approaches to interpreting folklore

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Approaches to Interpreting Folklore

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Page 1: Approaches to interpreting folklore

Approaches to Interpreting Folklore

Page 2: Approaches to interpreting folklore

Functionalism• Folklore communicates: it is an ongoing process of expressing

information and beliefs within folk groups. why and how it is important to the people sharing it

• One of the ways folklorists consider meaning is to examine the way folklore functions in the community. It is a way to link people with the items of their folklore.

• William R. Bascom (1965) identified four functions of folklore:1. Education, particularly, but not exclusively, in nonliterate

societies.2. To escape from limits or impositions the culture places on us.3. Maintaining conformity to the accepted patterns of behavior.4. Folklore validates culture.

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• Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who looked at culture and society as an organic whole. Bascom’s approach suggested the natural or organic connection between people and their expressive culture.

folklore is an important mechanism for maintaining the stability of culture

• Bascom’s system ignores the way folklore questions, critiques, protests, and sometimes undermines stability.

• If the function never changes, that implies the group never changes. The functional approach is always conservative and static; the functions themselves are conservative. Functional analysis, then, is ahistorical, suggesting that the text was used—or the performance occurred—for the same reason regardless of context.

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• Functionalism is the strategy or framework that requires us to make meaning of folklore, so if there’s only one meaning, someone has to decide what the one meaning is. Because folklorists assumed they knew the meaning of everyone else’s folklore, the functionalist approach maintained the old us/them dichotomy, which lends itself to a view of “the folk” as uneducated and their culture as unsophisticated.

• The term function refers to the role or purpose something or someone plays in a given setting. Looking at an item from this perspective allows us to explore what the object, verbal expression, or practice communicates within the group in which it is significant. It is not the only way to understand its value or assume that its meaning is the same within different groups.

• Folklore and people are connected. The meanings of texts depend on what a particular group of people does with a specific item of lore in a specific situation. It’s always about what’s happening in the group and the context. We can’t isolate meanings of folklore from folk groups in the same way we can’t isolate folklore itself from people.

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Structuralism• Structure is more than the plot; it includes the characters and

the actions they perform, places, names, repeated words and phrases—any basic elements that make the story recognizable. We recognize the standard structure of fairy tales; a princess, a prince, an evil female.

• F.A. de Caro explains, structuralism attempts to identify characteristics that are essential in every individual example within a given genre. He says that a structuralist analysis should reveal a basic, underlying pattern which accounts for all the parts of the whole and how they relate to each other in forming the whole.

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• Structuralism also works for jokes and riddles. Robert Georges and Alan Dundes have pointed out that many riddles begin with a “descriptive element” that consists of a topic, the object described, and a comment, which gives more information about the topic. Others offer a conundrum, in which something possesses opposite, apparently paradoxical, characteristics.

• Early scholars studied that myths are usually presented as existing outside time or before our own history, are usually believed to be true within the group they belong to, and may even be considered sacred. While tales, on the other hand, usually focus on a single story that does not obviously relate to big, universal themes, and are generally understood to be fiction.

• Vladimir Propp presented a system of describing tales according to patterns of story events, a “morphology” that described the organic nature of tale structure.

• Certain kinds of folktales in German, shared remarkably similar internal features. In most of these stories, a young character must overcome hardship, has an adventure (or adventures), is helped and/or hindered by magical or supernatural beings, and eventually triumphs in the end.

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The rules structure the whole• One major benefit of this approach is the emphasis on wholes,

rather than on parts, when describing and analyzing a text. • This approach makes genre not just a label or name for

something, but a real form, which exists regardless of any interpretation or classification. Structuralism has helped to uncover basic elements that formed and clarified meaningful genre and subgenre classifications.

• Many perceived the structural approach to folklore to be useful in analyzing certain “universal” elements in many kinds of verbal folklore. For instance, structure allows us to see that many cultures share riddles that require mental agility and cleverness.

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• A system of ethnopoetics originated to describe not just the structure of the narrative, for example, when someone laughed or gestured, but also the structure of the sound of the words and utterances, and how they contributed to the overall narrative performance, similar to the way a poem is presented on a page.

• Because structuralism required in many cases close analysis of how things were said as well as what was said, this system of notation has proved very useful for those studying structures in linguistic terms. It allows analysis of structural patterns, as well as analysis of performance styles and techniques.

