Biological Metaphors in Folklore Theory

Karin

Valdimar Tr. Hafstein:

Biological Metaphors in Folklore Theory
– An Essay in the History of Ideas –

Metaphors and the Forging of Interdisciplinary Links

Ever since the early Romantics first asserted the vital importance of folklore, and up until the end of the 20th century, an astonishing number of folklorists has consistently chosen to couch arguments in natural imagery and biological analogies. No mere illustrations, these metaphors both presuppose and entail certain conceptions of the ‘nature’ of folklore. I submit that, as argumentative devices, they should be presumed both armed and dangerous. They are best regarded as tropes deployed in the discursive practices of scholars. These practices are subject to discursive conventions, which include a mutable repertoire of metaphors. It is through these practices that the scholarly community defines and delimits its objects and the modes and methods of understanding these objects. These discursive conventions also imbue these understandings with authority.
Folklorists cannot help but be familiar with biological metaphors: life, growth, evolution, death, extinction, natural laws, morphology, ‘Märchenbiologie’, and tradition ecology, to mention only a few. From Herder and Grimm through van Gennep, von Sydow, and Propp, I argue that these metaphors are not only more pervasive in the scholarship than we usually recognize, they have moreover helped constitute some of the ways in which folklorists have approached the objects of their studies and constructed the discipline.

I hasten to add the obligatory disclaimer: my examination of biological metaphors will focus on the discursive practices of what I think are the greatest minds in the history of the discipline, prior to the advent of the ‘New Perspectives’ of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent developments in scholarly discourse on folklore. Although my approach is critical – I attempt to expose the metaphorical underpinnings and rhetorical implications of theoretical constructs, – I am not criticizing their theories, their rhetoric or their application of metaphor. Indeed, such criticism would be an exercise in futility: we’re stuck with the history of the discipline, whether we like it or not. As I see it, however, it is our duty as its heirs to engage that history, to understand how its developments have constructed the materials, methods, and boundaries of our discipline, and to define the positions we occupy vis-à-vis those taken by our predecessors. In this sense, my analysis of biological metaphors and the arguments they render plausible presents a critique –a history of the present if you will, insofar as these metaphors occupy the interstices of past and present paradigms of research.

The borrowing of expressions, models, and representations from one discipline to another, in and of itself, is of course not a bad thing – in the late 20th century, in fact, interdisciplinary borrowings were generally encouraged. Nor are such borrowings anything new: solutions to chronic problems within one field of knowledge have often been supplied by scholars who have incidentally had a sustained interest in another discipline. They have brought concepts from that field to bear on new problems, transferred methods, and extended insights (see Schlanger 1971: 20). What needs to be stressed, though, is that the direction of borrowing is almost always vertical, from higher status to lower status disciplines; along with terminology, models, and methods, an attempt is made to appropriate the authority of results attained by practitioners in other fields.

Disciplines in the bottom rungs of the hierarchy, a position all too familiar to folklorists, are seldom the source of solutions to intellectual problems in fields with a higher standing in academia (Ben-Amos 1973: 116-117). When they are, their contribution is likely to go unacknowledged; officially, at least, they don’t lend, they borrow. The models of natural science, on the other hand, along with those of mathematics, have held a certain logical and hierarchical priority within Western epistemologies and philosophies of science since the 17th century. At the point in time when the study of folklore and related subjects was first struggling for legitimacy (to some extent that is an ongoing struggle), the procedures of the natural sciences were taken to represent the norms of sound and scientific knowledge. In order to gain admission to the scientific domain, and to enjoy the intellectual and social privileges contingent on admission, students of culture and society, including folklorists, modeled their discursive practices on the epistemologies of natural science.

While the admissibility of biological metaphors is not in question – in principle, at least, any metaphor can further analysis, – I maintain that we need to examine the use to which scholars have put these metaphors in their writings. As Judith Schlanger convincingly demonstrates in a seminal work on organic metaphors (1971), "an analogy is never independent of its application; the application defines it and reveals its purpose" (256, my translation). In what follows, I attempt to show how biological metaphors and discursive practices deploying them have constructed folklore, or, in the words of Judith Schlanger, how "the norms of knowledge indirectly determine the nature of the knowable" (168, my translation).
What is in question, then, is not whether the study of folklore is really a biological science in some sense – we needn’t read the metaphors literally. The real question is what folklore has to be in order for us to conceive of the study of folklore as biological, or, at least, as analogous to biology. The answer, as will become clear, is that folklorists have chosen biological metaphors for a remarkably constant set of reasons: these metaphors can impart to their referents a semblance of natural concreteness, bounded units, immanent principles of growth (codifiable in natural laws), and an autonomy of form and purpose. While the theories advanced by these folklorists are a motley crowd, to be sure, the biological metaphors they rely on differ only in emphasis and not in essence. Their variation depends on two things. The first is the primacy of diachronic or synchronic perspectives. That is to say whether organic growth and descent are foregrounded or whether the focus is on organic form and unity (cf. Abrams 1953: 170-175, and Wimsatt 1972: 66-69). The second is in which unit of analysis ontological priority is vested (e.g., type, genre, tradition, folk).

