Folklore: The Development of a Science

On of my interests is the tension within folklore studies between those who practice folklore as a scientist, those who approach it from the literary standpoint, those who look at it as artistic inspiration and the lay folklore student. This tension has been apparent since the advent of the discipline and it pokes its head up very often in folklore studies dating from the turn of the century prior.

We can see this tension displayed by G. Calderon in his review of W. Dittmer's collection "Te Tohunga: The Ancient Legends and traditions of the Maori," which appeared in the journal Folk-lore XIX (1908). Calderon doesn't beat around the bush when describing the usefulness of Dittmer's re-purposing of Maori myth:

With the aesthetic side of Mr. Dittmer's work our Society is not concerned, except in so far as it affects the Folk-lore side; but I feel constrained, while recommending the book to the attention of those who like that sort of thing (among whom I cannot honestly include myself), to warn "the serious student of Folk-lore," if he has not hitherto turned his attention to New Zealand, from endeavouring to make acquaintance with it through the pages of Te Tohunga. For Mr. Dittmer's aesthetic, both literary and pictorial, is something of a modern kind which he brings from Europe and applies, almost forcibly, to his subject matter; it is not a development of the essential Maori notions for their own sake. It is New Zealand "a travers un temperament." The serious student would know more about Mr. Dittmer in the end than about the Maoris.

What then could be of use to the folklorist.  Take the review of W. D. Fernal's "Precious Stones: For Curative Wear and Other Remedial Uses; Likewise the Nobler Metals," by W. L. Hildburgh, included in the same issue of Folk-Lore:

It is well, I think, to point out here that much of what is recorded in the older books dealing with gems and stones, although interesting to the folk-lorist, is, strictly speaking, not folk-lore, but is what some learned man gathered from others, equally learned, about him, or from books, or reasoned out for himself. On the other hand, much is folk-lore, as is proved by our finding still, amongst the peasantry, especially in countries conquered and civilised by the Romans, many of the beliefs concerning the virtues of stones, more particularly the less valuable varieties, which were recorded by Pliny or by the medieval writers.

Even back then the argument of 'is it folklore or not' resounded.   One thing for certain though, back then they did love them some Frazier.  From A. R. Wright's review of "Primitive Secret Societies" by Hutton Webster (Also dig on the thinly veiled misogyny!):

The puberty ceremonies for girls, naturally less important, are also very fully dealt with, and the theories of Dr. Frazer and others as to the origin of puberty rites in general are touched upon.

HeeHeeeheeee. . . .Folk Art!

Fast forward to the 5:20 mark.

Type-written Rants

One of my favorite folk genres of the past century is the type-written rant. You can usually find them jammed under windshield wipers, randomly inserted into mailboxes or distributed by zany people in outdoor malls, parks and street corners.

Once, in Charlottesville a little over a decade ago, I had a chance encounter with a folk artist of the genre. I had ridden my bike to the library and had taken off my helmet while chaining up the bicycle. I had just shaved my head, and I was pretty shiny! "Hey nice shaved head! You really pull it off!" I turned to look and saw a very attractive blond lady - probably in her late twenties - and wearing a bikini top and cutoff jeans. I thought I had it going on. We started talking, and something did not seem right with her. She then asked me if I knew who King Ludwig was. "Oh yeah, craz King Ludwig! My mom has a picture of his castle." "I was him in a past life." She then takes out a type-written rant, with the names of famous people and hand-drawn arrows demonstrating how they are all related through reincarnation. I graciously excused myself and went into the library to do some library stuff. Turns out that she accosted enough people to be banned from the university grounds and had left a ton of her rants all over town. I should have held on to the sheet of paper though.

Beware of the Blog has an interesting post about another purveyor of the type-written rant:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2009/01/new-rants-by-francis-e-dec-esq-uncovered.html

Weird Hairy Females!

Cryptomundo has a great post about a monster stalking the Caucasus here!

The post taken from an article in the newspaper Pravda. Pravda has turned into something else lately. The online Russian version has gone completely tabloid, and is painful to read. The English language edition, though, is wonderful and wacky. It reads like a poorly edited edition of The Onion, if the Onion were written by Anti-Western slavophiles!

