Contexts of Folklore

Festschrift for Dan Ben-Amos on His Eighty-Fifth Birthday

Simon Bronner, Wolfgang Mieder

• Publisher: Peter Lang Group
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781433156489
• eBook ISBN: 9781433156496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Social Sciences

Dan Ben-Amos famously ushered in the performance turn in folklore studies in the 1970s with his paradigm-changing definition of folklore as "artistic communication in small groups." He went on to make profound contributions to issues of folktale, folk speech, genre, cultural memory, biblical and Jewish folklore, African folklore, and historiography, and gain renown around the world as a leading figure in folklore studies. In Contexts of Folklore, leading lights of folklore studies from many corners of the globe honor Ben-Amos by presenting original studies inspired by his insights. Their essays will assuredly be lasting, provocative statements of folklore research that will energize future generations of folklorists and other scholars of culture and communication.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Contexts of Dan Ben-Amos (Simon J. Bronner / Wolfgang Mieder)
• 1. Nondichao Bachalou, Museum Guide and Historian of Abomey, Benin (Clover Jebsen Afokpa)
• 2. The Truth of Fervent Desire: Stories About the Deaths of Jewish Cultural Heroes During the Holocaust (Haya Bar-Itzhak)
• 3. Signing at Cross-Purposes (Richard Bauman)
• 4. Stephen Dedalus Sings “Little Harry Hughes”: Anti-Semitism as Folkloric Performance in James Joyce’s Ulysses (Michael J. Bell)
• 5. Israeli Political Humor: What Was There To Laugh About in 1967? (Regina F. Bendix / Galit Hasan-Rokem)
• 6. The Bodies of the Narrator (Charles L. Briggs)
• 7. The Jesus Movement as Folk Group (Gary Alan Fine / Stephanie Bliese / Christopher Robertson)
• 8. Performancing: The Enactor’s Reality (Ruth Finnegan)
• 9. The Concept of Equal Validity in Narratives of Soviet Experience in the Former Finnish Karelia (Pekka Hakamies)
• 10. Trapping the Intruder: A Narrative Pattern in Homer’s Odyssey (William Hansen)
• 11. A Creole Narrative Grammar (Lee Haring)
• 12. Religious Nationalisms Compared: The Curious Cases of India and Serbia (Frank J. Korom)
• 13. Djuha at Home on the Isle of Rhodes, Italy, and in Georgia, United States (Isaac Jack Lévy / Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt)
• 14. A Quantitative Cross-Cultural Analysis of Folk Crafts in Relation to Foreign Aid in Developing Countries (Md Abdullah Al Mamun / Simon J. Bronner)
• 15. “Ceci n’est point une fable”: Tale Type ATU 63, The Fox Rids Himself of Fleas, from Popular Tradition to Natural History (and Back Again) (Ulrich Marzolph)
• 16. Folklore and the Emotional Brain (Jay Mechling)
• 17. “Proverbs Are Worth a Thousand Words”: The Global Spread of American Proverbs (Wolfgang Mieder)
• 18. Magic and Libel: Contexts for Muslim Memories of the Jewish Community of Herat, Afghanistan (Margaret A. Mills)
• 19. “Do You Want to Hear a Secret?”: Secret-Telling as an Oral Genre (Amos Noy)
• 20. In Praise of Formalism: Teaching Samson’s Riddles in a Diverse Classroom (Dorothy Noyes)
• 21. Giuseppe Pitrè’s Sicilian Folktales: Text and Performance, Prose and Poetry (Joseph Russo)
• 22. The Vernacular Sacred (Jack Santino)
• 23. Tradition and Embodied Knowledge in an Artisan Community (Amy Shuman)
• 24. Folk Narrative Genres, Liminality and Epistemological Uncertainty (Ülo Valk)
• 25. From Wheccumquek to Quink-Quankeo: “The Fals Fox,” “The Fox and the Goose,” and the Folk Ballad (Stephen D. Winick)
• 26. From Ginzberg’s Legends of the Bible to Ben-Amos’s Folktales of the Jews: Towards a History of Jewish Folk Narratives and Its Study (Eli Yassif)
• 27. The Shepherd, the Well, and the Jug: National Memory and Symbolic Bridges to Antiquity in Modern Hebrew Culture (Yael Zerubavel)
• 28. Motif as Symbol in Context (Juwen Zhang)
• 29. Waking Henry Iliowizi, Or, How Jews and Gentiles Have Something to Learn from the Dead (Jack Zipes)