What I Do

I've had enough people express an interest in reading my papers for my classes that I thought I'd post the first one. But a word to the wise, this is fairly theoretical and difficult. The next one will be easier, so maybe if you're not willing to attempt to wrap your head around how linguistic theory applies to folklore theory, then maybe you should skip this.

First a note on style: I am using a very peculiar style guide, all direct quotations are noted in single quotation marks, ex: 'quotation of other scholar'. All references were footnoted, which do not copypaste well, so I'm not including them. Please contact me if you really want them.

THE TENSION BETWEEN LORE AND LANGUAGE
Callan Stout
31 October 2008

As John Miles Foley suggests in his book, How to Read an Oral Poem, I propose to embark on a ‘pluralism of approach’ in exploring the relationship between lore and language. I will trace the history of folklore theory and how the terms lore and language have changed and been manipulated as the discipline has tripped and tumbled along its path, through various theoretical approaches and arguments over their practice.
The problem with defining the term lore is two fold; first, folklore scholars have not been able to agree on a single definition, and second, more often than not, a definition is only attempted as part of the term folklore. William John Thoms, the coiner of the term folklore, did not even venture a definition of lore in his scholarship-sparking letter, leaving folklore explained as ‘the Lore of the People’ (italics in original), which leaves us to assume folk means ‘people’.

Henry Glassie says, that by-and-large, Alan Dundes’ definition of folklore as ‘artistic communication in small groups’ is the most commonly accepted among folklorists. If ‘small groups’ means folk, lore is defined as ‘artistic communication’. This definition, however inadequate, leads us to the explicit inclusion of language in the realm of possible definitions of lore. Language is systematic communication, verbal communication being one of the many possible systems. Could lore exist without language? Is lore a product of language? If no form of communication existed at all, oral, written, signed, etc, anywhere, would lore exist?

Yet what is language? Does its definition shift and change like a sinking ship, the way the definition of lore does; Or has it been more successfully pinned down by linguists and linguistic anthropologists? Ferninand de Saussure says, ‘language has usually been considered as a function of something else’. Does that mean it can only be defined in relation to the elusive definition of lore?

Before the term folklore was officially (or unofficially) coined by William John Thoms in 1846, ‘Gentlemen’s Magazine’ proposed, in an 1830 issue, substituting lore for the suffix ‘-ology’. Lore takes on the meaning ‘the study of’, which is not used in common modern practice. In this suggestion the meaning of folklore changes to the study of the folk, which is a conception that has only arisen in the twentieth century incarnation of the discipline.

Dan Ben-Amos says the term lore was pulled from the Romantic vocabulary of the Eighteenth Century, ‘particularly that of the Scottish poets who sought to revive their vernacular writing’. Right away lore is associated with rescuing pieces of old culture from the rubbish bin of history. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED hereafter) gives as its second definition of the noun, lore, ‘loss, destruction’ a connotation that has proved inescapable to modern folkloric studies, despite its otherwise archaic status. J. Derrick McClure points out, ‘the fine tradition of folk literature and folklore […] has never ceased to flourish in Scotland’, but to the layperson lore is lost in the mists of time. In one of the many attempts to explain why I came to Scotland to study folklore, it was commented to me, ‘there are more castles in Scotland’ than in the United States. Somehow folklore is inexplicitly tied up in images of ruined castles in the popular imagination.
Language, however, has never been anything but a current phenomenon. Many languages not spoken by large populations are bemoaned to be dying out and language death does actually occur. Anthropologists and linguists often attempt to record dying languages before they expire. Since 1776 many commentators on the Scots language have lamented its presumed impending death. However, the general public does not commonly think of their language as something that can die. Lore on the other hand, is more commonly believed to be dying out.
When Thoms’s letter was published in The Athenaeum the predominate definition of lore, according to the OED, was ‘1. The act of teaching’ and ‘2. That which is taught’. Not until the fourth entry do we get ‘[s]omething that is spoken; information; story; language’, which the OED lists as obscure and only used between 1350 and 1450. This is closest to the definition attached to Thoms’s use of folklore and applied in the infancy of the subject. It is also the only definition that explicitly includes language.
A fifth definition: ‘Also, in recent use, applied […] to the body of traditional facts, anecdotes, or beliefs relating to some particular subject’, comes closer to how folklore is conceived today, followed by a reference to the article in ‘Gentlemen’s Magazine’. While this defintion concieves of lore in the magazine’s proposed way, it has not expanded into other disciplines and remains unique to folkloristics. Ben-Amos wonders if Thoms was aware of the ‘Gentlemen’s Magazine’ article or even the use of ‘lore’ for such purposes. If he was, folkloristics took a hundred years chasing itself around a bush before it got back to including the ‘people who have the lore’ in its study.

