community. Can a community even exist without the sense of
it?
Virág
Lappints & Dániel Bárth
Budapest,
Hungary
Recent studies on the
history of European mentality have devoted attention to the issue of historical
changes as well as cultural construction and representations of the
relationship between man and animals. Folklore narratology may provide an
opportunity to extend the scope of such investigations. The presentation
intends to analyse the various anthropological aspects of dog-keeping on the
basis of related folklore texts, literary sources and modern urban personal
narratives. The presentation of structural units and functions of these
narratives primarily relies upon the investigation of contemporary narratives
collected in the framework of our own fieldwork, carried out since 1997.
According to the presumption of the research project, social, mental, psychological
as well as ethological aspects of dog-keeping emerge in these types of texts.
The presentation pays special attention to the importance of narrative
strategies of anthropomorphism, which play a considerable (and frequently
legitimating) role in the construction and representation of man's perception
of and relationship to animals.
Pauliina
Latvala
My paper focuses on 'history-telling'
(cf. Portelli 1992, 1998) and its ways of reconstructing the past. The material
consists of the texts sent to a collection called 'the Great Narrative of the
Family', organized by the Finnish Literature Society Folklore Archive 1997. My
research questions include: What sort of purposes/intentions do these texts
have? What kind of relationship can be found between history-telling and
historiography in Finland? What are the various models and ways for a Folk
Archive to represent the past? When dealing with texts produced for an archive,
it is essential to analyse their multidimensional context and standpoint; they
are both private and public texts. The production of the text is never
context-free. Mikhail Bakhtin (in a 1979 collection of earlier texts) created a
concept in Russian language that has been translated in English both as 'Speech
plan' and 'authorial intent' (see Bakhtin 1986 Speech Genres and other Late
Essays) I prefer the latter (Intent, intention, purpose). I utilize the
concept of Bakhtin as well as M. A. K. Halliday's (1978) three
components of the text (ideational, interpersonal and textual) in my
text-analysis, in order to categorize the differences between ways of
representing the past. These three main ways could be designated as ideal,
marginal and multivoicing. The narrator has a continuous dialogue between
himself/herself, the imagined reader and the surrounding writing culture as
she/he finally deploys the chosen style and position.
Kirsi
Laurén
Joensuu,
Finland
Various natural areas
arouse mental images in us. Some of these are based on universal, scientific
definitions, which give us an exact idea of nature in general. However,
personal and culturally specific knowledge and fictitious images accompany
these facts. Each of these approaches may evoke entirely different images of
the same places, which in turn have a significant influence on our attitudes
and values towards different natural areas. When discussing experiences of
nature, it is thus important to take into consideration both facts and fictions.
I am especially interested in experiences of mires (peatlands, bogs, swamps).
In addition to its highly valued forests and lakes, the Finnish natural
environment also includes a wealth of mires, which cover one third of the total
land area. Seven years ago a nation-wide "Mire Story"-writing
competition was organized in Finland. The assignment was, "Write your own
story of experiencing mire". Almost thousand stories were submitted. I
collected my research data from this competition material with the goal of
clarifying the cultural relationship we have with our mires today and how we
experience "nature". Until the last decades mires have mostly been
appreciated for their economic and ecological values. In our westernized
society a growing number of us are no longer directly dependent on nature. More
often we have the possibility to go into nature without anxieties about
livelihood. I suggest that this possibility gives us freedom to experience and
enjoy nature more aesthetically and fancifully than in earlier times. In this
kind of "leisure-time" relationship to nature, fictive mental images
play an increasingly important role.
Linda
Lee
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, USA
This paper investigates
the conflicts that occur in the relationship between a mother-in-law and a new
bride. In many traditional folktales, the most conflictual relationship is that
between a new bride and her mother-in-law. This paper is based on my analysis
of several tale types (AT 706, AT 707, AT 712, and AT 880-899, etc.) that deal
explicitly with the chastity of a wife (or a daughter or sister) who has been
accused of infidelity (or premarital sexual relations). A common factor is that
the heroines are innocent but villains present evidence to the contrary. The
mother-in-law is often presented as an ambiguous figure in these tales. She
simultaneously wants her son to marry and produce children, yet she often works
to subvert and undermine the new marriage. For example, in many traditional
narratives, she implicitly accuses an innocent persecuted heroine of adultery,
or arranges for the heroine to be exposed to such slandering. Consequently, in
folktales the mother-in-law is often portrayed as the villain or the instigator
of villainous activity. In this paper I consider and critique several of the
ways that this tension has been interpreted in previous scholarship. For
example, some analyses of the conflict between the mother-in-law and the female
protagonist have interpreted this situation in Freudian terms as an example of
an Oedipal complex. This interpretation seems to me too simple, shifting the
focus from the female characters to the male protagonist. I propose to look
beyond such simple, androcentric explanations. My reading of this conflict
draws on a combination of theoretical perspectives, including socio-historical,
feminist, and symbolic. This paper contributes to our understanding of how both
ideologies and lived experiences may be articulated through traditional
narrative forms.
Art
Leete & Vladimir Lipin
Tartu,
Estonia & Syktyvkar, Komi Republik, Russia
During our joint
fieldwork among the Komis (from 1996 to 2004) we have recorded several hours of
hunting stories and discussed hunting rules. These stories have had quite a
range of characters and can be classified as being situated on the border areas
of different narrative genres. They reveal different aspects of Komi hunters'
worldview and behavioural rules, and tell us something about ways of narrating
among the Komis. Hunting stories can be broadly distinguished as narrations
describing situations that illustrate hunting rules or beliefs connected to
hunters' life, or those depicting peculiar situations experienced during
hunting trips. Quite a number of stories of both kinds also have didactic
aspects, and may help to share survival information for critical situations
(for example - the behaviour of wild animals). The exact purpose of telling these
stories cannot be easily identified. Neither are clear rules for
classification. From a generic point of view, they are a kind of borderline
narratives. At the same time, these stories are extremely important for hunters
in a pragmatic sense. Some stories have been told several times over the course
of our fieldwork. In this paper we propose to analyse several features that
characterise story-telling among Komi hunters. These optional guidelines can be
identified as taking into account hunting magic; describing social threats that
present-day Komi hunters must consider; designing stories according to some
rules of folk narration; individual characteristics of hunters, situations of
story-telling, and differences in criteria of truth of a researcher and of a
hunter (including aspects of cultural background).
Outi
Lehtipuro
Scientific progress
means inventions and discoveries that eventually change the world along with our
worldviews. Such advances have occurred in Finnish folkloristics over the past
few decades. Along with The Turn our understanding of folklore has profoundly
and irretrievably changed. Folklore is no longer interpreted as
"tradition" but as the result of thinking, as another language,
capable of articulating culturally important things that go beyond mere oral
expression. While it has been proven that the human mind also produces
folkloric expression outside the domain of oral culture, the old Finnish concept
of folklore (oral, anonymous, "folk" verbal expression) and its
implications have become clearer, suggesting a fresh understanding of
folkloristics as a core discipline of oral culture. Folklore appears to be a
fuzzy system of communication where verbatim accuracy is not necessary for
adequate communication of meaning. Progress seems to happen by accidents and
surprises; scholars do not always know where their findings will lead. Even
backlashes happen. By abandoning Volksdichtung, the aesthetic soul of
the discipline, something was lost in our "European" understanding of
folklore. The American notion of "artistic communication in small
groups" does not cover the cultural continuity contained in large folklore
collections. Locally as well as globally, folklore seems to possess an
enigmatic tenacity, a cohesion which holds constructions of utterances and
meanings together, while allowing for great surface variation. Recent Finnish
research, as a kind of contemporary extension of 'Finnish' thinking about folklore,
seems to suggest that the keys to a 'final' understanding of the existence of
folklore lie somewhere at the junction of aesthetics, linguistics and
neurobiology. This view is supported by recent discussions in academic
aesthetics (e.g. at the world congress in Rio de Janeiro 2004). Human beings
seem to have an urge to combine memorable aesthetic verbal expression with
emotionally grounded socially and culturally important messages. The task of
the folklorist is to find out what in each case the message is.
Merja
Leppälahti
When reading fantasy
literature, it is possible to notice a wealth of folklore motifs. The hero
often makes the same journey as the hero of Proppian folktales: he leaves home
because of some villainy or lack, meets helpers, donors, and villains,
undergoes and passes difficult tasks etc. On his or her way the hero can meet
various supernatural beings: dragons, pixies, goblins, trolls and elves, the
very same entities we meet in folktales. The hero can also get or find all
kinds of magical objects: cloaks making one invisible, magical weapons, charmed
necklaces and rings, all familiar from fairy tales. Folklore can be seen as a
pool of ideas for fantasy. It is somehow familiar and shared without studying.
It is part of our popular imagination. Fantasy literature also gains from other
sources, for example other fantasy in literature as well as films and cartoons
etc., which often have already taken motifs from folklore. So fantasy
literature has a multilevel relationship with folklore material. In my paper I
will present some folktale themes and motifs used in new Finnish fantasy
literature. I will offer some tentative interpretations, but focus primarily on
proposing possibilities for using folklore material today.
Isidor
Levin
St.
Petersburg, Russia
(l) Wenn
Erzählforschung künftig noch als separate Disciplin zu gelten habe,
so muß sie eine Wissenschaft von aer fariana erzählter Stoffe
(plots) sein, welche im Zuge deren Überlieferung entstand und dem Forscher
einheitlich dokumentiert problemgerecht zugänglich gemacht werden sollte.
Dafür kann ich eine bewährte Methodik und detailierte Instruktionen
bieten.
(1.1) Objekt
der Forschung sei grundsätzlich Textologische Rezeption und Reproduktion
genetisch zusammengehöriger Stoffe (also nicht der Schöpfung unikaler
Erzählungen in statu nascendi einer bestimmten Person).
(1.2) Zu
erforschen gelten Erscheinungen komplex erzählter Stoffe: /1.-2./ Die
Verbreitungsart der Belege in der Landschaft & Zeit (sc.
Geografisch-historisches Problem); /3./ Der Bezug der Erzähler zur
mentalen Topik (d.h. die Art des Gedächtnisses, anhand der verglichenen
Reproduktion, ob etwa unbewußt, vorbewußt oder gar kreativ
bewußt), dementsprechend sollte das Verhältnis der Erzähler zum
Erzählten, sowie zum Weitererzählen des Stoffes (sc. Das
psychologische und funktionale Problem).
(1.3) Ergebnisse
globaler vergleichender Erzählforschung wären in Gestalt einheitlich
konzipierter, womöglich synchroner Kartogramme in allgemeiner Diachronie
der Belege quantitativ korrelliert kultur-bezogen einerseits auf Typenebene und
andererseits innerhalb einer Stoffmonographie auch auf 'Motivebene' sollten
interpretiert werden.
(1.3.1) Der
Inhalt eines Repertoires (etwa von Witzen und Redens-arten ) läßt
sich einleuchtend aufgrund sinnvoller Gliederung des Wortgutes, mittels Sprachinhaltforschung
objektivieren Mein reichlich erprobtes Dokumentationssystem kann man lediglich
auf fabeilen plausibel demonstrieren. Es ist höchste Zeit und
glücklicherweise auch technisch billig machbar, das allenthalben
gesammelte Material analytisch leicht (ohne Terminologie!) zu erfassen, in
Buchform synoptisch, oder elektronisch als wohlgeordnete Databanken
herauszugeben.
(2) Die
im Titel genannte MS-Kollektion - rund 1,000 Heftseiten - wurde in Tartu ab
1929 konzipiert, für die Aufklärung des noch bäuerlichen
Wirtsvolkes über die 'Folklore' judischer, städtischer Minorität
des jungen Freistaates Ehstland - etwa 4000 Seelen - auf ehstnisch, dann ab
1935 bis 1940 meistens in jidischer Sprache, durch Walter Anderson's Studenten
vom universitären Lehrstuhl „Jüdischer Wissenschaft"
aufgeschrieben.
(2.1) Diese
Sammlung enthielt das,was man üblicherweise inadäquat als 'Volksdichtung
der Juden' empfand, und zwar: exotische Bräuche, Witze, Redensarten,
wenige Sagen und Märchen.
(2.2) H.H.
war diese Sammlung inhaltlich, 'geistlich' als Repertoire dürftig, nicht
traditionell. Denn die Ostseeprovinzen des Zarenreichs, insbesondere Ehst-
& Livland waren bis 1917 für Juden gesetzlich verboten, allerdings
nach 25-jährigem Dienst abgedankte Soldaten und manche Handwerker - also
NB! jüdisch ungebildete, bzw. religiös unkundige Menschen-, durften
hier wohnen. Es war nicht viel und nicht tief, was sie in der Familie den
Kindern vom Judentum angedeihen konnten.
(2.3) Dieser
Minderheit gewährte der Freistaat Ehstland eine in Europa
ungewöhnliche Kulturautonomie. Es gab einige muttersprachliche Schulen,
just von dieser Generation wurde, unter ehstnischer Gepflogenheit, mundliches
Wortgut aufgenommen.
(2.4) Während
beider Okkupationen von Ehst- und Lettland wurden die einheimischen baltischen
Juden, die Sammler wie die Informanten fast völlig ausgerottet.
Infolgedessen muß diese seltene, weil marginale Kollektion, die qua
Eigentum des Ehstnischen Literaturmuseums u.a. zufällig erhalten blieb,
als Denkmal untergegangener, verklungener Kultur aufbewahrt, gebührend
dokumentiert und vielleicht künftig ausgelegt werden.
Georgiy
A. Levinton
St.
Petersburg, Russia
In this paper
I intend to present the "narrative part" of a larger study, Genre-Space
of Traditional Russian Folklore (or Ethnopoetry, Oral Poetry), which is
described in its entirety elsewhere. Two main dimensions (axes, distinctive
features) of the space are (a) versified vs non-versified verse in Russian
folklore, as in some others as well, means sung or recitative performance), and
(b) prosaic vs. non prosaic, where prose actually means 'a story', i.e.
narrative. Thus we have four groups of genres:
(1) narrative
in verse,
(2)
non-versified narrative (prose sensu stricto),
(3)
non-narrative verse (lyrical song, laments) and
(4)
"neither verse, nor prose" (paroemia, spells, etc.).
The structure of the
two narrative groups is mainly symmetrical; each of them has one nuclear genre,
a "main" or most representative genre (fairy tale in non-versified
genres, and bylina (epics) in versified ones) and peripheral genres,
largely corresponding to each other. The category of "Spiritual
verses" (dukhovnyj stikh) corresponds to sacred legends (with
respect to both representing sacral genres), although their repertory of
narrative types is quite different (e.g. non-versified oral legend includes no
saint legends). Historical songs (some historical ballads as well) share common
subject matter with historical legends (istoricheskoe predanie - tales
about historical persons). Ballads roughly correspond to novellas (usually cold
novelistic or Romantic tales, AaTh 850=899), while comic or parody epics
resemble the "Jokes and Anecdotes" of Aarne's classification. For
many European traditions I might mention Animal Tales and Animal Epics,
respectively, but Russian tradition has no animal epics in verse. Each group
has one feature that diminishes as one moves from the central genre to peripheral
ones; in verse genres, this is verse itself. Epics are sung in bylina
(epic) verse; other genres combine epic verse and song-verse. In non-versified
texts this feature is stylistic elaboration, with special formulas which can be
found to a most sophisticated degree in fairy-tales and are much less prominent
in other genres. Some other symmetries connect these genres with non-narrative
ones.
Carl
Lindahl
Houston,
Texas, USA
Northern Europe and
North America, distant as they are geographically, are separated even farther
by their scholars' treatment of märchen. At the end of the
twentieth century, Europeans like Bengt Holbek and Anna-Leena Siikala marshaled
the enormous resources amassed by nineteenth-century collectors and re-employed
them in creative quests to get to know their long-dead tellers and discover the
cultural and personal meanings of their tales. By this time, across the
Atlantic, the great collectors of North American, English-language märchen
- Halpert, Randoph, Dorson, Roberts - had completed their collections without
getting to know their tellers or more than touching upon meanings of the
stories. But many of these narrators are still alive; and many of the tales
collected told by their parents and neighbors have never found their way out of
the archives or into the new formulation of Types of the Folktale, which by
default of the American scholars, fails to represent the depth of the
tradition. This presentation draws upon the repertoire of one family - the
Farmer-Muncy-Lewis family of eastern Kentucky - represented by live
performances over a span of 45 years as well as some forty manuscript tales
committed to writing in the 1950s by one family member. The family is talented,
eloquent, and profoundly concerned with the uses of terror: ways of
transforming negative märchen magic into tools for combating
pervasive personal and cultural demons, notably local violence, gender rifts,
abandonment, and a culture of war. In both performance and in memory, the
family narratives combine märchen, legend, and local history to
create a verbal commentary on their daily lives that echoes their most painful
experiences while shaping strategies for healing.
Aado
Lintrop
Tartu,
Estonia
There are two main
liminal periods in the Udmurt folk calendar - the period after winter solstice
is called vozhodyr (time of the vozho) or uivozho (night+vozho);
the period after summer solstice, referred to as invozho dyr (time of
the heavenly vozho) or vozho poton tolez' (month of vozho
emerging). It is likely that the Permian vezha or vozho originated
in a Finno-Ugric root associated with liminality, or existing somewhere
in-between *vajesh. Even at the end of the 19th century,
Udmurts believed that water spirits came into the villages and inhabited the
saunas before Christmas. In the twilight they could be encountered on the
street. The water spirits of the Christmas period were mostly called the vozhos.
On the other hand vozhos were little devil-like creatures with tails and
horns who hid in lakes and rivers in the daytime and danced in water mills and
empty houses in the nighttime. For the Udmurts, vozhodyr is the period
for mumming. The most common name for mumming is pörtmas'kon, cf. pörtmany
- 'to change, to transform, to slander'. Other words for mumming are pendzas'kon
(cf. pen 'soot, ashes', pendzyny 'incinerate, to burn to ashes',
referring to the most common way of masking by smearing the face with soot or
ashes), vozhoyas'kon ("vozhoing"; in several regions
the mummers called themselves the vozho). The winter vozho-time
was the main storytelling and riddle time for the Udmurts. Even as late as in
June 2002 three informants, living in the Udmurtskii-Karaul and Deby villages
in the Krasnogorskoie region (Northern Udmurtia), claimed that the words for 'riddle'
in local dialect are vozho kyl (vozho language/word/story) or vozho
mad' (vozho speech/word/story). Direct restrictions were placed on
riddles after the winter vozho-time.
Åsa
Ljungström
This contribution
analyses the ethnography made by teachers-to-be when training in the
classrooms. In an ethnology course, "Cultural Diversity", students are
asked to observe situations indicating everyday conditions of children at
school. They return with stories of how difference is made, or prohibited.
There will be idyllic reports as well as reports of
nothing-to-report-because-everything works perfectly. The stories told among
the students turn out to be narratives of certain themes. The background is the
need to make integration work, meaning that the majority has to learn to make
the world safe for diversity. The newcomers already know the demand to cope
with variety. In 35 years the population has been enriched by a million
persons, some 15-20 percent of the grownups, born elsewhere. Their children go
to school. The teachers meet everybody's children and may reach all kinds of
parents. The majority is still likely to place the onus of problems on the
Others, or outsiders. This is a reason to begin efforts to make schools safe
for diversity in the process of educating teachers. My analysis has the goal of
clarifying when the various systems of domination clash. Hierarchy positions of
gender, class, ethnicity, religion, age, and cohort meet at certain crossroads.
At school the outcome cannot be predicted. How can this be understood? How are
we to understand our reactions when the order of the world is turned upside
down? Whose order is it? Whose world? Also even if all the children come from
the same country there will be girls and boys present, and gender issues will
be at work. Teachers are expected to work wonders against any discrimination.
They are supposed to make the school safe for every kind of diversity. They
have to meet unexpected situations and react to them instantly, on the spot. It
is not easy to do the right thing. Teachers-to-be have knowledge that implies
and provides solidarity.
Torsten
Löfstedt
The Qur'an claims to
be a heavenly text, authored by God and transmitted to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel.
But it is also an oral text: Muhammad was known as the unlettered prophet (Sura
7.157), and in the Qur'an, Allah himself admits to using folklore to serve his
purposes (cf. 2.26, 39.27). Scholars have nevertheless been reticent about
identifying folkloric elements in the Qur'an, because they wrongly assume this
calls the truth value of the Qur'an into question. In his essay Fables of
the Ancients: Folklore in the Qur'an (Rowman & Littlefield 2003), Alan
Dundes seeks to remedy the situation, and shows that the Qur'an has many traces
of being an oral composition. He identifies three folktales in the Qur'an, and
points to the frequent occurrence of oral formulas in the text. In this paper I
continue Dundes' task. I examine the Qur'anic narratives of the fall of Satan
and Adam, which are found seven times in the Qur'an: 2.30-39; 7.11-25;
15.26-48; 17.61-65; 18.50-53; 20.115-125; 38.71-88. There are significant
differences between these versions; the multiple attestations of the narrative
combined with the variation between the versions give clear evidence of their
oral origin (cf. Dundes 2003.47). I briefly discuss antecedents to the Qur'anic
fall narratives in Jewish and Christian tradition (both canonical and
extracanonical), and then more closely examine the Qur'anic versions. I seek to
discover whether at the basis of the versions there is one underlying form, or
whether the Qur'an conflates two or more narratives. I also show how the
variation between the narratives relates to the context in which they are
found. This in turn leads us toward a better understanding of their intended
meaning.
Elizaveta
Lozhkina
The corpus of
published Udmurt folklore texts is classified as prose texts. It is interesting
to note that Udmurt oral tradition does not demarcate legends and parables,
true stories and memorats, belief legends (fabulats) and mythological tales,
household stories and archaic tales, etc. Such a generic situation demonstrates
syncretism. Texts contain some special features that under certain conditions
convert memorats or belief legends into fairy tales and conversely. Narration
changes its status depending on function and apprehension of a told story.
