GENED1196 Midterm: Theoretical Models & Approaches

What is ethnography?

Ethnography is the detailed study of a group or community by spending time with people, observing their everyday lives, talking with them, and learning how they understand their own traditions and culture.

What is fieldwork in folklore?

Fieldwork is when a folklorist goes into a community or social setting to observe, interview, record, and participate in traditions as they actually occur.

What are common methods used during folklore fieldwork?

Folklorists may use interviews, participant observation, audio/video recordings, photographs, field notes, and informal conversations to document traditions.

What is participant observation?

A research method where the folklorist both observes a group and participates in its activities. This helps the researcher understand a tradition from closer to an insider perspective.

Why is positionality important in ethnography?

Researchers have their own identities, experiences, and assumptions. These can influence what they notice, how people interact with them, and how they interpret what they observe.

What is Performance Theory in folklore?

Performance Theory argues that folklore should be studied as something people actively perform in particular situations, rather than simply as texts, stories, or objects.

What does Performance Theory focus on?

It focuses on the relationship between the performer, audience, setting, delivery, and social context of a folkloric event.

Why is context important in Performance Theory?

The meaning of folklore can change depending on who performs it, who the audience is, where it happens, when it happens, and why it is being performed.

How does Performance Theory change the way we study a folk song?

Instead of studying only the lyrics, we also examine how it is sung, the performer's style, audience reactions, setting, gestures, tone, and purpose.

What is the Historic-Geographic Method?

An older folklore research method that compares many versions of the same folktale or tradition from different places to trace how it spread and changed over time.

What was the goal of the Historic-Geographic Method?

Scholars tried to reconstruct the earliest or original form of a tale and determine where it may have originated and how it traveled geographically.

How would the Historic-Geographic Method study a folktale?

A researcher would collect versions from different regions, compare their characters and plots, identify similarities and differences, and try to map how the story was transmitted.

What is a limitation of the Historic-Geographic Method?

It can focus heavily on finding an "original" version while paying less attention to performance, context, and what different versions mean to the communities telling them.

What is intersectionality?

Intersectionality is the idea that people's experiences are shaped by multiple parts of their identity at the same time, such as race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, religion, or disability.

Why is intersectionality useful in folklore?

People within the same folk group do not necessarily experience traditions identically. Their different identities and social positions can affect how they participate in, interpret, or transmit folklore.

What is a simple example of intersectionality in folklore?

A tradition may have different meanings for men and women, younger and older people, or people of different social classes, even if they belong to the same broader community.

What is Oral-Formulaic Theory?

Oral-Formulaic Theory explains how oral performers can create and remember very long stories or songs by using repeated phrases, formulas, themes, and narrative patterns.

Who developed Oral-Formulaic Theory?

It grew primarily from the research of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, especially their study of Balkan oral epic singers called guslars.

What is a "formula" in Oral-Formulaic Theory?

A formula is a repeated phrase or pattern that a performer can use while constructing an oral performance.

Did oral epic singers simply memorize entire songs word-for-word?

No. Parry and Lord argued that singers could compose during performance using familiar formulas, themes, and story structures.

Why can different performances of the same oral epic be different?

Because the performer is recreating the story during each performance, rather than reproducing one permanently fixed text.

What is the Ethnography of Communication?

It studies how people communicate within particular cultures and communities and the social rules that determine when, where, how, and with whom certain forms of speech are appropriate.

What is the Ethnography of Speaking?

It focuses specifically on speech as a culturally organized activity. It asks how communities develop their own rules for storytelling, joking, greeting, arguing, singing, and other forms of speaking.

What kinds of questions does the Ethnography of Speaking ask?

Questions like: Who is allowed to speak? Who listens? When can someone tell a particular story? What tone should they use? What makes someone a good storyteller?

Why is this important to folklore?

Knowing the words of a story or joke isn't enough. You also need to understand the community's rules about how, when, and why it should be communicated.

What does "attention" mean in folklore performance?

Attention refers to how a performer signals to an audience that what they are doing deserves special attention—that this is a performance rather than ordinary communication.

What are aesthetics in folklore?

Aesthetics are a group's ideas about what makes a performance beautiful, impressive, skillful, entertaining, or appropriate.

Who decides whether a folklore performance is "good"?

The standards often come from the folk group itself. Different communities can have different expectations about what makes someone a skilled singer, storyteller, dancer, or performer.

How are attention and aesthetics connected?

Once something is marked as a performance, audiences pay special attention to how well it is performed and judge it according to the group's aesthetic standards.

What are the Twin Laws of Tradition?

The Twin Laws are continuity and variation. Folklore must remain recognizable enough to connect to tradition, while also changing as different people perform and transmit it.

What does continuity mean in the Twin Laws of Tradition?

Continuity means that parts of a tradition remain recognizable across different performances, people, places, or generations.

What does variation mean in the Twin Laws of Tradition?

Variation means that traditions naturally change. Different performers may alter words, movements, details, styles, or meanings.

Why are continuity and variation both necessary?

Without continuity, people might no longer recognize something as the same tradition. Without variation, the tradition could not adapt to new performers, situations, communities, or generations.

What is an easy example of the Twin Laws of Tradition?

A folk song may have the same basic melody and story (continuity) but different singers may change lyrics, verses, tempo, or style (variation).