• More importantly, scholars can use an ethnopoetic approach to discuss how expressive language works within particular groups and performances, and can extend this discussion to the holistic analysis of meaning and culture.

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• The major problems with the structuralism approach have to do with some of its perceived benefits. Overemphasis on genre resulted in much scholarly energy being spent on defining what things are, rather than analyzing how they operate within groups.

• de Caro points out, one way, “perhaps the major way human beings create order and structure reality, is by creating categories and placing entities within those categories”. Breaking out of categories allows us to consider how folklore works within a group—and to consider the effect of the blurring and overlapping that often takes place. An over-emphasis on structure highlights what texts look or sound like, but not what it mean to a group, or when, where, and why they exist.

• Thus, structuralism suffers the same problems of functionalism; making assumptions about all people that apply in all cases de-emphasizes the importance of individuals and groups, and ignores some of the dynamic processes of folklore. It focuses almost exclusively on constants, things that apply in all cases in a particular culture, rather than on the shifting aspects of meaning that depend on group dynamics and contexts.

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• Because structuralist studies at first focused almost exclusively on verbal folklore, the approach became associated for some time with only verbal genres.

• Then, the heavy emphasis on genre classifications limited, at least when it was used more for identifying rather than analyzing.

• Lastly, the danger of relying too heavily on a reductive search for overarching meanings created concern that structuralism was too simplistic.

• Recent folktale scholars have continued this approach, advocating integrated interpretations of folktales that combine analysis of structure, social contexts and symbolic meanings.

• Structural approach application has been in performance analysis and contextual studies. Any consideration of framing, or “markers” of performances, for example, is by nature a structuralist enterprise: frames shape—structure—the social and artistic spaces that surround performance, and within which performance occurs. The principles and theoretical applications established by structuralism remain a valuable analytical tool for folklorists.

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Psychoanalytic Interpretation• Psychoanalytic analysis involves the interpretation of symbolic

meanings within texts that illuminate shared developmental and life experiences of all humans. Psychoanalysts think a culture’s folklore presents a look at its collective psychological concerns. Though psychoanalytic interpretation has been employed by some folklorists in some specific situations, yet has often been dismissed by others.

• Dundes argues that psychoanalytic interpretation offers one of the most in-depth ways to go beyond mere collection of texts or artifacts and descriptions of context. The key Freudian concepts Dundes finds important to folklore study are the range of concepts such as ‘projection’ and ‘family romance’.

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• Among the major criticisms is that psychoanalytic theory is too broad, much like the functionalist approach: it assumes that all human beings share exactly the same experiences, and that particular texts express that experience in the same way.

• Another limitation to the psychoanalytic approach is that it is most frequently applied to verbal texts, and is difficult to apply to the study of groups, performance, materials and customs.

• For some folklorists, psychoanalysis provides insight into the more symbolic, psychological aspects of folklore that other approaches may not address in as much depth. Such interpretations are difficult to uncover because the meanings and symbols are often hidden within the text. As Fine says, “folklore provides a socially acceptable outlet for meaning that cannot be displayed otherwise. If the meaning was overt, the text would have to be repressed”.

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• Fine suggests two specific criteria that he believes should be applied by folklorists to evaluate the effectiveness of psychoanalytic interpretations: “Is the analysis internally consistent? And is the analysis externally valid?

• The goal of folkloristics is not to understand the text, but to understand people. Psychoanalytic not only applicable relating to sexuality, but also power, in particular gender-based; racial or ethnic conflict; or the Oedipal complex.

• If folklorists choose this approach, though, careful textual analysis and good fieldwork are important, a more “hybrid” form of analysis, combining different approaches that can create a system of checks and balances.

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Post-Structuralist Approaches• Post-structuralist approaches look beyond the organization of

elements in a text, or the order of events in a performance, or the belief that a single principle or idea provides the answer to what something means.

• Because of their concern with the marginalization of groups, social hierarchies and construction of identity, folklorists interpret the processes of fieldwork and analysis using multiple lenses.

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Feminist Interpretations

• women’s folklore: examining both the images of women and the genres through which women’s creativity has been viewed and by suggesting genres and approaches not previously recognized. It is to understand the unique characteristics that set women’s folklore apart from male experience and culture.

• Jordan and Kalcik point out that both gender and experience can bias fieldworkers toward a certain perspective in their observations, and are likely even to affect what the researcher perceives as important or worth noting.

