Grand Theory in Folkloristics

by John North (Editor)

Overview

Why is there no "Grand Theory" in the study of folklore? Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) advocated "grand theory," which put the analysis of social phenomena on a new track in the broadest possible terms. Not all sociologists or folklorists accept those broad terms; some still adhere to the empirical level. Through a forum sponsored by the American Folklore Society, the diverse answers to the question of such a theory arrived at substantial agreement: American folklorists have produced little "grand theory." One speaker even found all the theory folklorists need in the history of philosophy. The two women in the forum (Noyes and Mills) spoke in defense of theory that is local, "apt," suited to the audience, and "humble"; the men (Bauman and Fine) reached for something Parsons might have recognized. The essays in this collection, developed from the forum presentations, defend diverse positions, but they largely accept the longstanding concentration in American folkloristics on the quotidian and local.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253024428
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	09/19/2016
Series:	Encounters
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	482 KB

About the Author

Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and has carried out folklore research in Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, and the other islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean. He is the author of Verbal Arts in Madagascar and Stars and Keys (IUP 2007), a collection of folktale translations from the Indian Ocean islands.

Read an Excerpt

Grand Theory in Folkloristics

---

By Lee Haring

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2016 Indiana University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02442-8

---

CHAPTER 1

Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century

The state of folkloristics at the beginning of the twenty-first century is depressingly worrisome. Graduate programs in folklore around the world have been disestablished or seriously weakened. The once-celebrated program at the University of Copenhagen no longer exists. Folklore programs in Germany have changed their title in an effort to become ethnology-centered (Korff 1996). Even in Helsinki, the veritable Mecca of folklore research, the name of the graduate program at the University of Helsinki has been changed. According to the website, "The Department of Folklore Studies, along with the departments of Ethnology, Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology, belongs administratively to the Faculty of Arts and the Institute of Cultural Research." The latter title sounds suspiciously like "cultural studies" to me, and cultural studies consists of literary types who would like to be cultural anthropologists. I hate to think of folklorists being grouped with such wannabes! Here in the United States, the situation is even worse. UCLA's doctoral program in folklore and mythology has been subsumed under the rubric of World Arts and Cultures, and the folklore doctorate has been reduced to one of several options in that expansion of what was formerly a department of dance. The doctoral program in folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania has virtually collapsed and may not recover unless there is an infusion of new faculty members. Even Indiana University, the acknowledged bastion and beacon of folklore study in the United States, has seen fit to combine folklore with ethnomusicology into one administrative unit. As a result, there is no longer a purely separate, independent doctoral program in folklore per se anywhere in the United States, a sad situation in my view.

Some may feel that these administrative shifts are nothing more than a reflection of the name-changing discussion arising from those among you who have expressed unhappiness with the term "folklore" as the name of our discipline. Regina Bendix was quite right when she made the astute observation that the very coining of the term "folklore" by William Thoms was itself a case of name changing (from "popular antiquities," the Latinate construction, to the Anglo-Saxon "folklore"; 1998, 235). However, I believe she was sadly mistaken when she claimed that part of the disrepute of the field was caused by using the same term "folklore" for both the subject matter and the name of the discipline. This is, in my opinion, a red herring, a nonproblem that was perfectly well solved by several nineteenth-century folklorists, including Reinhold Kohler (1887), who distinguished between "folklore," the subject matter, and "folkloristics," the study of that subject matter. The term "folkloristics" goes back to the 1880s at the very least. In 1996, Eric Montenyohl informed us, "Of course the term 'folkloristics' is quite modern in comparison to 'folklore.' The distinction between the discipline and the subject material and the appropriate term for each came into discussion in the 1980s. Until that time, folklore referred to both the subject and the discipline which studied it — one more reason for confusion" (1996,234n2). Montenyohl probably is referring to Bruce Jackson's equally uninformed note in JAF in 1985 in which Jackson complains about the term "folkloristics" and proposes that it be banned, as if anyone could possibly legislate language usage. Jackson quotes Roger Abrahams's claim that I invented the term as ajoke. I certainly did not. On December 7,1889, American folklorist Charles G. Leland (1834–1903), in an address greeting the newly formed Hungarian Folklore Society, spoke of "Die Folkloristik" as one of the most profound developments in history (Leland 1890–1892). So folkloristics is the study of folklore just as linguistics is the study of language, and it has been for more than a century, even if parochial American folklorists are not aware of the fact. Yuriy Sokolov's textbook Russian Folklore, first published in 1938, recognizes the distinction, and the valuable first chapter of the book is titled "The Nature of Folklore and the Problems of Folkloristics." The Sokolov usage was pointed out by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in her rebuttal note "Di folkloristik: A Good Yiddish Word," also in JAF (1985). She also remarked that Åke Hultkrantz, in his important General Ethnological Concepts (1960), used "folkloristik" as a synonym for "the science of folklore." The distinction between folklore and folkloristics, therefore, is hardly a new idea, and I stated or, if you like, "re-stated" it as clearly as I could in my prefatory "What Is Folklore" in the edited volume The Study of Folklore (1965). I regret that neither Dan Ben-Amos nor Elliott Oring reiterated this important distinction between folkloristics and folklore in their otherwise excellent, spirited defense of the discipline in their respective 1998 essays in JAF. But in contrast, I was pleased that Robert Georges and Michael Owen Jones titled their useful textbook Folkloristics: An Introduction, and they stress the distinction between "folklore" and "folkloristics" on the very first page (1985). Jan Harold Brunvand did not include the term in the first edition of his mainstream textbook, The Study of American Folklore, which first appeared in 1968, but by the second edition (1978) he decided to include the term on the first page of the book and it has remained in later editions (1986, 1998) as referring to "the study of folklore," but he insisted on placing the term in quotation marks, which suggests he was not altogether comfortable with it. I have, however, noted the increasing usage of the term "folkloristics" in recent scholarship, and I believe it bodes well.

