From: Claus, Peter J. 1998. "Folklore." In India's Worlds and U.S. Scholars, 1947-1997, edited by Joseph W. Elder, Edward C. Dimock, Jr. and Ainslie T. Embree. New Delhi: Manohar. Pp. 211-236. (This Online version is taken from the original manuscript and may be very slightly different from the published version. Please cite the published version)
It must be admitted from the outset that India has never played much
of a role in American folkloristics, and in fact does not do so even today.
But what I hope to show is that the folklore of India has brought us --
at least those American scholars who have studied it -- around to
fulfilling some of the original ideals and goals of the discipline. Over
the past hundred-odd years, the study of folklore by Americans has been
shared by several disciplines, and has been taken in various directions
by its dominant interest groups, primarily anthropologists and students
of literature. What follows is, first, a discussion of the historical estrangement
of these two players, and then, in studying Indian folklore, their a reunification,
on more solid ground.(1)
The study of folklore in America, was conceived at the outset as an
interdisciplinary endeavor. At its inception its major professional body,
the American Folklore Society, and its official voice, the Journal of American
Folklore (JAF), tried to provide a meeting ground for students of literature,
anthropologists, historians, linguists and a smattering of other social
scientists. It has struggled through much of its existence maintain this
synthesis and a healthy forum for debates in which data is emphasized and
tolerance for diverse disciplinary perspectives is encouraged.
Not without difficulty, however. The American mind defines things in
opposition. The perennial arguments within the discipline about how to
define the term 'folklore' itself exemplifies this tendency, but it would
not serve my purpose to elaborate on these usually fruitless debates. Without
realizing that perhaps it was the activities of the elites, not the folk,
which needed special categories and continual redefinition, folklorists
seem compelled to define their special area of interest in opposition
to something else: classical, literary, elite, urban etc. The expressive
culture of the folk, 'the people' might reasonably be considered the baseline
for such a study, with special interests and social classes, at particular
times, and in association with particular ideological movements distinguishing
themselves in opposition to an existing standard, and thus needing defining
labels and explanation. That among the early folklorists it was those who
belonged to the humanities who felt the greatest need to define folklore
only suggests that their home discipline was already associated with the
elite (cf. Bourdieu 1984, 1993). The anthropologists within the American
Folklore Society, drawing from their experience in classless (and, as they
thought, also timeless) Native American societies, have always been less
concerned with defining a class of expressive culture to call 'folklore'.
While anthropologist Franz Boas, one of its founding members and later
JAF editor, and his students, dominated the journal it maintained an interdisciplinary
character. Anthropology itself, after all, is very much an 'interdisciplinary
discipline.' Anthropologists tend to divide themselves over theoretical
issues. And it was Boas' theoretical interests that had a greater
effect on the form American folklore took than did question about its subject
matter. He was strongly opposed to concepts of unilineal evolutionary and
favored, instead, studies of historical diffusion. This was, by and large,
in line with the major trends in both American and European folklore
studies, too. But European anthropology was still dominated by ardent
evolutionists who saw folklore as a survival of an earlier stage of evolution.
Sir James Frazer, whose Golden Bough served generations of colonial missionaries
and administrators as a guidebook for cataloging native superstition in
a lecture delivered before the University of Liverpool in May 1908, defined
the relationship between anthropology and folklore as follows.(2)
"Thus the sphere of Social Anthropology as I understand it, or at least
as I propose to treat it, is limited to the crude beginnings, the rudimentary
development of human society .... The study might accordingly be described
as the embryology of human thought and institutions, or, to be more precise,
as that enquiry which seeks to ascertain, first, the beliefs and customs
of savages, and, second, the relics of these beliefs and customs which
have survived like fossils among peoples of higher culture ....(161) The
one department may be called the study of savagery, the other the study
of folklore." (1908: 167)
By the turn of the century, the compartmentalizing tendencies of American
academic institutions meant that most of the disciplines which started
during the middle of the nineteenth century had to specify themselves.
Boas managed to preserve anthropology by emphasizing its scientific basis.
Boas tried to emphasized the scientific study of folklore, too, but this
was a harder job, at least as far as trying to find a place for it in academia.
Universities regarded 'folklore' and 'higher education' as oxymoronic,
and to this day, folklorists find it hard to establish a department to
call their own. Folklore has had to resigned itself to the interstitial
areas of academic institutions. Since it is usually in other departments
that folklore is taught, folklorists have to do double duty in departments
of language (teaching English) or literature (American) or music (American
genres), etc. Because America is a land of immigrants, American folkloristics
has been inherently international in its orientation, tracing the dominant
strains of American traditions from their European and African roots.
The fledgling discipline of anthropology, in which Boas also served
an important role, had its own history of institutional divisiveness. Lewis
Henry Morgan, often called the father of American Anthropology, had framed
the scope of the discipline around the theory of evolution. At the time,
it was questioned only in its particulars by European evolutionists such
as E. B. Tylor and Sir James Frazer. But in America, for many years, Boas,
at Columbia University, and his students, A. L. Kroeber and Robert Lowie,
at University of California, Berkeley, vigorously opposed this conception
of anthropology. Having justified itself on the ground of science, and
with evolution gaining ground as the background explanatory theory in biology,
cultural evolutionism persisted in anthropology at other universities,
notably the University of Michigan, under the tutelage of Leslie White.
Then, shortly after World War One, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown revolutionized
British social anthropology with Durkheimian functionalism, with its strongly
anti-historical mode of studying society. For him, anthropology could retain
its natural science credentials on the analogy of comparative physiology.
