WESTERN FOLKLORE最新文献

{"title":"On the metahistorical roots of the fairytale","authors":"Victoria Somoff","doi":"10.2307/1500423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500423","url":null,"abstract":"In the true folktale world, God needs not to be troubled to put everything in order, but this order comes about by itself. Max Luthi One of the aspects of genre theory is concerned with the problem of the border between two different genres that share some common features. It would not be exaggerating to state that this particular aspect becomes crucially important when differentiating myth and folktale-due to the undeniable similarities, acknowledged by folklore scholars since the brothers Grimm-between these two genres. The difficulty in drawing a border between myth and folktale has led to various cases of misunderstanding in folklore theory. Probably, the most famous is the Propp/Levi- Strauss debate where one of the points of disagreement is concerned with the genre of the material under study. According to Levi-Strauss, the difference between myth and folktale is not qualitative but rather a \"difference of degree\": \"Tales are miniature myths, in which the same oppositions are transposed to a smaller scale, and that is what makes them difficult to study in the first place\" (Levi-Strauss 1976:30); that's why myths rather than folktales (fairytales in Propp's case) are the primary choice for structural analysis. Propp defends himself but his reply, as distinct from his arguments on Levi-Strauss's other charges, is based on the general observation of a scholar's right to decide what to study and on the nature of the process of theoretical thinking: \"According to Levi- Strauss, a scholar first finds a method and then begins to think where to apply it; in my case it has been applied, regrettably, to wondertales,1 an area of little interest to the philosopher. But things never happen so in science; nor did they happen this way in my case\" (Propp 1984:9). Propp's pathos is justified; however, to the real question posed by Levi-Strauss-is it possible to apply the morphological sequence discovered in fairytales to myths-Propp himself gives an affirmative answer. \"There are myths based on the same morphological and compositional system as the wondertale. . . . At times they correspond, down to minute details, to the compositional system studied in Morphology of the Folktale. In some cases myth and wondertales have the same form\" (Propp 1984:79). But if the structure-although only in some cases-is the same for both genres, Levi-Strauss's reproach makes sense: Propp's discovery of the morphological model is to a certain degree accidental regarding the genre of the analyzed material and could have been made on the material of myths as well. Thirty years later, Alan Dundes suggests \"a form of constructive mediation\" between the two great scholars who are \"talking past one another\" (Dundes 1997). As far as Levi- Strauss's argument regarding Propp's choice of fairytales instead of myths is concerned, Dundes is obviously on Propp's side: \"The idea that a professional folklorist, a professor of folklore, did not know enough about myths to analyze them is, of ","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500423","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68839840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Epic Voice","authors":"Jacqueline S. Thursby, A. Hodder, R. Meagher, J. Foley, Gregory Schrempp, William M. Hansen","doi":"10.2307/1500441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500441","url":null,"abstract":"The Epic Voice. Edited by Alan D. Hodder and Robert E. Meagher. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Pp. 157, introduction, illustrations, maps, notes, index. $54.95 cloth, $15.00 paper); How to Read an Oral Poem. By John Miles Foley. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp xviii + 256, prologue, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $44.95 cloth, $19.95 paper); Myth: A New Symposium. Edited by Gregory Schrempp and William Hansen. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 262, acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliographies, index. $49.95 cloth) All three of these books, like ancient lamps, light familiar, well-worn paths to guide us to new comprehension of myth (or-to borrow a term used by Barre Toelken in his contribution to the third of the volumes under discussion-of \"fictional traditional narrative\" [88]). The Epic Voice sets a thoughtful tone for the discussion. Here the editors have assembled essays written by five senior scholars, in which \"decades of learning and thought [are used] to open the reader's mind to the fullness of the work at hand\" (1). The five works discussed are from five different venues of the ancient world: Mesopotamia (The Epic of Gilgamesh), Israel (stories of David), Greece (The Odyssey), India (The Ramayana), and Ireland (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley [Tain Bo Cuailnge]). Taken as a whole, these essays bring the reader to dramatic new levels of understanding through use of multiple examples to illustrate the cross-fertilization of oral and written narrative. The volume is a \"course-in-a-text.