Alan Dundes:Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century
Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century(AFS Invited Presidential Plenary Address, 2004)
Alan Dundes
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 Kôhler (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 a joke. 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 isthe 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 entitled "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 or Elliott Oringreiterated 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 entitled 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 entitled "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 of folklore 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 multi-cultural 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 entitled "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, it was 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 Müller's speculations about solar mythology. Even in the twentieth century, what little grand theory does exist comes from Sigmund Freud and Claude Lévi-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 andthe 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 madecontributions 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.
As many of you know, I find that psychoanalytic theory qualifies as grand theory, allowing us to fathom otherwise inexplicable folkloristic data. For example, there is a Japanese superstition that "pregnant women should never open an oven door." Informants could say only that it was bad luck. But with the knowledge gained from the symbolic equivalence of oven and womb (as attested in the phrase even in American folklore that a pregnant woman "has a bun in the oven"), we can understand that this is once again an application of Frazer's homeopathic magic. Opening an oven door would be an invitation for a miscarriage to occur. In this case, we have to use both Freud and Frazer to fully explain this superstition. The point is that most collections of superstitions, like the majority of folklore collections—be they proverbs or folktales—offer no explanation whatsoever. Let me give one further illustration of the application of psychoanalytic theory to a puzzling item of folklore.
From medieval Spain to modern-day Latin America, one of the most popular Spanish ballads is known as "Delgadina." More than 500 versions of this romance-corrido have been published. Famed Spanish ballad scholar Ramón Menéndez Pidal claimed that this Spanish ballad "is found wherever the Spanish language is spoken" (Herrera-Sobek 1986:91) and expressed his belief that "'Delgadina' is without a doubt the most widely known romance in Spain and America" (106n.11). The summary of the ballad: "'Delgadina' tells the story of a young woman who resists her father's incestuous advances. For this, she is locked up and denied anything to drink while she is fed only salty foods" (Mariscal Hay 2002:20; Goldberg 2000:148, Motif T411.1 Father desires daughter sexually. She refuses.). The abundant scholarship on the ballad tends to treat it as a literal reflection of the horrors of father-daughter incest and, in particular, of the absolute power of the father in the Hispanic family structure (Herrera-Sobek 1986), but no one to date has offered a convincing explanation of just why this ballad has enjoyed so many centuries of popularity. Delgadina is the youngest of three daughters of the king, and in some versions she wears provocative clothing, including a "transparent dress." In many versions of the ballad, there is some dispute over who is to blame for the father's attempt to make Delgadina his mistress. Often it is Delgadina who is blamed by her sisters or her mother. In one verse, after Delgadina begs her mother in vain for a jug of water, the mother responds, "Get away Delgadina, get away you evil bitch / because of you here I am seven years a wronged wife." In another version, a Sephardic one (Aitken 1928:46), the mother replies, "Get thee thence, Jewish beast! Get thee down, cruel beast: On thy account these seven years I have lived unhappy in marriage." It is important to note that this ballad is typically sung by women to other women (Egan 1996). Thus, it is clearly very much a women's song (Aitken 1928). The daughter fantasizes that her father is not happy with her mother but would prefer her instead. As Aitken puts it in her 1928 article, the girl is jealous of her mother and thinks, "My father really prefers me to my mother and would like to put me in her place and over my elder sisters" (1928:48).
In a parallel (cognate) ballad (of Silvana), it is arranged that the mother takes the daughter's place in bed for the prearranged meeting with the father-king (Goldberg 2000:100, Motif Q260.1). What I believe we have with this version, what Wendy Doniger refers to as the "bedtrick" (2000), is what I have termed "projective inversion" (Dundes 1976, 2002). If we perceive this celebrated ballad as a thinly disguised Electral story, we can see that it represents wishful thinking on the part of the daughter. She loves her father and wants to replace her mother in the marital bed. This taboo wish is transformed via projection into the father's attempt to seduce his daughter. The mother's substituting for the daughter in the parental bed is a perfect inversion of the taboo wish. Instead of the daughter substituting for her mother, the mother substitutes for the daughter, thereby saving the daughter from a taboo incestuous sexual act. The specific reference to the daughter being fed salt cannot help but remind us of AT923, "Love like Salt" (the basis of the King Lear plot), which also involves a king-father's attempt to have incestuous relations with his daughter. This plot is also reminiscent of AT706,"The Maiden without Hands," which occurs in ballad form (Brewster 1972:11–12) and has also been interpreted by me as a striking case of projective inversion (Dundes 1987). One could also mention the tale of Lot's wife, who is turned to salt, after which his daughters seduce their drunken father, a quite explicit Electral tale.
Whether one agrees with these interpretations or not, one can certainly see that the interpretations would not have been possible without recourse to grand theory, in this case, Freud's Oedipal theory and my modest addition of the concept of projective inversion. As for the reasons for the long-lived popularity of a father-daughter incest projection in Hispanic cultures, it is worth remembering that the central plot of Catholicism involves a virgin being impregnated without her consent by a heavenly father, another Electral fantasy with overtones of projective inversion. In summary form, "I would like to seduce my father but that is forbidden, so in the projection it ismy father who seduces me, much to my mother's consternation, with the psychological advantage of leaving me guilt-free. It's not my fault that my father desires me." The popularity of this plot in Catholic circles is also attested by the legend of Saint Dymphna. After her mother died, her father, a pagan Irish chieftain named Damon, searched the whole world for a woman to replace his wife but was unsuccessful until he returned home and saw that his daughter Dymphna was as beautiful as her mother. He makes advances, but she flees. He catches up with her in Belgium, but when she refuses to surrender, he kills her. The fact that the daughter dies or has her masturbatory hands cut off (in AT 706) is a sign that it is, in the final analysis, she who is ultimately being punished for her original incestuous wish. Now, admittedly, this particular type of grand theory is not widely accepted by conventional mainstream folklorists, but my point is that, without this or other grand theories, folklore texts will foreverremain as mere collectanea with little or no substantive content analysis. The stereotype of folklorists as simply collectors, obsessive classifiers, and archivists is strengthened each and every time yet another collection of unanalyzed folklore is published.