The Folk Organism: Enlightenment and Romanticism

Folklore’s involvement with biology and organicism goes all the way back to the ideological current that gave rise to the discipline, National Romanticism. The roots of this current of thought have been traced back to the ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement in the German-speaking lands of Europe at the turn of the 19th century. The most illustrious figures of that movement were Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The former brought organic tropes to a new and unprecedented prominence in his writings on social philosophy, whereas the latter envisioned and actively promoted a united science of nature and art. Both took great interest in folklore and play prominent roles in the history of folklore scholarship.

Of the two, Herder is more immediately connected with the study of folklore and his gospel surpasses that of Goethe in its significance for the subject of this investigation. Following Herder’s lead, the German Romantics anchored their ideology in the concept of the organism (see Schick 1971 for a literary analysis of Herder’s organicism). In his writings, and that of his intellectual descendants, the machine (most often the clockwork, hitherto a positive model of rationality) was reinvented as the antithesis of the organism. Though the characteristics attributed to each category in Romantic discourse tended to fluctuate, their polemical evaluation did not: the living organism afforded the tropes for all things positive, the dead mechanism for all things negative (Schlanger 1971: 48-51; see also Schmitter 1992). Enlightenment thinkers, on the contrary, had valued the mechanism as a product of will, and hence as an objectification of creation, which they opposed to what they depicted as the chaos of the preceding age of darkness. The crucial difference between organic and mechanic analogies, from a modern point of view, is this: unlike the mechanism, the organism is not willed. Instead, its principles of life were seen as immanent and autonomous.
The emergence of organicism was an element in the general exaltation of nature that characterized Romanticism. A sharpened self-consciousness of refined, elite culture led philosophers and artists to engage with its counterparts, nature and popular culture, often conflating the two. Nature, its four seasons and endless epiphanies, provided substance and inspiration to poets and authors, painters and composers, as well as to intellectuals and other men of letters. The prominence of biological metaphors in learned expositions is but one aspect of this much larger trend. The rise to glory of natural science at around this time is another aspect. The use of biological metaphors in theories of folklore reflects this relationship. They may be organic or natural metaphors, biological in the sense that they refer to forms of life (biology as subject), or they may be analogies to the science of life-forms (biology as science), or both.

Enlightenment philosophers were committed to a social and intellectual project which promised the triumph of reason over tradition and cosmopolitanism over parochialism. As Giuseppe Cocchiara shows in his monumental History of Folklore in Europe, the category of the folk or the ‘peuple’ is their invention (1981: 89-92). Fontenelle (1657-1757), Montesquieu (1689-1755), Voltaire (1694-1778), and their colleagues and contemporaries were deeply involved in the emergence of a new middle class and its creation of a differential identity for itself. They found their symbolic Other in the common people, the masses (cf. Abrahams 1993, esp. 3-4). The criteria by which they distinguished the categories were, of course, a direct representation of their values: the middle class was the champion of reason, the folk was the locus of tradition; the middle class was cosmopolitan, the folk’s horizon didn’t extend beyond the village; and, of course, while the middle class was urban, the folk was rural. While a middle class man (for the male of the species was the locus of reason) might adhere to religious tradition or avail himself of certain other aspects of tradition, he did so as a matter of an individual and informed choice, not as a factor of his social class. In contrast, the folk were depicted as blind, unenlightened followers of tradition – they were categorically traditional. By criticizing their customs and folklore, by characterizing traditions as errors, and thus the very opposite of reason and enlightenment, these writers distanced themselves and their audience from the masses, creating a category of people against which they could define themselves (ibid.). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has convincingly argued that we are entitled to see the formation of folklore studies in their works, bearing such suggestive titles as Sir Thomas Browne’s Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors (1649), and that the Enlightenment agenda, furthermore, made no small contribution to the way the discipline developed (1996: 245-246).

Ushering in the cultural populism and anti-rationalism that came to characterize the Romantic movement, Herder retained the Enlightenment category of the folk as an undifferentiated mass, opposed to an individualized middle class. However, he turned the evaluation on its head; thus he spoke of "children and folk, the most noble part of mankind" (1877-1913, v. 6: 309, my translation). Cosmopolitanism and reason are all very well if you’re participating in the construction of an empire, like the French state that fostered the Enlightenment, but Herder’s agenda, and that of the German Romantics, was altogether different. To some extent, the German-speaking population in Europe was coterminous with the Other of Enlightenment intellectuals. Most parts of what later became Germany were comprised of feudal societies, and, while peasants were the vast majority of the population, the ruling class associated itself with French civilization and language. Under these circumstances, German National Romanticism transformed tradition into a well of inspiration and parochialism into a cardinal virtue (Herder, in fact, coined the term ‘nationalism’; see Cocchiara 1981: 181-182).

a Presentation at 1999 AFS Annual Meeting

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