My favorite headlines from today's edition:

• Russia to retrieve its status of world's strongest superpower
• The mother of all paradoxes: The American Social System
• US economy to collapse before something improves
• The Absurd Persistance of Domination
• Earth on the Brink of Ice Age
• Soviet Cosmonauts Burn Their Eyes in Space for USSR's Glory
• Man Dismembers His Wife By Mistake
• The Tower of Babel of the European Left
• Obama: Deceiver, Cheat, Swindler, Liar, Fraudster, Con Artist
• Israel: You Are Serbia Now
• Our Santa Claus Is Better Than Yours

Wicked Cool Cheremis Omens and Magic

From the Sebeok and Ingemann book "Studies in Cheremis: The Supernatural"

• If when hunting you meet a woman with bare genitals, you will not have luck - you will not catch anything.
• If a woman gives birth to a child in a shirt, the child will be lucky.
• If a person has much hair in his armpits, he has luck.
• If your anus itches, a Tatar is coming.
• A big-testicled man's testicles begin to ache before there is rain; his testicles descend; then the rain comes; the weather will be wet.
• If on your way somewhere you must defecate, you will have luck.
• If Russians sing, there will soon be rain.
• If a cat washes its face with its left paw, a Russian will come.
• If a cat washes its face with its right paw, a Cheremis will come.
• If a person's horse harnessed for a trip defecates in the yard, he will have luck.
• If a person's horse harnessed for a trip urinates in the yard, he will not have luck.
• If, they are taking a horse to be sold, it defecates in the yard, they will not be able to sell it.
• If you meet a pig, you will have luck.
• If a squirrel comes into the village, the village will burn down.
• If an ant urinates on your foot, your foot will be injured.
• If there is a big cockroach in the house, it is a good sign.
• If the cockroachs hide in summer, it is not good, the village will burn down.
• If a tick sticks to one's neck in the spring, the hemp will grow tall.
• If all the crabs disappear from the river, there will be war.
• If the frog croaks, potatoes must be planted early.
• If a lizard urinates on your foot, it will be wounded.
• The time when peas bloom is difficult for children; they die then.
• If there are many hazelnuts, many girls will become pregnant.
• If maple leaves fall rightside up, the thief will be caught.
• If the Volga freezes on a meat day, the cows will give rich milk and there will be many fish.
• If there are piles of snow on the tops of trees, there will be many swarms of bees in the following summer.
• If bread falls out of your mouth while eating, you will not have anyone to give you food and drink when you are old.
• If your shoe becomes untied while you are walking, your wife is having sexual intercourse with another man.
• When a woman sings she is asking for the whip.
• If you place a stick into an ant hill and many ants climb up the stick, cucumbers will grow well that year; if they don't climb up, cucumbers will grow only here and there.
• A person catches a louse on a sick person and lays the louse on ashes sprinkled on the floor. If the louse crawls toward the door, the sick person will die; if the louse crawls toward the holy corner, he will recover.
• If a man keep's a cat's afterbirth rolled up in a kerchief, he will not become a soldier. If he is conscripted he will not pass the examination and be rejected.
• If a child eats burned bread, he will not be afraid of bears.
• If a person urinates into a river, the but bozez 'water spirit' will punish the person with some affliction.
• If a person puts on a new shirt on Wednesday, his body will itch until he puts on another shirt.
• If a person urinates into a spring, a sore will appear on his penis.
• If a person urinates toward the sun, either skin will come off the tip of his finger or sores will appear on his head.
• If a person eats food from which a cat has eaten, he will have lung trouble and breathe panting like a cat.
• When a girl sees her image in a mirror, she kisses the mirror and says, "Do not take my likeness."
• If children go far to play, an antlered hare will carry them off on its back.
• If a man has sexual intercourse with his mother-in-law, the sheep will multiply.
• Work done at night will not amount to anything.
• If a person cooks and eats a black cat in the bathhouse at midnight, he will become rich.
• "Ant butter," a salve to heal wounds, is made in the following manner: A cream-smeared glass is placed in an ant heap. When the glass is full of ants, it is put in dough and baked in the oven. Later the ants are shaken from the glass onto a cloth. The cloth is squeezed and "ant butter" comes out.
• If a cow's afterbirth does not come out, any man who comes in must undo his belt. If he does not do this, the afterbirth will not come out.
• A growth on a person's body, face, or neck, called pi ota 'dog testicle,' can be removed by rubbing it with bread and saying, "Let the dog testicle be the dog's," and spitting. The bread is then taken outside and fed to a dog.
• A stomachache can be cured "by rubbing it with another stomach," that is, by having sexual intercourse.
• If a person vomits, he should eat pickles, marinated herring, or some other sour food.
• Urine is used to cure certain diseases. A person who has jaundice (sar muze 'yellow sickness') must wash himself in his own urine daily three times before sunrise. A person who has sem muze 'black sickness,' must drink urine from a black sheep and wash himself in it.
  

