Historicizing Folklore

UNIT 1 FOLKLORE: HISTORICAL

PERSPECTIVES
Structure

1.0 Objectives
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Folklore: A Historical Science?
1.3 Collaboration Between Historian and Folklorist: The Common Ground
1.3.1 Transmission of Information and Source Material
1.3.2 The Oral-Written Issue
1.3.3 The Question of Objectivity
1.3.4 History and the ‘Non-Literate’ Communities
1.3.5 Reconstructing History from Tradition: The African Experience
1.3.6 Oral Tradition as Valid Material for Historical Research
1.3.7 Oral History
1.3.8 Oral Tradition
1.4 Let Us Sum Up
1.5 References and Further Reading
1.6 Check Your Progress

1.0 OBJECTIVES
After reading this unit you will be able to:
 Learn the meaning of folklore, folkloristics and history,
 Understand the role of history in folkloristic study,
 Learn the historical evolution of folklore as a discipline in India,
 Gain insights into how the people perceive their world in their own way and pass
it down to the next generation
 Realise the significance of folkloristic and historical study in non-literate
communities.
 Understand the relationship between the historian and folklorist

1.1 INTRODUCTION
A concept of folklore is seen as the discussion between the two or more people face to
face which is known to them since the past, i.e., they do not talk about the new thing
but the widely known thing which has been passed from the previous generation to
them.
The word folklore is made of two words ‘folk’ and ‘lore’, was coined by the Englishman
William Thoms in 1846. Here,‘folk’ means a social group that includes two or more 195
Folklore and persons with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive
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traditions. ‘Lore’ comes from old English ‘instruction’—it is knowledge and traditions
of a particular group, frequently passed along by word of mouth. Folklore is the
expressive body of culture shared by a particular group of people. It encompasses the
traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral tradition such
as tales, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture ranging from traditional
building style to handsome toys common to the group. Folklore also includes customary
lore, taking actions for folk beliefs, the forms and rituals of celebrations such as Christmas
and weddings folk dances and initiation rites. Each one of these either singly or in
combination is considered a folklore artifact. History is the scientific study of past
which has evolved from Greek word ‘historia’, means ‘inquiry’, i.e., knowledge acquired
by investigation.
Folklore refers to the traditional beliefs and stories of a community. This includes
folktales, myths, legends, beliefs, practices, superstitions, etc. This highlights that folklore
captures a wide span. It can be stated that folklore of a particular group of people is
built in accordance with their culture. People make sense of their surrounding world
through the usage of folklore. The various superstitions, stories, beliefs all add up to
the creation of this cultural heritage, and history is a narration of the events which have
happened among mankind, including an account of the rise and fall of nations, as well
as of other great changes which have affected the political and social condition of the
human race. History is culture. Different cultures shape different histories. Without
resort to falsification, historians select different facts and arrange them differently because
historians live in a different society governed by different needs. Writers throughout
Europe drew liberally as well on story collections from the Near East, such as the pre-
eighth century Sanskrit fable book the Panchatantra and Somdeva’s eleventh-century
work Kathasaritsagara. Because of the tendency and freedom among writers of the
time to copy, recopy and edit, many of the same stories appeared in writing again and
again. Such tales became even more widely known as individuals, who learned them
from written sources, re-told them to live audiences in varied settings, including courts,
churches, marketplaces, drinking establishments, and homes.
Folklore emerged as a new field of learning in the nineteenth century, when antiquarians
in England and Philologists in Germany began to look closely at the ways of the lower
classes. In 1812, the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm commenced publishing
influential volumes of oral folk narratives and interpretations of Germanic mythology.
The word they used to denote this subject was volkskunde. Then, on 22 August
1846, an English antiquarian, William John Thoms, sent a letter to the Athenaeum, a
magazine catering to the intellectually curious, suggesting that the new word “Folk-
lore” be then forth adopted in place of the cumbersome phrase “popular antiquities”.
The term caught on and proved its value in defining a new area of knowledge and
subject of inquiry, but it has also caused confusion and controversy. To the layman,
and to the academic man too, folklore suggests falsity, wrongness, fantasy, and distortion.
Or, it may conjure up pictures of granny woman spinning traditional tales in mountain
cabins or gaily costumed peasants performing seasonal dances. In the present work,
folklore will mean both a field of learning and the whole subject matter of that field.
History as a term possesses the same ambiguity, standing for the discipline and for the
content, but it does not create the same possible misunderstanding.
A concept of folklore and an interest in the expressive traditions from which the concept
is derived existed along before the word ‘folklore’ was coined. From the beginning of
196 recorded history, writers called attention to what they considered fantastic stories and
exotic customs. The ancient Greeks were among the first to commit to writing oft-told Historicizing Folklore
tales they called myths and to make such narratives the subjects of discussion and
debate. Folk history and academic history cannot be separated by truth, for both are
as true as their practitioners can make them. Nor can they be separated by significance,
for both are meaningful in context, absurd when shattered into fragments. Differences
do remain.
A minor difference between folk and academic histories is to be found in the medium
of communication. In oral history, it is difficult to preserve the unmemorable, the welter
of dull details and fine webs of qualification that make written arguments seem complex
and convincing do not belong in good tales. Oral history cannot be boring. Yet, in oral
history, it is harder to lie. Face to face with a small and knowledgeable audience, the
historian is checked constantly and prevented from drifting off along lines of thought
