Folklore

12 Key excerpts on "Folklore"

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  Educator's Companion to Children's Literature

  Folklore, Contemporary Realistic Fiction, Fantasy, Biographies, and Tales from Here and There

  • Sharron L. McElmeel(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • Libraries Unlimited

    (Publisher)

  2 Folklore Folklore comprises traditional creations of peoples, primitive and civilized. These are achieved by using sounds and words in metric form and prose, and include also folk beliefs or superstitions, customs, and performances, dances and plays. Moreover, Folklore is not a science about a folk, but the traditional folk-science and folk-poetry. —Jonas Balys as quoted in Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore Mythology and Legend (1949) J ? olklore books are the written versions of oral narratives that have been passed from generation to generation in various cultures. The storyteller is an important figure in oral cultures; storytellers tell of their people's history, explain the way the world was and how it originated, and preserve the lives, customs, beliefs, and emotions of the people whose story they are telling. In parts of Africa, storytellers are called griots. In the Pueblo communities in the southwestern United States, storytell- ers have been immortalized in traditional clay storyteller figures. Gail Haley created a storyteller, Poppyseed, as a literary device to tell the Appalachian tales of Jack. From Folktales to Myths The genre of Folklore includes several major groupings: folktales, ballads, fairy tales, leg- ends, fables, myths, folk songs, and tall tales. Most Folklore is classified in the 398 section of the library media center. Myths, however, are most often found in the 291 section, because they reflect the religious beliefs of a civilization. Myths Myths explain how something came to be in the universe—how the sun was placed in the sky, the origin of the constellations, or why the moon shines at night. Myths refer to gods and beings greater than humans and reflect the re- ligious beliefs of their cultures. Legends Legends are very much like myths in that they often explain how something came to be. Unlike myths, though, legends deal more with earthly things such as how the bear got its stumpy tail and how the jaguar got its spots.

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  Greek and Roman Folklore

  A Handbook

  • Graham Anderson(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  . . it is distinct [from more formal literature and art] in that it is essentially of the people, by the people, and for the people. (Theodore Gaster) The term Folklore as used today is ambiguous. The context in which it appears reveals whether the user is referring to all the unwritten narratives of primitive people and thereby drawing a line between the literature of primitive and civilised peoples. . . . A connotation which adds to the confusion is a hang-over from the earlier European use of the word Folklore to cover peasant customs, beliefs, and narratives—the anthropology of peasants. (Katherine Luomala) Although the word Folklore is more than a century old, no exact agreement has ever been reached as to its meaning. The common idea present in all folk- lore is that of tradition, something handed down from one person to another and preserved either by memory or practice rather than written record. (Stith Thompson) The entire body of ancient popular beliefs, customs and traditions, which have survived among the less educated elements of civilized societies until today. It thus includes fairy tales, myths and legends, superstitions, festal rites, traditional games, folk songs, popular sayings, arts, crafts, local dances and the like. (John L. Mish) “Or So People Say”: Some Definitions and Approaches 3 These approaches are typical of the level of variation we are likely to find. Only the fourth reflects an explicit preference in favor of regarding Folklore as survival of the primitive, a now rather unfashionable angle. The middle two are more convinced of the flexibility or ambiguity of the term than the oth- ers. There is some hesitation between the catchall formula and the cautious enumeration, in case we accidentally leave something out.

