Woodblocks:
A new folklore
Image: Rasel Rana's woodblock prints based on Bengali Tepa Putul dolls
WHAT IS FOLKLORE?
Narrowly, the term “folklore” has been traditionally considered the oral tales of a society. More broadly, the term refers to all aspects of a culture – beliefs, traditions, norms, behaviors, language, literature, jokes, music, art, foodways, tools, objects, etc.
Folklore is, in essence, anything and everything in life.
Narrowly, the term “folklore” has been traditionally considered the oral tales of a society. More broadly, the term refers to all aspects of a culture – beliefs, traditions, norms, behaviors, language, literature, jokes, music, art, foodways, tools, objects, etc.
Folklore is, in essence, anything and everything in life.
Most folklorists apply their cultural knowledge and analytical skills to the public field and work as mediators between institutions and society.
Folklore: Cultural Roadmaps to Creating, Perpetuating, Resolving and Evolving Peace and Conflict
Tatiyana Bastet &Ceri Houlbrook
Pages 187-194 | Received 30 May 2023, Accepted 30 May 2023, Published online: 22 Jun 2023
A Journal of Social Justice
Volume 35, 2023 - Issue 2: Special Issue: Folklore, Conflict & Peace; Guest Editors: Tatiyana Bastet and Dr. Ceri Houlbrook
Given folklore’s quiet pervasiveness in all our lives, it is unsurprising that it has often been used to think through the big issues faced by a community. Folklore is at once a useful lens, permitting focus and diverse perspectives, and an adaptable tool in the handling of such matters. Folklore is also intrinsically linked to place. Not just rural landscapes, but any place trod by human feet, from the woodland dell to the city street, from the desert to the suburb. Places have their folklore; stories and customs that are character traits of particular locales. This localized element of folklore has been widely harnessed in the processes of community identity building. It can be a shared source of pride that brings people together. However, it can also be divisive; a political tool for creating an ‘us versus them’ mindset, as it was so horrendously applied in Nazi Germany. But while folklore is bound up in a sense of place, it is not bound to a place. Stories and customs travel, taken as cultural luggage as people move in and out of communities. And just as folklore is not sedentary, neither is it stable. Practices and beliefs that appear ancient and unchanging are often surprisingly recent inventions, adoptions, or adaptations. Folklore is by necessity fluid – otherwise it would not retain its relevance.
For those of us who are of multiple cultures, lores, and heritages, folklore is an opportunity to explore - to find threads of curiosity and understanding - in our attempts to weave new folklores reflective not only of our experiences but to elucidate methods of mediation and understanding that set the stage for positive peace from the personal (generally based on our families and immediate communities) to communal and national/international experiences. To this end the non-western voice is not simply encouraged, but is actively allowed space to express its non-western, non-colonial sensibilities. This offers opportunities for cross-cultural pollination of a different kind as it allows for the possibilities of understanding, compassion, and friendly curiosity toward differences that arise from the excitement of recognizing a familiar story in an unfamiliar space.
Tales are composed of elements called “motifs,” which are combined in any number of ways to create a plot. Many tales have the same patterns of motifs. These patterns are called “tale-types.” Identifying the building-blocks and patterns of narratives is helpful in studying, comparing, and analyzing them. For a very brief overview of this process, see: Motif Index, What it Is and What it Does from the British Columbia Folklore Society. Below are a few important definitions:
A Function or mytheme is a plot point which directs the course of the tale and appears in set orders.
A motif is the smallest definite element of a tale.
A Tale type (or tale-type) is a recurring, self-sufficient plot or group of motifs.
" The limits of the index are its geographical range; it is mainly restricted to Europe, though it does recognize a number of Eastern tales. Subsequently, various scholars have created cultural or regional specific indexes to supplement and expand Thompson’s work."
Thompson Motif Index The Finnish scholar, Antti Aarne, compiled the first major tale-type index in 1910. The work was limited to European tales and was later expanded by, first, Stith Thompson, and, then, Hans-Jörg Uther. Stith Thompson translated and expanded Aarne’s tale-type index. His work categorized mostly European tales, with a selection of Near Eastern tales, into different general, abstracted types. His and Aarne’s work are collectively referred to as the “AT number system.” Each tale type is assigned a number identifier and a title (e.g. 510A Cinderella tale-type). In 2004, Aarne and Thompson’s tale-type system was expanded by Hans-Jörg Uther. Known as the “ATU tale-type index”, or “the ATU index” for short, this index is a standard reference in folklore studies.
Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essentialism associated with notions of "critical practice." We can see this manifesting in the renewed relevance of what were previously considered "outsider" art practices, the emphasis on first-person accounts of identity over critical theory, and the proliferation of exhibitions that refuse to distinguish between art and the productions of culture more generally. How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics underscores how the cultural traditions, belief systems and performed exchanges that were once integral to the folklore discipline are now central to contemporary art’s "post-critical turn." This shift is considered here as less a direct confrontation of critical procedures than a symptom of art’s inclusive ideals, overturning the historical separation of fine art from those "uncritical" forms located in material and commercial culture. In a global context, aesthetics is now just one of numerous traditions informing our encounters with visual culture today, symptomatic of the pull towards an impossibly pluralistic image of art that reflects the irreducible conditions of identity.
I worry about minds, hearts and social rituals being infected by development, not only because it obliterates the unique beauty and goodness of the now, but also because it weakens the “we.” ... The multiple we was traditionally characteristic of the human condition; the “first person plural” is a flower born out of sharing in the good of convivial life. It is the opposite of the statistical “we,” the sense of being jointly enumerated and represented in a graphic column. The new voluntaristic and empty we is the result of you and me, together with innumerable others, being made subject to the same technical management process — “we drivers,” “we smokers,” “we environmentalists.” The I who experiences is replaced by an abstract point where many different statistical charts intersect. (Ivan Illich, conversation with Majid Rahnema, Bremen, December 13, 1994)
A person is always a personal existential reality, concrete, communal, a centre of the universe (a microcosm), and a whole, that is, holistic.... An individual (self) is always an abstraction, an impersonal unit of an impersonal collectivity, a particular aspect of some general definition, theory or system, or aggregate. It is always part of an abstract globe. (Robert Vachon, 1995b, p. 56)
Though the narratives that each of these writers offers are often radically different from one another, what they share, this project argues, is their ambivalent investment in a “queer-crip” masculine subject whose resistant or “revolting” masculinity appears to carry the power to reinvent American brotherhood in the twentieth century. This intervention is methodological as well as thematic, challenging some of the orthodoxies that characterize queer literary studies—in particular, queer theorists’ large-scale embrace of psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading practices. Though foundational and important, these methodologies often lead scholars to overlook the representational work that disability is performing in these texts. Championing biopoliticized reading practices over psychoanalytic and deconstructive ones, this project therefore offers a set of correctives to traditional queer readings of canonical works.
Artist Joan Jonas is fascinated by myths and legends. Her installation The Juniper Tree is inspired by a story by Brothers Grimm. But she doesn’t depict scenes from the story:
When I started using stories with The Juniper Tree, which is a Grimm Brothers story, there was a continuous voice telling the story and I worked against it. I don’t illustrate the stories, but I represent and react to them – find ways to make my own language in relation to the story.
Joan Jonas
Props, relics, video projections, paintings and drawings are included in the installation, as well as garments and constructions used in the last version of the performance.
Legends don’t have to be ancient. Artist Sidney Nolan created a series of paintings and prints around the stories associated with the Australian outlaw and folk hero Ned Kelly. Kelly was the leader of a gang of bank robbers who, like Robin Hood, often gave money to the poor. His daring adventures became the stuff of legends. The strange square helmet that Kelly is wears in Nolan’s paintings, references the home-made metal body armour worn by the gang.
Op artist Bridget Riley’s abstract paintings were often inspired by her experience of different cultures as she travelled around the world. Nataraja is a term from Hindu mythology meaning ‘Lord of the Dance’. It refers to the Hindu God Shiva in his form as the cosmic dancer, who is usually depicted with many arms. In her painting Nataraja, vertical bands of colour are cut across by diagonals, creating a sense of dynamic movement and suggesting the rhythm of the dance.
