An academic discipline is generally defined by the nature of the materials it studies and the types of questions it explores with respect to these materials. The materials of folkloristics are generally recognized to be traditional ideas, actions, or consequences. Whether traditional materials are defined in terms of mentation, behavior, or product is largely a matter of the theoretical interest of the particular researcher. The domain of traditional ideas, behaviors, and/or consequences is further delimited by most folklorists in one of two ways. The first group of folklorists does not consider all traditional things, but only those held to be...

English-American folklore studies began as the leisure-time activity of scholar-gentlemen intrigued by the quaint body of customs, manners, and oral traditions called popular antiquities—rebaptized folklore in 1846. With the advent of evolutionary anthropology in the second half of the nineteenth century and with its emphasis on folklore items as survivals among the peasants of ancient practices and beliefs, folklore became the object of serious study by scholars like Tylor, Lang, and Gomme. Since then both English and American folklorists have devoted much of their time to the study of survivals and to the historical reconstruction of the past or...

Like many scholarly concepts, “tradition” is at once a commonsense and a scientific category. In its commonsense meaning, tradition refers to an inherited body of customs and beliefs. In the social sciences, an ongoing discourse has attempted to refine this understanding of tradition as it has proven empirically and theoretically inadequate. Recent efforts to clarify the concept of tradition, most notably those of Edward Shils, do much to add nuance to our conventional understanding but leave unresolved a major ambiguity: does tradition refer to a core of inherited culture traits whose continuity and boundedness are analogous to that of a...

Santa Fe, New Mexico, attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists each year because of its picturesque plaza, its historic role as a Spanish imperial capital, its nearby Indian pueblos, its wealth of museums, and its cultural events—and its ski slopes. It has an image as an Old World haven where one can meet the American Other, the unassimilated Native American culture. Perhaps the closest most visitors will get to real Indians is by strolling along the Portal of the Palace of the Governors, the oldest public building in the United States and now part of the Museum of New...

One of the main functions of speech is to communicate, to establish contact between an addresser and his addressee. If, however, the barriers of time and space are insurmountable, the verbalized message, once emitted, will fail to be received by the intended addressee—unless, of course, some vehicle such as the telephone is available to transmit the verbalized message. Until recently, most peasant societies have had no immediate access to such other vehicles for purposes of long distance, interpersonal communication; they have not usually been able to afford them nor, in most instances, would they find them necessary. Verbal messages...

This paper is a discussion of six jests collected in Spanish at the lower end of the Texas-Mexican border and presented here in English translation. They were part of several hundred texts recorded in 1962 and 1963, during a series of field trips in search of jests and legendary anecdotes that might reveal attitudes of Mexicans and Mexican Americans toward the United States.¹ I will attempt to relate them to Texas-Mexican attitudes toward culture change. They are not peculiar to the group from which they were recorded. Some of them have been collected from other Mexican groups, and their basic...

Celebration often exemplifies one of the central paradoxes of play.¹ From one perspective, it is autotelic and purely expressive, an ideal form of the ludic impulse in the classic sense described by Huizinga.² From another angle, however, celebration can be replete with studied political maneuvering and other instrumental stratagems. Their polarity notwithstanding, these two aspects of celebration are dialectically related in the “two-dimensional” process discerned by Cohen.³ Power relations are represented, negotiated, and acted upon in the arena of celebration, while celebratory symbols derive much of their meaning and dramatic impact from underlying sociopolitical realities. Celebration, then, is both culture...

All cultures establish territorial boundaries and assign special powers to boundary-crossers. This has been generally accepted since the days of Arnold Van Gennep and his Rites of Passage (1909). It is also widely accepted that the special attributes assigned to any “marked” object or person, such as a boundary-crosser, may be either positive or negative; they need not necessarily be one or the other, just as long as they are “special.” This was also articulated as early as the nineteenth century in James George Frazer’s numerous discussions of how taboo objects can both heal and destroy, protect and harm. As...

We go into restaurants and people want to know what kind of religion we are, not because what we look like but because they feel a joy about us.¹

Pentecostals are acutely aware of the many stereotypes, fears, and apprehensions that non-Pentecostals share about them. They realize that most non-believers find their beliefs and their religious behavior strange at best and abhorrent and primitive at worst. Strong anti-Pentecostal sentiment from outsiders only feeds the fire of Pentecostalism, however, and is proof enough for them that they are a special religious group.² The differences between Pentecostals and non-Pentecostals become exaggerated as...