The Why Here Why Now Project

A website that tries to capture the Zeitgeist of the 'progressive' community of Yellow Springs Ohio (which reminds me of the 'progressive' towns of New Paltz and Charlottesville). Going through this website you do feel like you are going for a nice walk through a town, and getting to know a bit about the community. I especially liked the photos of elaine's bench and the murals.

Whyherewhynow

My Dream of a Folklore Wiki/Database/Ontology

A pet project I have on one of my many back burners is a wiki-based folklore database. My dissertation research involved creating an ontological database using the program Protege. My dream is to expand this project, and to make it collaborative. Of course, this is a massive undertaking. Where's my grant money?!

As a student teacher I taught a class that incorporated a web-based collaborative-writing tool that allowed the students to critique and read each other's writing. It was a great tool for getting the class to interact with one another and there was a marked improvement in the computer communication skills of the students. However, the project did not really present a way for the students to collaborate on folklore-specific projects. For example, they did not post the stories they collected for fieldwork practice.

Lydia Fish at Buffalo has a wiki-based project for her folklore class, and it makes for interesting reading. I am a big fan of these sorts of projects, especially the presentation of student-researched topics. More often than not this material just gets shoved into a filing cabinet,or even worse, the professor incorporates the material into their own projects. Here the material is shared with the world at large - which is better for all involved. The website can be accessed here.

Interesting things collected by her students: pregnancy beliefs, folklore of restaurants, skateboarding folklore.

Interesting Facts About Cheremis Ritual

Interesting Facts about Cheremis Ritual

I am still enjoying reading through Thomas Sebeok and Frances Ingemann's Studies in Cheremis: The Supernatural. There are some interesting tidbits about Cheremis ritual which I would like to share with you.

First, there apparently is a holiday devoted to eating head:

B.5 buj kocma pajram 'head eating holiday'

In the autumn, in October, November, or even as late as December, falls the 'head eating holiday,' a day of feasting at slaughter time. There is no fixed date for this ceremony; each family decides on a different day, so that friends may be invited. On the appointed day, a feast is prepared. A man who knows the prayers, acting as the priest, kills an animal: a horse, cow, or goat, depending on the wealth of the family. The head, intestine, heart, liver, lungs, and other internal organs are cooked for the banquet. In the evening, when all the guests have assembled, the priest, standing next to the head which is in a large wooden bowl on the table, prays for prosperity and good fortune in cattle raising. Following the prayer, the priest eats three pieces of the head and then the owner of the house and his wife, relatives, and friends do likewise. After the guests have partaken of the head, they wish the people of the house prosperity and, particularly, abundant herds. After this, the rest of the food is served and the banquet lasts well into the night. Any meat left on the head after the ceremony is used by the family on subsequent days. The rest of the meat is kept for the family to eat during the winter.

Apparently, during the ritual of surem (driving out), it is lucky to beat women (albeit with switches):

The exorcism is performed by the young men of the community who go about usually at night or in the early morning, beating walls, fences, and steps with mountain ash switches. Women are also beaten so that the evil will not hide in their clothes. A great deal of noise is made, horns blown, and sometimes shots fired. Horse racing is also sometimes connected with this holiday. In some places young men masquerade as bears, deer, etc.m and one person, masquerading as sajtan, is driven from house to house.