\" How to Read an Oral Poem, by John Miles Foley, is an engaging work based on both fieldwork and archival research, whose playful title announces a discussion of relations between orality and literacy. The volume illuminates words, meanings, and usage in the work of four different oral poets representing four different oral poetic traditions both ancient and contemporary: a Tibetan paper-singer, a North American slam poet, a South African praise poet, and an ancient Greek poet. As Foley suggests, \"Our challenge is to fashion a model for oral poetry that realistically portrays, in both its unity and its diversity, a kind of biology that allows for species differentiation within the composite genus\" (38). He proposes a system of media categories (38) and discusses them. Foley's well-informed book carries the reader through eight chapters addressing, respectively, oral poetry; contexts and reading; performance theory; ethnopoetics; traditional implications; types of proverbs; examples of readings; and South Slavic oral poetry-an extended discussion in which he draws parallels to other examples in the text. Foley's afterword engages the reader in a fascinating comparative discussion of oral poetry and electronic media, specifically the Internet. \"The key to these possibilities,\" he says, \"is to recognize that-like the Internet we browse, learn from, and purchase on-oral poetry amount","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500441","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68840504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"O'odham Creation and Related Events, as Told to Ruth Benedict in 1927 in Prose, Oratory, and Song by the Pimas William Blackwater, Thomas Vanyiko, Clara Ahiel, William Stevens, Oliver Wellington, and Kisto","authors":"Colleen M. Fitzgerald, R. Benedict, William Blackwater, Thomas Vanyiko, Clara Ahiel, William Stevens, Oliver Wellington, Kisto, D. Bahr","doi":"10.2307/1500436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500436","url":null,"abstract":"O'odham Creation and Related Events, As Told to Ruth Benedict in 1927 in Prose, Oratory, and Song by the Pimas William Blackwater, Thomas Vanyiko, Clara Ahiel, William Stevens, Oliver Wellington, and Kisio. Edited by Donald Bahr, Foreword by Barbara Babcock. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Pp. xxvii + 227, foreword, acknowledgments, introduction, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth) The desert landscape of southern Arizona is home to the Akimel and Tohono O'odham, also known as the Pimas and the Papagos, both well-studied by anthropologists, linguists and ethnomusicologists. O'odham Creation and Related Events (OCRE) is a very significant addition to work on the O'odham, for it is a previously unpublished body of oral literature collected in Sacaton, Arizona in 1927, primarily from narrators William Blackwater and Thomas Vanyiko, by Ruth Benedict. OCRE began as a collaboration between Donald Bahr and John Bierhost, but the latter, who found the papers, had to leave the project. The completed edition, a collection of songs, stories, and ritual speeches relating to the O'odham creation stories, is probably the most complete of the published O'odham mythologies (Russell 1908, Saxton and Saxton 1973, and Bahr et al. 1994). Especially noteworthy is that the stories are usually accompanied by information about the source. At times, the contributions of the two principal narrators, Blackwater and Vanyiko, are presented in OCRE in a \"duet\" (or \"duel\") type format. In this and other ways, Bahr has given a structure and a context to Benedict's manuscript. The book's organization into five chapters is Bahr's, as are the chapter titles, the chapter introductions, and the supplementary notes and textual comments-these are mostly about mistakes in O'odham words and names, but they also include ethnobotanical material (using Rea 1997 as a resource), and they make significant comparisons with previously published collections. Bahr's own knowledge of O'odham oral literature-a life's work-is a valuable and essential component of OCRE. Of the book's five sections-1) The Rafter Hauled: The Long Telling of Ancient Times; 2) Pieces Left Out; 3) Pieces Afterward, on War; 4) Coyote Tales; 5) Oratory-the first two are devoted to stories set in the Edenic time before \"normal\" marriage and procreation. The stories in \"The Rafter Hauled\" relate how creation proceeded from nothingness to the Pimas before the Apache wars, and the stories begin with Earth Doctor (and later, with Elder Brother): \"In the beginning there was darkness. Darkness spun round upon itself and from it was born Earth Doctor. He went west, south, east, north, up, and down, looking everywhere, but there was nothing\" (5). Stories in the second section, \"Pieces Left Out,\" speak of ancient times in which Earth Doctor and Elder Brother play minor roles or none at all, and include versions (here told by Blackwater) of the rafter stories. Section two also presents, with an editor's synopsis, \"The Feud,","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500436","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68840557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Perspectives on the Jack Tales and Other North American Marchen","authors":"Paul Jordan-Smith, C. Lindahl","doi":"10.2307/1500435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500435","url":null,"abstract":"Perspectives on the Jack Tales and Other North American Marchen. Edited by Carl Lindahl. (Bloomington: Folklore Institute, 2002. Pp. vii + 179, foreword, photographs, notes, bibliography. $17.95 paper) Sixty years after Richard Chase cast his spell in folklore circles and the general public with The Jack Tales, the subgenre continues to beguile us: if, in fact, there is such an identifiable subgenre as \"a Jack tale\" (which in turn raises the question of whether \"genre\" and \"subgenre\" are still useful concepts). According