One of the characteristic social developments among many first-generation immigrant groups in Western countries, particularly in the United States, has been the emergence of “ethnic churches.”¹ In Israel the phenomenon is also common. Of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of synagogues established in Israel in the recent decades of mass immigration, the majority can probably be characterized as “ethnic synagogues.” The synagogue congregations tend to crystallize around a nucleus of individuals who, originating from a particular locality abroad, maintain the particular shade of Jewish ritual tradition they have brought with them, with which they are more familiar, and in which they...

I intend to examine a certain way of eating; that which is characteristic of the health food movement, and try to determine what people are communicating when they choose to eat in ways which run counter to the dominant patterns of food consumption in our society. This requires looking at health foods as a system of symbols and the adherence to a health food way of life as being, in part, the expression of belief in a particular world view. Analysis of these symbols and the underlying world view reveals that, as a system of beliefs and practices, the health...

Among certain groups and in certain behavioral settings in the United States, there is a greater use of ritual magic than is generally characteristic of the whole society.¹ Coal miners and fishermen as well as rodeo performers and gamblers are in occupations and situations that are replete with ritual magic. These groups and situations have in common a high degree of uncertainty associated with them. The “retention” of rituals in these cases, in an otherwise highly secularized society, functions to bridge the gaps of uncertainty. This interpretation is based on the classical theoretical formulation proposed by Bronislaw Malinowski.

Malinowski first...

In the traditional description of the public drinking place, tending bar has largely been characterized as a passive profession.¹ The bartender or barmaid has been seen as the distributor of drinks and as the person ultimately responsible for order. In the enactment of either task, they are usually described as peripheral to the existence of the social world of the bar; as persons who, at best, will listen to your talk or your troubles but never become involved in either. In truth, tending bar is more complex. The bartender stands at the center of societal ambivalence over public drinking. The...

In a cabin on a little peak east of Tuolumne City, California, lives “The Last Forty-Niner.” At least, that is what a San Francisco television station dubbed him in a five-minute segment of a magazine-format program about “real people.”

If Ben Fullingim were really the last forty-niner, his participation in the California Gold Rush, as fascinating as that would be, would have to take a backseat to his being “The Oldest Man on Earth.” Since the last forty-niner could not be much younger than 160 years old in 1988 it appears that what was meant was that Old Ben is...

Children reinforce the truth by swearing upon their honour, their heart, their Bible, their own life, or, preferably, their mother’s. Spitting, linking fingers, holding their hand up to God, and making crosses upon their body accompany their declarations.

If this catalogue seems impious it should be emphasized that the asseverations in the following pages (mostly collected from ten- and eleven-year-olds) are not treated lightly by those who use them. An imprecation such as ‘May I drop down dead if I tell a lie’ is liable to be accorded the respect of its literal meaning, and distinct uneasiness may follow its...

There is a right time for certain growth experiences, and childhood is the time to learn bridging the immense gap between inner experiences and the real world. Fairy tales may seem senseless, fantastic, scary, and totally unbelievable to the adult who was deprived of fairy story fantasy in his own childhood, or has repressed these memories. An adult who has not achieved a satisfactory integration of the two worlds of reality and imagination is put off by such tales. But an adult who in his own life is able to integrate rational order with the illogic of his unconscious will...

Though considerable attention has been paid to game activities by travellers, historians, antiquarians, and numerous others for almost two centuries, much of the scholarship of such pastimes, until well into the twentieth century, consisted of little more than gathering and publishing descriptions and the related texts.¹ A few scholars attempted interpretation and analysis,² but the majority were content to present their texts and descriptions in regional and national collections with occasional comparative references to analogous items among other peoples.³

It is no wonder, then, that so little attention of any serious nature was paid to this folklore genre until after...

A structural study of folk narrative that challenged type and motif oriented research was designed by Vladimir Propp.¹ In his analysis of the Russian magic tale, Propp identified the functions of the dramatis personae as the most constant aspect of tales. My study is an attempt to outline the apparent structure, the compositional structure, of the Turkish romance of the minstrel (ashik) by means of basic plot actions. I will not be content, however, with the delineation of the romance structure in isolation from the socio-cultural milieu, but I will explore the meaning for the teller within the Ottoman-Turkish culture....