When Radcliffe-Brown then came to teach in America at the University of
Chicago, he saw little value in either Boas' historical diffusionism or
the ideas of the American evolutionists. As a result, a deep rift formed
between native-born Cultural Anthropology (with its own internal
schools) and British Social Anthropology. Anthropologists focused
these debates in the American Anthropologist and gradually the JAF was
turned over to scholars specializing in Euro-American literature (Stith
Thompson)(3) and history (Richard Dorson)
and the incessant debates over what folklore was. By mid-century the long-standing
alliance between anthropology and literature within American folklore was
broken. Radcliffe-Brown's functionalism swept through American Anthropology.
He disdained pseudo-historical speculation, and relegated the study of
folklore to historians, linguists and amateurs, for whatever use they might
see in it. There were few anthropologists left in the American Folklore
Society. In anthropology, to call oneself a folklorist was an embarrassment.
As interest in folklore declined in anthropology, the American Folklore Society was left to those specializing in oral traditions, American regionalism and European roots. India was out of their territory. Up to this point in the history of the JAF, only a single full-length article -- by Murray Emeneau on the Toda in 1944 -- had been published on India.(4) The only major work done on Indian folklore by American scholars was done by Sanskritists and linguists, who favored a textualist approach.(5)
True, folklorist Stith Thompson was at work organizing several invaluable
catalogues of Indian folktales, but this material, too, was largely textualist
in nature and derived from secondary sources (Thompson and Balys 1958;
Thompson and Roberts 1960; Kirkland 1966).(6)
Traditions
When, at the close of World War II, the world the saw the birth of new
nations and America was rapidly realigning its world-interests, anthropologists
turned their attention from the study of small, isolated tribes to the
study of peasants in civilizations. India, naturally, aroused the attention
of a new breed of theorists. Robert Redfield, based on his work in Mexico,
had already conceptualized the study of large-scale civilization along
his now famous Folk-Urban Continuum. Together with his colleagues at the
University of Chicago, where he was Dean of the Social Sciences, he organized
a far-reaching project, the Comparative Studies in Culture and Civilizations
(for discussion of these developments within anthropology, see Wadley,
this volume). Anthropologists began the project by pursuing the institutional
dimensions of civilization through village studies. While not ignoring
the cultural dimensions of civilization, their focus was societal and structural.(7)
Attention to the more humanistic, cultural side of civilization picked
up in 1957. With India's independence still in recent memory, Singer organized
a symposium directed at assessing India's cultural traditions and published
the papers in a seminal collection of essays entitled traditional India.
Its preface begins collaboratively by pointing out that "... modern nationalism
in India ... has always shown a strong interest in the recovery or reinterpretation
of India's traditional culture," and suggesting that "The professional
student of culture and civilization may contribute something to this inquiry
through an objective study of the variety and changes in cultural traditions
..." (Singer 1959 ix).
Milton Singer, Redfield's colleague and collaborator on the comparative
civilizations project, having had first-hand experience in India, recognized
the need to restate the relationship between the Great and the Little,
the whole and the parts, not only on more concrete grounds, but on grounds
that might link the vast accumulated knowledge of Western Indology to the
anthropologists' village data. The difference between the two data sets
(orientalists' and social scientists') presented to the newcomer (as many
Americans social scientists were), as well as to those familiar with India
through its ancient texts, a contradiction increasingly difficult to ignore,
but equally difficult to reconcile.(8) A
major assessment of our knowledge of Indian civilization was clearly in
order, one which would allow us to grasp the nature of India's past as
well as its present, its parts at all levels (villages, regions) as well
as its whole in all forms (civilization, tradition).
Still working within the opposition between the social science and the
humanities, he chose to operationalize the "abstract, generic conception
of a structure of tradition" along two lines: the social organization of
tradition, on one hand, and cultural performances and cultural media on
the other.(9) The study of cultural performance,
as he saw it, was analogous to the analysis of social structure, "... except
that the data in this case are the cultural constituents of performances,
i.e. the cultural media of song, dance, instrumental music, verbal texts,
plots and themes, the scene of the performance, etc. rather than the statuses
and roles that occur in social organization." (Singer 1959 xii) Characteristic
of anthropological fashion at the time, Singer avoided the term
folklore to characterize this list of contents.(10)
Nor did he draw upon the then-standard folkloristic approaches to the study
of tradition. Folklore and anthropology had defined themselves in such
opposition by this time, that each tended to concentrate, as Singer noted,
on particular aspects of a performance: oral texts in the case of the former,
social function in the case of the latter. Singer merged these two approaches
in his consideration of Indian cultural traditions by including in his
focus the texts and contexts, performers and their audiences, and the sequence
of events within the performance time-frames. Further, perhaps in choosing
to avoid the term folklore, Singer sought once again to bring together
the student of literature and the anthropologist -- both as students of
folklore -- and encourage them to take to the field.
Singer, was by training neither an anthropologist nor an Indologist,
but a philosopher, specializing in symbolic logic, and the philosophy of
science. This perhaps explains why he was less influenced by the identity-opposition
which separated others who studied India at the time.(11)
When he went to India he went with a fresh, from the ground up, pragmatist
approach, and he came back with a suspicion that in India, oral and written
did not distinguish the elite from the folk in the same way as in the West.
Oral tradition (the medium which distinguished folklorists from students
of literature) is by no means confined to a particular class or caste:
Brahmans and merchants, farmers and shepherds, high castes and low all
have a wealth of folklore peculiar to their group. Nor were Redfield's
two traditions clearly separated: "Little and Great traditions are not
neatly differentiated along a village-urban axis."(171) Even the concept
of elite presented a confused picture: there were many distinct
elite traditions. In his own research on the cultural traditions of Madras,
Singer was able to survey a broad array of different traditions, from village
folk and ritual traditions, to the rapidly accelerating popular, classical
and secular traditions of the city. When organizing the conference papers,
and modeling its structure after his own research, choosing not to pin
the idea of cultural performance to "just folklore", he enabled everyone
to see broader connections than they might have seen under the simpler
dichotomies of the disciplines involved.