If Thoms was in fact harkening back to the definition of lore that included language, he would probably have conceived of language as, ‘The system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure,’ the first definition in the OED. This definition focuses again on a group of people and their shared use of the same patterns of communication, which coincides with the definition of lore given by Ben-Amos, with only one major difference; Ben-Amos amends it to ‘artistic communication’. Ben-Amos’s definition is in line with his contemporary Noam Chomsky’s conception of speech production (more on that later). For the most part, in the early years of folklore, lore and language were separate entities, the mixing of the two as unlikely as a leopard changing his spots.

In our chronological survey of the chimera-like relationship between the terms lore and language, we must next look at the influence of Charles Darwin on the discipline. Darwin’s theory of evolution influenced more than just the natural sciences, the ideas also swept through the social sciences. Edward B. Tylor was the driving force behind the application of evolutionary theory to folklore. In this theory, humans went through three stages of development, savage, barbarism and civilization. The peasant societies of Britain and Europe were thought still to be in the stage of barbarism, while aristocrats were in a stage of civilization (folklorists included themselves in this group).
Shortly after the founding of the American Folklore Society in 1888 with its desire to collect the survivals of American folklore before they vanished, the editor of the society’s journal, William Wells Newell, ran into a unique problem; folklore was then defined as a survival from a society’s savage stage of development. American Indians were grouped in the savage stage, but researchers were collecting folklore from them. If folklore was a survival from the savage stage, could groups still in the savage stage have folklore? The term mythology was cultivated to solve this conundrum. Mythology ‘characterize[d] the living systems of tales and beliefs of primitive peoples’ (italics in original). With this distinction and the theory of human evolution, mythology could theoretically become folklore when a society progressed from savage to civilized, although this potential for transformation does not seem to have been explored.

Newell revised the definition of folklore to ‘oral tradition and belief handed down from generation to generation without the use of writing’. This definition foregrounded the oral nature of lore. Elliot Oring points out that the new definition expanded the conception of lore past the linguistic limits of the past. In Newell’s new definition of folklore, language is limited to unwritten sources, keeping with the prior trends of the discipline. The oral requirement restricted the definition of lore by parameters of language.

Unlike their theoretical predecessors, folklorists using the Philological approach, focused their research on written manifestations of folklore. A large part of philological inquiry explored the relations of the language of myths (they do not use the term lore) and their etymological roots. This approach relied heavily on the concept of ‘psychic unity’, or the idea that humans are psychologically the same, and therefore the products of human thoughts can be exactly the same. Aside from the inherent fault in believing all humans think the same way, despite any and all differences, the idea of psychic unity would often also assume unity through time, ignoring the option of a diachronic process of creation.

Through this method, scholars like Max Müller related vastly different Indo-European language myths to one another. Müller concluded all myths told the story of the sun’s journey across the sky. Through etymological comparison between Indo-European languages Müller traced word origins and meanings back to references to the sun, moon and stars. Müller was a Vedic scholar, and consequently used the Indian Veda as his ideal source of all Indo-European mythology. This complete focus on the written language of mythology has been relegated to the history of the discipline, however the extent some early folklorists (they probably called themselves Antiquarians) focused entirely on written language so soon after the coining of the scholastic title, points to the interconnectivity of lore and language, in this case, with language supplanting lore.