You can also determine your future spouse by the color of sheep:

One of the most widespread customs, perhaps the one from which the holidy gets its name, is that of predicting the appearance of a future husband or wife by means of grabbing a sheep's foot. The young people go out to the sheep pen in the dark and grab either the foot of a sheep or some of its wool. If a white sheep is caught, the future mate will be a blond; if a black sheep, a brunet. From the size and age of the sheep it is also possible to predict the size and age of the future husband or wife.

The Cheremis were very resistant to both christianization and islamization, they to this day still retain great elements of their original pagan religion, as can be ascertained from the following description of a funerary custom:

As the corpse is carried from the yard into the street, a hen is killed at the gate; if it dies in the yard, it means there will be another death withing a short time, but if it runs headless out into the street, death will not visit the house again soon. It is believed that those who have previously died come to meet the recently deceased on the spot where the hen is slaughtered. Some say that in the other world the hen gathers all the nails which the dead person has lost during his life because a person may not appear before the ruler of the dead without all his nails. In other places, at the slaughter it is customary to say, 'Loosen with this blood your own blood from death!' The first drops of the hen's blood are then smeared on the eyebrows of the corpse. In some regions the hen is left where it died to be eaten by dogs. In other places it is cooked and eaten. Sometimes a chicken (a cock for a dead man and a hen for a dead woman) is hung by the neck under the wagon to 'free the blood' of the dead person. Sometimes the gate is not closed until the people return from the cemetery.

The Cheremis perform 'weddings of the dead' for those who die unmarried (not unlike those roumanians studied by Linda Degh, but it doesn't seem that the Cheremis actually pick out a bride or bridegroom for the corpse):

If an unmarried young man dies, the mourners express the wish that he find himself a suitable bride for the next life. If a single girl dies, in her coffin are put materials and ornaments for her to make her wedding clothes, especially a married woman's headdress. An unmarried dead person is accompanied to the grave as if to his wedding. Wagons and horses ae decorated with bells and ribbons; all his young friends accompany the deceased to the graveyard; sometimes even wedding attendants are chosen.

If I find any more cool stuff in this book, I will definitely share!

A List of Words That Sound Dirty Yet Aren't

Porknell - (n)- a person as fat as a pig. Sample sentence, "My porknell of an ex-mother-in-law is as fat as a pig."

Smellsmock -(n)- A licentious man.

Wang-tooth -(n)- molar. "I went to the dentist to get an impacted wang-tooth removed."

Tutmouthed -(adj)- thick-lipped. "The tutmouthed actress adopted another Third-World baby."

Spitchcock - (n) - eel cooked w/ breadcrumbs. "This is the best spitchcock I have ever put into my tutmouthed face and chewed with my wang-teeth, said the smellsock with the porknell of an ex-mother-in-law."

Shittle - (adj) - unstable.

Murfles - (n) - freckles. "Jan Brady used lemon juice to try and remove her murfles."

Donge - (n) - mattress. "The smellsmock invited the shittle murfled - yet tutmouthed - porksnell to his house to try out his donge. Bad idea."
(it's a bad idea because she is both unstable and fat. If it was just one or the other, then maybe it would be a good idea, but together the combination is terrible).

Coverslut-(n) - an apron or garment used to keep from getting dirty. "Put on the coverslut, you tutmouthed porknell! I'm making spitchcock here!"

Penistone - (n) - a breed of sheep, also a village in england (pronounced "Pennyston"). "The smellsmock leered at the penistone."

The Scariest of Monsters

From Sebeok & Ingemann's "Studies in Cheremis: The Supernatural"

A. 59. pailpak

This dwarflike evil spirit lives in the house and disturbs sleepers with nightmares. It eats unborn children in their mother's wombs, and children's hearts.