Nonetheless, all of the papers in the Singer volume, and Singer himself
at most times, discussed India's cultural media in broad generalizations
and in terms of familiar, unquestioned dichotomies: the Folk - Urban Continuum,
Little and Great Tradition, folk - classical, supported by the Indian intelligentsia's
categorization marga and desi.(12) The
various genres were, perhaps, being recognized for the first time and needed
to be placed into broad categories. There is value, however, in focusing
on specific forms and genres. Unfortunately, few who studied India had
any connection with the discipline of folklore in the United States. Thus,
during this period, the study of Indian folklore was studied in structural
and institutional terms, without much regard for the detailed historical
and thematic considerations (historical reconstruction and dissemination)
encouraged at the time by folklorists.
Since Singer introduced the collection of essays on Traditional India
with such a collaborative note, at this point in my narrative I should
perhaps mention what the state of folklore study was in India at the time.
Beginning even before the turn of the century, interest in folklore in
India had linked up with the nationalist movement. Indian intellectuals,
who a generation or two earlier might have emulated Western literary forms,
began to find their common roots in the revival of folklore. Not only did
they take up an interest in collecting folklore, but they drew what they
found in folklore into their own creative efforts. Tagore, for example,
argued vehemently that nationalistic sentiment needed a 'National Literature'
constructed on a foundation of folk traditions in order to link all Bengalis
into one chain of collective patriotic consciousness.(13)
Tagore's personal patronage of research, his prefaces for Bengali books
on folklore, his own writings on the subject, as well as his artistic indebtedness
to the itinerant mystic bards, the Bauls of Bengal, stimulated and shaped
the field of Bengali folkloristics. In doing so, however, he inadvertently
cast it with an urban, aristocratic version of the Bengali folk, infused
with the romantic vision of the peasant as a simple, peaceful and harmonious
individual. This was true not only of Tagore's work, but also that of his
whole generation and the subsequent ones that they influenced.(14)
The literary creation of the folk and the literary enthusiasm for folklore
was a necessary step in the history of Bengali nationalism, but in some
ways it was a problematic step in the development of Indian folkloristics.
As Blackburn and Ramanujan have noted,
"... the nationalist movement spurred new respect for and interest in
folk traditions. The search for ancient origins and the desire to present
a 'pure' heritage, which accompanies such nationalistic movements everywhere,
cast this research in a decidedly antiquarian and chauvinistic mold." (1986
7)
After Independence folklore continued to be the domain of writers and
literary scholars, but it gravitated increasingly to regional interests.
As Ramanujan has characterized this era:
"In India, the literature departments have begun to include linguistics
and folklore, and become interested in notions of 'region', 'tradition',
and 'folk'. Marga and desi, an old Indian pair -- loosely translated as
'classical' and 'folk', technical terms in native discussions of literature,
music, drama and dance -- have been linked to, or reincarnated as, 'Great
and Little Tradition'. These interest have naturally led to the collection
and analysis of regional folk-materials. For instance, in a language like
Kannada, of 200 books were published in the field of folklore in the last
two decades (Nayak 1974); all the three major universities in the Kannada
area have opened special departments and publication series for folklore.
The data is piling up ..." (Ramanujan 1987 79-80)
Folklore was also a part of Indian anthropological studies, which, both
before and after Independence, focused its attention on the so-called tribals.
In India, even more than in the United States, interest in folklore by
students of literature and anthropology was dichotomized. So deep was the
divide that not only was the type of folklore each concentrated on very
different, but they also tended to treat folklore in their own special
ways.(15) Students of literature collected
peasant lore; students of anthropology and linguistics collected tribal
myth. Selective pressures imposed by their respective disciplines emphasized
the differences between, rather than the variation within, the two categories,
and the considerable over-lap in the traditions of what was called tribal
and what was folk has rarely been seen.
None of the Indian contributors to Traditional India called themselves
folklorists. M. N. Srinivas, A. M. Shah, R. G. Shroff, Surajit Singh, Indera
Singh, T.B. Naik, and Nirmal Kumar Bose were all anthropologists. Of these,
Surajit Singh, Indera Singh and N. K. Bose perhaps leaned more toward the
American school of cultural anthropology. V. Raghavan, representing the
most humanistic side, with his training in Sanskrit literature and the
classical arts, spoke from within the culture. Although Singer drew heavily
on Raghavan's distinction between classical and folk -- derived from marga
and desi -- and linked these to the notion of Great and Little Tradition,
he began to see that this simple dichotomies were inadequate to account
for the "five different kinds of performances" ('folk', 'ritual', 'popular,
'classical', and 'modern urban') he was trying to trace (Singer 1959 169-174).
Although Singer's ecumenical vision brought together a wide range of
scholars within a single volume, interest in India's cultural traditions
for the next two decades were pursued only within the confines of separate
disciplinary discourses.(16) Fieldwork
brought anthropologists into proximity to the Little Tradition; Singer
turned their attention to the study of tradition itself.(17)
Soon they began to explore this new resource for what it might teach them
in terms of the folk exegesis of the indigenous categories they sought
to understand and explain.