This approach is missing the forest for the trees, with each word the philologists traced a separate tree in our metaphorical forest. I am able to trace the word Middle-Earth through the many languages Tolkien invented for The Lord of the Rings and deduce that in Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi the planet ‘Endor’ means middle-earth. The jump between The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, two very separate mythic worlds, is equivalent to the assumptions the Philologists made. The orality of lore has been stressed since the very beginning, and a problem arises when this fluidity of oral lore is ignored. When lore is fixed as written language and only the written words receive scholastic inquiry, orality is ejected from the equation. The oral prerequisite many scholars use to qualify an item as lore precludes language being defined as spoken communication. The multiplicity of oral variants makes using a fixed written form as the starting point for explorations into word-use practically a joke, or the Philologist’s Folly. Specific words were not necessarily used in every single variant of a piece of lore. They interpreted language in a way that would later be defined by structuralists as ‘langue,’ separate from the study of spoken language or what they called ‘parole’.

The structuralist movement of the twentieth century came in two phases, first the syntagmatic structuralists taking direct cues from Vladimar Propp in Russia and later paradigmatic structuralists building deeper applications of structuralism past the basic outline of a folktale.

Syntagmatic structuralism broke variants of folktales down into pieces based on actions, resulting in a plot structure. The plot structures of different variants of the same tale were compared for differences. In this way, the basic plot of a folktale with multiple variants could be derived. Syntagmatic structuralism did not completely ignore language, but neither did it not acknowledge the variability of the language of each telling of a folktale, to stay with the same example. The words used in each variant were deprioritized and viewed as unique to each storyteller, but not important in the overall plot structure of the larger story.

For example, the ‘Cinderella Story’ exists in many different forms all over the world. The basic story structure could be as follows:
1) Widowed man is raising daughter, or daughters alone.
2) Widowed man marries, and new wife as two daughters.
3) Widowed man dies, or is rendered incapable.
4) Youngest daughter (Cinderella/heroine) is made to do all the cooking and cleaning by her older sisters, or stepsisters and stepmother.
5) The opportunity to marry some one of a higher status (hero) is presented (usually a prince, but in Native America a celestial being).
6) The sisters make Cinderella help them prepare to impress the hero.
7) The sisters fail to win the hero, because of some inherent personality or physical flaw.
8) Cinderella wins the hero’s love, because of her inherent kind nature.
9) Cinderella and hero marry.
10) Sisters are punished.

The actions of the plot can then be analysed for their relation to each other. Anatoly Liberman, in his introduction to Propp’s Theory and History of Folklore, reminds us that ‘a literary text [or folktale] is of course a system: its parts are organized in such a way that they […] refer to other parts in the same text’. Structuralists would analyze the plot points for internal patterns. In Cinderella the wedding at the beginning and end of the tale would be considered a balance, for example. This form of analysis was also applied to single variants of a folktale or ballad, however this method lacks any specific exploration of language other than as a bearer of the action of the plot.

The second movement, paradigmatic structuralism, was developed from linguistic structuralism and was led by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The new emphasis borrowed the linguistic vocabulary of de Saussure’s structuralism to talk about story (or ballad) structure. Saussure’s approach to structuralism lay in the relationship between things; an element of a system was only as important as its relationship to the other parts of the system, but not alone. He used the terms langue and parole to differentiate between the rules of the language as they exist in a speaker’s head and the actual spoken words, respectively.

The paradigmatic structuralism of Noam Chomsky, a later linguistic structuralist, separated language into two similar categories: Deep structure, a person’s understanding of their language, their basic grasp on all the rules; and Surface structure, the manifestation of these rules in speech, which includes all the supposed mistakes a speaker makes. Deep structure corresponds to langue and surface structure to parole. Chomsky’s terms seem more appropriate as they imply that the two levels of understanding have their own structures, which can be subjected to analysis, although Lévi-Strauss’s terms make the connection to language more obvious.

Structuralism has direct application to folklore, in particular the study of storytelling. Paradigmatic structuralists saw the syntagmatic structure (all possible plot variations of a single tale) as the deep structure of an item and all the spoken and written variants of this tale as the manifestation or surface structure. Bertrand Bronson described a ballad as ‘a fluid entity soluble in the mind, to be concretely realized at will in words and music’. Here the ‘fluid entity’ is the deep structure and the ‘words and music’ is the surface structure.