Today storytellers often narrate belief legends as fairy tales and the audience
does not doubt this. Sometimes a typical fairy tale is perceived as a real
story because of an orientation toward authenticity. Here "the fact"
only covers itself with poetic imagery. The Udmurt fairy tale contains living
notions, especially mythological notions, and it is transformed in the
direction of artistic reliability. According to our material there are no
doubts as to the genetical affinities of memorate, belief legend and fairy
tale. The influence of folk religion and belief legend on fairy tale can be
seen from the fact that many of the characters in fairy tales are based on
models taken from the folk religion, folk beliefs. In the folk tales of
Udmurtia we find completely supranormal belief figures (spirits of nature: of
animals and the forest, the rivers and the lakes; spirits of farm buildings,
etc.) and actors of a mediatory nature combining supranormal with human
features (witches, the dead) that usually characterize superstitious tales. The
attitude of these supranormal beings toward the hero is ambivalent: on the one
hand they are shown as dangerous opponents; on the other hand they are friendly
and help the hero to achieve his goal. Often the behavior of spirits depends on
how the hero treats them, hero's principal knowledge of such beings. Some
researchers of Udmurt folklore call these tales "belief legends",
others - "mythological tales," or classify them as magic or
novelistic tales. Absence of stable terminology both in storytelling tradition
and folkloristics points to difficulties in the determination of prose genres
of Udmurt oral art.
Karina
Lukin
Due to many long-term
social, economic and cultural changes and a reasonably recent, rapid language
change among the Nenets living on the Kolguev Island, Northern Russia, these
people have begun to tell narratives also in Russian. Some of the elderly are
still competent performers of traditional Nenets-language folklore, but its
performance is restricted only to special occasions with mostly older people as
an audience. On the other hand the narratives in Russian are told quite freely
in everyday life and are known by most of the Nenets living on the island. In
my paper I want to pose the question whether these Russian narratives are part
of Nenets folklore and whether these narratives are folklore at all - or just
daily talk? The narratives in question tell about the places and history of the
island, but also about the past way of living; in this way the narratives are
tightly related to the traditional way of life and to Nenets culture in
general. In addition to this continuity, I also find another kind of continuity
in the structures and in the meanings related to narratives and to the places
they are telling about. In this sense, the narratives clearly represent Nenets
world view and culture. Despite the continuities, the changes seem to be more
evident due to the advent of another language (not Nenets, but Russian) and to
different kind of structural ways of performing the tradition (not by
traditional, but by new genres). This is why these narratives are not studied
or even collected by folklorists in Russia. Hence, these questions are related
to genre and meaning, and also to the problematics of authenticity.
Seppo
Luoto & Krista Anttila
Vaasa,
Finland
The idea of 'possible
selves" is a way of thinking about one's occupational future by
envisioning oneself in potential roles. It links self-concept with incentives
for future behavior. Possible selves represent individuals' ideas of what they
might become, what they would like to become, and what they fear becoming.
Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius (1986) are credited with developing the concept.
It has been applied in research and practice, for instance with adolescents
exploring career choices (Kerpelman et al. 2002; Packard & Nguyen 2003;
Shepard and Marshall 1999; Yowell 2002) and adults in transition (Beyer and
Hannah 2002; Ibarra 1999; Trentham 2000). Research has uncovered differences in
the way individuals construct possible selves, which reflect different
experiences regarding opportunity structure, stereotypes, and social messages
about potential and identity. These 'constructed possible selves' seen through
the theories of attribution (Weiner 1986), locus-of control (Rotter 1966) and
self-efficacy (Bandura 1977) shows that these constructions may influence our
behavior and affect our aspirations (Kerpelman et al. 2002; Lips 1999; Packard
& Nguyen 2003). In the context of entrepreneurship education students need
assistance in recognizing the contents of these possible selves. These
techniques for working with possible selves include for instance imagery and
visualization (Fletcher 2000), narrative (Whitty 2000), and mapping (Shepard
2000). In this paper we are interested in the 'possible selves' as a narrative
technique and also a view in the narrative research. Our claim is that the
traditional theories of narratology (for instance Propp, Greimas) do not offer
a proper basis for working with these 'possible selves', since they ignore the
subject and the ideas of constructivism. In our analysis tool of narratives we
try to combine the ideas of narratology and constructivism in order to build up
a more useful tool also for different practitioners (teachers, counselors,
students) for identifying and reflecting on the 'possible selves' as part of
narratives.
Emily
Lyle
Edinburgh,
Scotland, United Kingdom
At each stage in
transmission of a tale from generation to generation, modifications take place but
something remains. Thus there is a potential for material to be retained from
the distant past, from a time that I shall call the cosmological period, when
people lived in a conceptual world that embraced space and time and the
organisation of society together with ideas about how their world came into
being. I argue that the archaic cosmology in my study was that of both the
Indo-Europeans and also other peoples in Eurasia who had the institution of
kingship. This goes beyond the position of Georges Dumézil who saw the
Indo-European area as self-contained in culture as well as language. It was
meditating on narratives that has enabled me to posit a total cosmology and
begin to understand the mythology more fully. There are points in common between
Dumézil's views and my own. I shall look first at one motif where I
follow on from Dumézil and extend his interpretation of a triad: the
motif as known in Ireland of the birth of a boy who has three fathers (Lugaid
of the Red Stripes). It can be suggested that this is not only an expression of
trifunctionalism, but also hints at matrilineal succession to kingship. A
well-known Greek story which tells how Pelops defeated Oenomaus in a
chariot-race and became king on marrying his daughter, Hippodamia, forms a counterpart
to it and deals with succession through marriage to a princess - a theme that
resonates with folktales that tell how the hero married the princess and gained
a kingdom. These themes deal with a recurrent situation, while another type of
narrative deals with beginnings. Here I will draw es pecially on the Welsh
instance of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi interpreted as a theogony.
Vered
Madar
Jerusalem,
Israel
As part of my research on the
songs of Yemenite women, I have studied the lamentations of Yemenite Jewish
women now living in Israel. Lamentations about the dead, which I have collected
and analyzed, are one of the genres of folklore, songs passed along orally.
These women lived in a Jewish-Muslim-Yemenite cultural context and their
creations are the result of their linguistic, cultural and religious setting. I
will thus present these lamentations as an intersection of the cultures; they
open a window on Jewish life in a Muslim context and on the connections between
the two communities, with gender as one aspect of this study. By examining
these lamentations in the light of the definitions of this genre, I found that
although the lamentations of Yemenite women were certainly passed along orally,
at the same time they constituted a complex system of both vocal and physical
performance, as well as poetic text. In this lecture, I will use the theory of
Lord, which deals with creation at the time of performance, to illustrate the
way in which these texts are passed along orally, which allows for the
assumption of passage between cultures. This is especially evident when the
texts are still sung in Yemenite Arabic, despite the fact that the spoken
language of these women in Yemen included Hebrew elements. (The poetry of
Yemenite Jewish men, on the other hand, was written in both Hebrew and Arabic).
I will present the prohibition common to both Judaism and Islam, where women
are forbidden to lament their dead, particularly in cases where various bodily
injuries are involved. In both cultures, the prohibition stems from the pagan
background of this practice, and from the concern that the content of the
lamentations might express criticism of God and a reluctance to accept God's
will. There is evidence indicating the existence of acts of mourning common to
both Jewish and Muslim women, such as placing crossed arms on the head. There
is also evidence for the existence of professional lamenters among both Jewish
and Muslim women and of reciprocal visits to comfort the mourners,
notwithstanding variations due to geographical area and lifestyle. I will also
touch on the question of gender specificity in the performance of the
lamentations, mentioning the custom of Jewish men lamenting the death of
Muslims who had been their official patrons. The attempt to point out Muslim
elements in the songs of Jewish women does not stem from a desire on my part to
assert whether this cultural product is Jewish or Muslim. The claim that
cultures influence each other oversimplifies the infinite dialectical process
existing in the contact between cultures; dichotomous distinctions generally
simplify a complex situation. I therefore suggest defining this as a dialogue
between the cultural elements of the respective groups, thereby trying to
understand the processes these cultural products have undergone in Israel. This
lecture intends to initiate discussion surrounding these issues, taking into
consideration my limited access to Yemenite Muslim resources.
Elina
Makkonen
The University of Joensuu (in
North Karelia, East Finland) was established in 1969. Today it includes six
faculties and nine independent units. The University offers undergraduate and
graduate degrees in eight different fields (education, humanities, natural
sciences, social sciences, economics, forestry, theology, psychology). The
University has over 7,200 students and the staff comprises about 1,200 people.
The oral history of the university was published in August 2004. I have been
working as an interviewer in the oral history project and as an editor and a
writer of the publication. In the project, we have interviewed about 100
narrators: former and present students and staff (e.g. vice-chancellors,
professors, teachers, assistants, researchers and assisting staff). The oral
history of the University of Joensuu is one case study under analysis in my
doctoral thesis. In the paper in Tartu I shall concentrate on how a university
remembers. I ask: How do institutions produce and construct their own history?
Is it the institution, the community or the narrator who is telling and
remembering? Questions dealing with social, collective and public memory as
well as how institutions think, remember and forget are relevant in my research.
Fumiko
Mamiya
Kanagawa,
Japan
Im japanischen
Volksmärchen besuchen Menschen auf verschiedene Weise andere Welten. Das
Referat soll zeigen, wie andere Welten im japanischen Volksmärchen erfasst
und welche Vorstellungen ausgedrückt werden. Nach den Orten, als die diese
anderen Welten erscheinen, lassen sich grob vier Gruppen unterscheiden:
Fernwelten, Unterwelten (unterirdische Welten), Unterwasserwelten und
Überwelten. Fernwelt ist im japanischen Volksmärchen - der Landesnatur
entsprechend - meist das Gebirge. Der Held (oder die Heldin) gerät bei
einer Wanderung in die Berge ins Jenseits, begegnet Jenseitswesen, macht
dadurch irgendwelche Erfahrungen und kehrt wieder ins Diesseits zurück.
Denn Menschen können nicht ewig in anderen Welten bleiben. Wenn der Held
hingegen in Jenseitswelten eindringt, die er nicht einfach zu Fuß
erreichen kann (Unterwelten, Unterwasserwelten und Überwelten), braucht er
irgendwelche Mittel: Er wird von Führern begleitet, die der anderen Welt
angehören, muss beim Übertritt vielleicht die Augen schließen,
oder er braucht übernatürliche Wanderungsmittel. Die Erfahrungen, die
Menschen in anderen Welten machen, lassen sie sich in drei Gruppen einteilen:
positive, negative und ambivalente Erfahrungen. Durch die Analyse eines
umfassenden Korpus von Volksmärchen, in denen von einem Jenseitsbesuch
erzählt wird, möchte ich die Eigentümlichkeiten anderer Welten
im japanischen Volksmärchen klar machen. Überwiegend scheinen
männliche Helden von weiblichen Jenseitswesen in anderen Welten empfangen
zu werden. In diesem Referat soll auch gefragt und zur Diskussion gestellt
werden, welche Jenseitsvorstellungen als spezifisch japanisch anzusehen sind.
My paper deals with
laughter as an expression of emotions in stories. I study laughter both as a
communicative factor in fieldwork and as a stylistic means in narratives. When
is laughter used as an effect in storytelling and what does this laughter mean?
Is laughter always an expression of humor and comics? What else can it be an
expression of? The stories that I use for analyzing laughter are personal
experience stories of giving birth. In these stories the women use laughter in
many ways, both in contact with me as an interviewer, together with me, and as
a way of marking the meaning of the story. The women laugh often when they talk
about corporeality, pain and difficulties during the process of giving birth,
but also when they perform a self-presentation with elements that 'almost'
happened during birth. What do they reveal or conceal with laughter in
narratives and what can the laughter reveal about the point of their narration?
Licia
Masoni
Edinburgh,
Scotland, United Kingdom
This paper is based on
material collected between 2002 and 2005 during field work in Frassinoro, a
small mountain community in the North of Italy. While investigating
storytelling traditions, I was struck by the numerous references to the
narrative technique and ability of a man named Patriarca, who had died in the
sixties, becoming the village's last great storyteller. The interviewees, all
well in their eighties, tried to piece back together the stories they had heard
from him in their youth. The resulting versions of well-known international
folk and fairytales were infused with references to the reality of the village
in those earlier days. The interviewees defined these references as part of the
ability to 'embroider', which they agreed was the Patriarca's greatest quality.
I soon felt the need to further discuss the nature and function of those
references with the interviewees. I began by asking them what the difference
was between 'embroidering' and 'changing', and whether one could operate
changes, in order to bring stories back into daily life without betraying the
tradition. This paper outlines the interviewees' responses and analyses
variation and change in narrative, as a means to create meaning for people and
their lives, both as a community and as individuals. In the first part I will
analyse the function of references to reality which created meaning for the
community as a whole, such as street and personal names. Despite their
anachronistic character, the interviewees regarded these references as
fundamental parts of the structure of the tales, to the extent that they
resisted the idea of replacing them with their contemporary equivalents. The
resulting discussions revealed the interviewees' ideas of structure, genre and
functions of narrative. In the second part I will look at references to the
lived reality of the individual. Two sisters, after a long time, remember a
folktale their mother used to tell them: two very different renderings
mirroring their different life stories.
Stein
R. Mathisen
The meanings and
implications of belief narratives, and the relation between ethnic others and
supernatural others have repeatedly been analyzed in relation to cultural
identities and multicultural meetings. One aspect of belief narratives in
inter-ethnic contexts is that they are seen as statements on a conflict arena,
polarizing cultural and ethnic identities, and making borders between
categories more visible and clear-cut. This is obviously one function that
belief narratives might have. But narrative representations of belief can also be
understood in more elaborate and dynamic perspectives. Examples can easily be
found where narratives of belief and religion contribute to making
communication between opposite and conflicting cultures possible, or to
enhancing it. In this way narratives, and supernatural beings, as
representations of belief, can have the capacity to make borders more unclear
and categories less sharp. These two aspects of the narratives do not
necessarily exclude each other, but may in different contexts depend on cultural
signification, the distribution of power, and the strategies of the narrators.
With a long history of ethnic meetings between Norwegians, Kvens and
Sámi in Northern Norway, a large group of belief narratives are in some
way or other associated with relations among the different ethnic and cultural
groups. The aim of this paper is to discuss how these belief narratives can
deepen our understanding of the historical processes leading to cultural change
and identity transformation in multicultural Northern Norway. The way belief
narratives make use of established social categories and people in their
cultural and ethnic capacities, but also of supernatural beings in much more
ambiguous roles, represents an alternative point of view to the understanding
of inter-ethnic encounters. Through these equivocal supernatural agents, and
the magic experts who can control the powers of the other side, possibilities
for change, transformation and movement are narrated, conceptualized and
represented in fluid and polyphonic ways.
Michael
M. Mburu
Nairobi,
Kenya
This study is an
examination of various means by which oral narrative is used to inject Kikuyu sagacity
into the fallacious field of politics in the Mt. Kenya region. While
legends and praise songs are used to show the elegance of power and the might
it carries from tradition to tradition, the simple minds which form the
majority are at the same time exposed to the more complex and fallacious use of
proverbs. The study assumes that a scrutiny and critical analysis of the
relationship between sagacity and politics as developed by use of folk
narratives would set a clear picture of the state of Mt. Kenya politics as
viewed against the background of rhetoric and genuine social agenda. The
analysis indicates that folk narrative has been transformed rather than being
able to transform generations. This has caused inter- and intragenerational
gaps in the field of social responsibilities. The result has been
over-saturation of social agenda, with the old generation leaving the youth
with no place or way of becoming opinion leaders in the Agikuyu community. The
emergence of new "rootless" languages like "sheng" has
demolished the conceptual value of cultural dynamism within the set traditional
values that make up a community. In view of this, it is easy to understand why
there are no budding youths in the field of politics. The dynamism that has
rocked our culture has created a generation gap between the youth and the more
conservative older people. This thesis is a statement on the use of narrative
rhetoric in fusion with the ageless sagacity to dominate the easy going youths
in a turbulent sea of Agikuyu politics. By adopting this approach the study has
shown that the political players are rhetoricians who use narration in the form
of oration to communicate, in persuasion, the schemes and vision in their
social agenda. This work would be a new input to the use of critical
understanding in assessing the scope of folklore in perpetuation of social
domination in politics.
Theo
Meder
Something very strange
happened in the afternoon of July 7, 1996, in the vicinity of the famous
megalithic Stonehenge monument. That morning a farmer had inspected his field
of grain and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Neither did a pilot who flew over
Stonehenge at half past five in the afternoon. But to his amazement, when he
returned half an hour later, a huge crop formation of many small and large
circles lay down in the field near Stonehenge. The magnificent formation now
caused a true traffic jam on the A303 between Stonehenge and the crop circle.
Nobody had seen people in the field that day, or any strange phenomena: the
crop circle was just there all of a sudden. Soon, the crop formation was called
the Julia-set, after the mathematical fractal it represents. This story is
well-known among serious 'croppies', i.e. people who believe that (most) crop
circles are not man-made, but have a supernatural or extra-terrestrial origin.
Most of the time, the story is told to initiate 'non- croppies' and persuade
sceptics. The story can be found in oral and written sources, and like a
folktale, it comes in many variations, even if it is told by the same narrator.
Some say that the crop circle had formed in less than 15 minutes, others say
about 45 minutes. Sometimes it is the same pilot who flies over Stonehenge
twice, sometimes there are two pilots: the second pilot is supposed to fly a
fighter jet. The first pilot is supposed to be a crop circle photographer: in
one version he just flies over Stonehenge, in another he circles around Stonehenge
seven times. The number of circles within the Julia-set varies from 149 to 212.
The crop circle is either situated slightly downhill or uphill. Apart from the
pilot, all kinds of witnesses are mentioned: a farm worker, a gamekeeper,
Stonehenge security guards and attendants, tourists, motorists... One feature
remains stable, however: nobody knows the name of the pilot who actually
discovered the Julia-set. Another detail is not mentioned very often: the
farmer charged over a thousand visitors a two pound fee for entering the crop
circle site. Rather than a (contemporary) legend, a story like the Julia-set
narrative seems to be a tale of wonder and functions as an exemplum. It is a
story told to prove a point. It is a tale about a complex crop circle that was
formed in broad daylight by unseen forces in a short period of time. Physicist
and croppie Dr. Eltjo Haselhoff says: "The explanation of a simple human
hoax should be excluded." If we take the spiritual New Age world view of
the various narrators into consideration, the crop circle tales propagate
modern religious messages.
Mirjam
Mencej
Ljubljana,
Slovenia
The purpose of this
paper is to unveil the important role played by mythological beings - which at
first glance appear unimportant - in the construction and consolidation of the
annual cycle, i.e. the calendar system of stockbreeders. The paper is based on
the folklore tradition of a mythical being, the Master of the Wolves, whose chief
function was commanding or dividing up food among the wolves. He appears in
many Slavic and other European legends, and some Southern Slavs also celebrate
so-called "wolf holidays". A being with the same function appears in
many incantations against wolves. Although the legends (and the associated
holidays) and incantations exhibit many other common elements, their respective
messages are diametrically opposed: while the legends speak of the coming and
the setting free of the wolves, the incantations speak of their muzzling and
departure. In establishing the times with which both are connected, it turned
out that the incantations are normally connected with the first days of
pasturing in the spring and the beginning of summer, while the legends refer to
the last days of pasturing in the autumn and the beginning of winter. The
belief that on the last day of pasturing in the autumn, the Master of the
Wolves frees the muzzles of the wolves, which remain open throughout the winter
(owing to which livestock must remain in the barns from that day forward), and
again muzzles them on the first day of pasturing in the springtime (after which
the livestock are again free to roam), binds the two halves of the year into a
complete whole. The legends and incantations as well as the beliefs and customs
clearly indicate the remains of a tradition, the intention of which was to
explain the changing of time, the binary opposition of winter and summer, as it
pertained to the annual cycle of Slavic stockbreeders.
Alfred
Messerli
The Journal of the
Plague Year (1722) seems to be an authentic autobiographical report about the last
plague in London (1665). The novel by Daniel Defoe, which appeared anonymously,
was written following the news of a new black plague epidemic which had struck
the city of Marseille in 1720/21 and which, via Amsterdam, risked spreading to
England. In the novel the author also re-elaborates a form of
"rumour", today also defined as a "contemporary" or as an
"urban legend". This first report together with the analysis permit a
new reflection on a genre of oral folklore, its terminological designation and
its age.
Merili
Metsvahi
The aim of my presentation
is to give an idea about the ethnic narrative genres of Setu folklore. The
analysis is based on seven interviews made with a talented Setu narrator and
singer Ksenia Müürsepp (1911-2004) in the years 2001-2003. These
interviews include a lot of metafolkloric reflections. There are enormous
discrepancies between Ksenia's "genre system" and the analytic genre
system of folkorists. The only narrative genre with a distinct name is jutus.
It contains fairy-tales and jokes which were considered fictional (but not all
stories that a folklorist would call fairy-tales and jokes are jutused).
There is also a special verb that denotes telling fictional tales (jutust
ajada). The non-fictional tales can be viewed along a scale: at one end
there are narratives the activities of which took place in the distant past, on
the other, narratives about events that took place "in Ksenia's time"
(in her own words "in my time"). Saint legends, some belief legends
and some fairy-tales belong to the first group, memorates, some belief legends
and some jokes belong to the other. Some tales fall between the fictional and
non- fictional tales. About these stories Ksenia said that "the old
folk" told them, but she was not sure if they were true. In my
presentation I endeavour to show how Ksenia's "genre system" reflects
her "worldview" (the ideas about the world and the human and nonhuman
beings who inhabit it), and how the preferring of some genres reflects her
personality traits. I will also introduce some examples of genre shifting that
occurred during the interviews, and speak about some poetic devices that Ksenia
used in her narratives.
Wolfgang
Mieder
Alan Dundes
(1934-2005) was a giant of international folkloristics, the perfect proof that
proverbs are not universal truths, for he was indeed a "Jack of all trades
and master of all". Whatever he touched with his keen mind, his polyglot
comparative approach, his ability to amass references, and his incredible
interpretive gift turned to scholarly gold. Alan Dundes was a great
communicator, a person who never tired of championing folklore as a science
that offers answers to some of the most complex questions of humanity. But no
matter what project Alan Dundes dealt with, proverbs always entered into the
discussion as formulaic signs strategically employed to express what he called
worldview. This basic concept informed much of Alan Dundes's work on proverbs
for more than four decades, as can be seen from such articles as "Thinking
Ahead: A Folkloristic Reflection of the Future Orientation in American
Worldview" (1969), "Slurs International: Folk Comparisons of
Ethnicity and National Character" (1975), and many others. There are also
such theoretical articles as "Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking
Folklore" (1964, with Ojo Arewa), the incredibly influential "On the
Structure of the Proverb" (1975), "On Whether Weather 'Proverbs' Are
Proverbs" (1984), and "Paremiological Pet Peeves" (2000). His
essay volume entitled The Wisdom of Many. Essays on the Proverb (1981,
with W. Mieder) has also had a significant influence on proverb studies.