And this brings me to the second major reason for the decline of folkloristics as a respected and honored academic discipline. One reason, as I have noted, is the lack of new grand theory, but a second reason, I believe, is that we professional folklorists are badly outnumbered by amateurs who give our field a bad name. In the first week of June 2004, I was invited to participate in an ambitious conference in Atlanta called "Mythic Journeys," designed to honor the centennial of the birth of Joseph Campbell. The event was organized by the Mythic Imagination Institute, supported by the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the Jung Society of Atlanta, and sponsored by a number of groups and corporations, including Borders Books and Music, Parabola Magazine, and the Krispy Kreme Foundation. Although there were dozens of panels and presentations that were concerned with folklore (though not necessarily myth), there were very few professional folklorists in attendance. The presenters included storytellers, artists, filmmakers, Jungian analytical psychologists, and a very few individuals who were self-identified as folklorists. Before leaving for Atlanta, out of curiosity I looked up a number of my fellow panelists and presenters and was quite startled to discover that many of them were faculty members at small colleges who were listed as professors of folklore and who obviously taught courses in what they termed "folklore." The courses were typically concerned with searching for Jungian archetypes in literature, including J. R. R. Tolkien, or exploring manifestations of Campbell's composite "monomyth" that has little if anything to do with myth proper but is, rather, based on a combination of legend and folktale. Now there is no way other than establishing a fascist police state for the American Folklore Society to prevent such "folklorists" from teaching what they call "folklore." Robert Georges wrote an essay indicating his disgust at discovering that there are many individuals who simply declare themselves to be folklorists without any formal training or study of the subject (1991:3–4). Can one possibly imagine anyone claiming to be a physicist or mathematician without ever having had formal training in physics or mathematics? Georges also expressed disappointment that many who are trained as folklorists conceal that fact, preferring instead to claim that they belong to other academic disciplines. Here I cannot forbear reminding you of one of the worst recorded instances of a folklorist refusing to acknowledge his disciplinary affiliation. It happened in 1992 at UCLA. Exiled president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who has an interest in folklore, was scheduled to speak on campus. Donald Cosentino was at that time the chair of the folkloreand mythology program. As is customary on such occasions, a high-ranking official was on the stage to welcome the audience before turning the gavel over to Cosentino to introduce the speaker. Right before the event began, the UCLA vice-chancellor whispered to Cosentino, "We have a head of state here. Under no circumstances will I introduce you as the chair of folklore and mythology. I will introduce you as from the English department. Let's not embarrass ourselves." Cosentino did as instructed and introduced Aristide without identifying himself as chair of the folklore and mythology program. What bothers me most about this incident is not so much the vice-chancellor's outrageous insult to our field, but the fact that Cosentino did not fight it, instead cowardly acquiescing. I can assure you that had I been in such a position, short of punching out the vice-chancellor publicly on stage, I would have actually reported his whispered conversation and proudly announced my position as chair of folklore and mythology. In other words, I would have sought to embarrass the vice-chancellor rather than have him embarrass me and my field. A truly disgraceful incident in our academic history, one that was the very first item mentioned in the Lingua Franca attack (Dorfman 1997).
Related to the fact that we seem to be besieged by popularizer nonfolklorists masquerading as folklore scholars, if one walks into any of the large commercial bookstores such as Barnes and Noble or Borders and checks the "folklore and mythology" sections, what does one find? There are the inevitable numerous anthologies of Greek myths or dictionaries of mythology containing mostly entries devoted to Greek and Roman mythology, volumes of folktales from all over the world retold by editors—the word "retold" should be anathema to professional folklorists—typically bowdlerized and dumbed-down for children, and finally, at least a half dozen books by Joseph Campbell. I recall one incident several years ago in the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Berkeley. Although I much prefer secondhand bookstores, occasionally I check the commercial stores just to see if there is a new book that I should know about. On this occasion, I found myself unable to locate the folklore and mythology section. It had evidently been moved, as bookstores often reshuffle shelves and sections. I finally went to one of the bookstore personnel to be directed to the folklore and mythology section. Normally in such bookstores, sections are clearly labeled: religion, sociology, self-help, and so forth. In this case, the folklore and mythology label was absent and in its place was simply emblazoned in large bold letters: "Joseph Campbell." I was shocked to discover that the entire folklore and mythology section had been subsumed under Campbell's name. I remember being almost relieved that at least none of my books were to be found in that section. My sole point in mentioning this disheartening incident is to suggest that for many members of the literate public, the study of folklore means precisely Campbell and his writings. Yet professional folklorists have said very little about the huge corpus of Campbelliana. I do not know if any of his many books were ever even reviewed in JAF. Is this a case of "silence gives assent"? Very likely more people were introduced to the subject matter of folklore by the writings of Campbell or the PBS television series of lectures by him than by any other source. And yet we folklorists have said little or nothing about him and his theories. My thesis is simply this: the combination of a lack of new grand theory and the failure to counter the effective efforts of numerous amateurs and dilettantes who have successfully claimed possession of the field of folklore as their fiefdom has understandably led to a public perception of folkloristic as a weak academic discipline, a perception unfortunately too often shared by college and university administrators. The American Folklore Society, since its inception, has had as its goal the professionalization of the discipline of folkloristics. JAF should be the primary forum for the expression of new theoretical and methodological advances and the book review section of the journal should critique and rebut amateurish attempts to analyze folkloristic data. I am not blaming the past or present editors of JAF for the failure to do so. They can only publish articles submitted to them by us folklorists constituting the membership of AFS. So we must accept the blame for the state of our discipline. And, accordingly, it is up to us to fulfill the promise of our beloved field to demonstrate to all interested parties that folkloristics is a world-class global discipline with its own valid theories and methods, and we should not leave our field by default to popularizers and amateurs. Fakelore and folklorismus abound everywhere, and we run the risk of being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of unscholarly anthologies of adulterated folklore mixed with creative writing.