• The feminist perspective that developed through all this work encouraged studies focusing on women’s expression in a number of different contexts.

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• The collaborative nature of women’s communication allows folklorists to see collaboration as a legitimate way of making meaning. Folklorists can be intensely theoretical in an up-from-under sort of way, becoming virtuoso listeners who know better than to accept any construction of listening as passive. By listening to and talking to each other, folklorists and their consultants create meaning and interpret folklore together.

• Feminism opened the door for understanding the ways socially and politically constructed assumptions can marginalize some groups that don’t belong to a dominant group’s definition of “mainstream.”

• Feminist folklore scholarship led to investigations of the intersections of multiple factors, such as gender, age, class, race, and other characteristics.

• Feminist theories about women’s communications as collaborative acts allowed folklorists to acknowledge the value of incorporating the “insider” consultants’ perspectives within their interpretations.

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Reciprocal Ethnography

• Reciprocal ethnography assumes that not only do people know what they are trying to communicate through folklore, but they know best what it means. folklorists recognized that placing their own interpretive spin on the analysis of a text could be ethnocentric, because it often placed the text (or at least the interpretation of it) in the cultural context of the folklorist-researcher, not in the context of the group who communicated through it.

• The hierarchical implications of work in which the folklorist’s interpretation is the only interpretation, or the only right interpretation, conflict with the basic premise of folklore as a process of learning and communicating attitudes, beliefs, and values that are significant to the group sharing them.

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• Rather than interpret folklore performances themselves in scholarly isolation, folklorists ask group members about meanings and connections. After they have written about their interpretations, they may share their work and analyses with their consultants, and offer the opportunity for them to comment on the folklorist’s interpretations or present their own.

• Reciprocal ethnography is both an interpretive approach and a method for analyzing and presenting observations about folklore. As a result of this perspective, most folklorists incorporate their consultants’ observations and commentary into the analysis of the texts and performances they study. For many, this process of reciprocal ethnography involves providing consultants with drafts of written accounts (essays, articles, books), and requesting their feedback.

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• Honest, thorough interpretations of folklore do not occur in a vacuum. They are negotiated articulations of meaning that performers, creators, group members and scholars form together, as part of an ongoing dialogue or discussion.

• Reciprocal ethnography is a way of acknowledging the collaborative process of folklore, both in the ways it is created and shared among group members, and how it is interpreted and presented by scholars. Ethnographic documents are not the result of a single voice, and like all representations, they are negotiated. To explore new forms for discursive representation and interpretation, we need to experiment not only with forms of documentation but also with the process of working with ‘Others’.

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Intersectionality

• Folklorists look deeply into the intersections of social and political forces, along with personal, physical, psychological and emotional characteristics, that shape the underlying values and relationships we often express through folklore.

• Intersectionality concerns dimensions of class, race, politics, ethnicity, gender, culture, religion, sexuality, ability/disability, religion and society that overlap (intersect) to influence worldview and our expressive communications.

• Analyses of intersectionality attempt to describe and examine the ways multiple experiences operate within people and society in a kind of synergistic relationship. Intersectionality considers the interplay of simultaneous experiences that make us who we are.

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• Scholars who are interested in intersectionality frequently focus on oppressed or under-represented individuals or groups, those who have been excluded, ignored, or discriminated against by mainstream groups—in other words, those who have been “pushed to the margins.”

• Intersectionality provides a way to theorize about kinds of complex interactions among the social dynamics of the performer, performance, audience and observers.

• Intersectionality offers folklorists a way to deepen the study of the interplay between specific performance contexts and the forces within larger social contexts that influence performances and texts. Folklorists look at non-mainstream experiences and expression, and investigate how those perspectives comment on, critique, or challenge mainstream social or cultural values while solidifying and/or communicating group identity.

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ConclusionCurrent approaches to folklore study focus on people, and how people communicate with each other within the particular contexts that shape their cultural expression. At the center of interpretive strategies in folklore are the texts and contexts, reflective thinking, and the complexities of the interactions and intersections of performers, audiences, groups, researchers and society. Thinking about folklore from so many different perspectives has also provided a way to understand larger concepts related to social and cultural forces, and how those forces mold and inform the ways we express ourselves informally, artistically, creatively. Analyzing folklore allows us to share with others our own understanding of the complexities of how and why folklore conveys meanings.