Since at least the 1940's anthropologists have taken ethnomethodology
(or ethnoscience, 'emic') as their own special approach to non-Western
cultures (see the classic examples of Evans-Pritchard 1939, 1940, 1953;
for application to village study, see, e.g., Pitt-Rivers 1961) and tried
to construct society and the world in which it exists out of the conceptual
categories of that culture.(18) There are
several ways one might go about doing this. Aside from just being there
(fieldwork, often defined as 'participant observation') the most obvious
is through interviews. Another is to query the vocabulary people use in
describing their world-view. But one problem with such interactive approaches
is that unless you already know what terms and concepts are potentially
important, you cannot explore them. Another method exists. Many folklore
genres have the very sort of implicit cultural assumptions anthropologists
seek to understand. The fact that these are embedded in unintended, pre-existing
ritual and textual contexts, not predicated by foreign inquiry and assumption
foreign to the cultural scheme of things, make them ideal sources for understanding
broad cultural and relational systems.
One of the first to do so was Brenda
Beck. In a paper published in 1974, for example, she explored the general
theoretical relationship between descent groups, marriage alliances, and
family units (nuclear kin) by examining Tamil folklore.
"... Tamil folklore rarely mentions larger, opposed groupings of cross
and parallel males. Instead one can say that the folklore complements the
above analysis by placing a marked stress on the relationships between
immediate family members. Such a finding suggests that the folklore itself
acts as a kind of counterweight to the formal exchange relationships of
everyday experience." (Beck 1974 3)
Central to the divergence between the lived in experience of social
life and the folk ritual and oral narrative traditions was the position
of women.
"At the center of the kin nucleus ... is a female who is surrounded
by males.... Their shakti lies behind everything .... The power of the
female can cause a male to be successful, strong and prosperous, or it
can cause him to suffer defeat, misfortune and poverty." (Beck 1974 7)
Beck and other scholars pursued the implications of the 'tension' she
found in the complimentarity between oral tradition and social life --
as well as its particular embodiment in the image of women -- through a
number of subsequent studies (Beck 1980, 1982, 1986; see also Babb 1975,
Wadley 1980, Obeyesekere 1984, Trawick 1990). Such images encountered in
folklore and contextualized by village life, soon led researchers to re-examining
literary sources and larger contexts where they found a seamless transition
of traditions, a network of associated meanings extending in all directions.
In a similar vein (not yet explored to the extent it should be), in
another paper (n.d. [c. 1975]), "The Human Body Image: Its Popular Description
in Tamil Proverbs," Beck found that although the body and body parts occur
frequently in Tamil proverbs, they do not do so in equal frequency and
some are missing altogether (notably the breast and genitals): "The most
striking thing about the statistics, however, is the extreme emphasis given
to the head.... [and] that there is a rapid fall off of emphasis on the
body's anatomy as one progresses downward from the head to the feet." (n.d.
5) Surprisingly, the body's image in Tamil proverbs is used overwhelmingly
in negative parallels. In this and other regards, she notes, the proverbs
are like the ancient, but still universally revered, Tirukkural, in that
they present the body as a transitory container. If this is true, then
relationships between folk genres and even the most sophisticated philosophical
traditions exits in dimensions both subtle (unconscious) and abstract as
well as in terms of themes and motifs (see also Ramanujan 1986, 1987, 1989).
Other anthropologists at the time, too, began to look to various genres of folklore in order to fine-tune their understanding of Indian culture. Together with their colleagues in literature and religious studies, they began to explore the distinctive Indian concepts of the hero (Beck 1978; Blackburn 1978; Claus 1978; Narayana Rao 1986) and hero worship (Blackburn 1985), political ideologies (Beck 1978b; Claus 1978, 1979), philosophical and religious concepts, such as karma (Beck 1977, Wadley 1983), etc. These had all been noted as an important features of traditional Hindu culture, but little in the line of detailed data had been gathered on the topic at the village level. Because they had been working with folk genres, anthropologists were able to add to almost any topic of discussion the perspective from indigenous oral literature.(19)
Wadley's 1975 more extended study of Shakti may be put into the category
of folk exegesis, too. Her overall goal in this study was to understand
the concept of shakti, 'power', within the conceptual system of north Indian
village life. While the methods (linguistic and structural) she employed
toward that end drew from up-to-date theoretical developments in anthropology
at large, and although what she found out about shakti added new understanding
of the concept, the work was a major innovation in at least two other respects
as well. The one which is most important to my present essay was the way,
as well as to the extent, which she drew upon a wide range of folklore
to explore this concept. The other, that the concept of shakti, a feminine
principle, played such a key role in such varied everyday contexts in village
life provided a rich counter-point to the abstract, philosophical and religious
exegesis of this topic already elaborated by Indologist and other students
of India's high traditions (see Wadley, this volume, for reference to subsequent
studies of gender and authority).
Wadley's was one of the first within modern studies of Indian culture
to view folklore as an integrated system. She placed lesser importance
on the division between Great and Little Traditions than she did on the
unity of Indian tradition. She described the place of Karimpur within that
tradition as a "local-level", defusing past dichotomies. Furthermore, in
treating it (like any other societal or cultural phenomenon) as a conceptual
system, rather than a miscellany of derivatives (as the notion of peasants
as 'part society' suggests) or as survivals (as cultural evolutionism suggests),
she viewed it holistically, as a term pervading an ideology, forcing her
to look beyond particular motifs, genres or institutions and beyond the
heuristic dichotomy of practice (the organization of behavior) and media
(culture). This approach would not only lead us to understanding local
tradition as genre systems, but the suggestion that there was in Indian
tradition 'another harmony.'
Another Harmony
This flurry of research employing Indian folklore prompted a round of conferences in the early 1980's, sponsored by the Joint Council on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies under the general rubric of "Indigenous Terminology." The first conference, called "Models and Metaphors in South Asian Folklore", was exploratory, bringing together those who had been working on folklore, independently for the most part, in different regions of India.(20)
During this conference folklore began to transcend the Great and Little
Tradition divide, looking instead at the relationship between genres within
systems, and to trying to understand the genres themselves and power that
they held in particular contexts. A. K. Ramanujan steered participants
in the direction of examining India's folklore more directly and more resourcefully.
