Traveller and Folk Culture

who is most notably linked to the Indianist School and what do they believe

• Theodor Bonfey

• this group of scholars believed that fairy tales originated in India and spread to the rest of a world by a process of migration

what is structuralism in relation to storytelling, how does this link to folklore

• mythology and folktales work on symbols, symbols being shared ideas that emulate common binary ideas that underpin human understanding

• this is relevant to folklore discussions as we often focus on separating group ideas and beliefs, but structuralism brings attention to the shared groundings of larger communities and ties them together as part of a human existence 

• we can then analyse and mark where diversion of belief and practice happens 

what method applies ideas from linguistic narratology to folklore and what are the steps

• historic geographic model

• FIND: find all textual variations of a tale

• GROUP: group them on a geographical basis and place in categories of motifs

• DETERMINE: determine which forms are older and account for how they spread

• UR-TEXT: determine the original text

what are criticisms of historic geographic model

• too speculation based

• does not account for context of oral narration, therefore does not account for a theory of folktale

what is Propp’s morphology, what is its relevance to folktale 

• it is a set of ‘morphemes’, not in the linguistic sense but meaning smaller units of narrative 

• these morphemes occur in chronological order in many many folk tales, not all inclusive but many and in this order

• it demonstrates perhaps the migratory effect of folktale and how through oral narration stories may change vaguely in terms of arbitrary details like names, but the core narrative structure is consistent

what is the newer contextualist/ performance theory

defines folklore is distinctly different to regular speech through its signalling and cues reminiscent of a performance

who was Donald Alasdair and what is his relevance to folktale

• a renowned storyteller who was happened upon later in his life by a fieldworker collecting data in his area of South Uist 

• he was one of the last Gaelic seanchaids 

• he is notable in that his stories stretched a large repertoire that went back centuries, and he learned this through traditional contexts from his father and grandfather who was also a well-known storyteller 

• his language was very formulaic and fixed, and his recitals were more like poetry than a speech act