One of the few stories in a North American Indian repertory to receive genuine analysis from more than one writer is a brief, starkly horrifying text in the late Melville Jacobs’s collection of Clackamas Chinook literature from Oregon—titled “Seal and Her Younger Brother Dwelt There”¹—with full and penetrating commentaries on it by Jacobs himself and by Dell Hymes, and illustrative references to it in an important essay on the nature of fiction by Frank Kermode. “Seal and Her Younger Brother” might be said to have “arrived,” critically.² My intention here is not so much to add to its...

Whatever their culture, people have always sought to understand why some individuals live in better circumstances and have greater access to the good things of life than others.¹ Generally, scholars have found that explanations for differential living standards are not infinitely diverse and idiosyncratic, but rather that they are neatly patterned into stories and tales which revolve around well defined themes. These stories are sensitive cultural barometers. They not only reflect the way people perceive economic opportunities and social structure, but also indicate how particular individuals rationalize or justify their own position within that structure. For any full comprehension of...

Personal experience narratives have recently begun to attract the attention of folklorists, although there is no general consensus on the admission of such narratives into the canon of traditional folklore genres.¹ Up to now, studies of personal experience narratives have tended to concentrate on structure and content in efforts to identify what they have in common with traditional narrative forms. In this paper, I would like to make a few observations about the distribution and use of personal narratives in conversation, based on the assumption that, as forms of communication, such narratives do not occur in an interactional vacuum, but...

The purpose of this paper is to present a model for textual change in folksong. It is hoped that the model will be useful as a device in at least three ways: first, to bring together the various concepts dealing with textual variation which have been advanced by scholars; second, to clarify the relationships among different types of textual change; and third, to suggest possible types of changes which might otherwise be overlooked. To the degree that textual changes exhibited in folksong are paralleled by changes in oral narratives, the model may also be useful in the study of variation...

Anyone listening to a number of country blues songs will have noticed that they share certain basic linguistic and thematic features. Most noticeably, half-lines, lines, and stanzas will be found to recur in the songs of a great many singers. These may be modified, sometimes radically so, but they bear a recognizable relationship to lines and stanzas in other songs within the tradition. A similar correspondence exists at the thematic level, since the country blues singer develops a comparatively limited range of themes. Yet it is rare to find one singer reproducing exactly the blues of another. A close relationship...

a. Communicated by Charles Elphinstone Dalrymple, Esq., of Kinaldie, Aberdeenshire, in 1888, as obtained from the country people by himself and his brother, fifty years before.

b. Notes and Queries, Third Series, VII, 393, communicated by A. Ferguson.

1 As I cam in by Dunidier,

An doun by Netherha,

There was fifty thousand Hielanmen

A-marching to Harlaw.

Wi a dree dree dradie drumtie dree.

2 As I cam on, an farther on,

An doun an by Balquhain,

Oh there I met Sir James the Rose,

Wi him Sir John the Gryme.

3 ‘O cam ye frae the Hielans, man?

An...

In the introduction to the ballad numbered 163 in his collection, Francis James Child wrote, “A ballad taken down some four hundred years after the event will be apt to retain very little of sober history.”¹ And with this view most critics have concurred. In fact, it has even hardened into an axiom and on occasion has produced the paradoxical situation where ballads which are untrustworthy as history are reckoned, ipso facto, trustworthy as ballads, and ballads which are trustworthy as history are looked at askance as probable fabrications. At any rate, that statement of Child’s expresses our general attitude...

There exists a long tradition which claims that Martin Luther coined the common proverb “Who loves not wine, women and song, remains a fool his whole life long.” Even though the proverb appeared in print for the first time in the year 1775 in Germany, scholars and others have continued to attribute it to Luther.¹ But nobody has been able to locate this Epicurean proverb anywhere in Luther’s voluminous works. The closest statement that Luther ever made was in one of his so-called “Table-Talks” which was recorded between October 28 and December 12, 1536. Here Luther discusses the overindulging of...

The most salient characteristic of metaphor consists in a blatant violation of linguistic rules that results in the expression of a proposition that is either logically false or, in Rudolf Carnap’s terminology, “conceptually absurd.”¹ Walker Percy has put the matter nicely: a metaphor “asserts of one thing that it is something else” and is therefore inevitably “wrong.”² At the same time, of course, a metaphor is also “right” because, semantic disobedience not withstanding, the proposition it expresses can be construed as containing a truth. Interpreted one way, Thomas Brown’s metaphor, “Oh blackbird, what a boy you are,” is utter nonsense...