Folklore on Googlebooks

Google Books is awesome. Browsing through it is like visiting a well-stocked library. Over time more and more books are becoming available for full perusal, which is definitely a welcoming development. I have stocked my personal elibrary with dozens of folklore journals and books (most dating from over a hundred years ago). Going through those works you can stumble across some real gems.

I am currently going through the 1908 issue of the journal Folk-lore. The articles I have read so far have been doozies. The President's Address by M. Gaster is a must-read if only for it's unflinchingly purple prose.

Reading old journals is a great method of gauging the academic zeitgeist of the era. Take, for example, W. Crooke's "Some Notes on Homeric Folk-lore." Granted at the time academics were still actually hashing out the idea of The Iliad and The Oddyssey as being products of an oral culture, and there was still an argument over the whole issue of authorship of Homer's epics. But this article attempted to place the arguments into some sort of context, but the context Crooke placed it into was heavily (I mean heavily. . .) influenced by Frazer's The Golden Bough. We get the scattershot approach: going all over to place to Egypt, the Indus Valley, Samoa, Celtic lore, Norse lore, and I am leaving out tons of other examples. It makes for great - if excruciating - reading.

I just finished reading a Manx fairytale in the Collectanea section of the journal, which humored me to no end, even though the collector made many decisions a contemporary would never make. It stil lmade for great reading.

Great Place Names

George Stewart's fun "Names on the Land" has recently been reissued by New York Review Book Classics. (Personally, I pick up every book by this imprint, they have also recently been reissuing works by Platonov, including the haunting Kotlovan.)

Stewart describes thousands of place names, but one list really stood out, names that were not in good taste: Maidenhead, Fryup, Sizergh, Great Snoring, Shitlington, and Ashby de la Zouche.

In his notes Stewart makes no mention as to where exactly lie these places with 'tasteless' names. Time to find out.

Maidenhead - located on the Thames about twenty five miles from London. The name is not in reference to a hymen, but rather from the phrase "Maiden Hyth", new wharf, or even prior to have been called "Mai Dun."

Fryup - britishism for big old plate of fried food - 'fancy a breaky fryup.' Also a small town in Yorkshire. Town name might be from the Norse. "Up" = valley, "Fria" = lady's name. So, "Fria's Valley." Needless to say, but there are a bunch of dales and valleys in Fryup.

Sizergh - I have no idea why Stewart would consider this name in poor taste. All I can find out online is that there is a big castle there.

Great Snoring - usually this is when my ex-wife would elbow me and make me roll over on my side. Hardy har har. There is also a "Little Snoring." Once known as "Snoring Magma." In Saxon it was called Snaringa. The suffix -ing would signify "the place where these people live." Example: Reading = place where the Reads live, or place where Read lived. In Great Snoring there once lived a bloke named Snear.

Shitlington - Also in Yorkshire. If we parse this: -ing = "place where these people live," "-ton" = town, Shit = a man named Shit. Shitlington = Town Where a Man Named Shit Lives. There is also Middle Shitlington (also Shitlington Middle), Shitlington Crags, Shitlington Hall. I'm to lazy to find out what Shit meant in Old English. Also it's funnier this way.

Ashby de la Zouche - Again, I am perplexed as to why Stewart would think this is in bad taste. (Ashby de la Douche, now that is tasteless). Usually just called Ashby these days. "Ashby" = 's ash farm in danish. After the Norman conquest the area was given to the Zouche family, hence the de la Zouche. Many British place names reflect the many numbers of people who have conquered the island: celt,roman, norman, danish, viking, angle, saxon. All so that a thousand years later we can giggle when we hear the names.

Cheremis Folk Belief

A few months ago I stumbled across a used book store run out this guy's house. I start rummaging around and see that he has an amazing folklore section. I was expecting old paperbacks and stuff, but he had things like Stith Thompson's memoirs. In a small garage bookstore he had a full shelving unit devoted to folklore. How odd, but great.

Going to the other side of the bookstore I discovered a whole wall of archaeology and anthropology titles, including piles of journals and special publications. Paydirt! I opened a few covers and discovered "From the Personal Library of Margaret Mead" inscribed on the inside of a number of titles. What the heck was going on.