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  Folklore Concepts

  Histories and Critiques

  • Dan Ben-Amos, Henry Glassie, Elliott Oring(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 TOWARD A DEFINITION OF Folklore IN CONTEXT

  D EFINITIONS OF Folklore ARE AS MANY AND VARIED as the versions of a well-known tale. Both semantic and theoretical differences have contributed to this proliferation. The German Volkskunde, the Swedish folkminne, and the Indian lok sahitya all imply slightly different meanings that the English term Folklore cannot syncretize completely (Eriksson 1955; Hultkranz 1960, 243–49; Legross 1962; Lutz 1958). Similarly, anthropologists and students of literature have projected their own biases into their definitions of Folklore. In fact, for each of them, Folklore became the exotic topic, the green grass on the other side of the fence, to which they were attracted but which, alas, was not in their own domain. Thus, while anthropologists regarded Folklore as literature, scholars of literature defined it as culture (cf. Bascom 1949; Espinosa 1949; Herskovits 1949; Leach 1949). Folklorists themselves resorted to enumerative (Bayard 1953, 9–10; Dundes 1965, 1–3; Merton 1846), intuitive (Botkin 1944, xxi; Utley 1968), and operational (Utley 1961) definitions; yet while all these certainly contributed to the clarification of the nature of Folklore, at the same time, they circumvented the main issue—namely, the isolation of the unifying thread that joins jokes and myths, gestures and legends, costumes and music into a single category of knowledge.

  The difficulties experienced in defining Folklore are genuine and real. They result from the nature of Folklore itself and are rooted in the historical development of the concept. Early definitions of Folklore were clouded by romantic mist and haunted by the notion of “popular antiquities,” which Thoms sought to replace.1 Implicit in these definitions are criteria of the antiquity of the material, the anonymity or collectiveness of composition, and the simplicity of the folk, all of which are circumstantial and not essential to Folklore. The age of a song, for example, establishes it chronologically; the identification of the composer describes it historically; and its association with a particular group defines it socially. Each of these factors has an explanatory and interpretive value, but none of them defines the song as Folklore. Thus, the principles that united “customs, observance, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc.” in Thoms’s initial definition of Folklore were not intrinsic to these items and could only serve as a shaky framework for the development of a scientific discipline concentrating on them.2

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  Literature and the Child

  • Lee Galda, , Lauren Liang, Bernice Cullinan, Lee Galda, Lauren Liang, Bernice Cullinan(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Older readers who have been introduced to basic folktales and Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Summary 211 values, hopes, fears, and beliefs of many cultures. By recognizing recurring themes in Folklore from around the world, we can begin to build a bridge of understanding among all people. The oral ori-gins of Folklore make it a wonderful resource for storytelling and language development. Dramatic readings or performances offer one venue for cre-ativity. Children who are familiar with Folklore also learn to use similar patterns and conventions in their own writing, borrowing and exploring folkloric frameworks and characters for their own personal stories. Summary Folklore began as stories and poems told across the generations, as people sought to entertain, to explain the world, and to pass down their cul-tural values and beliefs. Folklore helps us under-stand not only ourselves but people from other cultures and other times. Folktales, fables, myths, hero tales, and songs add depth to our literary knowledge. Each type of Folklore has its own characteris-tics. Rhythmic nursery rhymes enchant young chil-dren. Folktales—which include fairy tales, talking animal stories, noodlehead tales, and tall tales— have universal themes and motifs and appear in different guises around the world. Fables incor-porate explicit moral statements that are intended to guide behavior. Myths explain the origins of the world, natural phenomena, and human behavior.

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  Essays on Semiolinguistics and Verbal Art

  • William O. Hendricks(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  For example, a myth, like narratives in general, presents, through the interactions of human and/or humanlike agents in a given setting, an event or series of events during which a problem or series of problems is presented or arises. This problem/series of problems motivates one or more of the agents to act in order to attempt to alleviate the state of disequilibrium which results from the existence/creation of the problem (s) (Georges 1968:225). Many of the criteria by which 'Folklore' is usually differentiated from 'literature' are of no real structural relevance. According to one folklorist, who by no means presents a minority view, The difference between Folklore and other expressive phenomena is in the range of relations possible in performance. Essentially, we distinguish between Folklore and 'popular culture' on the basis of dissemination (performance) methods; Folklore we say can only exist in the face-to-face encounter that leads to purely oral transmission. The same is true, only more so, in the dis-tinction between Folklore and high art or belles lettres. These do not differ greatly in expressive capacity, in art, or even in the presence of traditional elements of composition. But with the development of techniques of repro-duction of artistic objects (printing, recording, lithograph, etc.) a further removal of performer and audience is made possible, and the possibility arises for developing popular and high arts distinct from folk arts (Abrahams 1969: 125-26). One serious problem with the attempt to differentiate Folklore from literature on the basis of the oral vs. written criterion is posed by the existence of societies lacking an orthography. In such non-literate societies everything is orally transmitted. It would be ethnocentric to assert that such societies possess only 'Folklore' and no 'high art'.