What could be done with this material (folklore)? What does it mean? How
to frame its rich and distinctive qualities?
In a paper titled "The Relevance of South Asian Folklore" Ramanujan
distinguished some of the key concepts which would set the future for Indian
folklore study. Within society, different genres, he suggested, belong
not to different cultural worlds, or divided traditions, but are, rather,
themselves implicit cultural categories and have different contextual functions.(21)
At all levels, traditions are
"... coexistent, context-sensitive systems ... held and used deftly
and persuasively to perceive and solve the culture's special dilemmas....
They may contradict each other (as different proverbs do, within a language)
when treated as a single facetless system, but they would be seen as viable,
flexible "strategies" when treated in context. In cultures and in languages,
there are rules of structure and there are rules of use: novel is only
one-half of creativity; appropriateness is the other half." (1987 82)(22)
New, deeper, more intense genres -- crying songs, possession cults,
competitive games, sacrificial epics and ambiguously gendered heroes --
were introduced and presented in their performance contexts, provoking
new ideas and directions of inquiry. In these more specialized genres,
in their particular contexts (as well as in the other, more familiar ones
in theirs) there are often themes and emphases which give expression to
emotions not found in other realms of Indian culture: indeed, this is reason,
perhaps, for their very existence. But while these genres provide us with
a wider and fuller understanding of Indian culture as it is lived by participants
of all kinds and levels, it is also important to understand that there
are variants of themes and stories in other genres with which they have
inherent intertextual relationship, and with which they stand in implicit
contrast.
The next conference took up the intensive investigation of a particular
genre, oral epics. Several of the participants at the Models and Metaphor
conference had done extensive work on regional epics and the form, in its
regional variants, served as common ground.(23)
They were joined by other American scholars whose work focused on India's
epic traditions as well as J. D. Smith from England, Komal Kothari, J.
S. Paramashiviah, R. V. S. Sundaram, and S. M. Pandey from India. The regional
variants discussed were regionally representative: Pabuji, Devnarayan,
Alha, Guga, Dhola, Candaini of northern India; Annanmar, Palnadu, Ellamma,
Bow Songs, Paddana of the south.(24) Not
only were the performances as varied as shadow puppet shows and possession
cults, but each performance itself was seen to be something of great complexity,
embedding oral text in aesthetic forms of all kinds, sponsored by patrons
of all sorts, addressed to audiences from all classes. It quickly became
apparent to everyone that when taken as a performance tradition, not simply
as a collected text, we were dealing with a genre of both tremendous variability
and importance to the idea of Indian civilization. The performances themselves
needed new approaches to analyze their structure, ones which would also
indicate how their performers managed to produce and orchestrate them (Wadley
1989; GoldbergBelle 1989; Blackburn 1986, 1981). Some epics had to be looked
at as stories in relation to a whole system of regional epics (Flueckiger
1989, 1996; Claus 1989, 1991; Blackburn 1989) while others, consisting
of a single story, constituted a genre unto themselves.
Taken together, the studies of Indian folk epic (many not cited above)
generated a distinct interdisciplinary field of performance studies. Stuart
Blackburn has recently summarized the importance of Indian folklore to
this development.
"The study of performance in South Asian folklore is inseparable from
the history of the concept in international folkloristics. Drawing on the
pool of anthropological, literary, linguistic, and theater studies that
coalesced into a performance-centered approach to folklore in the 1970s,
performance studies in South Asia has produced a new literature that has
changed the textual orientation of Indology. Although no sustained theory
of performance has yet emerged, this new approach has demonstrated that
the meanings of folklore are not confined to words but are encoded also
in events, such as speech acts, behavior, music, song, and dance. Despite
differing emphases, vocabularies, and conclusions, the numerous monographs
published since 1970 have extended the definition and enriched our understanding
of text, audience, and genre in South Asian folklore." (Blackburn, forthcoming)
What makes India such a marvelous place to study oral epics is that
one can trace their numerous thematic threads through a vast network of
intertextual linkages, and through every conceivable performance context,
both within a given tradition and between them. My own research on a Tulu
oral epic tradition called paddana revealed to me some of the subtle kinds
of links village traditions entail. The Tulu epics are at once both a macro-genre
and a performance tradition. That is, within the genre there are not only
a number of distinct stories, but many of the stories exist in context-sensitive
variants. Furthermore, the stories and their variants make frequent intertextual
reference to one another. Contemplating the relationship between distinct,
named epic traditions in Tulunad, it became clear to me that there was
a larger 'epic' which "exists in the minds of the performers and audience,"
(1989, p. 57). That is, any particular story,
"... exists in a number of different forms, is identified by different
terms in different contexts, and is performed by different groups. Each
performance configuration in its own way elaborates on a different aspect
of the story. The Kordabbu story itself is an elaborated excerpt from a
larger pool of characters in a larger story. This larger story, however,
is never told in its entirety. It is in this sense--that is, as a large
repertoire of loosely connected and variable stories--that we may speak
of the paddana as a multi-story epic tradition."(Claus 1989, p. 71)(25)
What is characteristic of the many regional epics is also writ large
in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the flagships of Indian civilization.
Both are compilations of what had at one time been many independent story
traditions which throughout history performers and literati alike have
reworked in innumerable versions. Ramanujan identifies these "many Ramayanas"
as a "pool of signifiers" (1991 46), while Narayana Rao characterizes the
Ramayana as "... not just a story, but a language with which a host of
(ideological) statements may be made." (Narayana Rao 1991 114). Blackburn
sees it as a oral tradition containing many forms: "... the diversity of
the tradition--the many Ramayanas--is a function of the many genres, the
many languages, and the many occasions on which the Rama story is orally
performed." (1991 156) But for all of who contributed to the volume Many
Ramayanas: Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia there was no
question but what the study of the regional oral epics, this one or the
many others, provided invaluable insight into even the often-studied pan-Indian
epics. Even more importantly, what has been achieved in transformation
of folkloristics was not simply papers and books and improved research,
or even better scholarship, but a community of scholars who can better
appreciate the relevance of one another's work and who now regularly share
in the surveillance of the wider perspective it brought about.