I pick up a few titles - if I was of unlimited means I surely would have cleaned the place out. I talk to the guy behind the counter and it turns out he was a bibliographer for an anthropological society. I want that job. Really, i do.

I am working my way through one of those finds, "Studies in Cheremis: The Supernatural. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology Number Twenty-Two" by Thomas A. Sebeok and Frances J. Ingemann. New York 1956. This title makes me excited for so many different reasons. Firstly, I wrote almost a whole chapter of my dissertation on the work of Thomas Sebeok. I wish I had this book when I was dissertating, it would have improved that work exponentially. Sebeok was one of the first (if not the first) anthropologist/folklorist to employ a computer for the scientific study of folklore. The gist of that chapter of my diss was that his use of the computer was influenced by his allegiance to the structuralist school. Sebeok loaded one of those room-sized computers with tales and spells from the Cheremis people and did sophisticated (for the time) word-counts, determining repetitive imagery and the like.

He studied the Mari people of East/Central Russia (also called the Cheremis), who were a finno/ugric native peoples who numbered around half a million. For more on the Mari, check out the wikipedia article. The Mari are stuck somewhere between the Slavic Russians and the Mongol-Turkic Tatars, and demonstrate influences from both sides.

Thomas Sebeok was probably most famous as a biosemiotician. I am not smart enough to enough try to describe what that is. Instead, here is a great article explaining Sebeok's life work by someone with a much better vocabulary than me.

It is easy to forget that Russia is an ethnically diverse country, and I think studies such as Sebeok's are important in preserving the cultural heritage and identity of groups that are in danger of being swallowed up by more dominant (or better, populous) ethnic groups.

A Folklorist On American Idol!

One of the contestants tonight on Idol was a student in a folklore Master's program! His name is Anoop Desai, and he is from UNC-Chapel Hill, where he sings in one of the a cappella groups that inundates campuses. He looked like a gradauate student in folklore - khaki shorts and an untucked shirt, one of the judges called him a 'geek.'

Folklorist representing on Idol! And he wrote his senior thesis on southern BBQ.

He made it through to the next round, so we will - as Randy Jackson says, "See him in Hollywood!"

Join the Anoop fanclub on facebook.

A blurb about his appearance from Newsdays liveblogging of Idol:

More time to fill, so they show some clips of people singing badly. Masters student Anoop Desai shows up in shorts, Simon butchers his first name on purpose. Interesting guy, studies Southern folklore. I like his voice, he's totally unlike anyone we've seen yet this season. None of the judges expected his soulfulness, Anoop-dog is in the house says Randy. Simon says he looks a bit geeky, like out of a meeting with Bill Gates. They all like the voice though, so he and his big smile are through. I like him, a lot; curious to see if he wants this as much as some of the others who don't have fallback careers.


Could not find any videos of his appearance yet, but I did find this guy's:

Renewal and Rebirth!

My apologies to my one and a half readers for not posting in almost two years. Here's another go at it!

First things first, time to google the word 'folklore.'

First page of results nets the following:Folklore - Wikipedia article - Not a bad start. I like the wikipedia project, even though the current head honcho is kind of creepy.

American Folklore.Net Interesting. Not really my cup of tea, but a great resource for a lay person. And also for those family members who want to know what exactly you do with your life.

Third on the results page is the PS3 game called Folklore. Which brings up as many false leads as Nelly Furtado's album.

This is kind of cool, the oral history of Apple computers can be found at Folklore.org. I would rather that domain name go to some academic concern, or the JAF, but whatever.

University of Pittsburgh has a nice website that's still up, Folktexts. Looks like it needs an update or something, stylistically it looks a little 1998ish. But its crammed with fun stuff. (I went to Russian Summer Institute at Pitt, spent a lot of time in the "tower of ignorance.")

About.com has an Urban Legends Page that turns up on the first page of google results. Would rather see Snopes there.

Overall not a bad results page - the search term was incredibly broad. A couple of good book recs come up as well.

I intend on posting daily to this bloggy thing. New Year resolutions and all that jazz!