At the Mythic Journeys conference held in June in Atlanta, there was a splendid associated website with stunningly brilliant graphics. On the screen appeared a map of the world and one could click on different areas (peoples) and a myth from that area/people would appear accompanied by a sonorous narration of it. Very impressive indeed! But at the bottom of the screen there were various alternative options. One of the options was "write your own myth." I saw at one point that a number of ten- and eleven-year-old children had accepted the challenge and had e-mailed "their own myths" to the website. Nothing irritates me more than when, after I give a lecture on folklore to a group of elementary or secondary school teachers, one enthusiastic teacher comes up afterward to say that she very much appreciates the importance of myth and that is why she encourages her second-grade class to write myths as an exercise. No wonder such children eventually grow up to be confused about what myths really are andto become fans of Campbell's contention that all of us can be heroes of our own myths.
As apparently no folklorist has hitherto made any critique of Campbell, I should like to take this opportunity to do so. Part of the problem stems from the fact that Campbell does not really know what a myth is, and he does not really distinguish it from folktale and legend, two genres that provide most of the illustrative examples in his popular Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949. His illustrative examples include Little Red Riding Hood and the Porcupine subtype of Star Husband, neither of which any folklorist would dream of classifying as myth. Campbell tries to delineate a worldwide hero pattern, but he makes no mention of J. G. von Hahn's initial pioneering statement of 1876 in which he sought to isolate features of what he termed the Aryan Expulsion and Return hero pattern (Segal 1990:vii). Nor does Campbell refer to Otto Rank's path-breaking Myth of the Birth of the Hero firstpublished in 1909 or Lord Raglan's famous pattern of the hero biography which appeared as an article in Folklore in 1934 and shortly thereafter in book form in 1936 (see Dundes 1965).
Let me say something more about The Hero with a Thousand Faces, still Campbell's best-known book, and his first. Where did he get that resonant catchy title? In 1940, Campbell met Swami Nikhilananda (Larsen and Larsen 1993:283), who was a devoted disciple of Ramakrishna. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell cites Swami Nikhilananda's translation of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Campbell 1956:115n.33). We know that Campbell was very intrigued by the writings of Sri Ramakrishna (Larsen and Larsen 1993:283–6). In the second volume of The Cultural Heritage of India, the Sri Ramakrisna Centenary Memorial, Swami Nikhilananda contributed a 176–page essay entitled "Sri Ramakrishna and Spiritual Renaissance" (1936:441–617). We know that Campbell readthe 1936 essay because he cited it in his 1960 essay, "Primitive Man as Metaphysician." Consider the following quote from Ramakrishna contained in Nikhilananda's essay: "But he who is called Krishna is also called Shiva and bears the names Shakti, Jesus, and Allah as well—the one Rama with a thousand names. . . The substance is one under different names" (1936; emphasis added). We know that Campbell was a truly voracious reader and a master of assimilating much of what he read. We shall never know for certain, but the passage bears an eerie resemblance to Campbell's title. We have only to substitute "hero" for "Rama" and "faces" for "names" and we get "the one hero with a thousand faces." Note, I am arguing inspiration here, not plagiarism. In any case, the Campbell classic has been called "a sweeping and engrossing study of the hero myth" (Ellwood 1999:143). But the narratives analyzed by Campbell are not myths at all; they are folktales and legends.
In his discussion of "The Magic Flight," which is strictly a folktale motif, Campbell includes the narrative of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece ( 1956:203–4), but this has nothing whatever to do with myth proper. Rather it is a hero legend. There is nothing in the narrative referring to the creation of the world or humankind. In view of Campbell's abiding interest in the "quest" theme, it is not surprising that he frequently cites Arthurian material ( 1956:330), a subject he studied for his master's thesis at Columbia University (Larsen and Larsen 1991:75), including mention of the search for the Holy Grail. But such Arthurian stories are definitely legends, not myths. In Creative Mythology, the fourth volume of Campbell's tetralogy The Masks of God, he retells Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal. These are significant major medieval literary masterpieces, but by no stretch of the folkloristic imagination could either one be considered a myth. Campbell suggests that Wolfram utilized "an altogether secular mythology" (1968:476), but myth is sacred, not secular. At best these texts might be construed as literary legends. Yet both involve quests specifically associated with the Holy Grail. Campbell also considers Thomas Mann and James Joyce as mythmakers. One can only conclude that Creative Mythology does not deal with "myth" in the strict technical sense at all. Rather, it is a volume of essentially wide-ranging literary criticism. Considering that Campbell is not clear about what a myth is, no wonder his myriad followers are equally confused. This loose definition of "myth," one unfortunately shared by many writers on the subject, would seem to confirm Gregory Hansen's criticism that definitions of folklore (and that would include myth) have been stretched so far as to include everything. Some writers of books on myths include "B" movies and novels under the rubric of myth. As Hansen words it, "The problem is that if everything is now 'folklore,' then nothing is 'folklore'" (1997:99).
Campbell's adaptation of folklorist Van Gennep's rites of passage pattern, applied to narratives, was certainly insightful, but the universalist assumption based on an unproven assumption of psychic unity—namely, that all peoples possess the same mythic structure—is not. In Creative Mythology, the fourth volume of the teratology The Masks of God, Campbell himself refers to The Hero as follows: "In The Hero with a Thousand Faces I have shown that myths and wonder tales . . . belong to a general type which I have called 'The Adventure of the Hero,' that has not changed in essential form through the documented history of mankind" (1968:480).
It has long been a popular fantasy among amateur students of myth that all peoples share the same stories. This is clearly an example of wishful thinking. Campbell referred to the hero pattern as auniversal monomyth, borrowing this vacuous portmanteau neologism from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (Campbell 1956:30n.35). On the universality issue, the empirical facts suggest otherwise. There is not one single myth that is universal, a statement that runs counter to Campbell's view. He was invited to contribute to a special issue of Daedalus devoted to "Myth and Mythmaking" in 1959, an issue that also contained contributions by Mircea Eliade, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Richard Dorson. Campbell began his essay, "The Historical Development of Mythology," which was based on his introduction to his then forthcoming Masks of God series with the following statement: "The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the Fire-theft, Deluge, Land of the Dead, Virgin Birth, and Resurrected Hero have a world-wide distribution, appearing everywhere in new combinations, while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same " (1959:232; emphasis added). Even a beginning student of folklore could dispute this kind of argument by assertion. It is easy to make ex cathedra pronouncements about universals, but it is quite difficult to document them. Take the virgin birth, for example. If we look in the Motif-Index, we find Motif T547, Birth from Virgin, with just three citations listed for the motif. One refers to European saints, another to a classical Greek myth, and one to a South American Indian source. Period. I am not aware of any virgin birth stories in Africa. None are cited in the Motif-Index for Siberia, Polynesia, or Melanesia. We have dozens of myths reported from aboriginal Australia and New Guinea, but evidently no virgin birth stories there. So can we accept Campbell's assertion on faith that the virgin birth has a worldwide distribution? In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell has a whole section devoted to the virgin birth ( 1956:297–314), but the one African text cited tells of the first man having intercourse with his wives and daughters to produce children and animals, hardly a convincing example of a virgin birth. In his list of universals, Campbell also mentions the deluge. In my edited volume, The Flood Myth, one can easily ascertain that this myth is essentially absent from sub-Saharan Africa (1988).