The future
What I have tried to focus on in this essay is not Indian folklore,
but rather how, in studying this dimension of Indian culture, American
scholarship has come around to a broader, more unified view of a civilization--Indian
civilization. One last sub-theme needs to be discussed. I began this essay
with the observation that American folkloristics was, since its inception,
a broadly interdisciplinary endeavor. While this is true, it was not because
the
individualfolklorists were necessarily so broad minded. Folkloristics
at the time (but to use terminology of the present) could be divided into
two groups: those who studied the lore of Others (anthropologists) and
those who studied from a perspective within their own culture a segment
of tradition Other than their own (mostly students of literature). Although
these two perspectives sometimes came together in a single individual,
one of the two perspective generally subjugated the other, and always with
unproductive results, as evolutionism or romanticism. The unification of
Indo-American folkloristics, I would predict, will come about when, at
an international level, these two perspectives come together within a community
of scholars both American and Indian. In fact significant efforts in this
direction have been taken.(26)
Related to this proposition, the Models and Metaphors conference had
yet another dimension not as well-known publically. Shortly after the meeting
in Berkeley, a number of the participants presented versions of their papers
at a similar gathering of Indian folklorists in Mysore. Indian folklorists,
as mentioned earlier, had been busy collecting folklore. Because it was
published in regional Indian languages most of it was unknown to Western
scholars. By this time, though, they were also developing their own folkloristics,
with a discourse based in theories, ideologies and concerns distinctly
different from those prevalent in American folkloristics. Like American
Folkloristics at home, Indian Folkloristics presents an insider's view
of itself. The hope of the Mysore conference was that a final dichotomy
might be bridged. At the time it was thought -- rather naively and patronizingly,
in retrospect -- that the American participants might benefit greatly from
leaning about the rich database of material collected by their Indian colleagues,
while the Indian participants might benefit from the recent developments
and theoretical orientations of the Americans.
In fact, forging a bi-national discipline proved to be more of a challenge
than originally anticipated. The difficulty stems from the different discourses
in which the folklorists are enmeshed: American folklorists address themselves
to audiences who are outsiders to the Indian traditions, the works of Indian
folklorists are read by insiders. While I cannot, in this essay, pursue
the great significance of this difference, I would like to show why it
is important to understand that an international folkloristics has some
valuable common grounds in a perspective made up of both outsiders and
insiders.
An outsider's perspective is sometimes the only way people from within
a tradition become aware of features they are culturally conditioned to
ignore, whether because they are too familiar or because they are inappropriate
to discuss openly. As an example, one might point out that there are no
indigenous terms for folklore in most Indian languages. Terms recently
coined to encompass this realm -- janapada, lok versa, etc. -- are Sanskritized
translations of the English 'folklore'. The indigenous term de is not an
equivalent. Not all that is de is what is meant by folklore and for centuries,
up to the present era, that which is now studied as folklore had been completely
ignored or reworked into literary styles before considered appropriate
for inclusion in scholarly discourse.
An insider's perspective enables one to acknowledge and appreciate that,
as my earlier citation of Ramanujan suggests, in folklore, like language,
there are levels of competence and rules of appropriateness. While outsiders
may study "folklore in context," they do so abstractly, through observation
of events. To understand the performers' intentions -- "choosing a path"
as Susan Wadley (1989) has called it -- which predicate these events, or
the audiences' evaluation of the outcome, they must turn to experts, the
performers and audiences themselves (Flueckiger 1988), or to connoisseurs.
Alan Dundes long ago coined the term "folk literary criticism" to encourage
precisely this, but few folklorists have explicitly done so.(27)
Here is where collaboration with Indian folklorists could be constructive.
Raised in the culture, Indian folklorists cannot escape an evaluative perspective
on folklore whether or not they share particular folk-abilities to produce
it. In fact, at Indian folklore conferences many participants, coming as
they do from departments of literature, wax eloquently on the distinctive
beauty of folk expression, even to the extent of using the podium as a
stage for their own performance of it.(28)
If they were able to develop a dialogue with their Indian counterparts,
American folklorists might be able to tap into this kind of experiential
sensitivity and appreciation of the material.
It is equally important to understand the difficulties in forging an
international discipline of Indian folkloristics. One distraction (however
good-intended) is, as Singer recognized in the early years of American
collaboration in the study of Indian culture, governments. Academic collegial
ties need not be bound by national interests, though. Without ignoring
the very different interests a Karnataka folklorist may have in Kannada
folklore, or the different relationships it has to Kannada literary traditions
he might wish to explore, or the different constituents he must address
himself to, there must be much, too, he can only share with other folklorists
of the world. A Folkloristics which is so culturally bound as to be pertinent
only to the folklorists of one culture is unlikely to become anything other
than folklore itself.
In the years which followed the Mysore conference the Ford Foundation
enabled several series of international conferences and workshops, and
provided much needed support several Indian archives and Indian folkloristic
research. Through these, some American participants formed lasting ties
with their Indian colleagues and some joint ventures have come from it.
Still, the efforts toward internationalizing Indian Folkloristics have
been experimental and exploratory. Only time will tell whether this essential
step will be taken and a truly international discipline will emerge.
