Seminars
Pre-mid semester
Pre-mid semester
Pyramid Metaphor- Folklore at the base of the pyramid, forming the foundation for all other Indian literatures.
The Great and the Little Tradition- The high road and the country road.
The idea of the folklore ‘text’:
· Cultural performances-plays, weddings, rituals, games, act as texts.
· Written and hallowed texts are not exclusive forms of academic inquiry.
· “Written traditions live surrounded by oral ones and are even carried by oral means.”
· Writing as an aide memoir.
· “Speech lies dormant in writing until it is awakened…”
The substance of the text- myths, folktales and legends.
Why do we study folklore? Continuity, Curiosity and Necessity.
The metaphor of old knife whose handle and blade is changed a few times, but it is the same knife-the structure of relations remain the same, the cultural details change.
The problem of ‘context’
The nature of myth: fact or fiction?
Folklore as historical fact.
Cultures originally transmitted from one generation to another.
Folk- group of people who share at least one common factor.
A community should have a shared tradition, occupation, shared narrative or belief in narrative.
Development of folklore as domain, historical perspectives. Folklore as a means of comprehending our past. How it forms a continuum between past, present and future.
What actually constitutes folklore? Different propositions.
“Knowledge that is transmitted by word of mouth.”
The multifaceted nature of folklore
Oral tradition- adaptability, cultural transmission, resilience, integration of supernatural to impart ethical and moral connotations, intersectionalities abound.
Historical Development of Folkloristics
Contribution from Grimm brothers- collection of German mythologies- idea of studying a folklore comes from them.
What do you mean by a folk song? Points towards beliefs of folkloristics as a discipline.
Folklore societies- Finished literature society- how they analysing folk narratives- intersections of disciplines.
Christian missionaries started collecting and documenting narratives.
Folklore Studies as a Discipline.
Missionary Period, Nationalistic Period, Academic Period
Nationalistic- having pride in your folk cultures
Academic- need to understand historical, cultural and social formations in society.
Role of Western Education and Missionary in the Study of Folklore.
How folkloristics gets intersected by so many other disciplines-archaeology, linguistics, psychology.
The role of history in folkloristic study.
It has originated in a particular historical and social context.
Intersection of archaeology- providing material backups to intangible traditions.
The need for historians and folkloristics to collaborate- historical perspectives are very important.
Question of objectivity.
Leave our own biases- ethnocentric biases
Authenticity in folklore- no authentic folklore narrative.
Challenges in Relating Folklore to History.
Studying Folklore in Non-literate Communities.
Insight into Cultural Heritage, Role of Oral tradition, Empowerment and validation (amplification of their voices)
Ramanujan- distinguishing between literate and non-literate people.
How folklore associated with literate people and looked at from the perspective of the Orient.
Intersectionality
Folk Architecture
Sculptures in high debate.
Prime Minister of Greece gave proof to British museum that the artifacts were stolen.
The Benin Disaster.
The Punitive Expedition.
The Museumization of Folklore
How it is both positive and negative.
Preservation has both advantages and disadvantages.
Pros- Gives concrete proof to the existence of a folktale.
Cons- A motif gets frozen in time.
Ramanujan –
“How Sanskrit became a pioneer of India and regional languages were ignored.”
How you are preserving an aspect of it. What if the Grimm brothers had also preserved the slangs, local idioms?
We are studying in a time after it was done. What must be preserved is debatable?
How folklore studies comes from colonial consciousness. How the academic development is a very recent development. How ethnic communities can have their own folktales but not their own literature.
What remains is the artifact and not the context.
Anthropological studies- don’t take it as a frame of reference but as an entity demanding study of its own.
Resistance and resilience- folklore as a form of resilience.
Considering it as a resilience and an adaptation.
Digital Storytelling
Role of technology in the transmission of folklore.
Folklore as a Historical Artifact
The importance of folklore in Indian culture- pervades all aspects of life. Interplay between oral and written.
How folklore has influenced written texts.
Ramanujan- It shows the multiplicity of viewpoints.
