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Approaches To Interpreting Folklore

The document summarizes different approaches to interpreting folklore: 1. Functionalism views folklore as maintaining cultural stability but ignores how it sometimes undermines stability. 2. Structuralism allows deeper genre analysis but risks overemphasizing genres. 3. Psychoanalytic interpretation explores symbolic meanings but risks being too broad in its assumptions. Post-structuralist approaches like feminist, reciprocal ethnography, and intersectionality seek wider meanings beyond single interpretations and acknowledge multiple possible meanings depending on context.

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232 views14 pages

Approaches To Interpreting Folklore

The document summarizes different approaches to interpreting folklore: 1. Functionalism views folklore as maintaining cultural stability but ignores how it sometimes undermines stability. 2. Structuralism allows deeper genre analysis but risks overemphasizing genres. 3. Psychoanalytic interpretation explores symbolic meanings but risks being too broad in its assumptions. Post-structuralist approaches like feminist, reciprocal ethnography, and intersectionality seek wider meanings beyond single interpretations and acknowledge multiple possible meanings depending on context.

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Fachrizal Agti
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Approaches to

Interpreting
Folklore
Taken from:
Sims & Stephen’s Living Folklore (page 174-201)
Functionalism
 Bascom (1965) suggests four functions of
folklore: educating; escaping accepted
limitations of our culture; maintaining
cultural identity; and validating existing
cultural norms.
 All in all: folklore is an important
mechanism for maintaining the stability
of culture.
Functionalism
 Problems:

1. Ignores the way folklore questions,


critiques, protests, and sometimes
undermines stability
2. Conservative, static, and a-historical
regardless of context
3. Maintains the dichotomy: us x them
4. One way, one theory, one meaning
Functionalism
Solutions:
1. Incorporates reflexive dimensions of
analysis, and recognizes the folklorist as part
of an interpretive partnership with their
consultants. Analyses of meanings and
functions involve more thorough conversations
with the members of the communities we
work within.
2. Looks at functions and meanings of items of
folklore within a folk group rather than a
single function or meaning across an entire
Structuralism
 de Caro (1986) says that a structuralist
analysis should reveal a basic, underlying
pattern which accounts for all the parts of
the whole and how they relate to each other
in forming the whole.
 Propp (1968) presents a system of describing
tales according to patterns of story events, a
“morphology” (a study of the form and
structure of language) that describes the
organic nature of tale structure.
Structuralism
 Allows genre classifications to go “deeper”.
 Enables folklorists to study similarities and
differences among different cultures’ traditional
stories, and ways in which the concept of genre
can extend beyond the forms of those specific
stories.
 Describes not just the structure of the narrative
but also the structure of the sound of the words
and utterances, and how they contributed to the
overall narrative performance. (Ethnopoetics
approach)
Structuralism
 Problem:

Overemphasis on genre resulted in defining


what things are, rather than analyzing how
they operate within groups.
 Solution:

Integrated interpretations of folktales that


combine analysis of structure, social
contexts and symbolic meanings.
Psychoanalytic Interpretation
 Found by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic
analysis involves the interpretation of
symbolic meanings within texts that
illuminate shared developmental and life
experiences of all humans.
 Dundes (2002) argues that psychoanalytic
interpretation offers one of the most in-
depth ways to go beyond mere collection of
texts or artifacts and descriptions of
context.
Psychoanalytic Interpretation
 Problems:

1. Too broad by assuming that all human


beings share exactly the same
experiences, and that particular texts
express that experience in the same way.
2. Textually and etymologically oriented,
and lacks the fieldwork, ethnographic
analysis, and intense engagement of
Freud (Limon & Young, 1986)
Psychoanalytic Interpretation
 Solution

1. Fine (1992) suggests two criteria to


evaluate the effectiveness of
psychoanalytic interpretations: Is the
analysis internally consistent? And, Is the
analysis externally valid?
2. Multi-dimensional analyses that integrate
close textual analysis, explorations of
symbolic meanings, and contextual studies
Post-Structuralist Approaches
 Post-structuralistapproaches look beyond
the organization of elements in a text, or
the order of events in a performance, or the
belief that a single principle or idea
provides the answer to what something
means. These interpretations seek wider
connections to other kinds of texts and
events and acknowledge that there may be
more than one possible meaning, depending
on cultural and social contexts.
Post-Structuralist Approaches
 Feminist Interpretations
 Expand interpretations that are not grounded solely
in male perspectives, biases, and fieldwork
approaches.
 Open the door for understanding the ways socially
and politically constructed assumptions can
marginalize some groups that don’t belong to a
dominant group’s definition of “mainstream.”
 help to change the way we understand groups by
investigating the intersections of multiple factors,
such as gender, age, class, race, and other
characteristics.
Post-Structuralist Approaches
 Reciprocal Ethnography
 Assumes that not only do people know what they
are trying to communicate through folklore, but
they know best what it means.
 Both an interpretive approach and a method for
analyzing and presenting observations about
folklore
 Product: the consultants’ and folklorists’ reflexive
analyses in a variety of ways. Some might present
both, side by side, or present the consultants’
views when they differ from the folklorists’.
Post-Structuralist Approaches
 Intersectionality
 concerns dimensions of class, race, politics,
ethnicity, gender, culture, religion, sexuality,
ability/disability, religion and society that
overlap (intersect) to influence worldview and
our expressive communications.
 frequently focus on oppressed or under-
represented individuals or groups, those who
have been excluded, ignored, or discriminated
against by mainstream groups—in other words,
those who have been “pushed to the margins.”

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