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  Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

  • Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall, John Peck(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Folk literature’s universality, in short, is a demonstrable fact of cultural history. Folk literature is also intensely local, for the multiform versions of the types embody the conceptions, attitudes, and values of the many cultural contexts in which their performers have re-created them. It is an area of literature which deserves rather more serious attention than it has been accorded. One small attempt to move in that direction is Scottish Tradition: A Collection of Scottish Folk Literature (Buchan, 1984) which tries to epitomize in a critical anthology the folk literature of one culture, and which both exemplifies and expands the matter touched on in this rather rapid survey. Further Reading Bauman, Richard (1984) Verbal Art as Performance, Waveland, Prospect Heights Bausinger, Hermann (1968) Formen der Volkspoesie, Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin Burke, Peter (1978) Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Temple Smith, London Cocchiara, Giuseppe (1981) The History of Folklore in Europe, translated by John N. McDaniel, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia [first published 1952] Honko, Lauri and Laaksonen, Pekka (eds) (1983) Trends in Nordic Tradition Research, Studia Fennica 27, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Helsinki Jason, Heda (1977) Ethnopoetry, Linguistica Biblica, Bonn Ong, Walter J. (1981) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Methuen, London Renwick, Roger de V. (1980) English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia Thompson, Stith (1955–8) Motif-Index of Folk Literature, revised edn, 6 vols, Rosenkilde & Bagger, Copenhagen Toelken, Barre (1979) The Dynamics of Folklore, Houghton Mifflin, Boston Additional Works Cited Aarne, Antti and Thompson, Stith (1961) The Types of the Folktale, 2nd revised edn, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Academia Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki [first published in German 1910] Bascom, William R. (1965) ‘Four Functions of Folklore’

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  Marrow of Human Experience, The

  Essays on Folklore by William A. Wilson

  • William Wilson, Jill Terry Rudy(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Utah State University Press

    (Publisher)

  But in only two subsections of the book does he explicitly get at the relation of Folklore to literature. In the first he points out that in folk artistic works, community taste, as opposed to an individual aesthetic, determines the outcome of artistic creation. And in the second he, once again, shows what Folklore contributes to the artistic success of the literary works in which it appears (1979, 199–223, 181–94, 334–43). What we must have, if we want to win for our subject greater academic credibility, is not more studies of Folklore in literature, but rather careful analy-ses of Folklore as literature. Otherwise, we will continue to be viewed by our lit-erary colleagues as the folks who do the hack work for their more sophisticated and important literary analyses. Another unfortunate result of focusing on Folklore in music, art, or litera-ture instead of on the musical, artistic, or literary merit of the Folklore itself is that such a focus contributes to an evolutionary view of Folklore still prevalent among our colleagues in other disciplines, and occasionally among ourselves, and, in the process, diminishes the humanistic value of the lore. Many faculty members in arts and humanities colleges and departments view Folklore in a condescending way—as unsophisticated, aesthetically inferior material from which the more sophisticated fine arts may have developed or to which writers, composers, painters, and others may occasionally turn for the themes, motifs, and images that they, supposedly, will give fuller artistic elaboration. But they seldom see this material as significant artistic expression having originated from the same human imperatives as the works they study. If they treat Folklore at all in their classes, they usually do so historically—that is, they tend to treat it as primitive, subliterary artistic or musical material from which the “higher” art forms eventually evolved. And they view Folklore always as subservient to these higher forms.