Relevance of folklore in modern society, challenges of continuing and studying these cultures.
Folklore is the half-entity and the nation is a full entity.
Outcomes of fieldwork in folklore studies
1. Interdisciplinary contribution
2. Agency to community
3. Intercultural connections
4. Preservation of cultural heritage
04-01-2024
Folk- life of people within a particular geographical areas. Slides shown with domestic material objects of different material compositions. Labeled items and put them into identifiable sets. Folklore cannot be neatly classified.
Folklore as describable- configure into sets, define those sets, chart their distributions in space.
Expressions of folklore
Verbal, musical, tangible
Implications for us
We can categorize them and use them in our database.
Helps order the folkloristic database.
Grouping together simple folklore.
Labeling them in common ways.
Describing and systematizing the results.
Issues in Defining
Large number and variety
Individual conceptualization of form may vary.
Lexicon and basic set of concepts- may be shared. But differences exist in terms of how it is applied over time.
Concept of form/genre
Identify and order the phenomenon that are the subject of inquiry.
Historic-Geographic method
Cinderella and Cap o’ Rushes
Bowdlerization- purifying a version to make it fit for consumption.
22-01-2023
Why is there a need to put folklore into genres?
· Western influence, Broad (Habbit), Compare, Evolution, Academic discipline.
· Larger scope for academic discussions.
· Comparative studies- the outcome of our research should be how we are intersecting with other disciplines.
· Preservation and Transmission.
· Audience Expectation.
· Communication and Classification.
Who does the classifications?
· Grimm Brothers- Grimm’s Fairy Tales
· Vladimir Propp- Morphology of the Folktale
· Stith Thompson- Motif-Index of Folk-Literature
S. Thompson has 6 volumes. Male creator and female creator. Made an index. Western approaches. A.K. Ramanujan felt that Indians should not blindly follow the Western blueprint. He divided things into agam(inside) and puram(has outside influence). In our context, it’s very difficult to draw boundaries between folk, classical and ___.
Several approaches taken by scholars.
Morphology of the folktale- structuralist approach. Large structures inside which are units working in coordination to generate meaning as a whole.
The impact of science- because science is always objective. Because all objective and rigorous disciplines were concerned with data collection. They treated folklore as dead objects- subjectivity and speculation were missing. They were missing interpretation- detached from the cultural context.
Indian systems of classification.
Ramanujan.
Classical dances-canonical works-works that have acquired canonical status. It was fluent and flexible and when it became classical, it became rigid and structured.
Classical and folk- how they are overlapping.
How folk elements are incorporated into modern works. Classical, folk and modern are overlapping. Understand context as a modern context and apply theory accordingly.
Reflexivity, pluralism and overlapping- description of the Indian folkloristic blueprint.
24-01-2024
Context is more important than the text.
Informal learning comes as word of mouth.
Imitation or demonstration- the way things are done.
Repetition- doing the same things over and over.
Customary behaviour- Unconsciously enacted patterns & consciously evoked codes.
05-02-2024
Primordialist theory-
boils it down to your ethnicity.
Indus Valley civilization- particular geography becomes their identity.
Historical process rather than socio-historic process.
Fixed.
Modernist Constructionist Theory.
Historical Criticism.
What is it that folk has got?
Alan Dundes- It is the functions of folk…
The need for an ethnographic imagination.
Geographical imagination- fishermen communities. How these narratives are interwoven with spatialities.
Psychic structures- collective structures. Evil spirits. Innate psychological fear embedded in the human psyche which is making these communities come up with tales- the fear of the unknown.
How you need somebody to rescue us- damsel in distress. The condition of women. Did women have freedom? Protective figure coming to save the community.
Mentor or helper figure.
Diffusion- If we are dealing with a tale, Christian tales for example. Christian legends are connected to Scandinavian legends. Take a particular legend and move to a general framework. Now, the preferred approach is the other way around.
You should not take a linear approach because the influences are coming from different directions- vertical and horizontal axis. The evolution of yakshi figure- coming from a single origin.