Campbell plays fast and loose with folklore data to illustrate his so-called hero pattern. For example, in the section entitled "The Belly of the Whale," Campbell cites the story of Jonah, and I am sure that western ethnocentric readers nod their head in approval as this narrative of the Old Testament would seem to be a perfect example of this theme (though technically the creature is not really identified as a whale). Campbell then goes on to cite as a second illustrative example "The little German girl, Red Riding Hood, was swallowed by a wolf" ( 1956:91). This narrative, of course, is not a myth, but a folktale, namely Aarne-Thompson Tale Type 333, about a girl, which makes it about a heroine, not a hero. Does Campbell's pattern apply equally to the female of the species or only to males (cf. Lefkowitz 1990:430)? And the alleged swallower is not a whale but a wolf. But, more important, we know that, in the oral version of this girl-centered folktale (as opposed to the literary rewritings by males such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm), the girl is not swallowed by the wolf at all. Instead she escapes through a clever ruse by pretending to need to go outside to defecate. So because Red Riding Hood is a heroine, not a hero, and because she was not swallowed by the wolf (or tigress in the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese versions), it would seem, then, that this tale is not really the best possible evidence for the existence of an element of a supposed universal mythic pattern entitled "In the Belly of the Whale."
Despite the lack of evidence, Campbell appears to have no doubt about the existenceof folklore universals. In this respect, he is a throwback to nineteenth-century theories of psychic unity. Most folklorists would agree that the occurrence of parallels is due to monogenesis and diffusion rather than polygenesis, but this is not Campbell's position. His method, if we can even bear to call it such, is largely based on Adolf Bastian's unsubstantiated notion of "Elementargedanke," or elementary ideas, a clear-cut intellectual precursor to Carl Jung's concept of archetype, both of which are uncritically adopted by Campbell (1972:44, 1968:653; Campbell and Toms 1990:68). In his "Bios and Mythos: Prolegomena to a Science of Mythology," written for Géza Rûheim's 1951 festschrift, Campbell makes this unequivocal statement: "However, it is of first importance not to lose sight of the fact that the mythological archetypes (Bastian's Elementary Ideas) cut across the boundaries of . . . culture spheres and are not confined to any one or two, but are variously represented in all" (1951:333). Campbell eventually, by his own admission, came to prefer Jung to Freud, although he used both in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell and Toms 1990:121). And he seems to have accepted the idea of Jung's "collective unconscious." "Mythology," according to Campbell, "is the expression of the collective unconscious."In marked contrast to Jung, however, he does occasionally accept the fact that diffusion can account for the occurrence of cross-cultural correspondences in myths (1990:123).
Still, it is Campbell's insistence on the existence of archetypes that I find most disturbing. Consider this passage from Myths to Live By: "All my life, as a student of mythologies, I have been working with these archetypes, and I can tell you they do exist and are the same all over the world" (1972:216; emphasis in original). Jung claimed that there were panhuman, precultural autochthonous images that were supposedly part of a collective, as opposed toa personal unconscious substratum common to all humans, and that these manifestations of the instincts were to be found in dreams and folk narratives. There were only a limited number of these archetypes: the great mother, wise old man, the child, fourness, and so forth. Just as professional folklorists have tended to ignore Campbell and failed to criticize his oeuvre, they have similarly refrained from criticizing Jung and his notion of archetypes. Yet, in sections of bookstores nominally containing books on folklore, we find almost as many Jungian studies of folkloristic subjects as there are books by Campbell. Why has there been no critique by folklorists of the concept of archetype? I believe there is no single idea promulgated by amateurs that has done more harm to serious folklore study than the notion of archetype. I find it invariably cited by ignorant students, as well as equally uninformed members of the general public in the "q and a" period whenever I have occasion to give a public lecture on folklore. The problem with archetype, aside from the unwarranted assumption of psychic unity and universalism, is a practical one of simple identification of such, as is all too clear in the classic essay by Jung on the child archetype. Quoting Jung, Often the child is formed after the Christian model. . . . Sometimes the child appears in the cup of a flower, or out of a golden egg, or as the centre of a mandala. In dreams it often appears as a dreamer's son or daughter or as a boy, youth, or young girl, occasionally it seems to be of exotic origin, Indian or Chinese, with a dusky skin, or appearing more cosmically, surrounded by stars or with a starry coronet, or as the king's son or the witch's child with daemonic attributes. Seen as a special instance of "the treasure hard to attain motif" the child motif is extremely variable and assumes all manners of shapes, such as the jewel, the pearl, the flower, the chalice, the golden egg, the quaternary, the golden ball and so on. It can be interchanged with these and similar images almost without limit.