In recent years folklorists have urged the abandonment of solely text-oriented approaches to their disciplines.¹ Theoretical articles have demanded that various folkloristic genres be seen as vehicles of communication appearing naturally in social contexts.² Not surprisingly, much discussion has focused on that most prevalent of verbal genres, the proverb. Proposed methodologies for collection have emphasized the importance of recording age, sex and status of proverb-users as well as the specific contexts in which proverbs are used.³ Sociological relationships between proverbs and other minor verbal genres have been scrutinized,⁴ and structural models have been formulated in an attempt to link the...

In 1924, Ralph Linton called attention to the curious development of a “pseudototemic complex” among the members of the 42nd division of the American Expeditionary Force stationed in France during the First World War.¹ The 42nd division (it was said) had been named the Rainbow Division by higher officials because it comprised units from an assortment of states whose regimental colors were as variegated as a rainbow. After the division arrived in France, non-division personnel persisted in referring to division members as “Rainbow” and individual division members would identify themselves as such. Several months after the use of this name...

Round barns—henceforth in this paper a generic term used for both round and polygonal barns—are a traditional feature of American folk architecture, a feature which has been now and again reinforced by extrinsic, sophisticated architectural fashions. In a forward to a New York State Historical Association pamphlet entitled “Octagon Buildings in New York State”¹ Carl Carmer remarks that though Orson Fowler’s 19th century architectural polemics for the octagon certainly encouraged the construction of late 19th century polygons, the ultimate provenience of round and polygonal structures antedates Fowler by some years. Indeed, in Marguerite Marigold’s article “Hayfield”² in the...

It is not unusual in academic circles to hear deprecatory remarks about “airport art” when the locals cluster about the newest influx of tourists, hawking their carvings, shell necklaces, and other assorted twentieth century facsimiles of artifacts once vital to aboriginal ceremony and ritual. Indeed, the exuberant purchaser is fortunate if his joy in his recent acquisitions is not dampened by some purist’s studied opinion that native art is on the decline, prostituted to the lack of taste of the uninitiated and the cupidity of Westernized natives who know far better the value of a dollar than the studied skills...

Though in the history of folkloristics, biography has served primarily to illuminate folklore, recent work has reversed the relationship to show the extent to which folklore can serve as a primary medium for recovering a life. Traditional singers appreciate the powerful associations of songs with the circumstances of their acquisition and performance because they so vividly remember learning their songs from particular individuals and performing them in specific contexts. The songs continue to carry these associations over the years and to evoke memories each time they are performed. Though folklorists have utilized reminiscence to illuminate the songs, they have yet...

Triviality stalks folklore studies like an ugly family secret. The everyday use of the term “folklore” as a synonym for “false belief” or “superstition” is a difficult enough prejudice to overcome. But folklore inquiry lends itself to “fun” topics, and a culture that sustains the work/play dichotomy as strongly as does ours tends to devalue work that seems too much like play. Folklore genres such as children’s games or drinking songs or proverbs, for example, seem unimportant when compared with a novel or an opera.¹ And, worse, the folklorist studies these genres in settings and among groups that are peripheral...

Many of those outside the discipline of folklore and even some of those within tend to divide folklorists into literary or anthropological categories. With this binary division comes a related notion that each group of folklorists has its own methodology appropriate for its special interests; hence there is thought to be a method for studying folklore in literature and another method for studying folklore in culture. Looking at this dichotomy from the viewpoint of a professional folklorist, one can see that it is false; moreover it is a dichotomy whose unfortunate persistence has tended to divide unnecessarily scholars working on...

Every event, each human behavior, is a unique occurrence brought about by the interaction of particular objects, in particular places, at particular times, and under particular conditions. Since objects, time, place, and circumstance continually change, no two events are ever identical. Everything is utterly singular and new. The human mind cannot comprehend such a world, however. Concepts serve to rob events of their uniqueness by making them members of more general classes. The human mind is forever perceiving analogies, similarities, identities, and hierarchies, or otherwise recognizing relations between events. Were it not for our categorizing and classifying propensities, we would...