End Notes
1. For a more detailed, but sometimes differing interpretation, see Zumwalt 1988.
2. Although his work is rarely cited in connection with the development of any of the modern disciplines today, the immense intellectual impact Frazer's writings had in the colonies must be still kept in mind. For reasons which hopefully will be clearer later in this essay, one still finds the Golden Bough, its defining concepts, methodologies, and theoretical orientation used as handbook for the study of folklore in Indian departments of literature where 'the anthropological' approach is in vogue.
3. It must be said, however, as his classic, The Folktale, bears abiding testament, Thompson developed a deep interest in international folklore, and Indian folklore in particular. See also below.
4. That the exceptional work by Murray Emeneau on India is poorly represented in the pages of the JAF perhaps encapsulates all that I have thus far said about the dichotomies within American folklore. As a student of linguist-anthropologist Edward Sapir, he was also an intellectual descendant of Franz Boas. Neither of his monumental works on folklore, The Songs of the Todas (1937) and Kota Texts (1944-6) were primarily published as contributions to folklore.
5. There was also two-page note on Demon-worship
by the missionary, Dr. Bulmer (1894); and most major publications of Indian
folklore were at least reviewed. Several generations of European colonial
administrators and anthropologists, had gathered vast quantities of material
oral tales from the Indian countryside and these had found popularity in
European anthologies. For American folklorists, India, the land of stories,
was not altogether ignored, but interest in it earlier had been taken up
by text-oriented Indologists, rather than folklorists. India (and other
Asian countries) occupied a curious position: although thought of as having
a rich mythology and tale tradition, these became represented in the American
mind by their literary counterparts and studied by text specialists, Indologists.
It seemed not to occur to American folklorists these literary traditions
might have current oral tradition counterparts or that the relationship
between the written and the oral might be fruitful ground for investigation.
Until even relatively recently, for example, India had been represented
in world epic studies only by the literary versions of the Mahbhrata and
the Ramayana, despite the existence of dynamic independent regional oral
epic traditions and a bewildering array of folk Mahbhrata and Ramayana
traditions, each with fascinating peculiarities not found in the literary
forms. Whether American folklorists considered India too distant or they
were too preoccupied with North American Indian and Euro-American continuities,
they showed little interest in the rich possibilities inherent in Indian
oral tradition.
6. He also did the tale-type index for Emeneau's Kota Texts. Emeneau's acknowledgment speaks to the separation between folklorists and the group of social sciences to which linguist-anthropologist Emeneau saw himself belonging: "My thanks are due to him [Thompson] for what will undoubtedly be of great value to workers in that field." (1944 vi)
7. This was a group with diverse training, coming, as they did from several contemporary schools of anthropological thought: M.N. Srinivas (Oxford), McKim Marriott (Chicago), David Mandelbaum (Yale), Alan Beals (University of California, Berkeley), Oscar Lewis (Columbia), Kathleen Gough (Cambridge), John Hitchcock (Cornell), to mention a few. They were all, nonetheless deeply affected by British social anthropology and the functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. Whatever their differences, they saw themselves as social scientists.
8. Almost a decade later, in a rather similarly mixed collection of papers, McKim Marriott, with remarkable candor, describes the naivete of an anthropologist invited to 'play Holi' in a UP village: "I asked how it was to be played ..." In the forward to the same volume, and in reference to how Marriott subsequently came to grips with what he initially experienced, Daniel Ingalls articulated the ineffable wonderment of his Indological colleagues over the ambition of the American social scientists: "A difficulty remains", he write. "How does one bring the diverse facts of literature, of society, of religion, as one finds them in different ages and areas, into a single understandable system? What system shall we use for the evaluation even of contemporaneous phenomena? It may be said, of course, that systematizing is just what we should not yet do, for it has been the experience of the sciences, social as well as natural, to begin with description and to come to systems only when they are full grown. Let us first, then, gather the facts, But still, one must be aware of an ultimate goal, and one yearns for it. Personally, I tend to think of such a goal as a system of history, for such has been my training. But I recommend to the reader the very different systematization offered by McKim Marriott. Although the author is a scholarly man, his is the least academic of the contributions. And yet, from the disreputable phenomena of the Holi festival he builds, in bold strokes and in a very American way, a system that seems to me not inapplicable to much that is Indian, old as well as new, noble as well as mean." (Ingalls 1966:x-xi)
9. The idea of 'cultural performances' was Singer's own, one which developed within his own paper for the conference and then applied more generally to the particularization of a tradition in a media, carried by human agents and performed on certain occasions. Among the special connotations he captured with this term, most intriguing is that: "... people think of their culture as encapsulated in such discrete performances, which they can exhibit to outsiders as well as to themselves. For the outsider these can be conveniently taken as the most concrete observable units of the cultural structure..." (Singer 1959:xiii). In part, perhaps, he was thinking of the operational aspects of collecting folklore; but, in part he may have been trying to justify the outsiders' study of contemporary Indian culture, and to situate this interest in relation to his introductory remarks. "Those cultural traditions that become symbols of national identity ... take on a life of their own, quite different from their life as regional and local traditions. They become the chosen representatives of a national tradition.... The professional student of culture ... can contribute something ... through an objective study ... freed from the immediate necessity of choosing among them a single pattern of existence." (1959 ix)
10. Despite the fact that this volume of collected papers was published by the American Folklore Society, the term folklore does not even occur in the index. Apparently this did not bother the Journal's editor, Thomas Sebeok, himself a master of several disciplines and known to have favored interdisciplinary approaches.
11. The source for these biographic details is Singer 1984 vii.
12. The two exceptions are Norvin Hein's article on Rm Ll and Murray Emeneau's on Toda songs.
13. For further details see Claus and Korom 1991, where we attempt at various places, and in relation to several theoretical constellations, to reconstruct the development of the discipline of folkloristics in India.