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  Living Folklore

  Introduction to the Study of People and their Traditions

  • Martha Sims, Martine Stephens(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Utah State University Press

    (Publisher)

  Because of the fluid nature of the field, and the fact that it is built from so many influences, Folklore continues to evolve and change. It’s not just that people change, but that our opportunities for expression change; the influence of the Internet, for instance has had profound impact on how people communicate, and new forms and adaptations of Folklore have emerged as a result. That means that what folklorists say about performances and texts generated through these new means will change as well. Part of what we do as folklorists is discuss these changes as they arise, and continually examine our assumptions about groups of people and how they share Folklore.

  The study of Folklore encompasses so many types of expression that it’s almost impossible not

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  Folklore in the Modern World

  • Richard M. Dorson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  That was the great quest, the exciting hunt, to pin down the memorial of a prehistoric rite or custom or myth in its fossilized form as a peasant observance or utterance. Each of the Great Team restated the definition and methodology of Folklore in terms of its past-ness, backwardness, and peasantness: Andrew Lang: There is a form of study, Folklore, which collects and compares the similar but immaterial relics of old races, the surviving superstitions and stories, the ideas which are in our time but not of it... The student of Folklore is thus led to examine the usages, myths and ideas of savages, which are still retained, in rude enough shape, by the Euro-pean peasantry (Dorson 1968b:219). Edwin Sidney Hartland: Let me try to tell you what Folklore is. ... It is now well established that the most civilized races have all fought their way slowly upwards from a condition of savagery. Now, savages can neither read nor write; yet they manage to collect and store up a consider-able amount of knowledge of a certain kind. . . . The knowledge, organ-ization, and rules thus gathered and formulated are preserved in the memory, and communicated by word of mouth and by actions of various kinds. To this mode of preservation and communication, as well as to the things thus preserved and communicated, the name of Tradition is given; and Folklore is the science of Tradition (Dorson 1968b:231). Alfred Nutt: The folk whose lore we collect and study is essentially the portion of mankind which has ever remained in closest contact with Mother Earth, the class upon whose shoulders has been laid the task of making the soil yield food, and of doing the drudgery, the dirty work of humanity. ... In telling you what Folklore is I have emphasized . . . certain features that differentiate it sharply from our modern civilization. That is, as the word indicates, a product of town-life, Folklore is a product of the countryside (Dorson 1968b:261).

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  Frontiers Of Folklore

  • William R Bascom(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  15 ). Nevertheless, the encounter with narratives and songs, sayings and riddles in their cultural and situational contexts has already forced us to rethink our fundamental conceptual framework for Folklore and to reformulate the relations between Folklore and other verbal systems of communication, primarily literature. The effects of the ‘new perspectives’ extend beyond description, shattering basic assumptions that were at the roots of many a theory about Folklore, culture, and progress. Such ideas evolved together with the emergence of modern systematic thought and knowledge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were incorporated, probably without critical awareness, into modern research in the social sciences and the humanities.