Of special importance is Alan Dundes's controversial book with its proverbial
title Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder. A Portrait of German Culture
through Folklore (1984) with its many examples of German proverbs and other
folkloric and literary sources that are interpreted as a provocative picture of
the "German national character". And his book on The Art of Mixing
Metaphors. A Folkloristic Interpretation of the "Netherlandish
Proverbs" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1981, with Claudia Stibbe)
contains 115 interpretive essays explaining the origin, history, and meaning of
the proverbs and proverbial expressions illustrated in the painting, finally
making sense of this chaotic picture by going beyond mere identification of the
images to an interpretation of their deeper meanings as statements of the
follies and foibles of human life as they existed in the sixteenth century and
survive to this day. These contributions and many more will be discussed in
this tribute to Alan Dundes as a major force in the international field of
paremiology.
George
Mifsud-Chircop
Il-Mosta,
Malta
The predominant
anti-hero in Maltese folk narrative is Gahan (/'djahan/). He is the wise fool,
popular with one and all in contemporary Malta. However, in the first half of the
twentieth century there was a historical undercurrent which, through children's
literature, has manipulated and bowdlerised the discursive richness of Maltese
folk culture to the extent of framing Gahan as a "light-headed" fool,
at times defining his anecdotes, brimming with sagacity, slyness, guile, cheats
and deceits, as "stupidities". It is the aim of this paper to show
how through his research and publications the present author has challenged
this pseudo-scientific assertion which has been crystallised in the native
language of the Maltese archipelago. Humour is not only a device to uphold
interest in the tale. Above all it also facilitates the comprehension of the
progression of events, thus heightening effectiveness and efficiency of the
narration. Although artificially indulging in anti-social behaviour, the
Maltese wise fool semantically also takes the role of a social critic in his
farce as well as that of an interceder for the injured and the insulted. He is
a poetic vehicle to express folk wisdom, often putting the fool’s cap on
himself. His tales are a kind of "ritual of rebellion" which
represents an institutionalized way of expressing antagonism towards authority.
His anecdotes, better known in Maltese as "praspar" (/p'ra:spar/),
constitute the temporary subversion of a conscious, symbolic order in the
interests of a pleasure-oriented subconscious. Gahan's duty is to change chaos
to its inverse, cosmos, social disorder to order, the indistinct to the
distinct, disequilibrium to equilibrium, to create life and the symbolic
universe of our life.
Kati
Mikkola
How did rural people
adapt to modern society? How did folk schools reorganize the borders of the
public and the private spheres in agrarian villages? Were new educational ideas
resisted? Might people have even overturned dominant ideas through parody and
humour? Modernization and popular education have been previously analysed
mostly from the per spective of the cultural elite and their ideological goals.
The purpose of my presentation is to examine these processes also from the
perspective of ordinary persons. In Finland, primary schools began to be built
starting in the mid-1860s. In principle, the new public school contradicted the
fundamentals of the old estate system: the aim was not to train children for
specific jobs so that they could occupy a particular niche in society, but to
provide a general, civic education so that ordinary persons could now
participate in social life more fully. In schools, the ideas of the elite
received their ritual and performative forms, but at the same time they were
also shaped by local conditions. In my paper I shall briefly analyse the
tensions between the ideological educational ideas of the elite and the ideas
held by the ordinary people. My research material consists of recollected
narratives written by agrarian peasants and labourers. These source materials
illuminate the causes and means of resistance against modernization. In the
recollections of ordinary people, argumentation against the public school
system and other reforms is characterized by an attempt to preserve a
conventional worldview, way of life, and social order. Resistance to public
schools was linked to the fact that they posed a clear threat to the
traditional status system of the community. Just as public schools affected
everyday life at the level of mentality, practices and social activity,
criticism and resistance took place on several different levels.
Éva
Mikos
Budapest,
Hungary
In course of a
research project focusing on the investigation of the 19th century
Hungarian popular literature (primarily almanacs and other popular prints), I
have encountered several printed narratives that are in some way interrelated
with folklore texts. The character of this relationship may vary: since the
Romantic era several literary texts emerged in popular literature, which
Romantic literary texts clearly aimed at "re-producing" certain
features of popular (folk) culture and oral narration. These narratives can
basically be assigned to the genres of tale, legend or heroic poem. These
genres in the contemporary Hungarian literary canon were regarded as novelty
and their reception was accompanied by harsh disputes. Whereas elite literature
was engaged in arguing for or against the legitimacy of such narrative genres,
of the possible utilisation of folklore genres and discourses, popular
literature in the meantime integrated all sorts of novelty. This integration
was coupled with an effort to harmonise these new narrative genres with former,
well-established narrative traditions. What do these narrative traditions mean?
In 18-19th century Hungarian popular literature, in almanacs and
other popular prints several such genres had flourished, which narrative texts
(historical legends, anecdotes, jokes, riddles etc.) later were collected by
folklorists from oral folk tradition at the end of the 19th century
and then in the 20th century. The publishers of the popular prints
not only made use of oral tradition but also affected it, since presumably
these popular prints in the second half of the 19th century
considerably influenced peasant folklore. In Hungarian literary and folklore
studies distinguished attention has been paid to these interrelated connections
between written and oral tradition - primarily focusing upon lyric genres
(analysing both texts and tunes). My own investigations intend to point out
similar tendencies and mutual effects with regard to narrative genres (either
in verse or in prose), which interrelations are to be illustrated in the
presentation with some characteristic textual examples.
Margaret
A. Mills
Columbus,
Ohio, USA
In both the Shi'a
passion plays, ta'zieh, and in the formerly widely performed secular romances
designated dastan, the heroes and their allies sing poetry, either in part or
at all times, whereas their adversaries speak in prose. In the passion plays,
the two sides interact in their respective registers, whereas in the case of
the dastan, the "bad guys" are strategically incapable of hearing or
understanding the poetic utterances of the heroic side. Thus the songs of
dastan become a kind of restricted code accessible only to the virtuous. This
paper will explore the somewhat problematic relations of the poetic portions of
prosimetric performances in different genres to the cultural ideals of mystical
poetry in Persian, and to the supremely honored Arabic of the Qur'an, which is
regarded as the most sublime verbal expression, but also "not
poetry".
Nada
MiloševiD-<or:eviD
Belgrade,
Serbia
This paper is
concerned with:
1) folk
materials from the beginning of the nineteenth to the beginning of the
twentieth century (written down in Vuk Karadzic's collections; in the
periodical publications; in the archives of the Serbian Academy of Science and
Arts), with an exception of a tale found in a manuscript from the end of the
fifteenth century;
2) the
second source consists of materials from the field collections recorded in the
middle of the twentieth century (in the regions of south Serbia and Kosovo and
Metohija.
3) the
third source deals with the most recent texts dated from the last five years
(recorded in the area of central Serbia - Shumadija).
Although the old
material dictated to the collector, or memorized by him does not preserve the
information about "the folklore in action", it can be compared with
the new recordings in many distinctive traits. Through the method of text
analysis it is possible to observe a given period, cultural and social
environment, different mythological layers as well as parts of patterns of
deeply-ingrained conventional codes; psychological characteristics, the common
understandings of symbols and representations, the semantic system. Of primary
importance are the structure, the theme and the motifs of the tales, their
formulaic system. The subject of this paper is limited mainly to the narratives
which have corresponding numbers in Antti Aarne & Stith Thompson's
catalogue The Types of the Folktale are AT 460-462; and AT 930-934. The
results of the investigation show that the awareness of the need of
"adjustment" to the genre makes visible the evolution of the genre
and the general problem of the concept of genre in each concrete performance of
the tale. The special role in this "adjustment" belongs to the
legend. The legend becomes a kind of storehouse for other genres, mainly
because of its spiritual, psychological and cultural determination, and its
persistence.
Tatiana
Minniyakhmetova
Innsbruck,
Austria
There was not any
necessity to tell about rites and rituals in traditional society, while
participating in the events, every generation learned the intangible heritage
spontaneously. However, nowadays narratives about rituals are mostly connected
with special interests of individuals in kinship relations, or in more unique
occasions connected with interests of scholars. In this paper I would like to
examine the transfer of socio-cultural behaviour from the dimension of human
life into the verbal dimension, and the consequences that this transfer from
one dimension into another have on the material described. After transferring
from the medium of speech into writing a narrative becomes concrete. My paper
concerns the problem, what this 'material described' represents. My examples
represent narratives of adult respondents, with texts about celebrating
weddings among the Udmurt and Bashkir people. Variations show whether the
particular story concerns a person's private life or it is impersonal.
According to this subdivision, they have features of different genres. The
narratives about rituals characterize integrity of ritual disregarding whether
the story is detailed or very short. It has good structure, namely by talking
about the beginning of the ritual and by revealing its end in the conclusion.
Earlier rites were part of the informants' everyday life and also part of their
practical knowledge, or at least they were considered by them as practical
knowledge. This is the reason why these narratives represent special phenomena.
Mahendra
Kumar Mishra
India
Folk narratives as
oral tradition in Indian society represent the cultural expression of
collective mind. India as the country of unity in diversity perpetuates
cultural tradition in various expressive forms incorporating change across time
and space. Folk narrative like purana (myth) Kavya (epic) and katha (tales)
reinterpreted by the people with changing social order. Continuity of folk
narrative is made possible through the traditional storytellers and
professional singers/ caste genealogists. But with social change the profession
of story telling and the epic singing tradition has been affected seriously.
Modernity and education, socio-economic change has brought a drastic
transformation in folk and tribal society. People accepted techno-economic
change for their sustenance and accordingly their narrative singers also
changed their profession. They mould the narratives according to the need of
their patrons. They also mould the texts independently to make them more
acceptable to the audience with logical purpose and meaning. On the basis of
these premises, the aim of my paper will be to study continuity and change in tribal
folk narrative in Orissa. The castes and tribes of Orissa have rich narrative
traditions. Their content and context is interwoven in aesthetic and
ritualistic aspects. However, contemporary social context directs the creative
mind of the singers to change the content as per the social need. Folk
Narrative of the Bhunjia and Saora tribes of Orissa represent the above
premises. If on the one hand the Saora have been deeply influenced by Christian
literature and remoulded their native folklore, the Bhunjia have been deeply
influenced by the Hindu puranic texts and have tried to acculturate themselves
with the greater Hindu society.
Durgadas
Mukhopadhyay
New Delhi,
India
Pabuji ki Phad is an audiovisual
performance of folk narratives in Rajasthan, India. Phad or scrolls are
painted by the Chipa and Joshi castes. The Bhopas use these paintings as visual
aids while singing and dancing to illustrate the legend of their hero Pabuji.
These paintings have very strong religious and community connotations. They
have a symmetrical composition, as they are meant to be placed in the house
shrines for meditation. Pabuji ki phad depicts incidents from the life
of Pabuji, a prince who lived in the early 14th century. He is a
folk hero of Rajasthan and is worshipped as the incarnation of god. The phad
or scroll is about ten metres long. Bhopas are invited by the local villagers
to perform in their areas during times of misfortune. Bhopa men sing the ballad
and the women show the lamp and highlight the painted area which is being
elaborated in the song. They play the ravanhatta or the string
instrument, the dholak or the drum and other musical instruments
accompanying the audio-visual performance. With the painting rolled up on two
shafts of bamboo the Bhopa travels from village to village with the intent of
singing the liturgical epic of the exploits of the hero god Pabuji. This
performance is the principal ritual of the cult of Pabuji. There are only two
temples dedicated to Pabuji in his native village of Kolu. So rather than the
worshippers coming to the temple to honour their deity, the bringing of the par
painting to the villagers represents, in a sense, the temple coming to the
worshippers. The Bhopa is assisted by his wife, his son, who may be an
apprentice or other person, who points to the scenes on the phad about
which he is singing. The scenes in the epic tend to be of martial nature. The
recitation and singing and dancing continue all night long. Just before dawn,
the ceremony ends and the phad is rolled up.
Ilona
Nagy
Budapest,
Hungary
The curious
wonder-narrative in the apocryphal Acta Petri as a theme with a paradox
phrase became popular already in medieval Europe. It found its way to the
legends of salvation, as well as to the medieval manuscripts of the apocryphal Evangelium
Nicodemi. These late manuscripts are not sources, but a documentation of
this well-known popular tradition (spread first of all in the vita and miraculum
literature). The investigated Judas-story occurs only in two manuscripts. Not
only these two manuscripts, but even the type in general was never translated
into any other languages. The study tries to follow this strange process: a
narrative from an apocryphal source acquires variants from another apocryphon
in the course of transmission, and becomes an explanatory legend of oral nature
at the end of the twentieth century.
Sadhana
Naithani
New Dehli,
India
From anthropological
to psychoanalytical and from the study of the 'traditional' to that of 'contemporary',
folk narrative theories have emphasized a conjunction between lore and life of
the folk. This paper moves away from this position to identify post-modern and
post-colonial folklores - those whose practice expresses not an essential unity
between folklore and reality, but disjunctions between the lore and life of
folk. This paper presents neither traditional nor contemporary, but post-modern
and post-colonial realities of folklore. Shifts in folk narrative theories and
practices are related to the ever-changing reality of folklore. In the course
of the twentieth century, wars, migrations, and multinational trade have
created unprecedented relationships between folk and lore, whereby disjunction
is neither a corruption of the traditional, nor the creation of contemporary,
but rather the defining aspect of a new relationship between folk and lore.
Folk narrative theory in 21st century requires major shifts so as to
include the post-modern and post-colonial expression of folklore and study the
disjunctions.
Junko
Nakayama
Kyoto,
Japan
Seit 1885 hat Takejiro
Hasegawa "Chirimen-bon" (Crapepaper books) herausgegeben. Das Wort
"Chirimen" stammt eigentlich vom seidenen Kimono-Stoff, der sehr
feine Fältchen hat und weich ist, und "-bon" bedeutet Buch.
Chirimen-bon besteht natürlich aus Papier, das auch sehr feine
Fältchen hat. Nachdem man Text und schöne kunstvolle
Holzschnittbilder auf das japanische Papier gedruckt hat, verarbeitet man das
mit einer speziellen Technik, so dass das Papier Fältchen bekommt. Da das
japanische Papier sehr zäh und weich ist, nimmt es dabei keinen Schaden,
sondern wird noch weicher. Auf diesem kunstvollen Papier wurden japanische
Volksmärchen und Gedichte auf Englisch, Deutsch, Französisch,
Spanisch, Portugiesisch und auch Holländisch gedruckt. Am Ende des
17. Jahrhunderts (Anfang der Edo-Zeit) hat sich das Bakufu, die japanische
Regierung, nach aussen hin fast ganz abgeschlossen, und 1867 wieder
geöffnet. Japan musste schnell ausländische Sprachen lernen und sich
die Wissenschaften der Neuzeit zueignen. Andererseits waren für
Ausländer solche kunstvolle, teure japanische Bücher mit
Volksmärchen und Gedichten eine gute Methode, Japan besser kennen und verstehen
zu lernen, und zugleich auch gute japanische Souvenier. Heute gibt es nur
wenige Chirimen-bon in Japan, ungefähr 15 bis 20, darunter am meisten
Englische, Deutsche und Französische jeweils etwa 12, und von anderen
Sprachen noch weniger. Der Inhalt der Bücher ist derselbe, nur die Sprache
ist verschieden. Es gibt inhaltlich zwei Gruppen, eines ist die
Volksmärchen-Serie, die etwa 8 oder 9 Märchen enthält, und die
andere besteht aus einigen einzelnen Büchern, die damalige Gedichte oder
Literatur enthalten. Ich behandle hier "Kojo, Schiragiku"
(Fräulein Weissaster), das Tetsujiro Inoue im chinesischen Stil gedichtet
hat, und Karl Florenz ins Deutsche übersetzt hat. Dieses Buch enthält
ausserdem noch einige Gedichte, ein davon aus dem 12. Jahrhundert, und
andere neuere aus der Meiji-Zeit.
Siraporn
Nathalang
Bangkok,
Thailand
Claude
Lévi-Strauss, a prominent structuralist, advocates that if we take a
corpus of myths in a given culture and analyze their underlying structure, we
would be able to decode the hidden messages sent from the ancestors to our
generation. This paper thus aims at analyzing how various Tai myths told among
the Thai-Tai peoples in various areas in Southeast Asia reveal the messages
sent from Thai-Tai ancestors. Black Tai and White Tai in northern Vietnam are
now still non-Buddhists whereas the rest of the Tai speaking peoples mentioned
here, namely, Dehong Tai in Dehong, Tai Lue in Xixuangpanna, China; Shan and
Tai Khoen in Shan State, Myanmar; Laotian in Laos and Thai people in Thailand
are all Theravada Buddhists. The structural analysis of various Thai-Tai myths
reveals that the messages the ancestors are trying to convey to our later
generation concern the conflicts in their minds whether to continue respecting
the Nature Gods or to adopt the later introduced religion, Buddhism. The case
of the Rice Myth is an example. Versions of Black Tai and White Tai Rice myth
indicate the state where the Rice Goddess, one of the Nature Gods, still had
power over human beings and was still being highly respected. If we look at the
Rice Myth of Dehong Tai, Tai Lue, Tai Khoen and northern Thai people who are
Buddhists, we find that they not only have the story of the Mighty Rice Goddess
as do the Black and White Tai, but they also have another story in which the
Rice Goddess and the Buddha were rivals, competing over who would command more
respect from the people. This is an indication of "negative
discourse" between the indigenous beliefs and Buddhism. This kind of story
reflects the reluctance in the mind of Thai-Tai ancestors, the question
"Who should we worship: the Nature Gods or the Buddha?" The Laotian
versions, however, pick up another theme which reflects a more oppositional
discourse: the story treats the Rice Goddess as equally important as the Buddha
by telling the development of the size of the rice grains in parallel with the
stories of the four Buddhas in the history of Buddhism. This, then, reflects a
more integrated aspect of the two religions. Several other myths will also be
used to decode similar messages concerning religious conflicts that existed in
agricultural societies, where people tried to harmonize Buddhism into their
ways of life in rice culture where their Nature Gods have been deeply rooted.
Harold
Neemann
Laramie,
Wyoming, USA
Over the last
twenty-five to thirty years, the fairy tale fashion emerging in late seventeenth-century
France has received due critical attention. Critics have analyzed the
production of literary fairy tales in the 1690's as a complex socio-cultural
and literary phenomenon. The contes merveilleux by Perrault and other
seventeenth- century authors, most of whom were women, assumed very strategic
functions in the production of meanings in the context of the literary quarrel
between the Ancients and the Moderns, which marked the history of
seventeenth-century French literature. Perrault is not only known as the author
of Contes de ma mère l'oye, but also as the champion of the
Moderns. Significantly, the fairy tale fashion occurred during and in the wake
of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Given that Perrault was a major
protagonist in the literary quarrel and the creation of a new genre, i.e., the conte
merveilleux littéraire, it is not an exaggeration to suggest
that he conceived of his fairy tales as a literary model in support of the
modernist cause. Although the literary fairy tale per se has its origin
in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, the contes merveilleux
attest to a distinctive style of imitating folk narratives; a style that has
significantly molded the genre as we have inherited it, i.e., a hybrid form
consisting of both folkloric and literary elements. By evoking and playing on
the purported folkloric origins of the contes, as opposed to the classical
genres, Perrault created his own version of simple and naïve tales.
Interestingly, just as the contes merveilleux served as a model of
modernist literature, many seventeenth-century French tales subsequently became
models of narrative for new methods of interpretation bearing on new critical
theories.
Siegfried
Neumann
Rostock,
Germany
Dass "einfache
Leute" zur Feder greifen, um "ihr Leben aufzuschreiben", bildet
in Deutschland noch die Ausnahme. Geschieht es doch, wollen die Schreiber/innen
in der Regel Kindern und Enkeln Nachricht hinterlassen, "wie es
früher war". Daher werden diese meist handgeschriebenen
Lebensberichte gewöhnlich in der Familie aufbewahrt. So gelangen sie nur
selten zur Kenntnis der Öffentlichkeit, und falls doch, dann in Drucken an
eher abgelegener Stelle. Erst in den letzten Jahren hat ein wachsendes
Interesse an "wahren Schicksalen" eine Reihe solcher Autobiographien
ans Licht gebracht. Sie dienen zumeist nur als ansprechender Lesestoff, stellen
jedoch neben ihrem erzählerischen Gehalt auch eine wichtige Quelle
für sozial-, kultur- und mentalitätsgeschichtliche Studien dar. Hier
werden lebensgeschichtliche Fakten und Motivationen ansonsten eher
"stummer" Sozialschichten im gesamtgesellschaftlichen Kontext
greifbar. Das anhand von Autobiographien "einfacher Leute" in
Deutschland herauszustellen, ist das Anliegen meines Kongressbeitrags.
Liisa-Maria
Nitovuori
The paper is based on
an ongoing doctoral dissertation research on the formation of gender ideology
among youth workers in Finland. Through oral interviews, written recollections
and publications on youth work, the study seeks to produce information on the
meanings assigned by youth workers to gender in their work. In Finland the law
obliges municipalities to organise youth activities. Also non-governmental
organisations and religious communities are active in this field. The relevance
of youth work lies considerably in its ability to create informal learning
environments. Due to this characteristic, much of the education in youth work
takes place in the interaction between youth workers and the youth themselves.
This would suggest a hidden curriculum, which is present in the narration of
the youth workers. In this paper youth work is preliminarily defined as a
historical ethos, a tradition that conveys pedagogical, human and cultural
meanings. Gender is viewed as a narrative motive within this tradition. Philosophically,
the research is guided by phenomenology. The aim is to find a dialogue between
theory and practice and to see what questions and challenges the empirical
material may pose for the paper's phenomenological approach, which then may
need to be readjusted. The study employs methods from both textual analysis and
visual arts. In this paper, some of the prospects of a combination of
phenomenology and arts-informed narrative research are discussed. To shed light
on these, examples are drawn from a pilot field project that was carried out in
a youth club in Helsinki. Other empirical material referred to is a corpus of
written recollections by Finnish youth workers. Interviews and written
materials include verbal narratives; arts, however, provide visual ones. The
pilot field project included both verbal and visual methods of collecting
narratives, such as interviews and photography.