Artist and poet William Blake created his own mythology populated by a host of beings that he himself had either invented, or re-interpreted. In his book Jerusalem, Blake wrote:
I must create a system, or be enslav'd by another man's. I will not reason & compare: my business is to create.
So while other poets and artists used characters from Greek and Roman mythology, Blake created his own.
ELLEN GALLAGHER
Legends, myths and folk tales are usually a combination of fact and fantasy. They often include or refer to real people and events. Artists Ellen Gallagher and Anselm Kiefer have used legends in their work to explore and comment on significant and horrific events in history.
Bird in Hand reflects Ellen Gallagher’s interest in narratives surrounding the slave trade. In several artworks Gallagher has imaginatively explored of the Middle Passage. This was the most treacherous part of the slave-trading route between Africa and North America. Bird in Hand shows an underwater scene that seems to refer to the mythical Drexciya or Black Atlantis. This is a fictional underwater world populated by a marine species descended from drowned slaves. The central figure in the painting is a sailor or pirate with a peg-leg. His character is mysterious, but Gallagher suggests that he is an evil presence:
I think of this painting as an origin myth of sorts, with a kind of evil doctor, perhaps related to Doctor Moreau or Frankenstein, at its centre.
Ellen Gallagher
Bird in Hand (2006)
Tate
What is a Kanga?
Kangas are rectangular printed cotton fabrics that have been worn by women in East Africa since the 19th century. They have a decorative border; a central panel usually with recurring motifs; and an inscription. The rectangular-shaped printed cloth measures about 150 centimetres in length and 110 centimetres in width. They are sold uncut and in pairs. The images and Swahili texts inscribed on the Kanga are used to pass on various messages, including those which are social, political, religious, or health or development related. Some Kangas are printed and used as campaign tools, for passing religious messages and Christmas wishes, for raising awareness on various issues such as HIV/AIDS, or simply for showing images of influential figures such as politicians and celebrities.
Our intimate knowledge of Bangladesh and networks in the region mean we are able to recruit safely, using coded language and informal recruitment such as through Whatsapp. This links with our project's roots in finding folklore through our authentic communities.
Special Report: How textile kings weave a hold on Bangladesh
May 3, 20135:46 AM GMT+1Updated 11 years ago
[1/15]Rescue workers try to rescue trapped garment workers in the Rana Plaza building which collapsed, in Savar, 30 km (19 miles) outside Dhaka, in this file picture taken April 24, 2013. REUTERS/Andrew Biraj/Files Acquire Licensing Rights
By John Chalmers
DHAKA (Reuters) - Bangladesh's garment boom has made Mohammad Fazlul Azim a wealthy man. Over three decades his empire has grown from a single factory to a string of plants that employ 26,000 workers and clock up an annual turnover of about $200 million.
Azim, who is also a member of parliament, has benefited from government policies to grow the industry into a global powerhouse. His elegant home here in Dhaka is a haven of luxury with an outdoor swimming pool, walled off from the chaos of the capital's streets.
With local museums lacking any specimen of Dhaka muslin clothing, Hossain and his colleagues went to India, Egypt and Britain for samples.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, curators showed them hundreds of pieces imported from Mughal-era Dhaka by East India Company merchants.
Genetic samples revealed that the missing plant was already in their hands, found by the botanists in the riverside town of Kapasia north of the capital.
“It was a 100 percent match, and some history books say Kapasia was one of the places where Phuti carpus was grown,” Hossain told AFP.
The plant is now being grown in experimental farms in an effort to raise yields and scale up production.
Stories in the Cloth: Art Therapy and Narrative Textiles
April 2016
Art Therapy 33(2):58-66
DOI:10.1080/07421656.2016.1164004
Authors:
Telling stories through Textiles
Similar processes are utilized for both my textiles and text. In creating textile art, I start with piles of fabrics, colorized and stacked. Instead of sketching a plan, I form my ideas by cutting patterns out of muslin scraps. I lay the base cloth on the floor and start pulling pieces from the piles. I arrange the patterns, cutting and layering the themes on top of the canvas, pinning and stitching as I go. The zigzag and straight stitches of colorful threads become punctuation points to lead the viewer’s eye and thoughts. I allow the symbols to communicate a story.