I am not suggesting that we change the name of the American Folklore Society to Folkloristics Society of America to parallel the Linguistics Society of America. Rather, the critical question remaining is rather why folkloristics, the academic study of folklore, a subject that should be part of every major university and college curricular offerings, is in such obvious decline. Another related sad sign is the unfortunate demise of the journal Southern Folklore, the successor to the older Southern Folklore Quarterly. This was once a major folklore periodical in the United States, and I keep hoping that an enterprising folklorist at one of our many great southern colleges or universities will resuscitate this journal. I think there are reasons for the decline, and I also think some of the responsibility for the decline lies in part with the membership of the American Folklore Society (myself included). I suspect that some of you may think that I may have endorsed the scandalously discouraging essay that appeared in Lingua Franca in October of 1997 that made the dire prediction that "folklore as an autonomous discipline at Penn may well be doomed" (Dorfman 1997, 8). This essay that proclaimed the discipline of folkloristics as moribund, if not actually deceased, was all the more insulting because it was titled "That's All Folks!" which is a borrowing from popular culture, namely, the "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" Bugs Bunny tradition. These words uttered by a stuttering Porky Pig signified that the cartoon was over. (Incidentally the use of a stuttering pig, and other insults to individuals with various speech impediments and other disabilities, would no longer be deemed politically correct.) But the use of the tag line as a title of the article essentially equates the field offolklore to an animated cartoon that is over. I am not aware that any folklorist wrote a letter of protest or rebuttal, although I tried to do so. (I am sorry to say my response, "Folkloristics Redivivus," was not published by Lingua Franca, though it does appear on the journal's website (www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/dundes2.html). The last paragraph of my response reads, "At a moment in American history when multicultural diversity is being celebrated, this is precisely when enlightened university administrators ought to be encouraging practitioners of an international discipline which goes back to Herder and the Grimms, a discipline which has been ahead of its time in recognizing the importance of folklore in promoting ethnic pride and in providing invaluable data for the discovery of native cognitive categories and patterns of worldview and values." Lingua Franca did publish several short letters of protest, including one from Indiana University titled "Is Folklore Finished?" but it was signed by Liz Locke and eighty other graduate students. Nothing from the Indiana faculty. No letter from the IU faculty and no letter of protest from AFS. Not a peep! It seems to me that both academic and public sector folklorists have a stake in defending our discipline when it is attacked. Where was the AFS leadership on this occasion? Is it a case of the proverb "Silence gives consent"? Did, or does, AFS think that folklore as a discipline is dead? I might add parenthetically, and perhaps a little gleefully, that Lingua Franca, which started in 1991, ended in 2001; so it turned out that, after all, itwas Lingua Franca and not folklore that died a premature death; and I can happily report that the study of folklore successfully defied its gloomy prophecy and lives on.

The first, and in my opinion the principal, reason for the decline of folklore programs at universities is the continued lack of innovation in what we might term "grand theory." In Lingua Franca parlance, "Folklore is considered undertheorized." Elliott Oring, one of our few folklore theorists, put it equally succinctly as an aside in his article "On the Future of American Folklore Studies: A Response": "Folklore is liminal precisely because it has no theory or methodology that governs its perspective" (1991, 80). Any academic discipline worth its salt must have basic theoretical and methodological concepts. Folkloristics has some, to be sure, but most of them were devised in the nineteenth or early twentieth century and have been neither superseded nor supplemented. Interestingly enough, most grand theory in folklore was proposed by armchair or library folklorists, not fieldworkers. I am thinking of Sir James Frazer's formulation of the principles of sympathetic magic or Max Muller's speculations about solar mythology. Even in the twentieth century, what little grand theory does exist comes from Sigmund Freud and Claude Levi-Strauss, neither of whom would qualify as fieldworkers. Most fieldworkers, on the contrary, are involved with local communities and are not always concerned with the theoretical implications of the data they gather.