Dorothy
Noyes
Columbus,
Ohio, USA
As James Scott reminds
us, the plain speaking of truth to power is a rare, charismatic occurrence.
Rather, the political communication of subalterns depends on various strategies
of indirection, notably folk voice, a mode of communication that depends on
symbolic coding and the overt acceptance of subordinate status to achieve a
hearing in the public sphere. This paper examines the emergence of localist
voice in seventeenth century Languedoc, just after the Wars of Religion, when the
defeated region is seeking to reconstruct itself and to win royal favor under
the new absolutist regime. The The ater of Béziers, in competition with
other carnivalesque performances throughout the region, constructs a
distinctive set of local personae through whom the community's concerns may be
voiced to the center. As the stylistic features and communicative parameters of
these personae are modified over time, they take on a more restrictive
character, anticipating what in the nineteenth century we will recognize as
folk voice. Increasingly the local speaks only when spoken to, called into
being by an apostrophe from the center. Moreover, to be understood the local
now requires an interpreter, the provincial intellectual, who is the historical
ancestor of the folklorist.
Susanne
Nylund Skog
Stockholm,
Sweden
In Sweden, as in other
European countries, there seems to be a growing anti-Semitism, or at least a
more visible one. In a study that I recently began, I investigate the
consequences of this situation for Jewish women, born in Sweden. Many of these
women choose freely and selectively when to identify and present themselves as
Jewesses. My interest concerns, when, how and with which arguments they make
such choices. The aim of the project is to make an empirical investigation of
how Jewish women, in their life stories, handle and understand their heritage
and the identity categories that surround them. Furthermore, I investigate how
recent changes in Swedish society affect their identity formation. My attention
is therefore directed toward how societal norms and interrelated mechanisms of
inclusion and exclusion help to shape Jewish female identity. In this paper I
will concentrate on the motivations behind, and consequences of, when the women
break the silence about their Jewish heritage, and choose to identify as
Jewesses. Many of the interviewees have agreed to participate in my project
because they find it vital to share their experiences as Jewesses. They also
argue for the importance of transmitting experiences from earlier generations
of Jews, so that the suffering of the Jewish people not will be forgotten or
denied. At the same time, they are concerned that this makes apparent existing
conflicts and contradictions between Jews in Sweden. There is in the words of
one interviewee "a high price to be paid for breaking the silence".
Diarmuid
Ó Giolláin
Cork,
Ireland
Perspectives on
folklore and popular culture have tended to move between "populism"
and "miserabilism". The populist approach emphasises the harmonious
collective values of a traditional social order as a model for that other collective,
the nation. The miserabilist approach sees the value of development and
education in prising individuals loose from traditional cultural values and
allowing them to attain their potential in modern society. One of the supposed
characteristics of traditional society is orality, so that the more literacy is
present in a community, the more the individual stands out at the expense of
the collective and the more the shorter historical time stands out at the
expense of the longue durée. The question of public opinion in
traditional society is a particularly interesting one. The notion of the
bourgeois public sphere presupposes rational debate among like-minded
individuals who shape the opinions of the collective. Can we find a similar
process at work in traditional societies with their supposedly collectivist
ethos? Artistic creativity is in ways a similar phenomenon, insofar as it deals
with the relationship between an individual and a collective. The nature of
artistic creativity has been a fundamental question in the history of folklore
studies from the Grimm Brothers onwards, and the collective nature of that
creativity has been emphasized at the expense of the individual. The question
of artistic creativity today cannot be separated from the question of
ownership. But if variability is one of the characteristics of folklore, can
the concept of ownership exist, and if ownership, can copyright exist in
folklore? Traditional cultures are often understood in terms of commons, in
which farmers shared their seeds and storytellers shared their tales. The
recording of traditional cultures is a form of alienation since it nearly
always involves the establishment of a copyright regime. The extreme copyright
regimes of today have made artistic creativity within a traditional
collectivist aesthetic particularly difficult to define and to defend. In that
sense the identification of folklore has never been more problematic.
Ayelet
Oettinger
Jewish
pilgrimage to the holy land became possible from the 12th century.
The first Hebrew itineraries, documenting Israel at the time, provide
invaluable information for historians. Yet, looking at travelogs from a
literary point of view indicates that this travel literature constitutes a
genre comprised of literary conventions, rather than an accumulation of
independent, impressionistic writing. Early Hebrew itineraries, written during
the 12th-13th centuries, mainly those written by Benjamin
of Tudela, Petahya of Regensburg, Yaakov son of Netanel haCohen and Shemuel son
of rabbi Shimshon of Provance, will be discussed. These writers differ in their
places of origin, social and economical background, reasons for coming to Israel,
descriptive ability and talent. Their works, in addition to being written in
Hebrew, share three thematic principles, however:
1. All
itineraries are based on ancient regional lists of holy places in Israel.
2. Despite
their keen interest in the exotic and exceptional outside the holy land, they
disregard Israel of their time, seldom describing its people, geography, flora,
fauna, etc.
3. The
depicted reality is restricted to holy places - tombs of saints and wise men -
and the legends on their miraculous abilities.
The comparison of
these three principles with the norms used in Christian and Arabic travelogs of
the same period reveals that they function as fundamentals of the Hebrew
itinerary. Indeed, this literary genre was meant to strengthen the spirit of
its readers and to express the national-religious craving of the Jewish people,
rather than to depict travel routes, or the land itself.
Hisako
Ono
Kariya-City,
Japan
In der bisherigen
Forschung der Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM) - besonders nach der
Dekonstruktion des Mythos der mundartgetreuen Märchenaufzeichnungen der
Brüder Grimm - bilden vor allem die kontinuierlichen Textumschreibungen
durch Wilhelm Grimm sowie mögliche französische Einflüsse durch
die Hugenotten die Hauptgegenstände der meisten Kritiken. Es kann zwar
einerseits wie ein Widerspruch gegen die Grundprinzipien der KHM aussehen, wenn
die Brüder Grimm "aus eigenen Mitteln nichts hinzugesetzt" und
die Erzählungen mit verdächtig "fremdem Ursprung"
ausgeschieden haben. Im Hintergrund des Umarbeitungsprozesses und der
Auswahlkriterien der KHM scheinen aber anderseits die sogenannte
Begriffsverschiedenheit "des Einheimschen" zwischen den Brüdern
Grimm und ihr eigenes Bild "des Natürlichen", "des
Poetischen", "des Deutschen", "des Nibelungischen" und
"des Altertümlichen" zu existieren. Dabei spielt der Begriff des
"Waldes" eine große Rolle. Dieser Aufsatz hat den Zweck zu
präzisieren, dass das mit den untergehenden "Wäldern"
verglichene Naturpoesiebild bei Jacob Grimm und das "einheimisch"
gewordene Kunstpoesiebild bei Wilhelm Grimm im Hintergrund der Umstilisierung
der KHM und ihres wissenschaftlichen Lebens als eine Idee existieren. In 96 der
insgesamt 200 Erzählungen (außer den Kinderlegenden) der KHM
(7. Aufl.1857) kommen Darstellungen von Wäldern vor, die durch die
Umschreibungsprozesse ergänzt und dadurch immer detaillierter wurden. Am
Anfang des 19. Jhs., als sie Volksliteratur gesammelt haben, gab es aber,
forstwissenschaftlich und vegetationsgeographisch gesehen, in gesammten
Deutschland nur wenige Wälder, mehrere abgeholzte Einöden und
teilweise schon aufgeforstete, junge Wäldchen. Dieser Kontrast zwischen
der Anwesenheit der großen Wälder im Text und ihrer realen
Abwesenheit motivierte meine Forschung. Nicht nur die KHM, sondern auch die
anderen Werke der Brüdern Grimm als Geisteswissenschaftler wie Deutsches
Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm wird hier als Text
eingesetzt. Jacobs Wissen von der Geschichte des Verhältnisses zwischen
Menschen und Wald bei seinen Weisthümer[n], Deutsche[n]
Rechtsalterthümer[n] und Deutsche[r] Mythologie wird vor allem als
Argmente bei meiner Forschung verwendet.
Oladele
Caleb Orimoogunje
Unilag,
Nigeria
This paper studies the
roles symbolism plays in the verbal arts used in Yoruba indigenous healthcare
practices. It also probes into how various scholars have employed symbolism as
a critical concept and tool in their analysis of literary works to depict the
relevance of symbolism to literary texts and the outside world; this makes it
possible for the study to establish the fact that symbolism is unavoidable in
man's daily activities among the Africans in general and the Yoruba in
particular. An attempt is also made to show how symbolism is related to time,
place, object, and character in Yoruba indigenous healthcare practices. This
explanation shows how the time, place and character in their health-related
verbal arts make them to be in close contact with practical and applied
cultural values of their society. The psychological dimension as affecting the
users of these verbal arts is also investigated. Furthermore, a more elaborate
analysis is given on the symbolic characters in this study by suggesting
various classes of characters with the ideas they symbolise in the
health-related verbal arts among the Yoruba. The symbolic analysis in this
study is discussed at the meta-symbolic, meto-symbolic and phono-aesthetic
levels.
Toshio
Ozawa
Max Lüthi pointed
out in his 1947 book Das europäische Volksmärchen that the
fundamental characteristics of European ordinary tales are one-dimensionality,
depthlessness, abstract style, isolation and universal interconnection,
sublimation, and all-inclusiveness. In 1969 I translated Lüthi's book into
Japanese. After the translation I edited with a college a material collection
in 27 volumes from all parts of Japan and also visited many storytellers in
Japanese villages. When I sought to analyze Japanese ordinary tales using
Lüthi's conception, I found almost the same style of telling, though motifs,
happenings, and characters are different. How can this be explained? The
stories were told to be heard: for the ear, things must be clear and simple.
Otherwise the audience cannot picture in their own minds the scenes they heard.
This abstract style must have been formed during the process of oral
transmission. Today in Japan there are many storytellers who learn folktales
from books, where they are presented in a style fit for reading. Abstract style
has disappeared. Since I believe that storytellers and parents should learn the
original simple and clear style, in 1992 I established the Märchen
Akademie in different cities throughout Japan. Today it can be found in 54
cities. The central curriculum is the study of the theory of Max Lüthi,
and textual analysis derived from his theory. In my paper I will give an
overview of the entire curriculum. After three years of the fundamental course,
I began to teach an advanced course, where students practice retelling the text
with an abstract style in the meaning of Max Lüthi. I then publish then
the retold folktales at my folktale institute. At present, 18 volumes have been
published. The theory of Max Lüthi thus demonstrates its importance in
lands, where the practice of the traditional storyteller has declined.
Piret
Paal
Helsinki,
Finland
The Finnish Cancer
Patients, the Finnish Cancer Association and the Finnish Literary Society
collected stories about cancer in 1994 under the title: "When I fell ill
with cancer". During this writing competition people were asked to express
their cancer-related experiences, thoughts, and feelings. As a result,
altogether 594 women and 67 men from Finland shared their personal experiences.
As all people are different, there exists no such thing as a typical cancer
story, but there are themes that are persistent in all of the data collected.
The present paper describes four themes that are pervasive in the stories about
the cancer and more likely are generally common to the stories of illness. [EXPLANATION]
The emotionally hardest and most important in these stories is the moment of
diagnosis. It may be described as a moment, when a person is turned into a
patient. Because of the narrative structure and content this is described as
the peak of experiences. [COMPLICATION] The second important theme is the
impact of illness. It may be the symptoms of illness, the process of treatments
or the methods of coping with it. Depending on his/her needs narrator chooses
the approach. This is the explanatory part of narrative. [RESOLUTION] The third
theme appearing in stories observed is the view of death. The ways of naming it
are different and most likely dependent on the patients' view of life. As
psychologically it is the hardest subject for patients, in the narrative death
is hardly mentioned directly, here the narrators often use various poetical
expressions. [MORAL] The fourth theme concerns the philosophy of life and deals
with the meaning of illness. Here the patients/narrators usually evaluate their
illness experience. Typically this part of the narrative concludes with some
sort of concrete wisdom or saying.
Gyula
Paczolay
Veszprém,
Hungary
The first
Hungarian proverb collection is the Adagiorvm Graecolatinovngaricorvm
Chiliades Quinque by the Strassburg graduate Szekelyvasarhely schoolmaster
Janos Baranyai Decsi, published in Bartfa in 1598, comprising about one
thousand proverbs and idioms, including:
1. Universal
proverbs, found all over the world. ("No smoke without fire.")
2. Proverbs
originating in the Graeco-Roman classics. ("Let the cobbler stick to his
last", Pliny the Elder.)
3. Biblical
proverbs. ("You see a mote in your neighbour's eye but fail to see a beam
in your own.")
4. Proverbs
from Mediaeval Latin. ("Do not look a gift horse in the mouth.")
These can be
found in many European languages, and may have got into Hungarian via German
speaking students studying in Western universities and from one of the editions
of the Adagia of Erasmus. Other types:
1. German
proverbs. ("He who sits among the reeds can make a whistle of his
choice.")
2. Proverbs
related to Slavonic languages. ("Rust does not affect gold", "A
clever pig extracts a deep root".)
3. Slavonic
variant of a European proverb. ("A good priest learns until his
death.")
4. "A
lyer is caught sooner than a lame man." (later Hungarian wording:
"...than a lame dog"), having Italian (Piemontese, Bolognese), Old
French, Catalonian, Spanish equivalents.
5. "A
cheap meat yields a lean broth" also found in Turkish, Bulgarian,
Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and Czech. "A cheap fish yields a lean soup"
is common in Cheremis, Estonian, Finnish, Zyryan and Ukrainian, "Cheap
meat is eaten by the dogs" is found in different Slavonic and Baltic
languages.
6. "One
stone is sufficient to (frighten) one hundred crows" - found in Bulgarian,
Turkish and Persian.
7. "There's
no packed hay-cart unable to carry one more forkful of hay." No known
relationship.
Guntis
Pakalns
Alma Makovska
was the best contemporary narrator of the Latvian folk-tales known by Latvian
folklore researchers. Since 1987 more than 60 folk tales have been recorded
from her onto audio and video, a great number of them in multiple, repeated
versions. Alma Makovska had an excellent memory and narrative talent; her
repertory included several hundreds of different narratives - local legends,
ghost stories (including her personal experiences), tales based on dreams,
anecdotes and funny stories, as well as the history of her family,
recollections of ancient traditions, festivities, crafts, folk medicine,
including also songs (ca. 170), riddles, games and folk dances, etc. The
informant had inherited her tales mostly from her father (1889-1963), but also
from her uncle, grandfather (1790-1890), as well as her mother. Some of the
tales she had heard at school or read in textbooks. The author has succeeded in
finding some texts similar to Ms. Makovska's tales first published around 1896.
At the end of the 1980's Alma Makovska performed her tales in front of larger
audiences; several times she participated in TV and radio programmes. Alma
Makovska told her tales in the local dialect. In a written text very many
performance details are lost, e.g. intonation, changes of speech rhythm and
loudness, not to mention gestures, mimics, non-verbal dialogue with the
audience, etc. The paper will
1) characterise
the most significant peculiarities and "secrets" of her performance;
2) show
how facing the live tradition helps a researcher to "hear" and better
understand written records of tales, found in archives and publications;
3) discuss
how the recordings of the informant's tales have been used to teach both
children and adults how to perform, to tell tales.
Video samples will
demonstrate the way Alma Makovska performed her narratives.
Ulf
Palmenfelt
Visby,
Sweden
I understand
ethnography to mean a description of empirical material that is so meticulous
that it constitutes part of the scientific analysis. An ethnography of
narrating thus would include thorough descriptions of both the act of narrating
itself with all its cultural, social, communicative, and emotional aspects, as
well as of the narratives, their form, contents, meaning, function, and
aesthetics. Katharine Young's idea of describing a narrative situation as
consisting of a number (three, four, or many) of worlds or realms (Young 1987)
has proven to be extremely useful and productive. Its analytical strength lies
in its ability to provide links between text-centered and performance-centered
analyses, especially concerning the roles taken by participants during
different phases of the narrative event. When applying Young's model to a short
excerpt of a tape-recorded life history, its potency of reproduction becomes
obvious. First, the speaker appears to set up not one, but a number of parallel
taleworlds, occupying different positions in time and/or space. Complicated
liaisons are established between temporal and spatial elements of these
taleworlds. Second, inside Young's "Realm of the Ordinary" (or,
possibly, parallel to Young's "realm of thought", "realm of
interaction" or "social world") there seems to be need for a
"Realm of Experience", where all the not- yet-verbalized actions take
place. Furthermore, some taleworlds seem to belong to realms of dreams and
imagination, while others are situated in the future; still others (letters,
diaries) typically are not performed inside live narrating sessions, but appear
in frozen form. At different macro levels we find the taleworlds of the grand
narratives. (Young, Katharine Galloway 1987. Taleworlds and Storyrealms. The
Phenomenology of Narrative. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.)
Alexander
Panchenko
St.
Petersburg, Russia
The presentation deals
with the problems of symbolic, ritual and narrative resources which allow a
social group or a local community to consider a certain material object to be
sacred. "The elementary forms" of local cults of holy places can be
observed within some vernacular religious traditions in Russian countryside
where family and even individual shrines exist (or at least existed) which can
either disappear or not after their worshipper's (worshippers') death. However,
since a shrine comes to "communal possession", its symbolic meaning
becomes more complicated and reflected in a wide range of narratives and ritual
practices. Even at this level, it can be the matter of competition between
various families and/or ritual specialists. In urban culture and environment,
every sacred place is perceived and worshipped in different ways by various
groups of believers. At the same time, the multicultural nature of contemporary
urban environment allows more or less peaceful coexistence of various religious
discourses related to the same shrine. The paper deals with a number of
examples of the cults of local holy places in contemporary Russia.
Marilena
Papachristophorou
Athens,
Greece
A local legend transcribed
in several versions during fieldwork research in a small east Aegean island
forms the crux of the present paper. The "story" talks about the
habitation of the island by two brothers, Elias and Nicolas, some 200 years
ago; their descendants' families remain on the same lands to the present day.
The variants of this particular legend are usually considered as reliable - or
not reliable - historical sources; in this sense they touch upon oral history
and contribute to the construction of a consistent identity of the island's
inhabitants. A closer and more attentive approach to a group of legends
connected to the "main" one reveals a second semantic level, with
obvious connotations: the cavern inhabited by the two brothers, the symbolic weight
of their first names, the fraternal conflict underlined by the antagonism
between agriculture and livestock rearing, accompanied by the division of the
grounds etc. The principal questions this paper attempts to answer are: how the
story corresponds to real events and facts and to what degree it conveys and
mutes preexisting mythological elements, in relation either to surrounding
Modern Greek mythological traditions or possible mythological relics from a
remote (local) past, the latter partially revealed by archeological research.
In this paper it is argued that the position of this legend draws heavily from
its own and limited cultural context. Although it is an "independent"
narration describing precise historical facts and personae, it has nevertheless
developed in a consistent exchange with other narrations, beliefs, and
representations. It is thus proposed that the "Nicolas and Elias"
story is part of an entire, but restricted, mythological system inside the
borders of the miniscule island.
Anna
Papamichael-Koutroubas
Athens,
Greece
This study
aims at recording and presenting the genres of Greek narratives classified
according to their central theme. In the Greek classification system of these
cultural creations, one distinguishes four categories: a. Legends; b. Funny
stories; c. Myths; d. Tales. Besides these, another large category must be
noted: the proverbial expressions. Proverbial expressions, however, are not
independent like proverbs, which are more general and colourful though they are
classified together with proverbs, because they have in common figurative
expression, frequency of use and popular character. Our study will try to give
the causes and effects of the distinction between these narrative genres, their
characteristics and provide analysis of each genre respectively. The study will
also contain the subdivisions of each genre, e.g. for the first genre: a.
Legends:
1. Old
Legends (Oral History);
2. Lands
and Places;
3. Submerged
Places and Towns;
4. Death
and the Underworld (Hades), Charon;
5. The
Dead and the Souls;
6. Vampires;
7. The
Fates and Destiny;
8. Diseases;
9. Causes;
10. Plants;
11. Animals
etc.
Through the
classification the various types of narrative, their content and their function
will be depicted. An attempt will be made to locate the basic theoretical areas
which differentiate the narrative genres, to present their relation to Worship,
History, Philosophy etc. and eventual literary unities, as well as to approach
the thematic of locality and systems of representation (magic, myths etc.). We
will try to approach the sector of social analysis and social morphology, of
methods and techniques of research. Other factors to be taken into account are
the spectrum of ethnographical research in relation to narratives, the
investigation of functional spaces (e.g. the agricultural, the urban space
etc.) and processes of social change with reference to groups historically and
culturally connected with the narratives.
Éva
Pócs
Budapest,
Hungary
The subject of the
paper is an extended research project which has been running for a number of
years now (involving a group of university students) in a Roman Catholic,
ethnic Hungarian community in Romania, called Gyimesközéplok. Our
aim is to do a full exploration of the religious life of a population of
approximately 4,000. Within this connections between official and popular
religiosity form an important part of my research, along with additional
connections between religion and magic, signs of the extinction of a
traditional belief system and popular religion, the forms in which they live on
and the emergence of new forms under the pressure of globalisation and
secularisation. My paper discusses how these processes are reflected in the
narrative tradition known to the community, in the textual and contextual
changes of narratives. The typical characters of local narratives of the
supernatural are the deities, saints and demons of Christian mythology, the
demonic creatures of traditional popular belief (incubus demons, fairies,
forest spirits, dragons), as well as the dead of the family; ghosts of dead
persons with no status as such and persons of supernatural power (witches and
witchdoctors, healers, fortune tellers and the figure of the Romanian priest).
Within this, dominance has been gained by the narrative tradition related to
the figures of Christian mythology (the Virgin Mary and the devil), and characters
of traditional folk demonology (which mingle with the figure of the Christian
devil), and foremost of all, the figure of the returning dead of the family,
along with the theme of witchcraft. The last two areas are also being
permanently reinforced, in different ways, by Christian teachings and the
activity of the Christian priests. This narrative tradition is also part of the
religious system: a partial survival of folk belief is related here to the fact
that religion is (still) a very important system of norms in this area. In
terms of genre, the most important categories of narratives range from myth,
legend, taboo legend and exemplum through to accounts of dreams and visions.