For the text, I craft an essay much like I create fabric art. I start with putting words and thoughts to paper in no particular order. Bits and pieces, quotes, descriptions, and explanations, I get everything out and onto the paper, and then transcribe the words to the computer. The next day, I begin crafting the piece. I open a blank document and begin plucking out phrases and sentences from the pile. I copy and paste the words, rearranging order and flow, weaving the phrases together, tweaking and stitching the words until the piece is finished. I love that the same kind of approach works for all that I do. The process is efficient and streamlined. It works for me.
https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2014/10/02/tbt-when-stories-were-woven/
Woods blocks as central metaphor. Other designs included:
Workshops as dinner table.
Narratives and storytelling are terms often used in peace and conflict discourse, in fact the Institute for Integrated Transitions has an Inclusive Narratives Practice Group and while mythology is recognized as a narrative source, folklore is not.
...
It is the beliefs we hold, and the customs we practice, irrespective of culture, class, or creed coded in stories we used to tell and the stories we tell now. Where conflict has torn the narrative, active practice can help to repair it as demonstrated in the Stories for Hope project in Rwanda in which Tutsi survivors were paired with younger Tutsi to hear stories of the 1994 genocide and to reconnect with the folklore of their ancestors (Wallace et al. Citation 2014).
...
But while folklore is bound up in a sense of place, it is not bound to a place. Stories and customs travel, taken as cultural luggage as people move in and out of communities. And just as folklore is not sedentary, neither is it stable. Practices and beliefs that appear ancient and unchanging are often surprisingly recent inventions, adoptions, or adaptations. Folklore is by necessity fluid – otherwise it would not retain its relevance.
...
Folklore actively weaves social and cultural narratives, shaped by communities, that tend to both collective memory and identity (Armstrong and Crage, 2006). Because we now live in a more globalized society, symbols and narratives from other locales are adopted and adapted more quickly, though still reflective of cultural variation. Neha Khetrapal’s “Khadi Marigolds for the Martyrs of Jallianwala Bagh (India)” illustrates active engagement of people to accept or reject folklore and symbolism that shapes both collective memory and current identity. The fabric flower is an adaptation of the western red poppy used for remembrance of World War II and all that was lost. The Khadi Marigold shows an appropriate cross-cultural learning though adaptation of a widely recognized symbol: the fabric flower as memory trigger for an impactful historical event with great loss. It also places the fabric flower as being on its way to potentially becoming mythologized, where mythology is positioned as the archive of folklore.
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Kari Sawden supports Saeedeh Niktab Etaati’s journey as an Iranian-Canadian, processing her experiences, specifically during COVID, through embroidery. Design, color, and art are used as practice to emote and evolve personal lore, particularly during times of feeling displaced and grieving. This curation of memory and identity as an act of personal peace calls for an examination of this collective or communal to personal continuum. How much of what we learn from folklore of personal peace come from or can be expanded to the communal? Perhaps a more appropriate question is: how can we understand this entanglement such that an act of personal peace can ripple, affecting communities and vice versa?
Working through our exploration of internal conflict and acts of positive peace, creating in various forms is explored as a means of working toward inner peace by Sarah Bellisario. Here the focus is on ritual – defined for the purpose of this introduction as a series of symbolic and stylized bodily actions. Bellisario characterizes the artist as ritual maker, exploring the ways in which art creation is ritualized, with their own artwork created in response to past trauma provided as powerful, poignant examples of art therapy. Drawing on symbols, folklore, and notions of sympathetic magic, Bellisario demonstrates how the process of creating art can be cathartic for the artist – and also, as a shared healing experience, for their audience. The artist thus becomes the magical healer, with the potential for evolving a personal folklore from the communal.
The Witness Blanket is a collection of 880 items found in the debris of Canada’s Residential Schools set in a quilt like pattern made of wood
2. Artist Carey Newman and his team collected the items, their stories, oral histories, and folklore of Residential Schools across Canada. The Witness Blanket has been declared an entity in itself, living lore to remember, grieve, and hopefully heal. The interactive website https://witnessblanket.ca allows people to explore and experience the blanket, its items, and stories virtually. But the Blanket and its creators have also challenged our contemporary concepts and rituals regarding ownership, guardianship, and custodianship. The Witness Blanket, as a living entity, cannot be owned. guardianship, however, rests with the tribe local to where the Blanket is kept, and custodianship lies with the museum where it is housed. Artist and art have begun to change our perception of certain concepts through their storytelling.