  Literature and Folk-Literature

  The idea of Folklore, if not the term, evolved as the dark side of the enlightment, the contraries of the new ideals to which the age aspired. Rationalism “regarded the folk and its creative, especially literary, products with contempt and derision, as lacking in refinement, learning, mastery of diction, and subtleness and elevation of thought. This aristocratic attitude toward folk literature is characteristic of the Rationalistic movement” (16 ). The romantics, who extolled the very poetry the rationalists despised, reversed the attitude towards and valuation of the folk and its literature, but they did not reject the basic dichotomy inherent in the set of opposites of literature and folk- literature. Herder, who coined the partially synonymous terms Volkslitteratur , Volkspoesie , and Naturpoesie (17 ), considered the folk (Volk ) from political, social, educational and historical perspectives. The folk is the ruled, as opposed to the ruling, part of a people, and often is synonymous with the notion of nation itself. It is the less educated group within a nation, and also those people in ancient and modern times that have not yet reached a sophisticated level of civilization. This last characteristic is particularly important since it also implies that “the Volk is a class apart from philosophers, poets, and orators; a class different from sages. Not being wise and learned, they must be those upon whom artificial methods of training and culture have had less effect than upon the philosophers, poets, and orators. They are therefore more nearly the natural man” (18 ). Following Rousseau, and more closely his teacher Hammann, Herder idealized the natural man, and admired his poetic expression. For him, folk- literature achieved “the highest degree of harmony between the personality of the individual author, his subject, and the collective personality of his native audience or ethnic environment. Folk poetry, therefore, is to him the highest type and the final standard of all poetry” (19

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  Who Owns the Past?

  The Politics of Time in a 'Model' Bulgarian Village

  • Deema Kaneff(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  Unlike history or tradition, Folklore was a past Defining Folklore 153 in which anyone could partake, irrespective of whether they were Political or apolitical figures. Folklore straddled the temporal and spatial domains of both history and tradition. The wide-ranging scope of the folkloric past and the way this past was manifested as a collection of aesthetic objects, for example as survaknitsi in a competition, attributed to Folklore the power to be broadly relevant. With its wide relevancy, Folklore also had considerable unifying capacity – a factor that becomes particularly important when considering socialist iden-tity. As a past taken out of a traditional context and placed within a state-determined one, Folklore broke the particular religious/ethnic/gender significance carried by tradition. We see this in the folkloric survakane custom, where the focus of the competition was the variations in appearance of the folkloric survaknitsi (using various decorative materials dependent on agricul-tural livelihood) in order to create regional distinctions. Engagement in Folklore advocated an identity focusing on regional alliances, boundaries which were part of the state administrative structure and categorised the country in socialist terms. This ignored traditional-based distinctions that ‘operated’ at a more local level. All schoolchildren, irrespective of their ethnic or religious backgrounds, were encouraged to enter the competition. Folklore – as cultural objects with national significance – played an important part in engaging the population in the state-approved homogenising concept of ‘Bulgarianness’. This issue is explored in the following chapter. N OTES 1.

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  The Pacific Region

  The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures (Volume 5)

  • Jan Goggans, Aaron DiFranco, Jan Goggans, Aaron DiFranco(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Folklore Barre Toelken FOLK GROUPS In the archetypical West, certain recurrent ideas have functioned to define and ex- press values shared by substantial numbers of people who have seen themselves as central to the West. In this often stereotypical world, the Japanese and Chinese remain as outsiders, the Indians as implacable foes (or occasionally as spiritual guides—as long as they are not interested in holding on to much land), the women as supporting players who sometimes rise to glory, the men (and male values) as central issues of reality. In many ways, thus, the West has functioned mythically as an idea that gives dramatic voice to attitudes that promote an "American" hege- mony. Folklore, because it springs from those whose voices resonate from within a re- gion's cultures, can act as an antidote to mythologized notions of place. Most of the folk groups that have been prominent in the settlement of the West are mul- tidimensional; that is, occupations that have their own lore and language have been developed or excelled in by members of certain ethnic or national groups that have as well their own insider lore. For example, much of the cowboy culture that has colored the life and attitudes (as well as fueled the stereotypes and myths) of the West was brought north from Mexico and developed into a highly articulate cul- ture by Spanish-speaking ranchers. Much of the terminology still used in the cat- tle country comes directly from Spanish buckaroos (vaqueros). The preference for the word buckaroo by the cattle rangers over the word cowboy is still a locally dis- tinctive feature in some areas within the region we call the West. In eastern Ore- gon, parts of Idaho, and much of Nevada, use of the word cowboy marks someone as an outsider.

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