During fieldwork we noticed that belief tends to appear embedded in family histories
and rumours as opposed to the traditional genres of folklore. As far as the
actualisation, construction and context of these narratives are concerned, it
is characteristic that legends, whether Christian or non-Christian in content,
are usually only recited in ethnographic fieldwork situations. In the context
of the non-Christian demonic creatures of the folk belief an increasing role is
played by statements of and discourses on belief and disbelief, as well as by
negative legends. The remnants of the supernatural world of traditional folk
belief are best invoked by the tragedies, crises and emergencies of everyday
life. When there is a death in the family, the need to communicate with the
dead of the family actualises the narratives of the returning dead. In everyday
situations of emergency the living belief in bewitchment brings to light
witchcraft narratives. These are usually stories of personal experience; on the
other hand, they also play a role in constructing family histories and rumours
circulated within families of friends.
Gerald
Porter
Vaasa,
Finland
Juri Lotman (1975) has
mapped out what happens when narrative appears to be entirely absent, as in scientific
articles and timetables. Plotless texts affirm a particular world and its
ordering. They are organized according to the principle of binary oppositions
which establish fixed frontiers, while plotted texts cross the boundaries set
up by the plotless texts. Events take place whenever a character leaves the
space which is his or her own and enters some alien space. Personae can cross
the forbidden border both physically and mentally, and they can also be moved
to spaces which are not their own. Movement within the character's own space
and changes which do not involve boundary crossing are not considered events.
This paper considers songs used in England to scare birds as examples of this
kind of plotless narrative. "Rook starving", as it was called, used
to be a rite of passage into working life for many children in rural England. A
number of songs and charms used for this purpose were collected between 1851
and 1978. In addition, there are numerous circumstantial accounts of the
practice from the eighteenth century onwards. As documented, the songs of the
birdscarers are mostly short. They generally start explosively with a line like
"Shoo all you birds" or "Away you black devils away", but
after that they develop differently. Because of their functional nature, the
songs have a simple or cumulative structure, involving constant repetition. As
such, their circularity resists narrative development. However, some of the
songs have dynamic subtexts which explore aspects of powerlessness and the
possibility of disrupting established hierarchies. While many simply threaten
the birds, others make common cause with them. Some mock the landowner who had
sent them there, or other local farmers. In this way, they may indeed be
transgressive and, like the birds, cross forbidden boundaries.
Jyrki
Pöysä
Life historical
research has typically been interested in the thematics of life history narratives.
This is understandable not only because of the prominence of social sciences in
life-history research, but also because the subject, life history, is vague as
a genre: is it a genre, collection of genres or not a genre at all? In this
paper I am concerned with the poetics of life-history narrative in light of the
unity of action in narratives. The starting point for my exploration is
Aristotle's remarks about the plot in Greek tragedy. According to Aristotle a
"good" plot consists of incidents internally connected to each other
in a way that changing their mutual place would obscure the story (Poetics
1451a). In ideal tragedy parts of a story are motivated from the unity of
action, not from some other principle. A "bad" plot is an episodic
one, in which there is only a temporal connection between events of the story -
a case of post hoc instead of a case of propter hoc, causal connection
between events (1452a). This holds true also for history writing and Homeric
epic. An interesting parallel case is one person's life: life history told as a
temporal line of events would certainly not have been accepted as an example of
good plot by Aristotle. Plots based on one central figure are also bad plots.
According to Aristotle, "Unity of plot does not, as some persons think,
consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in
one man's life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many
actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action" (1451a). So, if
we are going to apply Aristotelian ideas about plot to life histories, there
seems to be a tendency to treat life historical narratives as narratives with
no (good) plot at all and life historical emplotting as a secondary phenomenon.
However, life histories do not usually seem to be plain inventories of
incidents. What kind of plot structures or elements of emplotment can we find
in life histories? What is the relation of the unity of action with other kinds
of principles of coherence, especially with the unity of person (Ich-Erzählung)
typical for life histories and other kinds of textual coherence? What is the
relationship of textual coherence with "cultural" coherence (cf.
Linde)?
Leonard
Norman Primiano
Radnor,
Pennsylvania, USA
Borrowing terms
suggested by British Marxist literary critic and historian, Raymond Williams, I
explore in this paper how such designations as "residual" and
"emergent" help to delineate vernacular religion's ambiguous and
complex character. Such an understanding, I argue, leads one to a richer
appreciation of responses to power within contexts of vernacular religious
expression; moreover, such a framework allows for comprehending religious life
as the sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic amalgamation of both
conformation and contestation. Such work also highlights the theoretical
contributions that contemporary folkloristics and religious studies can make to
each other, and how this act of distilling the two disciplines into a cross-pollinating
theoretical and methodological approach suggests trajectories for future
theoretical exchanges and applications.
Zuzana
Profantová
History is always a
problematic and incomplete reconstruction of that which no longer exists.
Concentration on everyday life of "common people" as well as on the
subjectivity of life experiences is generally typical of the histories of
everydayness. Although the objective circumstances and subjective behaviour
seldom overlap, the real tension between them creates an unusually interesting
research field for the interpretation of historical processes in life stories.
It has been shown that in attempting to understand how people interpret their
histories, it is not sufficient only to examine objective strengths and
structures. Those that cause essential changes to the social constellations,
which immediately concern a man himself, are not given beforehand. The
relationship of external and internal factors has to be determined constantly
and afresh. A micro-historical view offers an opportunity to map exactly this
interface in which the seeds of a society's dynamics are being sowed. In an
attempt to understand the present, one can get to a paradoxical situation: we
know a lot about it; however, we do not know something essential about it,
because cognition requires intervals. This applies mainly when one wants to
create a picture of a political event. Here, one often tends to easily
interchange the direct experience (either active or passive) of a contemporary
person with cognition (we interpret an event according to ideological or
moralistic schemes). Only later from a distance does one find out that it was
completely the other way around. That, which we consider to be understood,
later appeared to be an illusion. The era in which we lived until 1989 was more
or less exactly identified (socialism, real socialism, developed socialism, and
socialism with a human face). A citizen could and did not have to identify with
it as well as enter to a different extent into "the committed building of
socialism". However, the identity of a socialistic citizen was more or
less defined, as it was also supported by certain social certainties secured by
the socialist society in the field of employment, health care, education,
social welfare and accommodation etc. Persuasion about non-perversity of
socialist development was also fed the public awareness through the
disseminated idea of the irreversibility of a historic progress. November 1989
dealt this persuasion "a lethal blow." The idea of a progressive
headway towards a better future and rightful society encoded in the social
ideal appealed to a common man and a return to capitalism was generally considered
as unreal. Therefore, even after 1989 "democratic society",
"public against violence", "civil society", "market
society", "transformation", "transitions" and
"reform" etc were very often publicly discussed. Nevertheless, an
authorised denomination "towards the capitalistic yesterday" proved
to be real. A common citizen starts to lose orientation in this conceptual
chaos because they can not identify their era and thus can not identify with it
properly. They start to feel as if they were "excluded" from the
historical line. There is a danger that they will be alienated from the period
goals of their cohesion, and their civic involvement is growing weak. In
Czechoslovakia, fifteen years after 1945, there was a reinterpretation of
histories and an increase of knowledge about a number of secret activities of
the communist regime and secret police; archives containing items of secret
collaborators of the regime were opened. Ordinary people do not only feel put
off, but are astonished even by their own "common" past. Communist
ideals which they we propagandistically "absorbing together with maternal
milk" and thus necessarily "had got under their skin" show as
their own historical mistake, in which they participated. There is the threat
of a crisis of identity. "After all, they cannot deny their own
life!" Current historiosophical chaos subconsciously forces an individual
to escape from their own personal philosophical-historical shell, where they
try to put together a convenient version of their own life story. Social energy
of common people does not apply to "a better future" any more (we
have rung it out with the keys on the squares in 1989) but is invested into the
present. Philosophy of the period of stagnation and the "carpe
diem"-crisis gets the floor. The media seizes public opinion and the
thinking of the majority through "reality shows", which
"suck" the people into the imaginary world of a virtual reality. The
generation of constructors, devoted heroes, rioters and rebels is replaced by
the generation of hedonists, people enjoying their lives and spectators.
Instead of people doing great deeds, there are "million girls",
dancers, models and sportsmen etc. History is divided into Before November
(during totalitarianism and communism) and After November. Although this division
appears to be objective, it is measured by personal, subjective criteria i.e.
experiences, individual events but mainly by values. People in their life
histories confront the past and present in order to seize their own identity as
well as define the old and the past-November identity. The current era can be
characterised as a period of searching for an identity but also as an escape
from it. History in many cases turns inside out, which can lead to the loss of
continuity and integrity of personalities. A narrator talking about his or her
own life history presents and at the same time confirms, and defines himself in
a concrete version of his own life story. Simultaneously, he provides us with a
new look at historical events and their reflection in "small
histories", in micro-history.
RadvilP RacPnaitP
Kaunas,
Lithuania
The genre diversity of
narrative folklore is represented in the internationally accepted classification
of tales and legends proposed by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. However, the
preparation of national catalogues based on AT system encounters problems,
given that there exist narratives with contradictory genre particularities and
they do not easily fall into the limits of the one genre group. In her search
for more objective criteria for classification, the compiler of the revised
"Catalogue of Lithuanian narrative folklore" Bronislava KerbelytP has
taken the above-mentioned imperfections into consideration. She has worked out
an innovative structural-semantic analysis of folk texts, based on the
investigation of structural traits and on underlying semantic features of folk
narratives. Structural-semantic analysis shows that complex narrative plots are
made up out of structural segments, - the so-called elementary plots (EP). The
structure of every EP is distinguished by three compulsory elements: the
initial situation, the hero's act (that is, the acts of the hero and the
antipode), and the result. When the hero's trail is portrayed, the fourth
structural element - the command act (the antipode tells the hero to perform a
certain task) - is mandatory to the structure of EP. The hero is the character
whose fate is of interest in the EP while the character who collides with the
hero is the antipode. Thus, the EP shows a collision of two characters (or two
groups of characters) when the hero strives towards a certain goal. The result
of the hero - antipode collision depends on the nature of the hero's behaviour,
which can be of three kinds: correct, incorrect, or neutral. The paper aims at
disclosing main structural and semantic peculiarities of Lithuanian novelle
tales by means of structural-semantic and comparative method of research. The
theoretical statements are illustrated by the so-called "Tales of
Fate" (AT 930-949), which define some aspects of an attitude towards fate
and death in Lithuanian traditional culture. The assumption is proposed that
structural-semantic analysis enables one to define the function, the
boundaries, and the development of the folklore genres more precisely.
Katalin
Racz
Budapest,
Hungary
The presentation relies
upon a decade-long research project that has been carried out in Nagyk‰rös, a
medium-sized market town in central Hungary. Nagyk‰rös has been one
of the eminent fields of investigation for Hungarian sociocultural research
from the 1940s on. According to the presumption of this researches, between the
two world wars, owing to the successful and intensive, large-scale agricultural
activity, the townspeople had a good and model-like opportunity to enter middle
class. The experiences and analysis of fieldwork material pointed out that the
agricultural producers of Nagyk‰rös (whom the vast majority of the local population
belonged to) existed in a sort of transitional status; they were no longer
proper peasants; neither did they belong to working class or bourgeoisie.
Although in economic terms the local society was determined to leave peasant
mentality behind owing to up-to-date modes of production, general wealth and
achievements in productivity, in practice local society remained extremely
hierarchic, feudal-like, tradition-preserving and closed. Economic
opportunities and achievements were contradicted by the cultural and social
order. After nationalization was carried out, Nagyk‰rös became a
centre of food industry in the Socialist era. The primary question that the
second-phase researches sought to answer was how the local society changed in
terms of economic activity, walk of life and mentality in these decades. One of
the main outcomes of these investigations was that workers of the local food
industry continued agricultural activity as well, and in their leisure time
grew agricultural produce for market, but former peasant mentality was in the
process of disappearing. The presentation intends to share the outcomes of the
above-mentioned third-phase research project that commenced in the middle of
the 1990s investigating in what way local society has altered after the change
of regime (1990), when such fundamental challenges had to be faced as
re-privatisation and drastically increased unemployment. The presentation is
based on the analysis of a corpus of extended life-story interviews made with
the workers of six local factories between 1995 and 2004, with a view to trying
to point out what survival strategies workers had at their disposal in the period
of post-Socialist change, transition, uncertainty and new opportunities; what
sets of values oriented their choice; how they try to interpret their own
history, present status, choices and values, and what narrative strategies they
apply to establish a coherent life-story as an essential basis and condition of
self-representation and formation of identity.
Alexey
Rassykhaev
The anecdotical cycle
about Maksja Jogor is found in settlements of the Ust-Kulomskiy district of
Komi Republic (Russia). The prototype of the character is a historically real
person who lived in the village of Ust-Kulom in the first half of the 20th
century, and was a participant in the First World War. Many characteristics,
portrait features, and life circumstances of the historical person have found
reflection in the anecdotal story. Good and interesting story-tellers of these
jokes are, first of all, elderly men. It is preliminarily possible to discern
18 plots. Usually informants tell some yarns about adventures in which the hero
is a merry fellow-joker by the name of Maksja Jogor, who swindles simple people
and representatives of authority. Undoubtedly, reasons for the occurrence of
oral histories were that the original character and life circumstances of a
real person differed from standard rural behaviour. The further destiny of
stories was defined by other factors. The image of Egor became folklore and
extended over a wide territory: the real person frequented nearby villages
where they wrote down oral stories about his adventures. In due course there
was the typification of the image which kept features of its prototype, but
came to bear generalized national representations. Insufficient data on the
"real" Maksja Jogor's life complicate revealing the facts thought up
by people. The anecdotical cycle about the adventures of Maksja Jogor thus
makes for an exclusively interesting phenomenon in Komi folklore culture. Oral
histories persisting into the present testify to the viability of folklore
tradition (in particular Ust-Kulom's tradition) which is capable in conditions
of globalization to generate new texts of oral creativity and to help preserve
collective memory.
Taisto
Raudalainen
In my presentation, I
will compare some narrative genres available in the folk belief repertoire of
both Orthodox and Lutheran inhabitants of Central and Western Ingria. The
overall crucial point of the topic is the narrating of life experience in which
different kind of genres are combined as an intertextual macro-genre. My data
were compiled during field work sessions focusing mostly on life experience
narratives performed by elderly Ingrian women from Kupanitsa and Spankkova
parishes as well from the Votian villages located between the Kurkola and
Soikkola peninsulas in Kosemkina parish (called also Vaipooli) in 1997-2004. A
considerable part of the narrative motifs are connected with the critical events
of memorable history, mainly the period of mass evacuations that began in
spring 1943. At least three different kinds of narrative plots could be
explicated. One of them is based on the apocryphal motifs or lay prophesies.
The second one is connected with the dream-telling or visionary tradition. And
finally, there are belief legends containing different omens and warnings. Each
of these types characterizes the functioning of the narratives and narrating as
a traditional part of crisis-solving strategies actualized especially during
the times of trouble. It is interesting to mention that a remarkable part of
the telling corpus of the local Lutheran Finns has a correspondence in the
belief legends or, in some cases, some other narrative tradition of their
Orthodox neighbors. One of the most widespread plots is about the warning
activities of the guardian spirit whose unusual behavior reminds the household
family of unstable future events. The spirit appears as a house animal (cat,
coat etc.) or might be heard as an unpleasant voice throughout the night. These
events could have been taken place already long before the social cataclysm or
during the last night before the forced leaving of the household. Another motif
of an obviously Orthodox origin is about a huge cross rising upon the whole
village to prevent the total damage of it in the course of the future battles.
This motif is present in dream-vision as well. One of the most interesting
dream-motifs - which seems to be of the Orthodox origin as well - concerns
checking some strange currency, predicting travel to a foreign country. In the
Orthodox environment, the very Saints (Virgin Mary) have been met and sometimes
even heard weeping just before the evacuating activities began. The very
Christian symbol is also the appearing of the red cock which foretells the
victory of the Red Army. The fact is that this kind of themes could easily also
be transmitted by Orthodox Christian legends. First of all the Orthodox folk
mentality is characterized by the extremely powerful motifs from apocalyptic
narrative episodes. This partly belongs to the tradition of fortune-telling as
a part of the religious practice called obmiranie, falling into a
cataleptic state of consciousness. The prophetic modalities appear in stories
performed by elderly women (often aneled by priest already). However, these
stories could be told also by men as a kind of entertainment rather than
prophesy. The motifs regarding the struggle between the fathers and their sons,
the flood cataclysm or the stories about deserting the land and flames burning
the whole world are partly biblical by their origin (e.g., the Book of
Revelation, the Gospel of Luke or the Book of Esra in the Old Testament).
However, a remarkable part of these plots goes back to the long-lasting
tradition of apocryphal writings very familiar to the Orthodox lower level
mentality in Russia. (Cf. Vitkovsakii &
Vitkovskaya 2001). In Ingria, among those plots an extremely popular one
comes from the apocryphal Books of Sibyl and deals with the catastrophic events
taking place at the end of the world when rocks crash down and fireballs fall
from the sky (see also Korhonen 1938). It is rather probable that the interest
towards this kind of narrative plots with a rooting in the Orthodox apocalyptic
consciousness (so-called potaennye knigi) had already increased in
Ingria during the Swedish-Russian war activities and thereafter. However, a new
wave of the telling-tradition of these motifs may be connected with the popular
chap-books containing different apocryphal themes that were published in
Finland from 1850-ies up to the beginning of the 20th century. The
latest stratum broke out in the course of the First and the Second World Wars.
Summing up, a narrative stratum common to different Lutheran and Orthodox
groups in Ingria can be observed and needs further historically-focused genre
analyses.
Ravit
Raufman
Haifa,
Israel
Tale Type AT
700, named 'Fingerling', is presented as a narrative based on female
psychological mechanisms. The underdeveloped figure, who never leaves home or
separates from his parents, is presented as an expression of maternal-symbiotic
needs, motivated by the desire to preserve the mother's symbiotic relationship
with the infant. The immaturity characterizing this figure may be understood as
the experience of maternal immaturity, projected through the child. This idea
is supported by evidence taken from three sources:
1. Different
versions of this tale type from different cultural regions: The versions reveal
the close affinity between Fingerling and his mother. Some of them also
emphasize the fact that the mother herself suffers from early childhood
deficiencies.
2. The
hero pattern model, presents the circumstances surrounding the birth of heroic
protagonists of legends and myths as being very similar to those of the tiny
heroes in fairy tales. The major difference is that in legends and myths, the
heroes grow up to be heroic characters, who achieve their own separate
identities. This difference raises the possibility that the fairy tales about
Fingerling express a maternal, pre-oedipal point of view, in contrast to
legends and myths.
3. Female
dream narratives deal with pregnancies and women giving birth to tiny babies,
which symbolizes maternal immaturity and the lack of a father. The possibility
of seeing the fairy tale as a feminine genre is presented not on the basis of
the protagonist, but by referring to the female point of view at the root of
the narrative. This point of view might be revealed through a comparative
re-reading of fairy tales and female dream narratives. Such a comparison
teaches that the tales about Fingerling can be interpreted as the story of the
dependent, immature mother.
Reeli
Reinaus
The experience of
childbirth is without a doubt a very important event in a woman's life, which finds
attention in every culture. In some places birthgiving is considered a rite of
passage, marking a change of social status and admission to society. In this
way it is understandable that women again and again remind and describe this
event to their friends, family, or even to almost strangers. Talking about how
it felt to give a birth is also an important way to work through this
experience; verbalisation or written recording makes the experience easier to
handle. Lately, following the model of other countries, birthstories have also
spread on the Internet in Estonia, where their authors are anonymous. These
stories are mostly self-interpretations of limited social groups; on this basis
it is untimely to make any far-reaching inferences. In this report I describe
and analyse birthstories of Estonian women and attempt to find the differences
and similarities between them. I also pay attention to the formal side (length,
structure, manner of writing) and to the content (what is described and
emphazised, what is never discussed, etc.). I also consider reasons why these
stories are so popular and why women nevertheless write them down for strangers
to read.
Mari-Ann
Remmel
Although legends about
church-buildings are mostly based on international models and seem to be
similar, deeper insight reveals considerable regional peculiarities. The
situation is very different in Lutheran Estonia and Orthodox Setomaa district,
but there are some less noticeable peculiarities also within Lutheran area.
Areas of comparison are mostly West-, Central- and South-East Estonia. This
paper discusses popular motifs connected with immuring people in church walls,
as well as motifs about giants. Church legends are often constructed as
explanations of church names. Regional peculiarities of legends reflect
differences in traditional economy (the importance of ploughing) and give
evidence of historical cultural contacts. There are differences also in the
spread of Catholic features in oral tradition. For example, the parish names in
South-East Estonia are not based on Saints' names, but in the legends the name
of the immured person is derived from the name Saint of the church. In the
southeasternmost corner of Estonia it is not possible to speak of the
demonization of Catholic symbols (Saints, monks, nuns), as in case of monks in
Western Estonia.
Rita
RepšienP
Modern communication
offers its own rules of game. On the one hand, it raises serious claims
conditioned by advertising, management, rivalry, and professionalism. On the
other hand, meeting many requirements, it endorses and encourages the
orientation to values. Value is discovered when the need for meaning is
presupposed. In this context attention is drawn to semiotics, an area of
scholarship investigating what is before and after the sign and perceiving the
meaning as a process. In general, according to Algirdas Julius Greimas
(1917-1992), semiotics should be referred to as a scholarly project rather than
scholarship. Greimas is famous worldwide as a semiotician; he is a founder of
the so-called Paris school of semiotics, a professor of l'École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris, where he was at the head of
the semiolinguistic researches at that school for many years. On the basis of
structural semantics he created the theory of text semiotics and adapted the premises
of narrative grammar for mythical texts and miraculous fairy tales and stated
that deciphering narration reveals the ideology of axiology. Is semiotics still
in vogue? The new semiotics extended the boundaries of the narrative in the
research of film, art and advertising, thus emphasising the popularity of
narratology.
Uta
Reuster-Jahn
The animal trickster in
African, European and Asian tales is generally a small and weak creature, who
by his wit and cunning defeats stronger and more powerful animals. He pursues
purely selfish goals and in doing so he breaks the rules and conventions of
social order. He is also an ambiguous character: if he cannot control his
instincts and desires he will act in a stupid way and thus himself become
deceived. The function of trickster tales has been described as illustrating
the necessity of limits and order in society, as they show the resulting chaos
when these are absent. The trickster uses a number of different strategies in
order to reach his objectives. They all have in common the fact that false play
is involved, and that ethical rules such as reciprocity and confidence are
broken. In AaTh the trickster's actions are described by verbs such as "to
pretend, to disguise, to sham, to cheat, to steal, to play dead, to force, to
push, to feign, to lure, to use false words, to flatter, to persuade".