While Williamson and Williamson push at the edges of folklore by reframing the Barbie doll and all she stands for, into a trickster feminist, asking us to question standard historical narratives. If Barbie herself can live a new folklore, why can we not reframe – not erase – our historical lores?
"With the rise of transgressions that potentially rupture esthetics of memorial sites, it becomes essential to look for alternate tangible representations that transcend the spatial confines of the trauma sites. The quest ends with Khadi Marigolds that embody the essence of Jallianwala Bagh massacre and holds the key for perpetuating the memories of the martyrs for years to come in the service of “never again”.
EA Armstrong, SM Crage
American sociological review, 2006•journals.sagepub.com
This article examines why the Stonewall riots became central to gay collective memory while other events did not. It does so through a comparative-historical analysis of Stonewall and four events similar to it that occurred in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York in the 1960s. The Stonewall riots were remembered because they were the first to meet two conditions: activists considered the event commemorable and had the mnemonic capacity to create a commemorative vehicle. That this conjuncture occurred in New York in 1969, and not earlier or elsewhere, was a result of complex political developments that converged in this time and place. The success of the national commemorative ritual planned by New York activists depended on its resonance, not only in New York but also in other U.S. cities. Gay community members found Stonewall commemorable and the proposed parade an appealing form for commemoration. The parade was amenable to institutionalization, leading it to survive over time and spread around the world. The Stonewall story is thus an achievement of gay liberation rather than an account of its origins.
Armstrong, Elizabeth A., and Suzanna M. Crage. 2006. “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth.” American Sociological Review 71 (5):724–751. doi:10.1177/000312240607100502.
[Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]
Neha Khetrapal: Neha Khetrapal is an Associate Professor at the Jindal Institute of Behavioural Sciences, Room 315, T1, 3rd floor, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat-Narela Road, Near Jagdishpur Village, Sonipat, Haryana-131001, India. E-mail: nkhetrapal@jgu.edu.in
Tatiyana Bastet: Tatiyana Bastet is a doctoral researcher at the University of Hertfordshire who explores material and cultural history using a multi-faceted and cross-cultural lens. As a first-generation Bengali Canadian she learned to follow threads of folklore and myth, experiencing how pasts and presents weave their way to new expressions and understandings via practice, allowing for dynamic cultural intersectionality. E-mail: t.p.bastet@herts.ac.uk
Ceri Houlbrook: Dr. Ceri Houlbrook is a Lecturer in Folklore and History at the University of Hertfordshire, and Programme Leader for the Folklore Studies MA. She is also a member of the Folklore Society Council; founded in 1878, this was one of the first organizations established in the world for the study of folklore. Her primary research interests are the material culture and heritage of contemporary ritual practices and popular beliefs.
Block Printing
It’s hard to say what the specific origins of textile printing are, although we can confidently trace the technique back to the early days of China, Japan, Egypt, East and Central Asia. In China, block printing was discovered in 618 CE, when the technique first appeared during the Tang and Song dynasty period. Wooden stamps were created for the purpose of general textile patterns, but also to make Buddhist images. While there’s uncertainty about textile block printing’s beginnings, we do know that India was the nation which fully developed this design technique.
Since the 12th century, India has produced distinctive prints through handmade wooden carvings and and natural dyes. Gujarat and Rajasthan are the main areas known for block printing within the country. Each has a specific style, telling the story of communities, castes, and environments in each region. In Gujarat, Paithapur families discovered and practiced printing in a style referred to as a “Sodag iri print.” Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, has since been the hub for block printing. While its difficult to pin down the meanings behind each ancient style, MATTER has found a wealth of knowledge in a man from the area who still knows the stories of many prints. Block printing was later commercialised and colonised by Europeans, but nothing compares to the hand printed cotton of traditional Indian technique.
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