The critical methodological question is How can one possibly recognize this archetype when it appears in so many guises? How do we know when we come upon a "golden egg" in a folktale that it is a manifestation of the child archetype? Here one must recall Jung's own methodological dictum: archetypes are by definition unknowable. One can only approach them asymptotically or tangentially. Jung reiterates this point again and again. So, if archetypes are unknowable, how can we know them? One additional theoretical difficulty is that these supposed archetypes are allegedly panhuman and precultural. Because they are precultural, they are only marginally affected by cultural conditioning. One can easily understand why cultural anthropologists, whose primary working definitional and operational concept is "culture," would not be much interested in a theory that postulatedpre cultural entities, whether stemming from sociobiology or from Jungian dogma. Incidentally, I blame Freud, in part, for Jung's postulation of the existence of archetypes in a collective unconscious. One of Freud's most grievous errors was his belief that Haeckel's biological discovery that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" applied equally to mental products. In an attempt to explain the multiple existences of certain recurring fantasies—for example, seduction by an adult, observation of parental intercourse, and the threat of castration—he offered the following speculation:
Whence comes the need for these phantasies and the material for them? There can be no doubt that their sources lie in the instincts; but it has still to be explained why the same phantasies with the same content are created on every occasion. I am prepared with an answer which I know will seem daring to you. I believe that these primal phantasies, as I should like to call them,and no doubt a few others as well are a phylogenetic endowment. In them the individual reaches beyond his own experience into primeval experience at points where his own experience has been too rudimentary. It seem to me quite possible that all the things that are told to us to-day in analysis as phantasy—the seduction of children, the inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental intercourse, the threat of castration or rather castration itself—were once real occurrences in the primeval times of the human family and that children in their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth. (1916:370–1, 1987)
This is an unequivocal, if dubious, statement. If an individual lacks a symbol or fantasy in his or her own life, that symbol or fantasy will be provided through the ontogenetic recapitulation of phylogeny. Probably the most famous, or infamous, example of Freud's application of this principle is the conclusion of Totemand Taboo (1946). After acknowledging that the mere thought of killing his father on the part of a son could cause guilt, in the end Freud decided that it was an actual historical act of patricide arising from the primal horde's band brothers uniting to kill their father that accounted for the Oedipus complex and totemism and taboo. This, according to Freud, is because supposedly primitive man, unlike modern man, is not inhibited and accordingly "the thought is directly converted into the deed." The last lines of Totem and Taboo are a direct result of Freud's phylogenetic bias: "For that reason I think we may well assume in the case we are discussing, though without vouching for the absolute certainty of the decision, that 'In the beginning was the deed'" (1938:930).
Freud's phylogenetic inheritance fantasy is clearly comparable to Jung's "collective unconscious." The error in part consists of trying to make psychology into history. Freud's whole theoretical basis for psychoanalysis wasessentially the same as nineteenth-century folklore theory, specifically, the doctrine of survivals stemming from unilinear evolutionary theory. Adult neurotic symptoms were in essence survivals from a traumatic situation that had occurred in infancy or early childhood. To understand or explain the apparently irrational symptoms, the analyst had to reconstruct the fuller picture from early childhood by means of free associations and dream content. This is clearly parallel to what Andrew Lang described as "the method of Folklore." Lang, in comparing archaeology and folklore, remarks, "Here is a form of study, Folklore which collects and compares the similar but immaterial relics of old races, the surviving superstitions and stories, the ideas which are in our time but not of it" ( 2005:11). The theory was based on the nineteenth-century child-savage equation. As savages passed through barbarism en route to civilization, so children passed through adolescence en route to adulthood. To understand adult folklore (that is, survivals in civilization), one needs to find the fuller form existing among present-day savage (or primitive) societies. In Lang's words, "The method is when an apparently irrational and anomalous custom is found in any country, to look for a country where a similar practice is found, and where the practice is no longer irrational and anomalous, but in harmony with the manners and ideas of the people among whom it prevails. . . . Our method, then, is to compare the seeming meaningless customs and manners of civilized races with the similar customs and manners which exist among the uncivilized and still retain their meaning" (1884:21). Finally, Lang concludes, "Folklore represents, in the midst of a civilized race, the savage ideas out of which civilisation has been evolved" (25). Freud also saw a parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny. In his foreword to the German edition of Captain John G. Bourke's Scatalogic Rites of All Nations, which he wrote at the request of Viennese folklorist Friedrich Krauss, Freud wrote, "The science of folklore has travelled in other paths but nonetheless it has arrived at the same results as psychoanalytic investigations. It shows us how imperfectly various peoples have succeeded in repressing their scatalogic tendencies and how the treatment of the excremental functions on various levels of civilization approaches the infantile stage of human life. It demonstrates to us the perdurance of the primitive, truly ineradicable coprophilic interests . . . in usages connected with popular custom, magical practice, cult acts and the therapeutic art" (1934:ix). This may also illuminate Freud's fascination with archaeology, which also demonstrated the governing intellectual paradigm of the nineteenth century, namely, reconstruction of the past. A shard, like a superstition or a neurotic symptom, was a survival from the past, but a survival that could aid in the reconstruction of that past.
Allthis is not to excuse Jung's concept of the collective unconscious, but only to show that Freud's thought might have been directly or indirectly one of the sources of this mystical idea. There is yet another theoretical difficulty with the Jungian archetype, and this concerns the unconcealed Christian content of some archetypes. I have already referred to Jung's specific mention of the Christian connection to the child archetype. Much more disturbing, however, is Jung's claim that Jesus Christ is an archetype. In his essay "Aion," Jung asks, "Is the self a symbol of Christ, or is Christ a symbol of the self? " His answer: "In the present study I have affirmed the latter alternative. I have tried to show how the traditional Christ-image concentrates upon itself the characteristics of an archetype—the archetype of the self" (1958:36). I am not putting words in Jung's mouth. He adds in an italicized sentence, "Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self," and a footnote invites the reader "Cf. my observations on Christ as archetype in 'A Psychological Approach or the Dogma of the Trinity'" (1958:36). If we keep in mind that archetypes are assumed to be panhuman, that would constitute a most egregious example of extreme ethnocentrism, not to mention arrogance and hubris or orientalism—namely, to assume that all peoples have a built-in archetypal Christian part of their consciousness regardless of their cultural and racial heritage. Jung states, "The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them" (1958:117). Presumably that would also apply to Christian archetypes. Actually, it was precisely Jung's Christian bias that made him so attractive to Freud as a possible successor in order to make psychoanalysis more acceptable to a non-Jewish public, but the extension of that bias into myth as a form of folklore is simply not intellectually defensible or tenable.
