Customs like these, Alan Dundes observed, were windows on the social and psychological landscape. "Folklore furnishes a socially sanctioned outlet for cultural pressure points and individual ...anxieties," he wrote in Interpreting Folklore (Indiana University, 1980). Few aspects of culture escaped his scrutiny. If people did it, said it, made it, wrote it or believed in it, Dundes wanted to know why. He examined the folklore of wishing wells; the theme of the walled-up wife (think Jane Eyre); the psychological underpinnings of sick jokes (think Helen Keller); Choctaw tongue-twisters; the pervasiveness in United States culture of the number three (think bears, little pigs, little kittens); Turkish verbal duelling rhymes; the psychoanalytic implications of the bullroarer; ethnic stereotyping; and the humorous folklore-on-paper born of the office copy machine. "Folklore is not a matter of running down little wart cures," Dundes told The New York Times in 1985. "It is a serious subject that deals with the essence of life." Where folklorists of the past had concentrated on amassing data, taking to the hills to collect stories and ballads, Dundes stressed the need for interpretation and analysis. "The problem is that the fundamental question of meaning is never raised or discussed at all," he wrote in Interpreting Folklore. "Why should a particular custom or belief like the evil eye exist in the first place?"
Storytelling, Gender and Language in Folk/Fairy Tales: A Selected Annotated Bibliography As a woman and a storyteller in the oral tradition, I think carefully about the language within the ...traditional folk/fairy tales, specifically, the language which describes female characters. In the King Arthur legend "Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady," in order to save his life Arthur must answer the Black Knight's riddle, "What do all women desire most in the world?" the answer to this query, in two versions (both intended for children), is "her own way" (Hastings 1985; Sutcliff, 1981). ...Waelti-Walters (1979) argues that only when women begin to describe themselves in their own language within stories of their own creation will they change their status.
Cristina Bacchilega observes in the foreword that "this book exemplifies the interdisciplinary and transnational discourse of contemporary fairy-tale studies that seeks to foreground a fairy-tale ...text's situatedness as well as to historicize its intertextuality" (xiii). ...it explores the mutability that is the life force of folk- and fairy tales, their ability to adapt to a myriad of cultural contexts and shifting frameworks and purposes while still maintaining the individual and distinctive story core.
Pp. ix + 560, orthography, introduction, notes, appendix, references, index. $55.00 hardcover.) Arapaho Stories, Songs, and Prayers presents fifty two tales, five prayers and ceremonial speeches, and ...eleven songs gathered from the northern Plains tribe since the nineteenth century, incorporating aspects of linguistic anthropology with an emphasis on ethnolinguistics and the inclusive methods of contemporary ethnology. Native press efforts have incorporated the dual use method of presenting material in both indigenous and English languages as seen in the Malki Museum Press offerings, such as I sill He'qwas Wa'xish: A Dried Coyote's Tail by Katherine Siva Saubel.
The Stars of Ballymenone Cashman, Ray
Western Folklore,
07/2007, Volume:
66, Issue:
3/4
Book Review
Peer reviewed
Pp. 574, map, photographs, illustrations, compact disc, acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth In The Stars of Ballymenone Henry Classic returns to the Irish borderland of County ...Fermanagh and reveals how country people endure deprivation and violence through folklore. Compiled from Classic's field recordings and skillfully remastered by Doug Boyd, the CD includes twenty-six representative and superlative stories, songs, and musical interludes, offering us a more immediate and intimate appreciation of the primary materials under investigation.
The essays range from general theoretical exposition ("Folk Ideas as Units of World View") to close analysis of the expressions of particular societies, ranging from small occupational groups ("Viola ...Jokes: A Study of Second String Humor") to entire nations ("As the Crow Flies: A Straightforward Study of Lineal Thinking in American Folk Speech") . "Gallus as Phallus," "The Symbolic Equivalence of Allomotifs," and "The Ritual Murder or Blood Libel Legend" are important psychoanalytic essays, but I do not see why it was necessary to reproduce "The Folklore of Wishing Wells" and "Here I Sit" and "The Kushmaker" and "On die Psychology of Collecting Folklore" to illustrate the role of anal erotic impulses in folklore.