that shifting, shifting permute into falsehood in the solitude of the study.
It was earlier known as the fantastic stories about anything before the folklore term
was coined; means even when the term ‘folklore’ was not coined, the fantastic stories
and exotic customs were being transmitted to each other.
Ancient Greeks were the first one to discuss or debate the folklore which was known
as Myth. The Chi-Cheng was developed as Chinese anthology during 551 BC to 479
BC. The Roman historian talks about the traditions and customs of German Tribes in
his text Germania (AD 98). Kojiki (AD 712, English edition in 1882) and Nihongi
(AD 720, English edition in 1896) were Japanese historical texts which mentioned
about the myths, legends and folksongs for the chronological narratives which has
further developed as the folkloristic study after the decline of the ancient civilization.
Early chroniclers,Venerable Bede and William of Malmesbury, discussed the popular
stories of Virgin Mary’s miracles and Christian saints’ lives in the texts. Many short
moral compilations were used as the source by the medieval priests as sermons to be
passed to their people. Writers of European region even compiled many texts influenced
from the Sanskrit texts drawn from the Panchatantra and Kathasaritsagara, and
therefore, with the repetition of same stories again and again mentioned in the writings,
they widely spread among the people and also influenced them to transmit the discussion
into various settings, including courts, churches, market places, drinking establishments
and homes.
Folklore became as the source for the authors, researchers from the middle century
through the first half of 18th century as many writes like Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio
(AD 1313-1375) and English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (AD 1342-1400) discussed
many oral storytelling or folktales. Many humorous stories were widely told during the
Renaissance for the entertainment purposes,which later on passed through generations
and became widely known narratives. Stories like fools cutting the branch of tree on
which he was sitting (AD 1240), burning homes to kill the rodents and insects (AD
1282).
History stands for the series of past events in the existence of nation, individual, etc. As
per dictionary connotation, it is chronological record or narrative of past events. In
academic circles, the primary meaning of term history is that it is the scientific study of
events. Historiography represents the writing of history, especially of the writing of
history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particulars from
the authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those particulars into a
narrative that will stand the test of critical methods. The term ‘historiography’ refers to
the theory and history of historical writing. 197
Folklore and History is the study of life in society in the past, in all aspects, in relation to present
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developments and future hopes. It is the story of man in time, an inquiry into the past
based on evidence. Indeed, evidences are the raw materials of history teaching and
learning. It is an inquiry into what happened in the past, when it happened, and how it
happened. It is an inquiry into the inevitable changes in human affairs in the past and the
ways these changes affect, influence or determine the patterns of life in the society.
History and folklore both explain past events, but history as the subject provides us the
chronology of the events with the help of primary or secondary sources, whereas
folklore too explains past events and cultures but as a subject it does not provide us
the chronology nor it have the reasonable sources to prove.
Folklore comprises traditional creations of people, primitive or civilized. These are
achieved by using sounds and words in metricalas well as prose forms, and include
folk beliefs or superstitions, customs and performances, dances and plays. Folklore is
the generic term to designate the customs, beliefs, traditions, tales, magical practices,
proverbs, songs, etc., in short, the accumulated knowledge of a homogenous
unsophisticated people, tied together not only by common physical bonds, but also by
emotional ones which color their every expression, giving it unity and individual
distinction.
Even folkloristics themselves have widely divergent views about what constitutes folklore.
One of the reasons for this is that the concept about the nature of folklore itself has
undergone considerable change over the years.
According to Archer Taylor, folklore is the material handed down traditionally either
by word of mouth or by custom and practice.W.R. Bascom says that folklore
comprehends all knowledge that is transmitted by word of mouth and all crafts and
techniques that are learnt by imitation and example as well as by the product of such
crafts.
Folklore is history almost as old as the human society. There has been no society—not
excluding the most ancient or most primitive in which knowledge, belief, customs, etc.
have been shared and handed down. As Bascom says, folklore is one of the important
parts that go to make up the culture of given people…there is no known culture which
does not include folklore.
The study of folklore is hardly two hundred years old. Scholars agree that interest in
the systematic collection and preservation of folklore started in Europe—in Germany,
to be precise—towards the last part of the 18th century, almost in the synchronization
with the two intellectual movements of Romanticism and Nationalism. Two young
German brothers, Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, assiduously took up the task of
collecting, examining and publishing German tales and myths in a systematic manner. It
is a generally agreed that the history of modern folklore studies began with the publication
of the volume of German folktales under the title Kinder und Hausmarchen (Children’s
and Householders’ tales) in 1812 by the Grimm brothers. However, the new discipline
was known in Germany by the designation volkskunde, and the term continues to be
used even now.
Often phrases such as folklore studies and folklore research were used to refer to the
study, as distinguished from the materials. Folkloristics has been coined to mean the
discipline, as the scientific study of folklore. However, the use of such terms as folklore
studies and folklore research and even folklore to identify the field of study, still continues.
It is called as folklore studies, folklore research or folkloristics, this particular field of
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knowledge reminded more or less minor and marginal subject, both inside and outside Historicizing Folklore

