Folklore

INDRI SEPTYANINGRUM
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 Genre of Folklore

Verbal
Lore involving words
Music, story form, expressing belief
Verbal lore studied by folklorist : folk songs, myths and folk tales.
Jokes, proverbs, riddles, individuals own stories about their live.
They express beliefs and values, even educate members of the folk group

Material

It could be permanent (functional tools) and ephemeral (foods and body

painting)
They are tangible
The materials objects are handcrafted or mass-produced items that are
used in expressive way
Example : Quilts
Customary Lore
Custom : patterned, repeated behavior in which a persons participation
indicates involved membership.
Example : Crossing fingers for a good luck.
A fraternitys secret handshake that indicates membership in the group.

The reason genre is a useful tool :

It gives folklorist a common language to use as a reference point.
Provide foundation for identifying, discussing and analyzing qualities of
items of folklore.
Help folklorist to locate and communicate with others studying the same
kinds of folklore
Defining Folklore Beyond Genre Labels : Text and Context

Genre classifications are not the focus or our approach to understand

folklore.

To look at folklore as a complex, interconnected act of communication.

Text : refer to words, objects, ideas, and behavior.

Context : everything that surrounds the text (the setting, people,

situation)

Folklorist believe that in order to understand the cultural expression

that they are interested in, they must study it in context.

 Brief History of Folklore Study

18th century
Romantics thought that civilization separated humans from the

nature world.

Those who lived farther away from civilized society were closer to

humanitys nature.

They traveled to these remote area collect the remaining fragments

of pristine folk culture

18th and 19th century

German scholars believed that the members of the rural, lower-

class communities of Germany held the knowledge of the countrys
ancient Teutonic past.
Folklore was considered to be the cultural trapping of the
country.
This nationalist approach to folklore emphasize on examining a
dying culture
The goal of this approach : to find the essence of the stories,
beliefs, customs and traditions that connected all the people of a
given country to a common cultural past.
 The term folklore was first used in 1846 by an English scholar,

William John Thoms

The latter part of 1800s, intellectuals collected the folklore in the US,

as a means of preserving the history of rural pre-industrial people.

Bronner : the transition from Americans early interest in the study

of popular antiquities to folklore indicates that scholars were

beginning to recognize that lore had relevance in peoples daily lives,
and that folklore was more than merely old-fashioned historical
objects or practices.
 Another development : the search to find the original text, most
accurate version against which to compare all the later variants.

This is to locate and to trace the migration of texts as people moved

from one geographic region to another.

Most scholars still assumed that folklore text were remnants or

artifacts from a fading past that must be preserved.
20th century
Many scholars throughout the U.S and Europe interested in how

people shared and learned folklore

Franz Boas (Late 19th century-early 20th century), examined

diffusion, the way texts moved and changed from culture to culture,
and encouraged students to perform fieldwork.

Cultural relativism, emphasis on culture and the ways culture

shapes groups and individuals view of the world.

In order to trace transmission of texts, Stith Thompson and Antti

Aarne categorized tales based on their narrative elements.

 In the 1930s, U.S government established the Federal Writers Project, in

which thousands of unemployed writers participated in a vast project to

collect the life stories, tales, songs and verbal expression of ordinary

Americans.

Botkin and John Lomax, influenced the direction of folklore collection

through their emphasis on the process of interviewing individuals about

their experiences and recording details of setting, situations and cultural

features (context).
 In 1960s and 1970s, an important convergence of folklore
scholarship and linguistic scholarship about performance in verbal
art occurred.

The scholars looked at how we communicate- at language as

something we participate in, within clearly defined settings and

situations.

These developments encouraged a move away a primary focus on

products or texts, toward a focus on the performance of text in

context.
 As a result of performance approach:

Folklore scholars came to see that sharing folklore is a lively activity

that teaches individuals about beliefs and values of the group and
maintains identity through repeated enactments of ideas that are
important to the group.
 However, some scholars critiqued performance studies because:

Not giving enough attention to the cultural, social and emotional

elements of folklore

Too narrowly focused on specific speaking and performance context

Limon and Young also pointed out that performance studies in the

1970s had neglected womens folklore and non-verbal texts.

Its success depends on observers or analysts having intimate

involvement within a performance community in order to be literate

in its language and cultural system.
 Recognizing that interpretations of meanings without input from

those expressing these texts was essentially an outsider-imposed

interpretation, folklorists began to consult members of groups in
order to incorporate group members view into the analyses.

Performance is still the center of the study of folklore, but the

concept has been expanded along with the study of social context and
intersectionality ( the examination of how our many roles and
experiences overlap to simultaneously influence our lives as well as
our expressions of our experiences. )
Thank You