Among these "to flatter" and "to persuade" are purely
verbal strategies. In my paper these two verbal strategies of persuasion and
manipulation are examined by using a number of trickster tales as examples. It
will be shown that there are certain psychological factors on the side of the
trickster's partner which the trickster by empathy realizes and subsequently
exploits. By showing successful strategies of persuasive communication, the
tales impart basic rhetorical knowledge to their audiences.
Ilana
Rosen
Beer-Sheva,
Israel
Immigration
is an inherent part of human experience in the modern era. In Jewish-Israeli
history nationalism and nation-building have played major roles starting from
the mid 19th century through several waves of immigration to the
Land and State of Israel since 1882 to these days. In its first phases,
nation-building also involved an intensive culture-construction in terms of
socio-economic principles, education systems, language, arts, and other aspects
of life. Since then, the people matured and their ideologies moderated, until
we reached a more pluralistic approach, which gives voice and ear to several
narratives at the same time.
By now,
Post-Zionist scholars are engaged in exposing the myth-making and
hero-manufacturing accompanying this process, as well as the significant rates
of emigration following every immigration and the negative phenomena during
both, such as workers exploitation, commercial prostitution, sexual and other
abuse amongst the most ideologically renowned circles. Pro-Palestinian scholars
and politicians stress the tragedy of the Palestinian people throughout the
Zionist Era and especially since 1967. More recently, a complaint about the
imposition of European values on Jews coming from Islamic countries is being
formulated.
It is interesting to
note the differences in treatment of this claim by various disciplines.
Historians study specific cases such as the founding of agricultural villages,
or development towns, or immigration from specific countries or areas, but they
refrain from making general accusations against the absorbing authorities or
Israeli society. By contrast, literary and cultural scholars do formulate such
accusations on the basis of text analysis, but with little attention to
socio-historical considerations. On this basis, this paper offers a
cross-analysis of the disciplines and claims involved in the
Israeli-Orientalist claim, as well as synoptic analyses of relevant oral
narratives and histories.
Stanislav
Rosovetski
The paper gives an
account of an unexplored folklore genre, the secret story. This term means an anonymous
patriotic narrative about some important events in the existence of the nation
(the people), which glorifies fighters for national and/or social liberation
and exposes crimes of foreigners ruling in this country or of traitors. The
secret story has been disseminated in a way "for you as a friend"; it
was intended for like-minded persons. The author and/or oral narrator of a
secret story, when describing enemies, uses devices of national (ethnic)
"laughter culture". Defending himself in case of disclosing his
authority by enemies, on the one hand, and activating the listener's perception
on the other, he uses Aesopian language and the mode of "no names
called". This model for the genre specificity of the oral secret story can
be reconstructed through its embodiments in ancient literary texts. Some traits
of the secret story may be found in "The Secret History"
("Anecdota") by Procopius from Caesarea (6th century) and
in the anonymous "The Secret Story of Mongols" (13th
century); one can also see reflections of old Slavonic secret stories in
narratives about Avar's invasion and "Khazar tribute" in The
Russian Primary Chronicle (11th century). In full the traits of
the secret story are demonstrated by the two works of literature: the Old
Russian "New Tale about the Fames Moscow Kingdom" (1610) and the Old
Ukrainian "News about the Cossack Rebellion in 1630" (1630).
Investigation of these patterns of the secret story allows one to arrive at a
conclusion about its sacred roots. For example, the taboo regarding calling the
names of the leaders of the rebellion served the purpose of securing their
safety from infernal attacks by hostile deities.
Anne
Rowbottom
Manchester,
United Kingdom
The increasing
popularity of alternative therapies is introducing many people to alternative
spiritualites, often for the first time. One example of this is to be found
among sufferers of Myalgic Encepalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS),
a condition for which scientific medicine has been unable to produce a cure.
Although many people with ME/CFS remain hopeful that medical research will
eventually determine a cause and provide a remedy, their reliance on science is
far from absolute. Lacking a cure, many people seek alternative therapies where
the emphasis is on the holistic healing of body, mind and spirit. However,
those following this path often face difficulties in accommodating Christian
beliefs with the beliefs of the alternative spiritualities that they encounter.
The material presented in this paper is grounded in my own experience of ME/CFS
and developed through a case study drawn from work in progress. In this case
study Nancy, an older woman, describes her negotiation of the tensions between
traditional religious belief and an emerging belief in new age spirituality. In
conclusion I argue that in this self-narrative can be seen the working out in
lived experience of wider cultural changes in vernacular spiritual beliefs.
Luisa
Rubini
Why does Ms Ramsay,
the protagonist of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), read to
her son "The Fisherman and his Wife" by the Grimm brothers? Two early
16th century Italian "poemetti" can help to explain this.
They bring to light a very early form of the tale-type 515 and allow to
reconstruct its genealogy and historical transformations. The central theme is
the setting of desire, which structures the balance of the sexes.
Helena
Saarikoski
I present an analysis
of a videotaped interview which was made in 1998 in Helsinki of two sisters
aged 9 and 7. This analysis is part of my larger study of local fan cultures of
the Spice Girls, a phenomenon that broke through young girls' cultures in
Finland in the latter part of the 1990s. In the interview, the girls tell about
two rather traditional practices that relate to the fancying of pop idols,
collecting items and playing games inspired by the media narrative. The
repertoire of a small group of girls' indoor games, play with dolls and
imaginary and role games appears to be the relevant cultural context of
fancying pop idols. The girls apply ingredients of the media narrative
selectively and creatively in their spontaneous games. The media narrative is
translated into play narration, and further into the verbal narration in the
interview. In the interview, different embodied voices carry differently voiced
narrators. An active "I" narrator tells about collecting as a hobby.
The hobby, with its contents of gathering an individual collection, comparing
it with those of others, and consuming and exchange, builds up a subject
position of an individual "I" and an individualistic identity. A
narrating "we" produces the playgroup, a societal subject, and a
group identity, as well as the pride in all of that, the feeling of "we
the girls". I describe the internal differences and polyphony of a
vocality that is defined as girlish in an oppositional structure, as heard
against men and women's voices. A speaker who masters different voices and
narrator's positions realises the polyphony as a means of creating varying
attitudes and perspectives in a negotiation of the reception of the media
narrative and its application in the construction of identities in girls'
groups.
Anu
Salmela
Turku,
Finland
Somalis - like the
majority of immigrants with refugee background - have lived in Finland mainly
since 1990's. At present, there are approximately 7000 Somalis living in
Finland, and 430 of them live in Turku (a city on the western coast of
Finland). Hence, they are the largest black minority group of the city. My
ongoing ethnographic Ph.D. research within the disciplines of comparative
religion and women's studies examines gendered ideals and everyday practices
described by Somali Muslim women in Turku. The focus of my presentation is the
multi-layered social dynamics of gossip. Based on the ethnographic material
(field diaries and interviews), I will first discuss definitions of appropriate
and inappropriate behaviour for young Somali women (clothing, leisure-time
activities, dating etc.). What kinds of morally loaded meanings do these
gendered ideals and representations have in relation to evaluations of Finnish
culture and cultural continuity? Because of their position as a small ethnic
minority in the city, Somalis almost without exception know each other by
appearance. Thus, in the second instance, I will concentrate on the role of
social networks and socio-spatial informal control in the city space of Turku.
Thirdly, I will link these two themes to gossip, which is a recognised social
phenomenon among Somalis in Turku. What kinds of meanings do the interviewed
women attach to gossip? What types of issues are gossiped about? Is gossip gendered?
What kinds of motives do gossipers have? And finally, how does the possibility
of becoming a target of gossip influence young women's behaviour in public
and/or non-domestic spaces (e.g. in the city centre or in social events such as
weddings and other festivities)?
Kirsti
Salmi-Niklander
The first decades of
the 20th century were a period with many dramatic events in the
history of Finland. It was also a period of transition in the history of
communication. Many old media, such as broadsheets and hand-written newspapers,
had their "last heyday" and gained new meanings during the periods of
censorship and political oppression. At the same time new media such as
telephone, gramophones and radio started to get established. Narrative genres
of oral tradition had a rich interaction with these new media. In my paper I
discuss this period of transition among the young people in the small
industrial community of Karkkila in Southern Finland. The paper is based on my
doctoral thesis Self-education and Rebellion (2004). The most important
materials are the editions of a hand-written newspaper written by these young
people from 1914 to 1925. My theoretical background is derived from both
folklore studies and book history. Inspired by the research of Robert Darnton,
I have outlined the communication circuit of the working-class youth of the
early 20th century, discussing the position of the manuscript
tradition (hand-written newspapers, minutes, and letters) in relation to the
printed texts (books, newspapers, broadsheets) and the oral tradition. In my
paper I focus on the narratives of love in the manuscripts written by
working-class youth. How do they work with the ideas and narrative genres and
themes adopted from the printed media and the local oral tradition?
Christina
Sandberg
Our attitude to death,
both individually and culturally, can be seen, for example, in the way we
relate a death event. Although death has lost its social status, and thus also
its common interest, we still have an apparent need to speak about our loss, a
dear person's death, and about the events prior to or after the actual death.
It is, however, not only a narrative about the deceased; it is also a narrative
about the relations between the family members, and a story about the narrator
himself. In the present study, members of one family are narrating about the
mother's death; the father and the two daughters are telling the same story
from their own perspective, but they are also speaking about the new role each
of them was forced to take on due to the mother's illness and her subsequent
death. According to Michael Foucault, power is a relationship between people,
and this relationship is manifested in different ways in different situations.
My aim is to study how the grief over the wife's/mother's death is given
utterance in the family members' narratives, and how their personal experiences
reflect different relationships: to the deceased, to each other, to other
mourners, to public institutions, and to me - the interviewer. I will demonstrate
that networks exist, for example, of the relative strengths between a husband
and a wife, parents and children, sisters, and between the one who knows and
the one who does not know, and I will show how this pattern alters depending on
the narrator's own agenda; his/her need to beautify or to deny certain aspects
of the death event or of his/her own actions. Power relations are definitely
present, and active, in the narratives, in three different structural
"hows" and in three different aesthetical "hows".
Mikael
Valentin Sarelin
Loud music, black
leather, spikes, and artists soaked in blood. This is the first sight that
meets the observer at the "typical" black metal concert. When the
researcher enters this extreme arena as an outsider and starts documenting the
ongoing communication between artists and fans, he takes on a communicative
role, the role of the researcher. Black metal is a musical culture with its roots
in heavy metal. During the 1980's heavy metal gave birth to thrash- and death
metal, two quite extreme genres of metal, which in their turn gave birth to the
even more extreme black metal, as a protest against the ongoing
commercialisation of thrash- and death metal. Naming their satanic culture
black metal, the fans wanted to make sure that this new culture would stay
underground, out of reach for the major record labels and the television.
Within the framework of my research, where I look at the cultural contexts of
black metal, and contexts such as individualism, gender, violence, racism and
respect, I attend black metal concerts in order to witness the ongoing
communication between musicians and fans. With me I bring my notebook and my
camera, I usually shoot pictures of both fans and musicians during the ongoing
concert. From my partaking in the concert arise questions about the ethics of
field research. How does the presence of an outsider influence on the behaviour
of the fans and the artists during the concert? As they know that there is an
outsider present during the concert, taking photos and interviewing them, do
the fans put on a role to ensure the stereotype of the black metal enthusiast?
As a researcher I have my own role, as have the black metal fans. Does the
researcher have responsibilities towards the objects of his research, in this
case black metal fans, and to which content is it acceptable to expose the
individual and his integrity? These are questions that I want to discuss in my
paper.
Sigrid
Schmidt
Hildesheim,
Germany
Die
Untersuchung zeigt, dass unter "Kindermund" verschiedene Arten von
Kinderaussagen verstanden werden:
1) Witze,
die als Helden meist stereotype Kinderfiguren haben, wie Klein-Fritzchen,
Klein-Karlchen, Klein-Erna. Bei näherer Betrachtung erweisen sie sich als
wohl von Erwachsenen erfunden und hauptsächlich für Erwachsene
erzählt.
2) Witze,
die Kinder meist für Kinder erzählen und die ebenfalls gern
Kinderhelden und Erwachsene kontrastieren.
3) Tatsächliche
Aussprüche von Kindern gegenüber Erwachsenen, die diese belustigt.
Diese dritte Gruppe steht im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung.
Die von den Kindern
ernst gemeinten Aussprüche lassen sich in die Hauptgruppen "Mangelnde
Sprachbeherrschung", "Nicht-Durchschauen der Welt der
Erwachsenen", "Fragen" und "Schlagfertigkeit"
gruppieren. Es soll diskutiert werden, in welchem Maße diese
"Witzchen" weiter erzählt werden, das Alter der Kinder von Belang
ist und vor allem, in welchem Verhältnis sie zu den allgemeinen Witzen
stehen.
Kristinn
H. M. Schram
Reykjavík,
Iceland
Is identity a product of
political authority or a more dynamic cultural construction? Drawing on my
fieldwork among Edinburgh taxi drivers, I will present a case study suggesting
that everyday narrative has a greater influence in defining who we are than
does the formal discourse of national politics. A prolific arena in the shaping
of national, local and personal identity can indeed be found in the complex
constructions of everyday life, such as in its familial and occupational
contexts; the latter being the focus of this paper and its underlying research.
Through their formal and informal knowledge of the city and extensive
interaction with its locals and visitors, the cultural life of taxi drivers
poses a worthy subject of research both on an individual basis and in the context
of the dynamic but communal culture of folk groups. This paper therefore
discusses how in an occupational context the identity and cultural environment
of individuals is negotiated and represented in their oral and visual
narrative. With this aim I have focused on the in-group narrative of taxi
drivers, researched through reflexive participant observation, audio-visual
documentation and qualitative inquiry into the informants' own
conceptualizations of the significant cultural scenes, settings and events of
their everyday life. I argue that narrative is an important part of the taxi
drivers' canon of work technique e.g. in redefining and managing their urban
environment; an endeavor significantly influenced by the interrelationship of
their personal, local and national identities, as expressed in the various
contexts and narrative events. Concurrently I exhibit the methodological
benefits of reflexive and dialogical approaches and contextual narrative
research as an alternative to hegemonic perspectives in under standing cultural
representations of identity and its negotiation in everyday life.
Gyöngyi
Schwarcz
Budapest,
Hungary
The German minority is
the second most significant one in Hungary since the 18th century.
After the Second World War, in compliance with the principle of 'collective
guilt', the majority of Germans usually living in villages were expatriated
from Hungary. Although the German villagers of the settlement under survey
escaped expatriation, they were deprived of their movable and immovable
property and they were practically treated as outlawed citizens until the
beginning of the 1950s. The local German society vividly preserved and
transmitted the memory of fear, denial of rights, hardships and disappointment
as part of individual life stories and family stories. With the transmission of
these narratives the Local German society preserved and integrated these
experiences into its ethnic identity, which reinforced certain elements of
ethnic identity, i.e. the awareness of German origin and solidarity. Nowadays
the ethnic identity of the various generations of the local society is
constituted of different elements, which is reflected in the difference
observable in the narratives related by members of various generations about
the period of ordeals. The presentation intends to account for this difference
in the constituting elements of ethnic identity of the various generations on
the basis of an analysis of life story interviews and related narratives.
Elo-Hanna
Seljamaa
My paper is inspired
by M. M. Bakhtin's ideas about genre and the possibilites they offer for
approaching and interpreting chain letters. Though a marginal phenomenon of
written folklore, chain letters - especially the ones that have emerged along
with the spread of e-mail - pose several interesting questions to folklorists,
particulary to the ones like myself, who are struggling to give up classifying.
I have thus come to treat chain letters as a kind of a mental puzzle, enabling
one to practice thinking about folklore genres and the concept of genre in
folkloristics in terms other than fixed, pre-existing categories. Since Bakhtin
stresses both the importance of genres in all spheres of life as well as the
need to recognize the historic nature of all genres, his views on genres offer
valuable points of reference here. I have found two of Bakthin's works to be
especially useful: "The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship"
presumably co-written with P. N. Medvedev in the late 1920s and
"The Problem of Speech Genres", an essay from the early 1950s. In my
paper I aim at synthesizing genre concepts elaborated in the mentioned works:
relying on concepts of primary and secondary genres, I combine them with
Bakthin's and Medvedev's ideas of genres as complex systems and means for conceptualizing
and controlling reality.
Valery
Sharapov
Syktyvkar,
Komi Republik, Russia
In 2003 the
Finno-Ugric Society in Finland supported the carrying out of an international
web-based project on the past and present fieldwork at the Finno-Ugric peoples
in Russia (project leader A. A. Survo). Currently, the website
Fieldwork (available at http://www.komi.com/pole) features a historiographical
series of articles about fieldwork and expedition reports by scholars of
Finno-Ugric studies in Russia and abroad, and some unpublished materials held
in the regional and central archives of Russian and foreign research
institutions and museums. Users of the site can sort images and texts by
authors, regions, research topics, or conduct complex searches. Future plans
include adding a cycle of historiographical overviews and biographical data
about the scholars studying the traditions of Finno-Ugrians, and expanding the
selection of modern audio-visual materials. The preparatory work at the
electronic publication was carried out by members of research institutions in
Russia (Izhevsk, Kudymkar, Moscow, Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg, Perm,
Petrozavodsk, Syktykvar), Finland (Helsinki, Joensuu), Estonia (Tartu) and
Japan (Tokyo). In the course of the project, preparations for the publication
of an article collection on the history of Komi ethnography in the 19th-20th
century were carried out. The surprisingly long discussion on the practical purpose
of publishing the collection in the Institute of Language, Literature and
History of the Komi Centre of Sciences at the Uralic Department of the Russian
Academy of Sciences and the partly justified criticism of the collection's
international board of editors are suggestive of the topicality and
productivity of the methodology and discourse on methodology of folkloric and
ethnographic studies in the Finno-Ugric areas of Russia. In 2004, the project
of an electronic encyclopaedia Readings of Nalimov was financed by the
grant of the President of Russia. The encyclopaedia is dedicated to the
intellectual heritage of the Komi ethnographer V. P. Nalimov
(1879-1939) and aims to make available the scholar's biographical and
historiographical work, the electronic corpus of his published works, but also
the less known excerpts from his unpublished manuscripts on Finno-Ugric
cultures (from the files of the Department of Ethnography, Institute of
Language, Literature and History of the Komi Centre of Sciences at the Uralic
Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences). Among the project objectives is
the organisation of the 3rd Readings of Nalimov (Syktykvar 2005) and
prepare the first collection of V. Nalimov's research articles for publication.
The collection will include articles about the life and creative work of the
scholar, his correspondence with his colleagues in Russia and abroad, and
criticism of his works published during his life (including the unpublished
reviews of his work by academician D. K. Zelenin). The collection
also discusses the problems of fieldwork and includes approaches to methodology
proposed by V. Nalimov in the 1920s-1930s. The presented projects are a
logical conclusion to the popular online encyclopaedia The Traditional
Culture of People Living in the Northeast Part of Russian Europe (available
at http://www.komi.com/folk, project supervisor N. D. Konakov). It is
important to remember that the presented projects aim to construct dynamic
hypertextual databases that can be updated, edited and restructured, rather
than to construct static descriptive models. The application of hypertextual
and hypermedia solutions enables to combine a chronological, geographical and
thematic approaches, i.e. to freely organise the selection of corresponding
information corpora (textual, graphic, audio, video). The projects under
discussion thus form a so-called "information pyramid", with
educational resources targeted at the general public on the top, and founded on
the vast corpus of systematised archive and museum materials and research
results. We have reasons to believe that the body of electronic folkloric and
ethnographical resources will be effective in presenting and popularising
scientific research results, but will also enable to construct a specific
method for studying the culture of Finno-Ugric peoples in Russia.
John
Shaw
Edinburgh,
Scotland, United Kingdom
In north-western Europe
questions regarding how legends travel have been a growing area of methodical
study since Christiansen's book Migratory Legends, and have been
prominently featured in earlier ISFNR conferences. There have been numerous
studies on individual Migratory Legends, exploring their history, development,
and geographical/cultural distribution, and giving rise to fruitful insights
and suggestions regarding their transmission across various boundaries since at
least medieval times. Further recent studies have addressed classification
within specific legend genres, leading to further questions as to which legends
migrate and why. The past two centuries have been a time of large-scale
voluntary or forced migrations, some originating in north Atlantic Europe and frequently
documented, that have provided new opportunities for investigating how
folklore, including legends, has survived and changed during mass population
movements. In the case of the Scottish Gaelic diaspora communities established
in North America during the Highland Clearances, few retained their traditional
cultures intact past the middle of the twentieth century. Cape Breton Island,
Nova Scotia, where oral storytelling traditions have been extensively recorded,
is a notable exception, and provides a unique opportunity for ethnologists to
study survival and adaptation of various folklore genres through comparisons
with those surviving in the Highlands from the early nineteenth century. In the
case of international tales, a strong continuity has been demonstrated in the
post- migration repertoire, reflecting a high degree of cultural conservatism
over five or six generations. Legends, however, differ from the above in some
important respects. This paper will examine the kinds of legends that have travelled
over the Atlantic; how they have adapted; legends that have sprung up in the
new environment; and what distinctive new developments have appeared in
post-migration tradition.
Christine
Shojaei Kawan
Göttingen,
Germany
Snow White is
one of the most widely known tales, made world famous by the Grimm brothers and
later by Walt Disney. At the same time, the Snow White tale type is represented
by a comprehensive international corpus of folktales with independent traits.