The Jungian underpinnings of Campbell's approach to folklore put the approach outside the limits of academic folkloristics. The universalistic premise of psychic unity, coupled with the claim that archetypes are inherited, leaves little room for the influence of cultural relativism and the formation of oicotypes. The inheritance issue is a controversial one. Listen to what Jung himself says about it. In the preface to Psyche and Symbol, published in 1958, not long before Jung died in 1961, he said the following:
Mind is not born as a tabula rasa. Like the body it has its pre-established individual definiteness, namely forms of behavior. They become manifest in the ever-recurring patterns of psychic functioning. as the weaver bird will build its nest infallibly in its accustomed form. The archetypes are by no means useless archaic survivals or relics. They are livingentities which cause the praeformation of numinous ideas or dominant representations. . . . It is important to bear in mind that my concept of the "archetypes" has been frequently misunderstood as a kind of philosophical speculation. In reality they belong to the realm of the activities of the instincts and in that sense they represent inherited forms of psychic behaviour. (1958:xv–xvi)
It is hard to believe that anyone could accept such a mystical notion as a viable concept in folklore research, but Campbell did. What are we to make of the coffee-table books full of images of alleged archetypes? Of course, it is possible to produce images of mothers from different cultures, but this does not constitute hard evidence of the existence of a Great Mother archetype—only that all cultures have mothers and images of them, but hardly the same image. Even theChristian images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary differ radically within western cultures, typically taking on the physical racial features of the painters of the images or their patrons. If infantile conditioning is critical with respect to man-God relations as Freud argued in The Future of an Illusion (1928), then to the extent that infantile conditioning varies from culture to culture, so man-God relations will vary accordingly, and thus there are different myths in different cultures. The constants are not archetypes, but human relationships. There are parent-child relationships in all cultures, and hence there are parent-child struggles in folklore around the world.
When Campbell wrote his 1944 commentary on the Grimm tales for Pantheon, he did his homework. He cited tale types, The Motif-Index, and all the scholarly apparatus contained in the writings of folklorists of that time. He even mentioned the historic-geographic method, a.k.a. the Finnish method, as the preferred form ofthe comparative method employed by folklorists to trace the development and diffusion of a particular folk narrative, but he claimed in a footnote that Franz Boas was a practitioner of the method. During his Columbia years, Campbell actually studied with Boas and, in any case, should have known that Boas never once used the Finnish method. But Campbell's "little bit of knowledge" points to one of our problems. Folklorists have had some success in publicizing the results of our efforts for the past two centuries such that members of other disciplines, after a minimum of reading, believe they are qualified to speak authoritatively about folkloristic matters. It seems that the world is full of self-proclaimed experts in folklore and a few, such as Campbell, have been accepted as such by the general public (and public television, in the case of Campbell). I cannot tell you how many students as well as applicants to the folklore program at Berkeley include in their statements of interest that they have read and enjoyed Campbell's writings. I suppose, in that sense, we owe him a lot for getting people interested in our discipline. The problem is that so many have read only Campbell and know little else about folkloristics. There are, in my opinion, two other factors that contribute to the low level of folkloristics in the academy: (1) the loss of previous knowledge and (2) intimidation by informants. The loss of previously known facts is perhaps partly attributable to the veritable explosion of knowledge in virtually all fields. It has become increasingly difficult to keep up with all that is written in folkloristics and the myriad journals and monograph series around the world. Bibliographies, computer databases, and search engines help, to some extent, but there are still too many instances of reinventing the wheel. The issue of information retrieval is exacerbated by the growing number of amateurs purporting to represent our field. They are blissfully ignorant of earlier studies of their subject matter. Ihave already mentioned Campbell's failure to reference either Otto Rank or Lord Raglan's earlier delineations of the hero pattern, and there are countless other examples.
In the mid-1940s, classicist Rhys Carpenter gave the prestigious Sather Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, published later as Folktale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (1946). In a book with that title one would think there might have been at least a mention of AT1137, The Ogre Blinded (Polyphemos), or the motif in which Odysseus put an oar on his shoulder and walked inland in search of a community that did not know what it was (Hansen 1990, 2002:371–8). But no such references are to be found. Instead, we find a poorly argued proposition that the Odyssey contains the framework of the folktale of the bear's son, a hypothesis Carpenter proposed after reading the scholarship (by Friedrich Panzer and others maintaining that Beowulf was derived from that tale type. We have had the Tale Type Index since 1910 and The Motif-Index since 1932. Not only could a classicist in 1946 get away with not citing such obvious folktale elements in the Odyssey, but, even worse, a major press could publish a book without having obtained competent prepublication reviews by folktale specialists. One has only to compare the Carpenter book with Bill Hansen's recently published magnificent Ariadne's Thread: A Guide to International Tales found in Classical Literature (2002) to see the difference between research by a classicist posing as someone with knowledge of folklore and a classicist who is an authentic full-fledged folklorist.
Let me cite another example of "lost knowledge." In 1955, Ray William Frantz completed a doctoral dissertation at the University of Illinois entitled The Place of Folklore in the Creative Art of Mark Twain, just one of a considerable number of studies of Twain's interest in and use of folklore in his classic writings. Frantz published some of his findings inhis article, "The Role of Folklore in Huckleberry Finn " (1956). His work was similar to that of Victor Royce West, who wrote "Folklore in the Works of Mark Twain" in 1930, drawing from his 1928 master's thesis at the University of Nebraska. These and other various attempts (cf. Jones 1984) to demonstrate Twain's definite interest in folklore could have been strongly enhanced by simply examining the membership of the American Folklore Society during its early years. In the very first issue of the Journal of American Folklore, we find included on a list of the "Members of the American Folk-Lore Society" one S. L. Clemens of Hartford, Connecticut. Not only was Twain a charter member of the American Folklore Society, but he remained a member for at least five years according to the membership lists in volumes one through five. This means that he received JAF for its initial five years of publication, and we may logically assume that he may well have read some of its contents. In any case, given the fact that Frantz and none of the many other critics who have been concerned with Twain's possible interest in folklore have ever mentioned his membership in AFS, we can point to this omission as a prima facie instance of a "loss of knowledge." This kind of factual information like tale types such as 1137, Polyphemus, comprise knowledge available to any true scholar, and part of our task as professional folklorists is to remind our students and our colleagues of the existence of such knowledge. I would also classify as "lost knowledge" Montenyohl's assertion that "folkloristics" is a modern term.
