What is Folklore Dr Balram Uprety Assistant Professor
What is Folklore? Dr. Balram Uprety Assistant Professor in English, Department of English, St. Joseph’s College, Darjeeling, India
Definitional Problem Ø “Folklore”: Linguistic bias and othering of folklore in English language Falsehood, error, flaw Example: To say that democracy naturally leads to free press is nothing but folklore Similar usage of myth in English: falsehood
Lack of Definitional Consensus Ø There exist twenty one definitions of folklore in the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend published in 1959 Ø Definitional fluidity, plurality as well as robustness: Also a lack of direction and boundary: Ø Who are the folks? What is the subject matter of folklore? What is more important in folklore—the folk or the lore etc
How Oral is Oral Literature? Written-Oral Binary: Foundation of Its Definition Ø What is the problematique of this binary? Ø Associates folk with pre-literate, pre-industrial chronotope when the technology of printing was absent. Implication? Oral becomes the antithesis of technological, rational, scientific and rationality. Larger implication? Orality—an episteme of prehistory, primitivism, irrationality and atavism
Written-Oral Not Oppositional but Complementary or Symbiotic ü The role of written in the production, preservation and perpetuation of the oral ü The Indian context: some of the greatest examples of the oral literature are written ü Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagara, Vetalapanchavimsati, the Buddshist Jataka Tales
Another Problem of the Written-Oral Binary ü The Folkloristic fieldwork cannot be carried out without writing, recording and transcriptions ü The oral is written: and the written was oral: Interactive and not oppositional
Rural Bias in definition: Is Folklore a Relic of Past? ü Spatio-Temporal bias in the emergence of folklore as a discipline—Herder. Romanticisation of peasantry in the late 18 th century; Grimm Brothers: Focus is rural. The English interest in folklore coincides with Romanticism—Folklore was seen as an antithesis of urbanisation and industrialisation ü Rural bias—in the definition of William J. Toms
• “Quaint rites, customs, beliefs, superstitions, tales and myths current among the rural peasantry living in areas away from urban centers of civilization. ” v 19 th Theory of Evolution: March of civilsation from savagery to barbarism to civilization—the peasantry represented the savages and uncivilized within civilization and folklore survived in this class as a survival of the past
Implication of this past-centric definition of folklore ü Responsible for folklore’s epistemological othering and marginalization ü Association with savagery and peasantry indirectly equates folklore with primitivism and regression and barbarism anti-modernity or nonmodern. Therefore, it becomes only a footnote in modern academia ü Denies its continuous creation and transformation in the era of urbanisation, technology and science
ü Dorson: Folklorist should study the modification and transformation of folklore in the age of urbanization and industrialization ü Example: The New York Underground Druglore, The Russian Tractor Lore, The Lore of Death Car ü The Spatio-Temporal Bias of Nepali Folklorist vis a vis Teej
The Difference of Oral Textuality: Performative/Contextual Textuality • Performative/Contextual: makes folklore more of a process than a product • Importance of Context: Written literature like a novel or a poem: frozen in its fixity • Oral genre like proverb is dynamic: All proverbs are not in use; proverbs give rise to anti-proverbs
Two Implications of this Contextual Significance and Dynamism ü Dynamism of Folklore: Folklore-not a relic of past; it is continuously re-invented in a new context; never exhausted, not an anti-thesis of modernity and civilization ü Significance of Fieldwork: Field in folklore studies is ever new, every fieldwork yields different result because of the dynamism of life in the field
Anyone Can Do Folklore: The Foundational Myth Ø Dorson “Parlor Folklorist” Ø Implication of disciplinary colonization i) Loss of Academic rigor; ii) Politics of Funding III) Does not allow folklore to emerge as an autonomous discipline Ø Why can’t just anyone practise folklore? Fieldwork, classification, context sensitivity motif analysis: there are many such discipline -specific internal dynamisms
Does Globalisation Kill Folklore? ü Homogenizing, Standardizing: Uniformity in global cultural order ü Imperial onslaught of western market eco ü Globalisation: is it a threat or opportunity? ü Marketisation and commodification of cultural artifacts —Marketisation: mass visibility to folklore artifacts ü Globalization and folklore—mutually altering relationship ü “Glocalisation”—importance of the local and the indigenous to the very survival and success of globalization
• Globalization and folklore—not antagonistic but interactive • Example: Nepali Teej and the Assamese Bihu • The empowering transformation of Teej due to globalisation
Is Folklore Politically Innocent? • De-politicisation of folklore ü Exoticisation: pastoral, rural, innocent, bucolic, idyllic, uncontaminated, away from the corrosive and corrupting influence of power ü Dangers of de-politicization in the climate of politicized epistemologies: personal is political ü If knowledge is power and power knowledge—the ruralization and pastoralization of folklore as a discipline has a serious implication
ü It indirectly seeks to deny the political potency and reading of folklore as a discourse of power and power of discourse. Such de-legitimization of folklore as a discourse of power seeks to marginalize it epistemically in this era of politicized epistemologies.
Thank You
- Slides: 18