Since the first manuscript version (1808) up to the second edition of their Household
Tales (1819), the Grimm brothers made significant modifications of their
tale concerning, most notably, the figure of the antagonist, the expulsion
episode and the resuscitation. If the heroine they presented to the public, a
girl "as white as snow, as red as blood and as black as ebony", is
not an entirely new creation - similar images appear earlier in Basile and in
various Perceval versions - it was through the impact of the Grimm collection
that this type of beauty became a stock picture in fairy tale imagery. At the
same time, considering the overwhelming success of the Grimms' Snow White tale,
it is remarkable that so many folk variants remained uninfluenced by the Grimm
tradition. A striking example is the episode of the prince's mourning for the
beautiful maiden which has remained a typical feature of folk variants although
the Grimms, who had adopted it for their first edition (1812), omitted it in
the second one, introducing instead the now well-known quick solution by
accident. Snow White also offers an opportunity to reconsider Walter Anderson's
concept of self-correction, formulated in the 1920s, from a long-term
perspective: apparently, inherent conceptions are corrected over and over again
when they have been altered, as shown by the rendering of the wood house
episode in the folk variants and in more recent derivatives of the book tale
(and/or Disney) tradition (jokes, films, parodies). Traits that appear to be
innovative may thus in fact be traditional.
Anna-Leena
Siikala
The great myth-theories
created by the German romantics and evolutionary theoreticians in the
nineteenth century, and by many well-known researchers in the twentieth, have
guided the manner in which folklorists have understood the nature of myth and
also identified myths of the Finno-Ugric tradition. Classical theories of myth
basically present five main directions. These are:
1) Intellectual
examination methods which consider myths an explanation of the world and an
expression of the world view (the nineteenth-century evolutionists, James
G. Frazer and E. B. Taylor);
2) Viewpoints
which emphasise mythopoetic thought (Max Müller, Ernst Cassirer);
3) Psychological
interpretations (Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung);
4) Theories
which emphasise the bonds to society, among which belong the basically
functionalist viewpoint of myths as texts of a rite (Émile Durkheim and
Bronislaw Malinowski); and
5) Structuralist
interpretations (Claude Lévi-Strauss). (Cf. Percy Cohen refers to seven
main theories of myth in his "Theories of Myth", Man 3/4,
1969).
Although
classical theories of myth are sometimes represented as in opposition to each
other, it is characteristic of them that they are partly overlapping and
complement each other as e.g. Lauri Honko has stated (Honko "The Problem
of Defining Myth" in A. Dundes (ed.), Sacred Narrative, 1984).
Myths are in fact many-dimensional and may be approached from many angles,
whose appropriateness depends on the object of research and the given material.
Myths are narratives, poetry, but not merely poetry. Mythology recounts how the
world order began, and what sort of forces are behind it. It does not however
contain a fully fledged religious philosophy or normative dogmatic system.
Although myths deal with problems and preconditions of existence, they do not
necessarily offer explanations, nor do they require explanation. In the manner
of poetry they are open to various possible interpretations. For this reason
myth and fantasy readily merge with each other. The particularity of myths lies
in their ability to contain within themselves both the eternal and
transcendent, the temporally bound and immediately present (cf. Th. Gaster
"Myth and Story" in A. Dundes (ed.), Sacred Narrative,
1984). Today the viewpoints of mythic researchers are more multifarious than
ever. In addition to new methods of examination developed out of the five
historical directions presented above, myths are approached for example on the
basis of cognitive theory and gender perspective. We may ask: how do myths
depict the historical and cultural processes of their cultures and the changes
in the ecological environments? What do they tell about linguistic and cultural
contacts? And what do they tell of thought patterns derived from afar, and how
those ways of thought are accommodated when constructing a culture in
transformed social contexts? In this presentation I take three different but
complementary methodological approaches, which can be applied on the basis of
different theoretical interpretations. These are:
1) comparative
research,
2) investigation
of the corpuses of myth of small communities, and
3) mythic
dicourse-analytical or textual research.
Renata
Sõukand
Tartu, Estonia
Knowledge of folk medicine is today widely used in production of
"natural" medicines; proof has been found that folk medical herbs are
pharmacologically active. The Estonian Folklore Archive holds up to 5000 texts
on Estonian herbal folk medicine, dating from the 19th century; to
date this material is poorly analyzed, mostly because of its unevenness and
variety of interpretation possibilities. According to their information density
the texts could be divided into four categories:
1) short statements (the most represented),
2) descriptions
of preparation of herbal remedies;
3) descriptive
texts, that make visible some of the religious background;
4) detailed
analysis of phenomena from the perspective of informers.
All these texts could
be "read" differently, and indeed, there is no methodology for
analyzing them so far. Sometimes it is difficult to tell who talks to us
through the text - is it the individual or the community? Or in fact the
researcher, who draws from the text the information that he/she can or wants to
see? The text, even the short one, is a communication process; thus herbal folk
medicine could be looked at in the light of Jakobson's model of communication.
What makes the herb "own"? When can one draw a line between "own"
and "alien" and how does this affect narration? Transmission of
information on an herbal remedy is affected by its position in folk religion,
usage in the home, and the personal expectations of the transmitter. The text
could be viewed as an insect caught in a web of narrations coming from nature
and culture, the future and the past, hopes and expectations. In the paper the
author proposes a semiotic model that helps to read the message itself as well
as the context of Estonian herbal folk medicine.
Marija
Stanonik
The
"Greek term mythos signifies an utterance, speech, 'telling a story' -
hence, a folk tale, or a legend. Mythos, the uttered word or story, begins with
Man's first spoken word, which is literally the 'first mythos'". Kirill
V. Šistov explains very clearly how and why literary folklore and
language are more closely connected than literary folklore and literature are
in general. From a historical perspective, even the beginning of the world's
oldest literatures cannot be located earlier than four thousand years in the
past. The beginnings of literary folklore, however, go back to the time when
human speech began to emerge, one hundred thousand years ago. The distinction
between literary folklore and literature as such has developed gradually at a
time when literature finally began to take its shape. With many nations we see
their literature coming into existence almost before our very eyes, as it were.
As a popular Slovenian saying goes, every village has its voice. The numerous
dialects and varieties of the Slovenian language correspond closely with the
geographical diversity of its ethnic territory on the cross-roads of three
distincly different geographical units of the European continent - the Alpine
world, the Mediterranean basin, and the Pannonian plain. Our ancestors adapted
differently to this varied environment, especially in the borderlands, where
they came into daily contact with new neighbours. They got to know their
customs and ways of living; with time, certain elements from these neigbouring
cultures were invisibly sifted through and fused into their own, creating new
cultural mixes that gradaully merged and combined in the three most
characteristic segments - the alpine, the mediterranean, and the pannonian.
These characteristics have created a unique imprint on the culture and
lifestyle of the entire Slovenian ethnic territory, the borderlands as well as
central parts of the country, and have significantly influenced Slovenian
literary folklore. Voices (Glasovi) is a collection of folk tales from
our time. Over the past decade they have evolved into a unique book series. The
key principles for the publication of the series have remained unaltered since its
inception:
1. Its
confines itself to oral tradition in prose.
2. Only
materials that have been gathered locally after the year 1945 and have not been
published yet (with the exception of school and company bulletins, and local
newspapers) can be considered.
3. Ideally,
written versions should be transcripts of audio-taped recordings, but it is
probably unrealistic to insist on this at all costs - hand-written record and
at times even recapitulations and retold variations have to be taken into
account.
4. The
lexis and the syntactic structure must be retained in minute detail, whereas
from the phonological aspect it has to be determined individually for each book
how far we are allowed to stray from the literary standard so that the book can
still be of interest to readers who are not familiar with the dialect.
Having a correctly
transcribed text in the dialect version printed next to its standard written
form would certainly be the best solution, and we were able to afford this in
three cases (for the regions of Porabje, Prekmurje, and Austrian - Carinthia),
where most of our general readers would be at a loss when faced with only the
transcript of the dialect. Half of twenty voumes were collected by school
teachers, eminent professors, and by students of Slovenian studies; but we also
had a priest, a painter, a veterinarian, a journalist, a precision mechanic,
and some retired people among our authors. Collectors usually set out with
considerable scepticism as to the possibility of finding any such mateials in
our day and time. As the work approaches its completion, however, it becomes
clear that it would be impossible to finish it without harbouring a guilty
conscience, for there is still so much that remains unwritten. More often than
not they really deserve to be praised for the heart and effort they have pun
into in it.
Lidija
Stojanovic Lafazanovska
Skopje,
Macedonia
Dieser Beitrag befasst sich
mit den "narrativen Transpositionen" individuellen Lebensgeschichten
makedoniker Einwanderer im Hamburg, und fokussiert sich auf wichtigsten und
markanten Bestimmheiten verschiedenen Lebensstile. Alle diese Bestimmheiten
werden von Aspekt der Habitustheorie und Feld (Pierre Bourdieu) analysiert
werden. Konkret wird die innere Urbanisierung, d.h. "die Stadt im
Kopf" (G. Korff) aus einzelnen Lebensgeschichten vorgestellt, mit dem
Ziel, ihre Vielgestaltigkeit bei allen Kategorien Migranten zu erweisen. Fragen
der mentalen großstädtlichen Zeit- und Raumaneignung und
-wahrnehmung prägen schließlich einen Komplex von konzeptuellen
Überlegungen zu Urbanität und Mentalitätswandel. In diesem
Sinne, viele narrative Transpositionen beschreiben eine wesentliche Diskrepanz
zwischen Habitus und Feld, und geben uns zu viel Belegen von "einem
großstädtischen industriellen Raum und Zeit" als eine ganz neue
Erlebniskategorien und Werte. Dies resultiert im ersten Period des Aufenthalts
als eine mechanische Aneignung der ganz neuen und "unverständlichen"
Handlungen und Gewöhnheiten. Wie wird das Geburtsort erlebt und wie
verläuft die narrative Transposition dieser Erfahrungskonstellation?
(d.h., makedonische Städte wie Skopje, Strumica, Stip, Ohrid, Prilep,
Bitola). Hier sollte die Bedeutung von "Wohnung", "Nachbarschaft",
"Straße", "Verwandschaft", "Kneipe", sowie
die Arbeits- und Freizeitmodelierung untersuchen, die im Vergleich zum Hamburg
als zwei kulturelle Grammatiken funktionieren. Wie funktionieren und wie
reflektieren sich in Lebensgeschichten die zwei zentrallen Gefühlen:
Apathie und Energie, und wie werden die typischen "soziallen Phobien und
Euphorien" erlebt und erzählt? Und endlich, ist es möglich im
Lebenslauf einer Generation eine totale Transformation des Habitus und Über
gang von einer gemeinschaftlichen mechanischen zur einer industriellen
gesellschaftlichen organischen Solidarität?.
Jaak
Tomberg
Tartu,
Estonia
Today's western
culture and consumer society - call it post-modern, as I and many others have,
or whatever - is relentlessly obsessed with naming. Objects, in order to
increase their consumer-appeal as products, are given names alongside with
constructed symbolic universes which have little to do with the material
functions of these products as objects. These proper names quickly multiply;
they are all too often slightly modified, or supplemented to the point where
they are almost unrecognizable and no longer derivable from their earlier
versions. Uncountable amount of names refer to different products which have
unrecognizably small differences in material function.
This
situation may lead to some interesting generalizations if given a perspective
of the theory of naming. My paper tries to explore how different theories of
naming and reference (e.g. Saul Kripke's or Bertrand Russell's) can be applied
to the description of the post-modern society and how do names and the
constructed symbolic universes behind them function if they are used in the
interest of maximum consumption. The paper incorporates philosophy of language,
cultural theory and examples from literature.
In the consumer
society, the basic intuition is oriented towards differentiation, not towards
the essence. And this is clearly reflected in what has happened to many proper
names around us.
Marju
Torp-Kõivupuu
All living beings are
mortal - from the moment of birth, metabolism causes changes that end in the
disharmony of synthesis and decomposition - the arrival of death. Death has
always been treated as unnatural, and awareness of its unavoidability results
in the tragic perception of life, fuelling philosophical and religious
concepts, first of all that of the soul and immortality - that is, a state with
no death. Christianity connects death with sin. Religion, uniting sin and
transience, representing the living human as separated from God with His
transcendental and eternal-ontological basis (God, the Creator), frees human
beings from the coils of death and gives them eternal life. Naturalist and
materialist concepts of men deny individual immortality. The continuity of a
living being is possible only in its progeny and as a species, or in an
indirect sense also as a memory in the minds of the younger generation.
Traditional tales based on popular religion and related to either concurrent or
proximate dates of birth and death have a significant role in contemporary
Estonian family lore. While the religious tales of a traditional society
interpreted this coincidence as positive in the vein of the soul's migration or
reincarnation, the contemporary tradition, ousting death and everything related
to it from everyday culture and turning it into a medical subject and/or a
taboo, has related these narratives to various bad omens. The paper analyzes
these narratives within the perspectives of religion theory and philosophy,
taking its authentic sources from the Internet forums and chat rooms of various
family magazines of recent years.
Yukinobu
Umenai
Kagoshima-Shi,
Japan
Interessanterweise
gibt es zwei Paare von Märchen aus Japan und Deutschland, die über
die klimatischen, geographischen und geschichtlichkulturellen Bedingungen
hinaus einander ähnlich sind: das erste Paar ist "Der Gevatter
Tod" (KHM44) und das japanische Brettltheaterstück von Encho dem
Ersten Der Tod, und das zweite das Märchen "Der singende
Knochen" (KHM 28) und das alte japanische Märchen "Der singende
Schädel." In diesem Referat werden daher diese zwei Paare analysiert
und die Topologie dieser Märchen aufgrund ihrer Gemeinsamkeiten und
Unterschiede betrachtet. Zwischen dem japanischen Brettltheaterstück und
dem Grimmschen Märchen gibt es 5 Verschiebungen:
1. Kein
Auftritt von Gott und Tod,
2. Der
Tod spielt Ratgeber,
3. Die
Hauptperson verwendet einen Zauberspruch,
4. Die erste
Kranke ist die Tochter eines reichen Geschäftsmannes. Der zweite Kranke
ist einer der reichsten Herren der Hauptstadt Edo,
5. Das
Honorar besteht aus 3000 alten Goldmünzen.
Außerdem
gibt es zwischen dem alten japanischen Märchen "Der singende
Schädel" und dem Grimmschen Märchen "Der singende
Knochen" 4 Gemeinsamkeiten:
1. Der
Auftritt der zwei Männer, eines guten und eines bösen, beide haben
dasselbe Reiseziel,
2. Der
böse Mann ermordet zu seinem eigenen Nutzen den guten,
3. Der
Knochen des guten singt ein Lied,
4. Infolge der
Wirkung des singenden Knochens wird der Böse bestraft. Auf diese Weise
wird die kulturelle Umgebung eines Märchens bei seiner Verbreitung in
einem anderen fremden Land in den folgenden 7 Punkten in eine andere kulturelle
Umgebung versetzt: 1) in der Religion, 2) bezüglich der
Personen, 3) in den Lösungsmitteln, 4) in der Lösungsweise,
5) im Beruf der Personen, 6) in der Belohnung, 7) in der Art und
Weise der Strafe. Allerdings bleibt das wesentliche Motiv eines Märchens
bei der Verarbeitung in anderen Ländern meist gleich. Nur bei
W. Grimm ist die Beeinflussung durch die starke Symbolik der Flamme so
eindringlich, dass das Hauptschema etwas verändert erscheint.
Tiina
Vähi
Seventeenth-century
witchcraft trials in Estonia revealed poignant ideological and religious
divergences on the folkloric werewolf concept. On one side there was the
worldview of homo Christianus - judges as representatives of the state
authority and clericals as proponents of the ecclesiastical ideology - and on
the other the animistic folkloric philosophy of homo naturalis - the
accused, mostly peasants, who lived in close contact with nature. The ruling
Christianity clashed with the suppressed folk religion. This brought to light
different concepts of law and justice, of ethics and customs, which accounted
for the differences in the interpretations of werewolf beliefs. The world of homo
Christianus had at its centre God, who had appointed man as the ruler over
the whole creation. From this perspective, the idea of man turning into an
animal was tantamount to repudiation of the law of God; it was amoral, unacceptable
and incorrect. Furthermore, it was impossible, for it would have required a
miracle that went beyond man's powers. As the common people earnestly believed
in this "miracle", however, the issue of the authenticity of the
metamorphosis was explained in theology as an illusion and was reduced to the
devil's lie and delusion. The exposition of that, as well as the condemnation
of and penalisation for witchcraft, was fair and just, and even obligatory for
a Christian, on the basis of the Bible. The common people, who represented homo
naturalis, had been joined with the Christendom through baptism. As
appeared from the witchcraft trials, however, their understandings of Christian
ethics and the Biblical views on witchcraft and magic had remained ambivalent
or had been pushed to the background. In everyday life the people turned to
folk magic, which also included the werewolf concept. They were guided by the
magical mentality of the former folk religion, which lacked a distinct and
unambiguous boundary between the ethical categories acceptable-unacceptable.
Sinikka
Vakimo
The Finnish nation
state building occurred in the 19th century, when Finland was attached
to Russia as an autonomous Grand Duchy, although the struggle for independence
was at its hottest in the turn of the 20th century. At the same time
Finnish art achieved unparalleled international success. It was then that
Finnish artists created works of an international standard. Many artists then
combined national themes and expressed "a national spirit" with
international influences. In addition "folk culture" and Kalevala
played an important role in the nationalistic movement, thus the characters represented
in art and in other cultural texts were mostly examined and interpreted in a
nationalist light. The aim of my presentation is to explore the politics of an
old female body in nationalistic context in Finland at the turn of the 20th
century. Nationalisms are depicted here as masculine, built up collective
narratives, discourses and presentations in which a nation and gender orders
are constructed as natural and self evident matters. As many scholars studying
gender and nationalisms (e.g. Yuval-Davies; Moghadan, Novikova, Valenius) have
interestingly pointed out, women play special roles in nationalisms, but not
always in the same way. Therefore, I will explore the role of special women -
aged women - and the figures representing them in few popular paintings created
by famous Finnish painters at the turn of the 20th century. In this
preliminary introduction I try to conceive possible ways of interpreting these
figures by outlining the uses of the old female body as a marker of cultural
and political aspects.
Ülo
Valk
The paper discusses
genre formation and modes of narrating beliefs in Estonian newspapers,
magazines and internet forums that address supernatural topics, such as energetically
charged places, sightings of flying saucers, haunted houses, poltergeists and
contacts with the other world. In this vernacular discourse about the
supernatural, beliefs tend to be ascribed to anonymous "others", to
the "superstitious folk", whose ideas are contested and ridiculed. On
the other hand, some people explicitly accept beliefs and confirm them by
telling narratives about supernatural experiences. The points of view of
believers and disbelievers challenge each other but both contribute towards
building up the system of vernacular beliefs, either imagined (ascribed) or
"real" (accepted). Different parties tend to use elements of
scientific discourse - to provide empiric facts, numbers, and to introduce
reliable witnesses. Narratives and certain genres (e.g. conversion memorates)
function as powerful tools of building up worldviews.
Katrien
Van Effelterre
Which castles of
Limburg were haunted by ghosts frightening curious intruders? What kinds of
witch stories were told by the inhabitants of Maasmechelen? In which farms of Hasselt
did a fireghost leave its black fingerprints? Which crossroads were the scene
of encounters with the devil? Why did the helpful dwarfs leave Tongeren? Before
the year 2003 answering these questions would have cost Flemish scientists a
lot of time and effort. From now on just a few seconds are enough to display
the Goat riders, wizards, freemasons, wildfires and other blood- curdling
creatures from the mysterious world of the "Jenseits" on your
computer screen. In the forties of the twentieth century prof.
dr. K. C. Peeters from the K. U. Leuven started a
tradition of legend research, which was continued by prof.
dr. S. Top. The fieldwork of dozens of students preparing a thesis on
folklore resulted in a huge collection of approximately 70,000 legends from all
over Flanders. A mass of paperwork with transcripts of original stories as they
were told in the local dialect of the informers was stored in the archive of
the Seminar for Folklore and Ethnology of the K. U. Leuven. In order
to make this unique collection of legends accessible to everyone who is
interested the project "Op verhaal komen" [Breaking the story] was
launched on 2th May 2002. Thanks to the financial support of the
Vlaamse Gemeenschap in the context of permanent in crease of accessibility and
study of cultural heritage in September 2004 already more than 21,000 legends
from Limburg and West-Flanders were digitalised and presented on a website
called www.volksverhalenbank.be. Since October 2004 visitors to the website are
offered the possibility to react to stories and to tell variants of the stories
that are mentioned. On October 15th we also started a second project
that involves the digitalisation of numerous recordings of interviews with the
storytellers. The aim is to preserve this precious material and to integrate a
selection of the sound fragments into the website.
Ergo-Hart
Västrik
The reflexive turn in
anthropology and folklore studies has posed questions concerning the nature of
field recordings and it has initiated heated debates on the problematics of
representation. In this context much attention has been paid to the issue of
producing (or inventing) research material, that is, to certain metadiscursive
practices applied in shaping the ethnographic descriptions and/or the folklore
texts. In my presentation I will delineate various strategies of textualising
knowledge about vernacular religion of Votians, the small Balto-Finnic ethnic
group, as this was done by Paul Ariste (1905-1990), the most outstanding
scholar of Votian language and folklore of the 20th century. In
1942-1980 Ariste made 25 field trips to Votian villages and compiled a
5499-page manuscript collection "Vadja etnoloogiat" (Votian
ethnology). Ariste's intention was to document and study particularly the
archaic heritage of Votians and thus his field recordings were evidently
past-oriented (the contemporary religious context was manifested only in his
field diaries). Ariste preferred informants who were on the one hand religious
but at the same time also superstitious personae. Due to his research interests
we can find from his collection material about unique old-type religious
concepts, supernatural phenomena and other manifestations of Greek Catholic
village Christianity. In my analysis I will concentrate on the recurrent
structures in folk belief accounts, memorates and belief legends as well as the
descriptions of ritual practices found in the collection of Paul Ariste. In
addition, my aim is to discuss the ways of transmitting religious folklore
within the tradition group through a variety of genres and the role of the
researcher in moulding these genres.
Francisco
Vaz da Silva
Lisboa,
Portugal
Since Berlin and Kay's
classic study on Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution,
several authors have examined the universal chromatic triangle of white, red
and black in several perspectives, regarding different cultures. The
involvement of eminent anthropologists (such as Rodney Needham, Marshall
Sahlins, and Victor Turner, to name but a few) in discussing the semantics of
the chromatic triangle indicates the importance of this topic for the study of
traditional symbolism. But so far, attention has mostly been focused on ritual,
and sights have been set on non-European cultures. Differently, this paper
addresses the problem from the perspective of European fairytales.