But if "lost knowledge" is an impediment to making advances in folkloristics, so also is what I would call "intimidation by informants." Two folklorists, both major scholars whom I personally admire very much and whose publications constitute hallmarks of the highest-quality scholarship, are both advocates of a policy that insists on not writing anything that might possibly offend any informant. One of these great folklorists insists that his informants are his friends and he wouldn't dream of saying anything in print that they might find insulting or offensive. He expresses his satisfaction in a sentence in perhaps his magnum opus: "One problem down. I had written and lost no friends" (Glassie 1982:33). I understand that the rapport achieved in successful fieldwork often results in firm, if not lifelong, warm friendships. But giving informants drafts of articles and monographs to vet with the right of veto power or, at the very least, the right to exercise censorship, I find unacceptable. Folkloristics, like any branch of learning, should not devolve into a popularity contest. What if doctors felt it was morally reprehensible to ever tell a patient of a serious disease that required immediate remedial action? This would surely not be in the patient's ultimate best interest. Although there is no need to deliberately offend an informant, there is a need to make the best possible and most enlighteninganalysis of any data elicited from that informant. If folklorists are afraid of saying anything their informants might not like, the field will never become more than mountains of unanalyzed texts accumulating in folklore archives.
Sometimes the issues involve more serious ethical questions as is the case with our second major folklorist. In this instance, the folklorist collected Navaho folklore for several decades, his expertise so extensive that he was invited to be the sole non-Navajo speaker in a lecture series for a purely Navajo audience. This was surely a great compliment to this folklorist. After lecturing on Coyote stories to this audience, he was startled by a question posed by an elderly singer: "Are you ready to lose a member of your family?" It turned out that there was a level of meaning of the Coyote stories that the folklorist had not been aware of, a level that had to do with witchcraft, and the questioner was trying to warn the folklorist that he was on the edge of potentially dangerous territory with his research. The folklorist took the warning to heart. In an essay written on this incident, he remarked, "Just as a folklorist needs to know where to begin, so one needs to recognize where to stop and I have decided to stop here" (Toelken 1987:400). He continued, "Rather, as far as discussion of the Coyote tales is concerned, I intend to avoid the information myself, as unscientific and as unscholarly as that may seen. Indeed, in that regard, this is an un-scholarly non-essay, an un-report on what I am not going to be doing with texts recorded over the past twenty-five years" (400). The story is even worse. It is one thing to voluntarily desist from studying one's field data; it is quite another to destroy that data. In this case, the folklorist had a problem once his principal informant died. He knew that the Navajo feel obliged to avoid any interaction with the dead, which includes listening to the recorded voice of someone deceased. In consultation with his deceased informant's widow, the folklorist boxed up sixty-plus hours of original field recording tapes (as well as copies he had used in classes and lectures) and sent them to the widow by registered mail, knowing full well she would be obliged to destroy them. In his essay on the subject in JAF, he describes how he came to make this painful decision (1998). My view is that not only has he deprived the academic world of data that may not be able to be replicated, but also that the Navajo themselves have lost a precious resource. We know that many Native Americans have been grateful for earlier work by folklorists and anthropologists in preserving parts of their culture that have unfortunately faded away with the decimation of their populations and their acculturation into mainstream American culture. This is no doubt an extreme example of informant intimidation, but I fear for our field of folkloristics if our very best scholars are timid about analyzing their data or, worse yet, impelled to destroy that data. The field cannot possibly advance if data is destroyed or if we are afraid to analyze it fully for fear of offending someone, either an informant or a colleague.
I have had several personal brushes with would-be intimidation. The first occurred in the late 1960s. I had completed a coauthored study of Turkish verbal dueling. Realizing that some of the data included material that would be considered obscene by most middle-class Americans, I was uncertain where to submit it. I decided to submit it to South Folklore Quarterly and I wrote a cover letter to the editor Butler Waugh, who has a doctorate in folklore from Indiana, explaining that I would understand if he could not accept the paper for publication. I was surprised and delighted to hear from him that he liked the paper and accepted it for publication. Six or so months after the paper had been accepted, I received an unexpected letter from Edwin Capers Kirkland. Waugh had moved from the University of Florida to Florida International University in Miami, and Kirkland was the temporary acting editor of SFQ. The letter informed me that he was very sorry, but it turned out that SFQ would not be able or willing to publish my Turkish verbal dueling paper after all. The reason given was not about the cogency of my argument or the accuracy of the reportage of the data, but that the article might offend the regents of the University of Florida. I did not feel this was a legitimate reason for the paper's rejection, especially when the official editor of the journal had previously accepted it. I wrote a strong letter of protest to Kirkland, not asking for reconsideration, but complaining that this was not a valid reason for rejecting the paper. Some of the older members of the American Folklore Society may remember this incident because my revenge consisted of sending a copy of my letter to every major folklorist I knew on the grounds that I wanted to let my colleagues know that an acceptance from SFQ might be nullified at a later date. Needless to say, I bitterly resented this gutless and spineless editorial decision, although I was later pleased that the paper in question did appear in JAF in 1970.
A second encounter with intimidation or censorship resulted from the last time I had occasion to address this society. It was my presidential address delivered more than twenty years ago at the annual AFS meetings in Pittsburgh in 1980. Because such presidential addresses are routinely published in JAF, I sent the final manuscript to the editor for consideration. Because the presentation was quite long, he quite rightly sent it on to the AFS publications editor. Eventually, I received a rejection letter. The reason for the rejection was not because of poor writing, faulty argument, or insufficient data, but rather, that the research was an insult to AFS members of German-American descent. I found this reasoning absurd and insulting, as I am myself an American of partly German descent, but I did realize that the name of the publications editor suggested that she herself was of German-American heritage. Whether the editor actually sent it out for review, I have no way of knowing. The point is that, even if the work was insulting to German-Americans, this is not an intellectually valid reason not to publish a well-researched paper or monograph. As most of you know, the book was published, but not until 1984. The AFS rejection surely contributed to the four-year delay in publication.