The plot action listed above would be considered the deep structure of the Cinderella tale. A particular telling or variant, for example the Disney movie, would be considered surface structure. The creation of images through the use of specific words could be a focus for the analysis of surface structure. Using linguistic theory to describe folktales unites lore and language in a way that makes them impossible to separate. Liberman explains that ‘Folklore presents an ideal case: “improvised” texts are related to the text known to the community and to active bearers of tradition exactly as speech is related to language.’ Specific wordings can foreground an aspect of the tale that is especially relevant to the community at the instant of telling, reinforcing the relevance of the tale in the modern community.

While syntagmatic structuralism allowed a researcher to identify related or similar plots of a tale, paradigmatic structuralism allowed the variants of a single plot to be explored in terms of their differences of action, or language. Although the discussion was not explicitly always about the language used in the expression of lore, the borrowing of terms from linguistics added a dimension that made language inseparable from lore. This differentiation is the first time folkloristics was truly removed from relying on any form of language as its study. Structuralism was the first theory to venture into the realm of the unexpressed (or later, the un-performed) aspect of folklore. This held particular saliency for Lévi-Strauss who stated that ‘to speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing’ a statement with which Chomsky would probably agree.
The Philologists Folly worked on the assumption that the manifestation of a story was the definitive version. The distinction between the underlying rules or plot and the manifestation of these rules had not yet been conceived.

Chomsky’s theory of a generative grammar, which speculates on how a person converts deep structure into surface structure, leads right into performance theory. Performance theory looked at the entire event of a folktale performance. Performance theory aspires to examine all aspects of a storytelling event (to keep with our previous example). For our purposes we will narrow the field a little and focus on a single aspect. Dennis Tedlock and Dell Hymes have explored pausing, or the lack of speaking, in performance, which perhaps is the ultimate tension between language and lore. Without pausing, words would run together and a speaker would be very difficult to understand. Other types of pauses are used to enhance the story by building suspense or some such thing. Operating within performance theory, does the pause belong to the researcher focusing on language of folktales or a researcher focusing on lore? If you told the tale in another language would you still use the pause? Tedlock explores its use in Zuni oral literature and I am familiar with its existence in American English story telling, therefore the pause must belong to lore. What if I just tell a different story, in the same language, and use a pause for the same reason? Justifiably the pause must belong to the realm of language in this latter case. Perhaps there is no way to know for sure, and things like pauses must be studied as both a part of language and a part of lore.

To switch around the prefix folk and use it in conjunction with language rather than lore, sociolinguists have started exploring what they are calling folklinguistics. Folklinguistics deals with a group’s perception of their language use, how they perceive the language use of other groups and how they think other groups view their language use. This body of knowledge encompasses what I would call language-lore. Language-lore beliefs including thinking that people who use Valley Girl English are stupid, or that Southern American English users are uneducated, or that speakers with the Boston Brahmin accent are snobby. I have even heard multiple stories about a foreigner to America, who is a non-native speaker of English, mispronounce the word sheet to that it sounds more like shit and have to deal with the ensuing consequences. Stories in this vein make up the as of yet barely explored body of language-lore.

The relationship of lore and language in the study of folklore is like two siblings going through puberty together, you never know which one is going to start yelling first or which one is going to wind up being the focus of study during which decade. However, the continuous interplay between the two terms does point to their co-dependence in folkloristics. Perhaps the exact nature of the relationship will never be enumerated in a list, but the see-saw of lore and language should continue to be pushed as long as folklore is studied. As Bronislaw Malinowski concluded Myth and Primitive Psychology, so conclude I:

'Without words, whether framed in sober rational conversation, or launched in magical spells, or used to entreat superior divinities, man would not have been able to embark upon his great odyssey of cultural adventure and achievement.'

Winter Travel Plans

I think I might be overextending myself this holiday. But none-the-less it should be good.