Historically speaking, the roots of the discipline of folkloristics lie in antiquarianism, or what I might term as the quest for the quaint or perhaps the quest for the curious. In my travels to folklore centers overseas and in this country, I see more often than not what I would call "butterfly collecting." Items of folklore are treated as rare exotica, metaphorically speaking, to have a pin stuck through them and mounted in a display archival case such that it is almost impossible to imagine the folklore items were ever alive (that is, performed). Context is typically ignored, and it is the text only that is prized by the local collector. Because such local collectors who ought to have ideas of a theoretical or methodological nature do not, the field has by default been left to armchair library scholars, the modern analogues to Frazer. In the United States, the atheoretical void is exacerbated by the paucity of even armchair or library scholars. Despite the richness of our library resources and the infinite capacity of information technology with its dazzling array of databases, American folklorists have contributed precious little to folklore theory and method. Almost every viable theoretical and methodological concept employed in folkloristics has come from Europe. In one sense, I suppose it doesn't really matter where a good idea comes from. Folkloristics is and always has been an international discipline. So we gladly use French folklorist Arnold Van Gennep's notion of "rites of passage," Finnish folklorist Kaarle Krohn's "historic-geographic method," or Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow's concepts of "active bearer" and "oicotype." But all these concepts were formulated at the end of the nineteenth century or early twentieth century. Where are the new hypotheses and speculations about folklore?

Now, I can just imagine that some of you folklorists, especially those imbued with a healthy dose of nationalism and pride, are saying to yourselves, "Wait a minute. Americans have made contributions to theoretical folkloristics. What about feminist theory? What about performance theory? What about oral formulaic theory?" Well, what about these so-called theories? Although Milman Parry and Albert Lord are given credit for developing oral formulaic theory, John Foley has shown that the roots of the theory came from European scholars who preceded them (1988, 7-15). The situation is analogous to Francis Child's canonical collection of English and Scottish ballads, which was incontestably modeled after the Danish folklorist Svend Grundtvig's massive treatment of Danish ballads or Stith Thompson's revision of Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne's tale type index. American folklorists have, for the most part, been followers, not leaders. I have to admit that I fall into this category myself, having been inspired by Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1968) and Austrian Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory.

As for feminist theory, what precisely is the "theory" in feminist theory? Despite the existence of books and articles with "feminist theory" in their titles, one looks in vain for a serious articulation of what that "theory" is. The idea that women's voices and women's roles in society have been adversely impacted by male chauvinism and bias is certainly true, but does that truism constitute a proper "theory"? And what of "performance theory"? No folklorist would deny that folklore lives only when it is performed, that folklore performances involve participants and audiences, and that the issue of competence in performance is a feature to be recorded and analyzed, but where is the "theory" in performance theory? I do not consider either so-called feminist theory or performance theory to be "grand theory." As far as I'm concerned, they are simply pretentious ways of saying that we should study folklore as performed, and we should be more sensitive to the depiction of women in folkloristic texts and contexts.

True grand theories allow us to understand data that would otherwise remain enigmatic, if not indecipherable. Here we may observe that some of the older grand theories continue to yield insight. Consider the Jewish superstition that one should never have a button sewed on or a garment otherwise repaired while a person is wearing that garment. Informants, if asked, can shed little light on the possible rationale underlying the belief. But with the help of Frazer's law of homeopathic magic, we can quite easily explain the custom. The only time a garment is sewed while it is worn is when a corpse is being dressed for burial. Hence, sewing on a detached button or repairing a tear in a garment is treating the wearer of the garment as a corpse and, in effect, signifying or forecasting that the individual might soon die. No wonder it is considered to be such a taboo.

In maritime folklore, we learn that it is bad luck to whistle while on board ship. I can remember back in my own days in the United States Navy being chastised by a warrant officer for whistling. Why should whistling be forbidden on a ship? Once again, grand theory can help us. Whistling, given the principle of "like produces like," the basis of Frazer's law of homeopathic magic, is a model of a windstorm. There is even a folk metaphor "to whistle up a storm." Although wind was clearly a necessity in days of sail, too much wind was not a desideratum as it might result in a ship's capsizing and sinking. The point here is that grand theory, once formulated, may continue to yield insight.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Grand Theory in Folkloristics by Lee Haring. Copyright © 2016 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Foreword
Michael Dylan Foster and Ray Cashman

Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century
Alan Dundes

Introduction
America's Antitheoretical Folkloristics
Lee Haring

The Sweep of Knowledge: The Politics of Grand and Local Theory in Folkloristics
Gary Alan Fine

What(’s) Theory?
Margaret A. Mills

The Philology of the Vernacular
Richard Bauman

Humble Theory
Dorothy Noyes

Grand Theory, Nationalism, and American Folklore
John W. Roberts

There is No Grand Theory in Germany, and for Good Reason
James R. Dow

Responses
What Theory Is
Newton Garver

Weak Theory in an Unfinished World
Kathleen Stewart

Or in Other Words": Recasting Grand Theory
Kirin Narayan

Disciplining Folkloristics
Charles L. Briggs

Afterwords
Reflections on Grand Theory, Graduate School, and Intellectual Ballast
Chad Edward Buterbaugh

Ten Years After
Lee Haring