to Carl Lindahl and other contributors to this anthology of articles and stories, genre is still a vital folkloristic concept and both Marchen and Jack tale are alive and well in spite of Chase, not because of him. Rather, as Lindahl makes clear, they are alive and are exceedingly richer and more varied than what Chase delivered. Lindahl's book comprises four essays (two by Lindahl), six transcripts of Jack tales (three of which are presented in two versions), and a memorial note on folklorist Herbert Halpert, whose research notes graced both Chase's Appalachian collection and Vance Randolph's Ozark tales (WAo Blowed Up the Church House), and whose spirit hovers, no doubt bemused, throughout. Lindahl's introduction gives a short survey of North American Marchen studies, focusing particularly on the question of why the academy has let them fall into neglect. He also examines Chase's influence on the academy and the public, as well as the careers of other scholars of the genre, including Leonard W. Roberts, Vance Randolph, Herbert Halpert, Chuck Perdue, and others. In his second essay, \"Sounding a Shy Tradition: Oral and Written Styles of American Mountain Marchen,\" Lindahl continues his examination of Chase, Randolph, and Roberts, comparing versions of tales included in the present collection, and concluding that Roberts's versions were vastly more faithful to the oral styles of the tellers than either Chase's literary versions or those of Randolph, who tended to present them, in Lindahl's view, as legends or jokes. Charles L. Perdue Jr., in his essay, \"Is Old Jack Really Richard Chase?\" compares Chase's published version of Jack tales with their unaltered transcripts and analyzes the eleven tales published by Isabel Gordon Carter in 1925, demonstrating that Chase's versions were \"less emblematic of the narrators he claimed to represent and more a reflection of himself.\" Chase, a shameless self-promoter, had a well-developed talent for appropriation, as he subsequently came to assume \"ownership\" of the tales he published-one might almost say, of the genre itself-becoming not merely a collector but a performer. After collecting tales in North Carolina in the late 30s, he attached himself to James Taylor Adams, and the two of them collected Jack tales from tellers in Wise County, Virginia. The present work gives both Adams's and Chase's simultaneous transcripts of a single tale, \"Jack and the Bull,\" as told in 1941 by Polly Johnson.","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500435","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68840315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lafcadio Hearn's America: Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials","authors":"L. Hearn, Simon J. Bronner","doi":"10.2307/1500437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500437","url":null,"abstract":"Lafcadio Hearn's America: Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials. Edited by Simon J. Bronner. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Pp. x + 242, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth) In a world of 24-hour cable news channels, endless talk-radio programs, and high- speed Internet access, the newspaper may be nearly forgotten. Though we curl up with a Sunday edition and a leisurely cup of tea, or hurriedly leaf through a daily while commuting to our jobs, the paper is far from our sole source of news and entertainment. A hundred years ago, however, such a claim would have been unthinkable. Journalists in that Golden Age of Print wrote for audiences that relied almost exclusively on print resources-newspapers and magazines-for understanding their world. While a few journalists of the era used the print medium to expand that world by elucidating the lives of \"Others,\" of people outside the mainstream of American life, no journalist achieved that goal more skillfully than Lafcadio Hearn. In the present collection, Simon J. Bronner forefronts Hearn's ethnographically centered journalistic work on the Others of the age. As Bronner shows in the introduction, Hearn's work has been valued for its local color and its literary worth and has been praised for its journalistic merits, but here Bronner makes the further case that \"much of [Hearn's] journalism was ethnographic because he chew symbolic significance from the communication behavior he directly observed\" (1). For Bronner, Hearn's ethnographic sketches are panes through which we can see into the lives of Jews, African Americans, Creoles, and other Others during the turbulent times when American was dealing with industrialization, modernization, and immigration-a time when the developing nation needed to challenge traditional practices in order to accommodate unprecedented change. The works collected here date from the years 1873 and 1894, with Cincinnati (America's largest city at the time) and New Orleans as the contextual backdrops. Bronner divides the collection in thirds. The first section, \"Communities and the 'Under Side' of America,\" contains engaging pieces detailing the lives of those who lived on the levee in Cincinnati; the Cincinnati Fire Department; the workings of the county jail; and the city's poor. The second section, \"'Enormous and Lurid Facts': Language, Folklife, and Culture,\" consists of interesting, pointed studies of, for example, superstitions in New Orleans; black minstrels; Hearn's own experience with a medium; and-an outstanding comparative piece-Jewish and gentile butchering methods. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500437","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68840724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation","authors":"Barre Toelken, L. Evers","doi":"10.2307/1500342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500342","url":null,"abstract":"Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation. Edited by Larry Evers and Barre Toelken. Foreword by John Miles Foley. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 242. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) In Native American Oral Traditions (NAOT), editors Larry Evers and Barre Toelken bring together the work of seven pairs of Native and non-Native collaborative writers from the western United States. Wanting to \"publish essays that explore dimensions of perspective, discovery, and meaning which emerge when Native and non-Natives work together on oral texts,\" the editors propose that their work will serve as a \"benchmark of the collaborative work that is being done with Native American communities at this time\" (1, 4). Each chapter includes an oral narrative, usually in both the Native language and in English; a discussion of the narrative; and a consideration of the collaborative venture. Represented are traditions from the Yaqui, Tlingit, Lushootseed, Tohono O'odham, Atsuge-wi, Coos and Coquelle, and Yup'ik. Beyond providing a benchmark, this edition offers a first-rate collection of Native American tales and asks provocative questions important to all interested in oral narrative. Major issues provide centers of discussion: What is collaboration? What forms does it take? How can researchers encourage more collaborations? Why and how do authors work collaboratively? How do cross-cultural partners navigate the rock-strewn waters of the collaborative way? How can the \"insider/outsider\" concept be reconfigured? How can partners enact collaboration in the texts they produce? How do cross-cultural partners accomplish the work of interpretation? In their Introduction, Evers and Toelken discuss collaboration by offering a brief history of Native and non-Native joint projects, citing those that are and those that are not collaborative. Longtime co-authors Felipe S. Molina and Larry Evers propose ways for researchers to work collaboratively in the future. In \"Like this it stays in your hands,\" they present a talk by Yoeme deer singer Miki Maaso and suggest that in community- and school-based bicultural/bilingual programs community-based American Indian intellectuals and university-based non-Native scholars can pursue collaborative work (29). Since all the authors comment on their partnerships, NAOT offers a wealth of details on the collaborative venture. Darryl Babe Wilson of San Francisco State University writes of his labors to help preserve and present Susan Bradenstein Park's never-published fieldwork with his Atsugewi people done in 1920 when she was a brand-new Berkeley anthropology B.A. The limits of collaboration run like a subtext through the essay by Marya Moses and Toby C. S. Langen as they present a Snohomish story, but they do not discuss their challenges as fully as do others, such as the Dauenhauers. Husband and wife team Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, in their article about their continuing search for var","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500342","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68838073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Crypto-Mormons or pseudo-Mormons?: Latter-day Saints and Russia's indigenous new religious movements","authors":"Eric A. Eliason, Gary L. Browning","doi":"10.2307/1500336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500336","url":null,"abstract":"Latter-day Saints and Russia's Indigenous New Religious Movements In 1990, when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints established its first mission in Russia, Mormon1 missionaries almost immediately began hearing and passing on stories from native Russians about long-established \"Mormon\" communities already there (Browning 1997). \"Whole tribes of native Siberians call themselves Mormons. Many people in villages around Orenburg and Samara are Mormons but will deny it if you ask them. My grandfather was a Mormon, but he died long ago,\" are paraphrases of the more common story types. These rumors intrigued missionaries and Latter-day Saint scholars alike, since the limited missionary resources of the early Church and the effectiveness of both Tsarist and Communist opposition to foreign missionaries kept Latter-day Saints from establishing an official presence in Russia until Gorbachev's reforms in the late 1980s. There is no known historical evidence that the LDS church had any converts in Russia before 1989, except for one pre-Soviet-era family that left the country. Nevertheless, for over a decade, many Latter-day Saint missionaries and members, scholars, and various Russians have assumed a historical link of some sort between reported indigenous Russian \"Mormons\" and the newly arrived Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some sort of link seemed plausible since locals explained that besides sharing a name, the Russian \"Mormons\" also often did not smoke or drink, had strong family values, held secret worship services, and may have once practiced something like polygamy. The rumors even alluded to secretly transcribed copies of the Book of Mormon circulating in Russia for decades. Based on such parallels, some Latter-day Saint missionaries tried to reintroduce the local \"Mormons\" to the official Church but had difficulty finding them. At times they seemed