Here are the plans:
14 Dec - 21 Dec: Paris
21 Dec - 22 Dec: London (yes, folks that's one night only)
22 Dec - 30 Dec: LA
30 Dec - 7 Jan: NYC

I think I should start buying carbon emission off-sets. Or at least taking actions which off-set my plane travel carbon emissions. Actions are cheaper than off-sets.

If anyone would like goodies, from any of these places (including Scotland. And, no, I will not bring back kilts, they are too expensive. But whiskey is fair game. But one bottle per person please.)

Driving

It snowed yesterday covering the North East in a blanket of white powder. Filling in the crevices between cobblestones and the folds of the fields.

Driving south through the land tamed centuries before by the toil of sweat of our ancestors, you feel like you are wrapped in clouds, slowing watching the sun sink in golden bands of light between the fluffy white of land and sky. Slowly giving way to the all encompassing dark of the early northern night.

The fields are a patchwork of white and brown stretching on forever across both sides of the highway revealed only by the pale beams of our headlights fleeting through the expanse.

OMENS

I would never call myself a superstitious person, but that probably has more to do with the social implications of the word "superstitious" more than anything else. I wasn't raised in any crazy belief system, or any "normal" belief system, if those even exist.

In classes this week we are studying identity and belief as applicable to the communities of the North East of Scotland, which makes you very aware of things that are believed to by extranatural (means basically the same thing as supernatural, minus any negative connotation). I also find it difficult to navigate the path between church based religious belief and folk (or non-church) religious belief, but that's probably due to my lack of religious instruction.

While walking home from lectures in the gloaming hours of the evening, through a small cobble stone alley between a stone fence and a wee house, a black cat came down the lane towards me. As we passed each other, she meowed, almost like a warning, and at the same time, from a tree above us, a raven cawed.

*see below for a definition of "gloaming".

If that's not a warning from the invisible world, I don't know what is. But the problem arises in interpretation. Obviously I've already taken it as a warning, but I've grown up in a tradition of reading black cats as bad luck, in some places they are good luck. Ravens have a cornicopiea of meaning associated with them. I only need to pick the right culture in order to understand a raven's caw in whichever way I want. I problem is deciding if the interpretation of the cat's meow and the raven's caw are from the same tradition of beliefs. Or I could take the neo-pagan approach and pick whichever one I like best and bugger-all if they ever existed together before. However, I think neo-pagans are full of tosh.

I am familiar with black cats and ravens being signs of bad luck, hence my interpretation of this moment in the alley as a warning of something bad to come. Although, I don't know what I'm being warned about. I suppose I could cast about in my head and discover something I should be warned about.

SCOTTISHISM #3

gloamin(g) (n.)

Spelled with or without a 'g'. This is a word you can't truely understand until you've lived in the far northern pieces of the world. There's nothing like it. The direct gloss into English is: "Evening twilight, dusk." But what it really means in Doric (or North Eastern Scots, its the same) can't be summed up in three words.

1813 Hogg Queen’s Wake (1874) 32:
"Late, late in a gloamin when all was still, When the fringe was red on the westlin hill."

Gloamin is the long slow sunsets, that last for hours as the sun slowly slides across the hills and behind the glens. But even after the sun has passed through the gates into the world beyond, the light lingers low across the trees and hangs off the lacy clouds.

Loch Feochan, originally uploaded by dunard54 on flickr. For more images visit scotlandinthegloaming.blogspot.com

Scottish Country Dance

I went to Dundee this past weekend, which is about 45 minutes to the south of Aberdeen, for a Scottish Country Dance with some of the other University's in Scotland. Here is a picture. Sorry I'm not dancing in the shot, maybe next time. But isn't that a cute dress? I feel like a princess and a ballarina while wearing it. Albeit, maybe the evil twin of the good princess or ballarina, but that's even better. Its more fun being the evil twin of someone sickeningly prefect.

One Week Later

As I'm sure everyone is well aware it has now been one week since Barack Obama became the next President of the United States of America. Although that happiness has sightly been dampened by the sad passing of Prop. h8 in California. However, people are working on that problem and I pledge to join the fight when I am back in the country, if it is still being carried out. I do hope they succeed before I return.