I might also mention en passant that I have actually had essays rejected from not one but two different festschrifts on the grounds that the contributions would offend readers in a particular part of the world. For the Ortutay festschrift in Hungary, I submitted my comparison of ethnic jokes about Jews and Polish Americans. Eventually, I was informed by the editors that there was a pact among members of the Eastern bloc not to insult fellow members. Hence, it was against Hungarian law to publish any jokes making fun of Polish people. Theeditors, however, said that, if I wanted to revise my submission, the jokes about Jews could remain. Considering that the whole point of my essay was to compare the two sets of stereotypes, there was no way I could remove all the Polish jokes. And, of course, I was personally outraged at the suggestion that it was perfectly all right for the anti-Jewish jokes to be published. I might observe that it is not easy or common to be rejected from festschrift volumes, but I have managed it twice. The second occasion involved my essay on East European political jokes being rejected from the Felix Oinas festschrift because prospective readers in the Soviet Union might be offended by it. This was very similar to what happened when I submitted an earlier essay on Romanian jokes to the East European Quarterly. The editor of that journal rejected the essay after admitting that he knew most of the jokes and knew they were traditional but feared subscriptions to the journal from Eastern Europe would be cancelled if the essay appeared in the journal. The rejection from the Oinas festschrift made me especially sad because, as a former student of his, I was quite devoted to the late Oinas and I was pretty sure that he personally would have been pleased to have my essay included. As a matter of principle, I decided to decline the invitation to submit a substitute "nonoffensive" essay in its place.
My latest encounter with would-be intimidation occurred in one of my most recent research efforts, in which I applied a folkloristic theory, oral-formulaic to be precise, to the Qur'an. I was advised by colleagues both here and abroad not to carry out the study. It was not safe to do so, I was told repeatedly. Upon reading my completed application of oral formulaic theory to the Qur'an (Dundes 2003), one trusted colleague eventually confessed that, of course, I was absolutely right in my analysis but it was just not politically correct to have done it. In the Islamic world, applying any theory previouslyemployed in the analysis of secular data to the Qur'an would be an enterprise deemed blasphemous, and in the West scholars could in theory have carried out the research but would not dream of doing so for fear of offending their colleagues in the Arab world. As a result, neither the Arab scholars could make this effort nor would the western scholars choose to do so. Censorship is one thing, but self-censorship is in my view a form of academic cowardice. Accordingly, I have spent much of my career resisting attempts at intimidation that might lead to self-censorship. In this instance, it was left for a non-Islamic folklorist to carry out this modest project. In my career, I have never been afraid of offending either informants or colleagues. Whether the group in question consists of football players, Germans, or Orthodox Jews, it makes no difference. My credo remains: Folklore is to be analyzed as best I am able, and the chips will fall where they may. On the day when I become afraid of making an analysis that some may find distasteful or offensive, I shall know that I am on my deathbed.
I hope that this survey of "gloom and doom" is not taken by younger folklorists as discouragement. Yes, the decline of folklore programs is worrisome, the inroads made by amateurs and popularizers are to be condemned, and the loss of knowledge and intimidation by informants is to be decried, but all is not lost. There is as much folklore in the world as ever, and the challenge of collecting and analyzing has never been more exciting. When my wife Carolyn and I visited the Baltics this past summer, I was greatly encouraged to see the tremendous folkloristic energy at Estonia's University of Tartu. I believe Estonia is well on the way to rivaling its neighbor Finland as the prime mover of folklore scholarship in the world today. And Latvia and Lithuania are also major players in contemporary international folkloristic of the twenty-first century. I find the enthusiasm for folklore and the high level of folklore scholarship in these countries very encouraging. In my four-volume set Concepts: Folklore, just published (2005), I have not hesitated to draw upon the superior folklore scholarship from the Baltics as well as Finland. Folkloristics is certainly not dead in those areas of the globe.
Richard Dorson ended his classic American Folklore with the sentence, "The idea that folklore is dying out is itself a kind of folklore" (1959:278). Now, I do not actually approve of his use, or misuse, of the word "folklore" in the latter part of that sentence—it indulges in the all too prevalent stereotype meaning of folklore as fallacy or error—but I do think the sentiment may be just as applicable to folkloristics as it continues to be to folklore. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, another of our small band of folklore theorists, seems to echo Dorson's sentiment when she says, in another of the many essays concerned with questioning the name of our discipline, "Ours is a discipline predicated on a vanishing subject" (1996:249). Dan Ben-Amos, another major theorist, is even more pessimistic in his important essay, "Toward A Definition of Folklore in Context," when he asserts, "If the initial assumption of folklore research is based on the disappearance of its subject matter, there is no way to prevent the science from following the same road" (1972:14), in retrospect a sad prophecy of what has happened at the University of Pennsylvania. But folklore is not vanishing; on the contrary, folklore continues to be alive and well in the modern world, due in part to increased transmission via e-mail and the Internet. And, as I have indicated, the idea that folkloristics as a discipline is dying out is simply not true either. To paraphrase Mark Twain, charter member of the American Folklore Society, "Reports of folkloristics' death have been greatly exaggerated." So as my last hurrah, let me conclude with: hurrah for folklore, hurrah for folkloristics, and hurrah for the American Folklore Society.
Alan Dundes was Professor of Folklore and Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He published more than 250 articles and edited and coedited numerous works, including The Study of Folklore (1965) and International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore (1999). His most recent works include Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability (1997), Folklore Matters (1989), From Game to War and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore (1997), Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore (1999), The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges: An Unorthodox Essay on Circumventing Custom and Jewish Character (2002), Fables of the Ancients?: Folklore in the Qur'an (2003), Folklore: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2005), and several casebooks on the vampire, the walled-up wife, and Oedipus. This address appears posthumously, as Dundes died while it was still in press. References Cited
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Journal:Journal of American Folklore
Issue: Volume: 118, No: 470, Pages: 385-408, Year: 2005
ISSN: 1535-1882
Publication Date: 10/18/05
Copyright: Copyright © 2005 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 转自：民俗学论坛
http://www.chinafolklore.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=4850&extra=page%3D1
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