14. His idealistic world-view is in part derived from the cultural evolutionary point of view which dominated British anthropological scholarship in India during Tagore's lifetime.
15. As in the United States, anthropology in India was divided between those are cultural anthropologists and those who regard themselves as social anthropologist. The former tend to focus on tribal groups, the latter on village peasant societies. While it has been standard in tribal ethnographies to include a collection of tribal myths, folklore was often ignored in village studies. Increasingly, however, both types of anthropologists have been leaving the collection of folklore to linguists and adventurous literary scholars.
16. Another issue Singer touches upon must also be mentioned. Between the interests of "modern nationalism" and "the professional student of culture" lay areas of potential conflict. To forward the goals of national integration, Singer goes on to say, "Theoretically, any element of traditional culture is a potential candidate for selection, but in fact only a small number are so chosen at any given time. In this selective process, cultural traditions take on a fluidity and self-consciousness that reflects constantly changing moods and aspirations, and changing conceptions of national identity." Cultural traditions are the constructions of an illusion in national scholarship no less than in governmentally orchestrated cultural displays. Until recently, collaboration between Indian and American folklorists has been minimized by their different relationship to the material. While both have been working hard since Independence, their goals have been quite different. As suggested in the quote, by Singer, above, Indian folklorist have sought their traditional moorings in the common ground of folklore and have concentrated on collection. Americans have seen themselves in the role of dispassionate pursuit of theoretical issues.
17. Another ingredient to this successful formula was dramatic improvements in South Asia language training at American Universities.
18. American anthropology has always seen culture and society reflected in, if not embodied in, its language (Morgan 1871; Boas 1911; Kroeber 1909). During the 1960's there were various attempts at developing rigorous methods -- ethnosemantics -- for revealing a people's reality by semantic analysis of its vocabulary (Frake 1964, 1980).
19. For the difference folklore brought to the anthropological study of village India, compare, for example, the studies on the concept of karma cited above with those based on traditional anthropological methods as in Lewis 1958 (pages 253-9) or Kolenda 1964.
20. It must be remembered that none of those who worked on folklore at this time had formal training in either folkloristics or classical studies. Guiding the neophyte students of Indian folklore as advisors and discussants at the first conference, were Wendy O'Flaherty and Alan Dundes. Dundes and O'Flaherty, each in their (also separate) realms of written and oral texts, were masters of comparative analysis and interpretation. They continually reminded us that much of what we had been treating as exclusively regional folklore (India's Little Tradition) had counterparts in other, world-wide, domains and a wealth of scholarship to draw upon.
21. A similar discomfort with the dichotomies of Great and Little were expressed at a more abstract, social and cognitive level earlier in (Obeyesekere 1963).
22. An expanded sub-set of this paper was published in Another Harmony (Blackburn and Ramanujan 1986), while this version, closer to the original read at the conference, was published by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore in Indian Folklore II (Claus, Handoo and Pattanayak 1987). The paper was further reworked and published by the University of Hawaii.
23. Although two of the participants, Beck and Roghair, were to see their work published in 1982, the same year of the Oral Epics Conference, at the time the conference was planned and held, these books were not yet available.
24. Of course the Mahbhrata and Ramayana, in a variety of regionally performed incarnations, were frequently discussed for the background influences they have had on regional epics. But for the first time discussion was not dominated by these favorites, and certainly not their textual form. Indeed, from the evidence presented at this conference it might even be suggested that the popularity of the Ramayana and Mahbhrata owes much to the regional performance forms in which they are embedded: i.e. that it is these Ramayanas and Mahabharatas, not their textual versions, which have made them emblems of Indian civilization (for the follow up of this suggestion see Richman 1991).
25. Inspired by American research on Indian oral epics, Scandinavian folklorists focused a series of workshops and panels on Oral Epics around the similar themes of variant forms in a "pool of tradition" (Honko 1996:1). One of the organizers of the project, Lauri Honko, working on the Tulu Siri Epic collected during specially arranged sittings compared dictated to recorded variants of the text. Drawing upon the work of American scholars, he, too, postulates the existence of a 'mental text', consisting of "... such elements loosely organized around a larger topic ... a kind of general storyline with a store of obligatory, alternative and optional textual possibilities to be accepted or rejected by the singer at the moment of performance ..." (Honko 1996:1). Earlier folklorists often worked from texts which had been dictated and their focus was more on the content of the text. While my own research used the concept to better understand the relationship of texts to live performance contexts, Honko uses it to identify elements in an artificially induced text. Although the induced text of an individual raconteur has little ethnographic significance, Honko uses the material to critique the kinds of epic texts folklorists in the past have collected in the name epic tradition.
26. In the context of what I have written in this
paragraph, I must also acknowledge that the development of Indo-American
folkloristics has been blessed by highly productive collaborative efforts
between individual Indian and American scholars, and with the presence
of several bi-cultural scholars such as A. K. Ramanujan, V. Narayana Rao,
and Kirin Narayan, to mention only several.
It is also worth noting that throughout the history of folkloristics international collaboration has often worked well when the two cultures are historically related as homeland and immigrant ethnic group, and it may be that in the future rewarding insight into Indian culture will come from America folkloristics along these lines, too, although at present the folklore of the Indian diaspora in American has been very limited.
27. A notable exception is Kirin Narayan (1989, 1995). In the process of their work, probably all folklorists acquire a degree of insiders' appreciation of the aesthetic differences between performances, but that is a different matter. Their evaluative understanding is usually generalized to the cultural as a whole, and is rarely put to test.
28. The American Folklore Society annual meetings have this delightful feature, too, with the exception that talented folk-folklorists post-pone their performances for after-hours.