the groves of academia.

As Durga Bhagwat, a celebrated scholar of Indian society and culture points out,
“India is a land which is known for its love of stories. From the very remote times
Indians have looked upon stories and songs as special divinities.” Indian folklore also
figured prominently in the development of modern folkloristics. Once J. Grimm (1835)
had postulated a connection between Indian and European mythology, and Max Mueller
(1856) had elaborated upon it, the study of Indian folklore became essential to the
development of folklore theory in the latter half of the 19th century. That was the initial
stage of the study of Indian folklore along modern academic lines in which Indian
folklore research was dominated by philologists and linguists working in Sanskrit,
Persian or Arabic with little, if any, direct knowledge of India. The second phase was
marked by the shift from classical text to field collection in India, done mostly by the
British Government officials, both civil and military, and their wives, as well as Christian
missionaries. In the third period, there was combination of the methods of field collection
and philology, again engaged in the mostly by Western scholars, with only one or two
Indian scholars occasionally joining in. In the fourth period, beginning around the 1950s,
anthropologists and language specialists began to record the major genres of verbal
folklore in most regions of India. During this time, the primary role in the study of India,
including the field of folklore, passed from Britain to America.
Soon after Independence, “the nationalist movement spurred new respect for, interest
in, folk traditions”. Starting from the around this time, folklore programmes were setup
in some Indian Universities. One of the earliest such programmes was started at Gauhati
University by the late Birinchi Kumar Barua, way back in 1955.The fifth and current
period of research in Indian folklore started approximately in the 1980s. Extensive
field research, particularly explorations into new fields as well as the induction of new
perspectives, characterizes this period. There have been closer and deeper academic
exchanges between Indian and foreign scholars. The result has been that the conceptual
basis of the field is shifting; ethnographic and linguistic skill in South Asian research
have now been enriched by the comparative reach and specialized focus of folklore
studies. This combination of new materials and new approaches promises to find new
meanings for India folklore.