Twelfth-century Chrétien de Troyes has famously let us know that the
sight of three drops of blood on snow reminds Perceval of his sweetheart. Seven
centuries afterwards, the Grimms still knew that a queen looking at three drops
of her own blood on the snow was bound to think, "Would that I had a child
as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the
window-frame" Nowadays, we do not really know much about the underlying
symbolism. Still, the image is so vivid in the fairytale world that the time
seems ripe for a theoretical contribution from folkloristics.
Eszter
Vékony
Budapest,
Hungary
Traditional letter has
been an important means of written communication. E-mails are going to or
probably have already fulfilled this function in our postmodern cyber culture.
Nevertheless, they not only function as a medium of personal and official
communication, but also convey entertaining texts, pictures, audio or video
files. In the framework of a research project in 2004 I started systematically
collecting all e-mails that I received via a distribution list created
especially for non-personal and non-official e-mails, mostly with funny or
shocking contents. My presentation focuses on re-sent or forwarded texts and
certain types of fixed texts. The number of the collected text-content e-mails
exceeds 500. The collection of material has not yet been finished; therefore
the corpus is being extended permanently. Among these texts such jokes,
proverbs, riddles and other texts emerge that can be assigned to several
different epic or lyric genres. Although e-mails exist in a medium of written
communication, they bear strong similarity to oral tradition. Almost without an
exception the e-mails of the corpus were forwarded, thus the authors are
unknown, and several of these texts can also read in numerous variants.
E-mailing is a postmodern way to transmit anonymously various works of
folklore, which used to spread as part of oral tradition. The material was
collected in a group consisting of 30 members. The members work at the same
team of a multinational company, which provides IT support for other companies.
At this site of support no IT knowledge is required, only a good foreign
language skill, thus the members have different intellectual backgrounds and
interests. Although this distribution list is used by a relatively small group,
I expect and believe that these data may present a wide range of generally
preferred types of texts mostly circulating in mailboxes and sometimes even at
websites.
Liisa
Vesik
Rehepapp
(http://www.folklore.ee/rehepapp) is a database containing (and being added to)
legends (digitised within the government program Estonian Language and National
Memory) and other tradition digitised within different research projects.
Currently the database contains 18,000 digitised and proofed, orthographically
corrected narratives. The number of digitised texts exceeds this many times,
but since the textological pre-release preparations are in progress, these are
not open for public access. The present paper gives an overview on the
technical solutions, meta-data, research opportunities and a case study of the
database. Technical solutions (FreeBSD-based freeware database), manner of
presenting meta-data (location, time, author, collector, performer), legal info
(copyright, being open for free use for research and study purposes), main
goals such as convertability, long-term storage, access are similar to those of
the database LEPP (Portal of South Estonian heritage; cf. e.g.
http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol27). The database attempts exhaustively to
cover Estonian heritage material on selected topics and mythological beings. In
the present case, heritage on fairies, mythological diseases, location-related
folklore (lakes, trees; inc. sacred places), spells, cosmology, etc. is
included. Attempting to encompass Estonian heritage on these selected topics,
Rehepapp includes folklore texts from different archives, (19th-20th
c Estonian, 19th c German thematic) publications and oral history
(specifically, material recorded in the 1920-1930s). Generally, texts
integrated into Rehepapp represent principally different material corpora:
digitised manuscripts, transcriptions of audio records, oral history accounts,
digital-born texts and printed texts. As other big corpora, the database allows
for broad-base research: intertextual relations, intertextual studies,
textology, different methods of linguistic analysis, inc. Labov-Waletzky
analysis, maping motives, typology. The influence of published texts on
heritage as well as to an extent the spreading and way of presentation are
easily observed. Later theoretical analysis is unlimited and full of
possibilities for the user. The opportunities offered by the database are
demonstrated on the example of heritage on lendva (an old concept among
many peoples of a disease or witch's arrow sent by a witch to kill a specific
person or animal). The concept of lendva was on the decline already at
the end of the 19th century, but sudden death and illness as
associated with it even in mid-20th century. This paper is an
outcome of the ESF grant No. 5117.
Tatyana
Vladykina
Izhevsk,
Udmurtia, Russia
The analysis of Udmurt
spells has revealed that their image system is directly connected with the
knowledge of a speller. The images of a profane world figure in the texts
written from ordinary representatives of the traditional culture. Those who
have special "abilities" intersperse sacral information as well as
the information about the world structure into the spell context: the sky pole èíü-þáî , the hub of the
universe ìóçúåì ãîãû, the white/sacral
spring òäüû îøìåñ. The suggestion that
the private sacral knowledge is reflected in a spell text, first of all - image
system, can be proved by the fact that in the Udmurt spelling-conjuring
tradition there are no identical spells. During the conjuring act the healer ïåëëÿñüêèñü recreates a unique
text with a unique image combination according to traditional spell formulae.
This rhythmically organized text is given a magic power by the healer. The case
of spontaneously created spells is also confirmed by the fact that those who
practice healing often declare they have never been given the texts of spells
by anyone before. The spell casted whispering over a patient has a special
significance for the healer himself/herself, the influence on a percipient is
rather indirect one. Most of people who have ever addressed ïåëëÿñüêèñü mention that they
didn't hear/didn't understand the words casted during the conjuring act. Ïåëëÿñüêèñü gets into contact
with the beings of the other world, lays down irrational conditions for them.
Researches have already noted the Udmurt spells have a correlation with the
narratives of sorcery learning (Bogayevskiy 1890, Vladykina 1998). These
narratives contain sacral information that was considered not to be divulged.
According to these narratives the ability to conjure is given by higher force
or another healer/conjurer after the elected learner has passed a range of
tests. The narratives contain an evident thought: it is necessary to have
initial abilities to get the sacral knowledge. If the learner lacks the
abilities he/she can go mad during the learning. Having passed tests and got
the knowledge ïåëëÿñüêèñü puts his/her own
barriers before the spirit of disease, travels with it around the infinite
Universe. Investigation of the image system of the Udmurt spells in the light
of conceptions about the ways of getting knowledge could help to explain their
"unusual" nature.
Vilmos
Voigt
Budapest,
Hungary
Database is today a
much-cherished keyword in conversations about folklore. Digitization is a
similar fashion term. Quite a few years ago, the words "computer" and
"morphology" have shared the same fate. They are "in the
air", and everybody is eager to get "database" to her/his
institution. I am old enough to remember the overall use of the terms
"structure/structuralism" and "morphology" in folklore
research of yesterday (or even of the day before yesterday). However, there is
a difference in using the words "database" versus
"structuralism" or "morphology" in folklore studies. The
second and the third is a term, referring to a methodology, theoretical
assumptions, etc. The first is but a label of a product, a
"trademark" without any deeper theoretical background. We know, great
folklorists (Propp, Dundes, Mihai Pop etc.) used the term "morphology".
"Structure" and "structuralism" was a key term in the works
of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elli-Kaija Köngäs, Pierre Maranda, E.
M. Meletinsky, Claude Bremond, Heda Jason and others. Well known
anthropologists and folklorists have used those terms, and their entire books
were written about our topics. But what, indeed is the "database"?
The word is like a "nylon stocking" or "winchester" - a
trademark. It is a practical, and not a theoretical naming. Nobody knows, from
where and by whom we have heard first time about it. It is like a folklore
motif: it occurs everywhere and it is nowhere explained. However, in my paper I
try to give some hints: what could be the outlines of a theory of database in
folklore research.
Piret
Voolaid
The online
database "Estonian Droodles" (available at
http://www.folklore.ee/Droodles, contains 7,200 droodles) includes a number of
longer doodle riddles (about 430 text variants, 79 types). The question
component of the sc. narrative droodles, or droodle tales, is a verbally
transmitted tale visualised by a pictorial image. The performer of a droodle
sketches the image during narration and the story ends with a pun question. The
close interrelation of riddles and the narrative genre is illustrated by a
particular type, which etymologically derives from the tale type 1579 of the
international Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale type index. My presentation will
discuss the plot of tale type ATU 1579 and its forms which originate in
traditional folklore genres. In addition to (i) the narrative genre and (ii)
the riddle genre, the plot has been widely applied in the form of (iii) an
interactive computer game. The different forms and goals of a type plot may be
regarded as points of contact of folklore and the revival of folklore.
(i) In
folkloric form the plot of ATU 1579 occurs in traditional folkloric context (in
the pre-computer period). The plot is passed on from generation to generation
as a piece of traditional folklore in the form of a narrative and a riddle.
(ii) The
revival of folklore takes place when the plot of ATU 1579 is used as an
instructional tool for students of information technology. Here the folkloric
text forms a basis where the solution to the question is already known and a
computer programmer's task is to transpose it into a visually attractive form
of an interactive computer game by technological means.
(iii) As an
online strategy game the plot has once again entered the folkloric context.
Interactive dialogue is held between the programmed computer (performer of the
droodle) and the player (solver of the droodle). The game's spread is
physically limited to the computer. At least two folkloric domains occur -
firstly, the domain of players as a new folklore group and, secondly, the user
may spread the plot in the form of traditional oral/written folklore.
Mbugua
wa-Mungai
Arguably, the most
conspicuous development to have happened in Kenyan popular music over the last
fifteen years is the marked Americanization of its forms; the rubric 'Kenyan
hip hop' is now a common place. While the Americanization of entertainment
cultures globally is passé, what is not is the rich discourse on local
identities that this phenomenon fosters. Popular urban music in Kenya is a
platform upon which some of the issues at stake might be interrogated. The
predominant terms by which Kenyan youth culture is debated assume a
unidirectional impact by African American expressive culture (principally hip
hop fashion and decor) acting upon local youth music. However, a look beneath
the surface of Kenyan youth music reveals that the understanding upon which
such an assumption is founded is at best superficial, ignoring as it does the
crucial aspects of agency and adaptation in cultural process. Even as they
remain quite versatile at making such appropriations, young people still see a
clear demarcation between 'foreign' forms and "what is ours" ["Ismarwa!"].
Kenyan youth rappers appropriate the surface representations of African
American youth culture not to speak to American themes per se but more
crucially to explore local social space. Their practice evinces a particular
concern with anxieties of an identity especially in conflict with the broader
narrative of the 'Kenyan identity'; subversion is key to this process. Based on
selected texts by popular rappers, my paper examines the processes of
appropriation and contestation at work in Kenyan youth music and interrogates
youth understanding of the dynamics of cultural and self-identity.
Rainer
Wehse
Several
folklorists, like Linda Dégh or Katalin Horn, maintain that narrating
folktales in general serves as a therapeutical and educational means to drive
away boredom, apathy, aggression, and fears, or stress their indispensable
means for relaxation. But do these generalizing statements really hold true for
all narrative genres - not only maerchen, tall tales, parodies, jokes, and
anecdotes - but even gruesome legends or terrifying rumours? The above
interpretations may be correct, but where is the proof that this is really so?
Very few efforts have been made to go beyond the stage of speculation or
hypothesis. One means of getting closer to a solution is the presently
neglected method of experimental folk narrative research that is characterized
by a planned, systematic, and controlled approach. Ever since it first started
at the beginning of the 20th century, experimental narrative
research focused mainly on the process of oral transmission, the most famous
study probably being Walter Anderson's experiments on the transmission of
legends. The results of this side of experimental research finally led to the
conduit theory by Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi that stated that
only tradition bearers, who have expertise or much experience with a particular
genre, will pass on a text without major alterations. Another focus of
experimental folk narrative research involves the relation between the narrator
and his narrative, a research area dominated by psychologists. What to my
knowledge has not been done yet is experimental research on the impact of
folktales on an audience. For this reason I have conducted a pilot study, in
order to verify one of the two opposing hypotheses which claim that
1. the
telling of legends, rumours, and related genres leaves one pessimistic or at
least pensive or
2. that
such genres improves one's mood.
The description and
results of the study will be the main issue of my paper. The outcome of the
investigation hints that story telling as such has a therapeutical effect on
most people. This effect may not necessarily depend on particular tale types,
contents, or genres but may be caused by the very act of telling and listening
within a group. Listeners as well as tellers may show these effects that can be
characterized as soothing and relaxing, as suppressing (or maybe solving)
problems, and as a feeling of diffuse wellness. In addition, storytelling may
create or enhance joie de vivre and build new energy.
Guo
Wei
Hehe Abuka of
the Manchu nationality and Mi Luo Jia of the Zhuang nationality are both great
Goddesses, the creators of the world, who made all things of creation.
"Hehe" means mummy in Manchu language and "Mi", mother in
Zhuang language. These two Goddesses who created man are the first great
ancestral Goddesses of their respective nationalities. The following are the 5
differences between the two Goddessess:
1. The
Difference of Birth between the Two Goddesses: Hehe Abuka was born from bubbles
while Mi Luo Jia was born from flowers.
2. The
Discrepancy of Superhuman Strength: The air of Hehe Abuka bore all things on
the earth: her light bore all things of creation, and her body gave birth to
the 10,000 things of creation. The lower body of Abuka bore Hehe Banamu, the
mother of the earth and her upper body bore Hehe Woleduo, the Buxing Goddess.
Then the three Goddesses pooled their efforts to create man. Mi Luo Jia wetted
the earth and then moulded human beings with the wetted earth. She picked
fruits and threw them to the masses. When she picked hot peppers, she could
turn them into men, as she gathered carambola (star fruit), she could make them
women, and she might create birds and beasts by scattering mud into the sky.
3. The
Divergence of Divine Character: Hehe Abuka pulled the meat out of her own body
to make Ao Qin, a goddess with 9 heads, some of them asleep and some awake.
Hehe ordered Ao Qin to keep watch over the mother of the earth who was addicted
to sleep and not let her fall asleep. When Ao Qin rushed out the heaven gate,
Hehe threw to Ao Qin two stones which were in her own body. One of the them
became a horn on Ao Qin's head and the other became the male genitals, so Ao
Qin turned into Yeluli, a queer god of bisexuality, who gave birth to a large,
number of strange gods, who went up to heaven and down to the earth to bully
the goddesses there. Led by Hehe Abuka, the goddesses had many a fierce
fighting against Yeluli and vanquished him at last. Thus, Hehe became the main
Goddess in the vault of heaven. Mi Luo Jia gave birth to man and seed grain
with her own milk, so she became the mother both of human beings and 5 ceriais.
4. The
Diversity of Belief among the People: Hehe Abuka sent Yingjiang to be the first
female Sa Man who passed on the divine drum and the Sa Man religion. In the
mythology of the later stage of Manchu history, the heaven Goddess evolved into
the heaven God Abukaenduu. But now in the Manchus some of their surnames still
show homage to the heaven Goddess. In the mythology of Mi Luo Jia, several
statements are compatible: a) She made human beings, mountains and rivers,
and all things on the earth on her own; b) She and Buluotuo the God
created human beings, mountains and rivers, and all things of creation
together; c) She was the mother of Buluotuo; d) She was the wife of
Buluotuo; e) She turned into an old woman of flowers who grew flowers in
the flower mountain, bestowing both white flowers and red flowers to people to
make humans and those who had got both kinds of flowers would bear boys and
girls Mi Luo Jia planted a white flower together with a red flower, turning
them first into a man and a woman and then a husband and a wife. After the death
of people, she returned them to flowers; f) In the rooms of the Zhuang
puerperae are elected the spirit tablets of the old flower women, decorated
with mountain or paper flowers, and in the Zhuang area there are temples of old
flower women in many counties. g) The Grandfather's Ancestral Hall in
Mount Ganzhuang in Tianyang County, Guangxi, offers sacrifices to Buluotuo
while Rock Mu Niang offers sacrifices to Mi Luo Jia. h). The Scriptures of Mo
Religion 'Classic Poem of Buluotuo' hants: "When you ask Buluotuo, he will
speak. As you ask Mi Luo Jia, she will say." Both the God and Goddess
would show you how to extrieate yourselves from calamities.
5. The Difference
between Sa Man Religion and Mo Religion The Sa Man Religion is the religion
among the Manchus and also the religion of the imperial court of the Qing
Dynasty, which has the scriptures in the Manchu language. The Mo Religion is
the religion popular among Zhuang people, offering sacrifices to the god of the
Zhuangs and the Taoist god of the Hans, creating its valgar characters by
borrowing the Chinese method of associative compounds and pictophonetic
characters and copying its scriptures. Solely-respected goddess à
equally-revered god and goddess à goddess' achievements of creating the
world. Their alienation into a god of protecting children reflects the history
of human evolution in which goddesses waned in power. The rice-planting culture
gives us expression to the divine achievements that Mi Luo Jia created man and
cattle, found ox soul and seed grain, and brought up man and grain strain, etc.
Susana
Weich-Shahak
Tel-Aviv,
Israel
In the
Judeo-Spanish oral tradition, the repertoire of the Sephardi childhood offers a
singular example of minimal narrative with performances which fall between
speech and music. I will refer to a repertoire that is an integral part of the
oral repertoire of the Sephardi Jews in their vernacular language, called
"Judezmo" in the Eastern Mediterranean communities, and
"Hakitia" in those from Northern Morocco. This is the repertoire used
by the Sephardi children as accompaniment for their games or performed for them
by their elders. With a series of Video examples from the repertoire that our
informants remembered from their childhood, I will present various
characteristics of this particular repertoire, in their texts and in their
musical aspects as well as some remarks about their social function. The
examples to be presented belong to the traditions of Rhodes, Tetuan,
Alcazarquivir, Saloniki and Izmir.
Tünde
Zentai
That the bed may be
the most important place in our life, was, as it is well known, highly preferred
by witches in folk beliefs. Throughout Europe and over the world, old
narratives give us a lot of evidence for the nature of this connection. In my
presentation I shall take this relationship out of the complex traditional
system of bed-bedding- sleep-habits-customs-beliefs and produce a couple of
texts to exemplify some historical trends and changes of the subject matter in
Hungary. The first narrative is a passage of a witch trial report entered on
record in 1618, the second one is a belief memorat sound recorded in 1972, the
third one is a part of a life story, taken up in 1997, with special attention
to the changes in sleeping customs. These narratives inform us not only about
attacks of night witches but the traditional forms of bed made on the floor and
bedsteads. Studying the constellation of beds and witches from 1618 to the end
of the 20th century we have more and more knowledge about beds,
meanwhile these beliefs are slowly diminishing.
Adam
Zolkover
Bloomington,
Indiana, USA
Roger Abrahams' Deep
Down in the Jungle exists in a precarious position as a book both
foundational and widely influential, so closely tied to the historical circumstances
of its creation that it is quickly losing relevance in contemporary
scholarship. It is a product of the same era in American race relations that
produced The Negro Family: A Case for National Action - The Moynihan Report;
and like that document, it stands in some respect as a testament to the
then-progressive notion that African-American family structure is, in some
sense, pathological. Abrahams himself admits this of the first edition of the
book (1964) in the introduction to the second (1970), but even in the second
edition, his revised analysis cannot escape this pathological theoretical
framework. The point that I wish to illustrate in this paper, is that despite
this - despite the fact that Abrahams' thesis has become increasingly incompatible
with recent trends in the social sciences - the data that he presents is not
without its relevance. The narratives that Abrahams collects and the
ethnographic information that he provides can, with only a small amount of
reinterpretation, remain useful to scholars interested in folklore as a social
event, and narration as process rather than product. Using elements of the
methodological frameworks pioneered by scholars like Dell Hymes, Elizabeth
Fine, and Ibrahim Muhawi, it is possible to retranslate Abrahams' narratives,
so to speak - to reorganize them on the page in such a way that they begin to
reveal certain elements of the style of oral performance. Then given
thisinformation, it becomes possible to understand something of the way in
which the texts were not simply a conglomeration of words, but a catalyst for a
historically specific, distinctly African American discourse.
Gabriel
Zoran
The paper will examine
the concepts of narrativity and fictionality implied in the Homeric epic. The
Homeric epic has been studied mainly for its poetic practice, and the various
meta-poetic statements scattered along the text have been read mainly as a
means to reconstruct the genetic process of the text itself. Much less have
they been understood as a chapter in the history of meta-poetic thought. The
dominant concept of poetry in the Homeric epic is that of the poet as a person
chosen by the gods, whose poetry is the fruit of a direct intervention of the
Muse, and thus it has very little to do with his own choice or consideration.
But alongside this dominant view, there are also opposite ones, regarding the
poet as a craftsman, who works according to his professional competence. This
concept, which turned out in the course of time to be the dominant one (cf.
Aristotle's 'Poetics'), exists in the Homeric epics only as a marginal and
hinted one; however, it can be systematically traced. In the framework of this
conception several quesions can be raised about the narrative consciousness
implied in the epic. What is the function of the narrator in the construction
of the plot? How is he supposed to cope with special narrative problems, such
as simultaneity or parallel events? What is the nature of the represented world
as related to the narrator's existence: is it conceived as fiction or reality?
What is the function of the listener, and how are his or her responses taken
into account in the construction of plot (concepts of tension, curiosity,
identification, etc.)? These issues will be discussed mainly through an
analysis of the dialogue between Telemachus and Penelope in 'Odyssey' I, and
the Demodocus scene in 'Odyssey' IIIV, and will be supported with various short
references, scattered along the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey'.
Rachel
Zoran
Bibliotherapy is a
therapeutic method within the field of art therapy, which suggests that the
therapeutic dialogue focus on a literary text, either written or read, which
then functions within the therapeutic dialogue as a "third voice",
added to the voices of the patient and the therapist as an autonomous
interlocutor. The idea of such a "third voice" is based on the
assumption that a literary text has therapeutic qualities of its own, which can
be applied in therapeutic processes and contribute to their progress. The use
of fairy tales in this context has a special place. Within all cultures fairy
tales have an important role in the process of socialization, a function which
has major therapeutic implications. When a fairy tale is involved in a
therapeutic dialogue, it should be taken into account that it enacts not only
the patient's personal identity themes, but also the central themes which
construct the psycho-cultural substratum of the society in which that tale has
developed. The fairy tale should therefore be regarded as bringing into the
clinic not only the personal subconscious, but also an entire socio-cultural
substratum. This common substratum, however, does not discard the individual
differences between various readers-listeners who respond to it. Fairy tales
are originally intended for all ages; nowadays, however, the fairy tale is
identified mainly with children. Rereading a fairy tale which we have heard as
children, provides an opportunity to return to significant parts of memories
connected with the situation of our first encounter with it. This possibility
is therapeutically valuable, since it enables us to have a dialogue with our
past from an adult viewpoint. This paper will present a group experience based
on rereading "Cinderella", and analyze various responses to that
encounter. The responses will be discussed according to the main themes of the
tale: orphanhood and humiliation, supernatural aid, and escape