ephemeral. It seemed most stories of \"lost Mormons\" in Russia would be best understood simply as new additions to a vibrant body of Latter-day Saint missionary folklore about independent \"Mormon\" groups in remote areas.2 Such folklore arises despite the Church's great care to \"go through the front door\" and obey local laws. For example, eager young missionaries occasionally circulate rumors about secret Church organizational efforts in countries closed to missionaries, such as the Soviet Union to the 1990s and China to the present.3 However, the whole body of stories about Russian \"Mormons\" cannot be readily dismissed as enthusiastic but spurious rumor. The existence of \"Mormons\" in various places in Russia long before 1990 is alluded to in the works of early twentieth-century Russian religious studies scholars such as S. V. Bulgakov and Timofei Ivanovich Butkevich.4 In the 1950s, Russian \"Mormons\" came to the attention of John Noble. After World War II, this American, who was accused of spying, served time in Vortuka, a Soviet labor camp incarcerating many \"religious criminals\" ","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500336","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68837886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contes tendres, contes cruels du Sahel nigérien","authors":"G. Calame-Griaule","doi":"10.2307/1500340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500340","url":null,"abstract":"Contes tendres, contes cruels du Sahel nigerien. By Genevieve Calame-Griaule. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Pp. 293, photographs, bibliography, index. 22.50 paper) In this book, the dean of French Africanist folklorists has revisited the treeless, drought-ridden West Africa of her early fieldwork, with its \"landscapes of infinite horizons, the soil crackled by drought, the iridescence of the salt-pans, the tents of matting in the encampments, and the elegant veiled silhouettes of the nomads, the clay towns peopled with black-robed women and turbaned men\" (283). These landscapes became familiar to Genevieve Calame-Griaule when she first visited the arid Sahel with her father, the anthropologist Marcel Griaule. In those years, Griaule created the first great masterpiece of collaboration between a European and an African sage, Dieu d'eau (1948, translated 1965 as Conversations with Ogotemmtti), the elaborate account of the mythico-religious system of the Dogon of Mali. After that beginning, Genevieve Calame-Griaule deepened and extended research into the relation between Dogon worldview and verbal art. The result was her magisterial Ethnologie et langage, a classic of African folkloristics (1965, translated 1986 as Words and the Dogon World). She brought together a team of four more researchers into a number of West African societies in Mali, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Niger, and Togo. The team has produced numerous papers and books studying the meaning(s) of West African narratives through comparative analysis, interrelating texts with ethnographic data. Under her leadership they have founded an Africanist discipline of ethnolinguistics, based on the principles that \"certain significations can only be discerned through textual and contextual analysis, whereas others require recourse to ethnographic and extra-textual exploration\" (translated from a 1984 essay). Their regular seminars provide for the exchange of research findings. With other scholars they edit and produce the principal French folklore journal, Cahiers de litterature orale. Also a leader of the Societe des Africanistes, Genevieve Calame-Griaule has made significant studies of both linguistic and paralinguistic codes. Research for this book was carried out in Niger, among the group called Isawaghen, between 1970 and 1978. Two members of the research team are dead, Pierre Francis Lacroix and Suzanne Bernus; the two principal storytellers, Taheera and Aminata, are also gone. Thus the book becomes a memorial to them as well as a memoir of their expedition, a scientific study, and a continuation of the Griaule tradition. Itself a personal experience narrative, the book is a model of presentation of African tales, their tellers, and their setting. The author's introduction, clearly and agreeably written, describes Isawaghen society and its dry surroundings. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500340","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68837987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Purposeful deceptions of the April fool","authors":"N. Mcentire","doi":"10.2307/1500334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500334","url":null,"abstract":"The first of April, some do say, Is set apart for all Fools' Day. But why the people call it so, Nor I, nor they themselves do know. But on this day are people sent On purpose for pure merriment. Poor Robin's Almanac (1760) As I sift through childhood memories of holidays and family traditions, the first day of April comes to mind. I can see my mother, a reserved and proper New Englander, watching my father dip into the sugar bowl and put a spoonful of salt into his coffee at breakfast. \"April fool!\" she says, as he tastes the bitter surprise. My brother and I cannot contain our mirth as we watch him fumble towards the sink, desperate for a quick gulp of water. \"Priscilla!\" he says, shaking his head as he refills the glass. \"You did it again.