During the last week I think we have caught a glimpse of what glory that will be the next eight years of America.

On a less political note; during the last week, I have acquired a boyfriend. Not to say that he is mine, as people can not possess other people. But we are so far quite happy together.

That is all. Thank you.

Ooooooh, I'm going scottish dancing this weekend out of town and will post photos as soon as I'm back at my computer.

I Believe in American Again

I feel like I fell in love and won the lottery and climbed Mount Everest all at the same time.

This is a high that no drug could rival or any mistep corrupt.

I don't think I'll ever feel like this again.

Following from Abroad

I've been sitting at my desk despartely trying to focus on something else, but I have both the CNN and CBS results counts open on my computer. CBS has already posted numbers, I think CNN is trying to be more steady handed.

At 10:51pm GMT, 5:51 NYC time and 2:51 LA time, CBS says:
Popular Vote
Obama 67%
McCain 33%

But it doesn't say who is reporting from where, so maybe those are the results from Dixville Notch and Hart's Location, New Hampshire. To which these numbers corrospond to my previous tabulations.

Election Day Anxiety

I've decided that the reason I'm sick is because I'm so anxious about the election that my body doesn't want to work properly. I've also decided that this truely is an ELECTION FOR HISTORY. I know they say it every single time, but I feel this one in my gut. Sadly my gut is not telling me the outcome of the election, but it is trying to get rid of my lunch. To which I say "you ate it, you'll like it! God Dammit!"

However, if the New Hampshire towns of Dixville Notch and Hart's Location are any indication of what the rest of the country is thinking then Obama is sure to win. However, aside from having the honor of being the first town's in the USA to close their polls and report their counts, they do not have a history of picking the president. There just isn't enough corrolation between their past choices and the actually out come, to make this mean anything at all. But this year, they voted:

Dixville Notch: Obama - 15, McCain - 6.

Hart's Location: Obama - 17, McCain - 10, and 2 write-ins for Ron Paul.

Totals: Obama 64%, McCain 32% and Paul 4%.

Ralph Nader was actually on the ballot, but no one voted for him. I'm hoping these precentages hold for the rest of the country. FINGERS CROSSED!!!

I also bought a pair of dancing shoes.

Aren't they pretty? Now I'm a real highland dancer.

A Sad Day

Barack Obama's tutu ('grandmother' in Hawai'ian) died to day. Without her Barack would not be the person he is today. She deserves the thanks and appreciation of the world. It is because of her that we are so close to living in a world that will set the stage for the ideals of the future.

In Hawai'ian myth the spirits of the dead journey across the ocean to the horizon, and there, where the sea forever washes the sky in his cooling water, there, there is a gap. Just big enough for spirits to pass. They is where you all travel on our last journey. Past the end of the road and over the ocean, through the gap in the world and into Lua o Milu. A land of eternal sunsets. There we wait for the ones we love to chase the sun to the edge of the world, but we wait patiently, their road is long and they shouldn't rush. But we wait none the less.

The World should pick the "Leader of the Free World"

I recently found this website as a link on my friend's facebook page. Its really awesome.

http://www.iftheworldcouldvote.com

Despite how tight the presidential race might be in the US, the world thinks we should vote for Barack Obama. And if the world could vote, Obama would be our next president by a landslide. The only country that thinks otherwise is Macedonia (the former Yugoslavia). Mind you the site doesn't tell how many people from each country voted, but it does give precentages and Obama is leading world wide with 86.9% of the vote.

It's too bad that more people can't vote in the US election. In the Uk, if you are living in the UK at the time of an election, you are a UK national, a European Union national or a Common wealth national (Canada, Kenya, Melasia, India, etc..) you are allowed to vote. Which at first I thought was crazy, but now I think it makes a lot of sense.

So what the US should do is let anyone living in its borders for at least 1 month at the time of election can vote. I think that's fair. And maybe your address cannot be at a hotel. That's a good stipulation. Any thoughts anyone?