It Started with Bili Majhi (original) (raw)
1999
Most scholars date the serious study of children's folklore to two nineteenthcentury collections of children's games: The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland: Tunes, Singing-Rhymes and Methods of Playing According to the Variants Extant and Recorded in Different Parts of the Kingdom (1894-98) by Lady Alice Bertha Gomme and Games and Songs of American Children (1883) by William Wells Newell, the first secretary of the American Folklore Society. Lady Alice was married to the distinguished British scholar Sir George Laurence Gomme, and together they formed a successful research team. Consistent with Victorian mores, she limited her studies almost exclusively to children's games while her husband's interests ranged much more widely. The two of them intended to edit a multivolume Dictionary of British Folklore with Traditional Games as Part I, but the project was never completed. The Gommes were part of the intellectual milieu that adhered to the theory of cultural survivals, and Traditional Games reflects that discredited bias. Lady Alice regarded the games in her vast collection as remnants from the ancient past that reflected the ideas and practices of primitive peoples. She arranged the games alphabetically, which, as one historian has pointed out, "camouflaged Lady Gomme's primary intent, to reconstruct the evolutionary ladder of children's pastimes" (Dorson 1968,27). For example, she decided that the game of "Sally Water" originated as a pre-Celtic "marriage ceremonial involving water worship,'" and that "London Bridge" echoed an ancient foundation sacrifice. She gathered her data from a network of retrospective adult correspondents rather than from direct fieldwork. Dorothy Howard writes the following in her introduction to the 1963 edition: The games in her Dictionary, it must therefore be inferred, are games belonging to Lady Alice's childhood or earlier and not necessarily 12 WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS OF CHILDHOOD? 2 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE Rosemary Levy Zumwalt When I first started work in children's folklore, I dutifully asked my five, six-, and seven-year-old informants all the prescribed questions: Where did you learn that? Why do you think it's funny? What do you call it? They would, after the weeks passed, bear this with strained patience. With their heads cocked to one side and their eyes narrowed, they would answer, "I didn't learn it from anybody. I made it up!" "Can't you see why it's funny? It's funny, that's all!" I would persist and get the answers I needed for my collection. Now, years later, as I look back at this initial study of children's folklore (Zumwalt 1972, 1976), I am struck with the richness the children were offering me. At the time, the rhythm, the lyrics, and the image captivated me. I focused on symbol, the ideal little girl in folklore. And I emphasized tradition, the creation and continuity of this image. I likened it to the formation of stalactites, the concentrated accretion over centuries, a drop at a time, forming a multifaceted image. The ideal little girl in folklore could, according to the refraction of light from her crystalline image, shine with innocence, glitter with enticement, or gleam with lust. The ideal little girl was present in the folklore, and she was important. Yet, coupled with this ideal little girl portrayed in the texts was the real little girl who performed the jump-rope songs: I am a Pretty Little Dutch Girl All dressed in blue. And these are the things I like to do: Salute to the captain. Curtsey to the king. And show my pants to the u.S. Marines! This was the same little girl who would throw down her jump rope and run to the baseball diamond to play what she classified as a boy's game. The children in my early folklore study were presenting me with the complexity of their lives. That I chose to study one aspect, the image as revealed in the text, is understandable. Part of the leverage one needs to launch an undertaking is just such a focus. That I now recognize the text and context, the ideal and the real, the conservative and the innovation, adds to my wonder of the child's world of folklore. I would like to reflect on what I see as the complexity of children's folklore, a complexity that has sometimes been overlooked for a simpler view. An approach that was predicted on the simple nature of the child was nineteenth-century cultural evolutionary theory. In this framework, the child was equated with the savage. In much twentieth-century literature on children's folklore, the equation remains. For an understanding of cultural evolutionary theory as it pertains to children, we must turn to the works of
Contexts of Folklore: Festschrift for Dan Ben-Amos. ed. Simon Bronner and Wolfgang Mieder, 2019
Tale type ATU 63, The Fox Rids Himself of Fleas, although widely distributed in European oral tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has rarely been identified in earlier written sources. The most recent revision of the international tale-type index (Uther 2004, 1:59) adequately summarizes the short tale's content: A fox (jackal) takes a bunch of wool (grass, moss, wood) in his mouth and backs slowly into the water. The fleas in his coat jump forward until all of them are on the wool. Then the fox lets go of the wool or dives under the water. The present paper studies the tale's historical dissemination.
Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West, 2002
The cultural memory of cattle worship can be traced from the dawn of Western civilization through the mythology and rituals of ancient Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, among others, and on into European settlement of North America. Deeply rooted notions of masculinity, power and wealth, freedom and honor stem from this millennia-old "cow mythos" and pervade even contemporary American culture. Christopher Manes deconstructs the myth by positioning it in its historical setting.
Of Beasts And Men: What Does The Fox Say?
Cardiff University SHARE eJournal Blog (Of Beasts & Men series), 2018
The common interaction between both humans and foxes has led to a variety of differing relationships between the two. In this article, a discussion of the differing roles and interaction dynamics seen in past societies is made in comparison to what we can see in modern history and contemporary societies. Further, the piece also discuss the potential issues that modern perceptions of the fox may hold over current archaeological study.