\" On any other day, for my mother to substitute salt for sugar and wait for her husband to begin his day as a fool would be absurd. Quiet and patient, she was not known as a prankster. But on that one day and that day alone, this unexpected change in her behavior was oddly acceptable. In North America, Europe, Iceland, New Zealand, and Australia, the first day in April is an unofficial holiday that is marked by pranks and lies. It is a time when untruths are expected. April Fools' Day is also known as all Fools' Day and April Noddy. Addison and Steele's Spectator describes April 1st as \"the merriest day in the year in England\" (1760: 1:47), presumably referring to the merriment of conducting April Fools' pranks. In the north of England and in Scotland, April 1st is called Huntigowk Day and it is the day of the fool's errand. A person is sent off to deliver a letter. When the recipient reads the letter, he or she tells the naive deliverer to take it to someone else who lives-always-farther down the road. The letter actually reads, \"It's the first of April! Hunt the gowk another mile.\" Eventually the gowk,1 which means a cuckoo or simpleton, is sent back to where the delivery began, a place where friends have gathered to shout \"April gowk! April gowk!\" (Santino 1995:100; Dundes 1989:99). An April gowk text collected in northeastern Scotland by Peter and Iona Opie cautions each person who reads the letter to keep a straight face and thus guard the joke: \"Don't you laugh, and don't you smile; Hunt the gowk another mile\" (Opie and Opie 1959:245; Bundes 1989:99).2 Icelanders make reference to cases of hlaupa april (\"running April\"), seemingly derived from the Danish lobe april, or fool's errand. The April Fools' Day hoax is only valid if the victim \"could be tricked into taking three steps\" (or, alternatively, crossing three thresholds) before realizing the hoax (Bjornsson 1995:110). In France and Italy the term April Fish (poisson d'Avril; pesce d'Aprile) refers to a wide range of ritual pranks.3 The fish, or fool, is often marked by the sign of a fish (Dundes 1989:102). Confectioners' windows display chocolate fish on April 1st, and friends anonymously send each other humorous postcards imprinted with pictures of","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500334","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68837861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillan and Stories of Frankie Silver","authors":"K. Baldwin, D. Patterson","doi":"10.2307/1500339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500339","url":null,"abstract":"A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillan and Stones of Frankie Silver. By Daniel W. Patterson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 224, acknowledgments, photographs, illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper) A Tree Accurst is a landmark in folkloristic literature whose analytical strength draws power from collaborations among performers and scholars of expressive folk culture. Bobby McMillan, award-winning traditional singer and storyteller, and Daniel W. Patterson, Kenan Professor Emeritus of English and Folklore at UNC-Chapel Hill, have been friends since 1974, when a high school buddy of McMillan's, then Patterson's student, brought Bobby to the folk song class as a guest. \"As soon as he started singing and talking about ballads,\" Patterson remembers, \"it was obvious to me that he was one of the most important Appalachian tradition bearers of his generation in North Carolina\" (2). Founded in long-standing mutual regard, the Patterson-McMillan collaboration gives us here a carefully detailed, multi-faceted, award-winning study (Chicago Folklore Prize, 2001) of a complex of traditional ideas and expressive forms that carry forward to our time several stories of the terrible events surrounding the ax murder of Charles Silver in 1831, and the 1833 hanging execution of his wife, Frankie Stewart Silver. A study of southern Appalachian social class and politics as represented through traditional arts and performance, A Tree Accurst has breadth of meaning beyond the Toe River area, where the murder and execution occurred, and where Bobby McMillan grew to a man learning to revere and perform the tales and songs of his neighbors and kin, women and men. Unanswered questions linger long after Charlie Silver's notorious murder, Frankie Silver's conviction for the crime, and her public hanging attended by ancestors of the western North Carolina folks who retell and dramatically recreate the history and legend in school play projects, a family museum, and a world wide web site (www.frankiesilver.com). Contested elements of the story still fascinate local and family historians; horrific and sympathetic aspects still inspire fiction writers, poets, classical music composers, and dance choreographers. Patterson addresses concepts of legend construction in community context; profiles the biographic resources for traditional performance and esthetics; explores issues of class and gender, family connection and conflict, for historical legend interpretation. And he comments on the often troubled relations between academic folklore and other formative cultural influences on public attitudes toward folk culture, notably public television and grant-funding agencies. The cursed tree grew near the murder site where once stood Charlie and Frankie's cabin. \"They claimed that if you got up in [that tree], . . . you couldn't get out\" (iii), McMillan explains, and sets the metaphor for his life long involvement wit","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500339","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68837934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}