1.2 FOLKLORE: A HISTORICAL SCIENCE?

As we have seen in the preceding section, folkloristics has from the beginning been
involved with a past-oriented perception. Folklore, according to this perception,
belonged to an earlier age and had come to be retained in the present age in the beliefs,
practices, tales, myths, ballads, etc., of the peasantry living in the countryside. The
business of the folklorist was to identify such folklore items to collect them, and if
possible, to interpret them. It is significant that before the coining of the term ‘folklore’,
the phrase that was in vogue in the English language to designate folklore items happened
to be ‘popular antiquities’, the very word ‘antiquity’ suggesting pastness. William John
Thoms’description of folklore itself reveals in no uncertain terms that folklore was
made only of material that belonged to the bygone days—the manners, customs,
observations, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc., of the olden time, records of old
time, some recollection of now neglected custom, some fading legends, local traditions,
or fragmentary ballads.
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Folklore and In fact, Thoms’ description of folklore represented the 19th century attitude towards
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folklore. Folklore then was conceived of as things surviving from the past that were
fast disappearing. It was thus incumbent upon the folklorists to concentrate their efforts
in the collection and preservation of this fast-vanishing survival. Collect or perish seems
to have been watchword making the rounds in the world of folklore at that time.
Also, in the 19th century, currents of nationalism and romanticism induced many to
engage in the collection of oral traditions, preferably from peasants in rural areas.
These traditions, as it was thought, were dying out. As such, it was urgent to collect
them before they were totally lost.

1.3 COLLABORATION BETWEEN HISTORIAN AND

FOLKLORIST: THE COMMON GROUND
1.3.1 Transmission of Information and Source Material
Historical research is the term applied to the work necessary for the establishing of
occurrences, happenings, or events in the field with which the historian is concerned. It
is clearly stated here that the facts that historians deal with are not their own experience
but only relics, tracks or traces of the occurrence based on accounts of the occurrences,
or something that is the end-product of such occurrences, which could be written,
verbal or material.
This expert opinion on historiography, apart from displaying an open-minded and
pragmatic attitude towards traditional source material of history, also underlines a few
other relevant points which are of vital importance for our discussion here, and with
which we will deal more elaborately in this section and also in the next. These points
are:
a) Verbal accounts can be and have been original sources for historiography,
b) The distinction between verbal and the written is not of fundamental significance,
and
c) The subjective element may be present in both written and traditional sources,
and it is for the historian to make allowances for it in both.
However, there appears to be among many historians a kind of distrust or guarded
skepticism about the admissibility of verbal or unwritten material for the purpose of
constructing history. There are several reasons for the distrust or skepticism but some
of the reasons for such distrust or skepticism may be listed as follows:
a) Whatever is unwritten or in the oral tradition is unreliable;
b) Good history must be based on the facts supported by documents or other
tangible evidences; and
c) Illiterate peoples do not care for chronology and thus do not have a sense of
history.

1.3.2 The Oral-Written Issue

Whatever is written is more prestigious and trustworthy than whatever is not—this
idea somehow seems to be ingrained in many sections of the scholastic world, including
200 that of history and historiography. But this excessive veneration for the written material
is clearly misplaced. There is no necessary or inevitable dichotomy between the oral Historicizing Folklore
and written traditions. In fact, often the written tradition starts with the putting down of
the oral material into writing and the occurrence of various types of oral material is a
common feature of all written traditions.
Bynum examines this oral-written issue in the context of history in the following way:
According to a familiar doctrine, there is no scientific history except in the
scholarly, written tradition of western historiography since Herodotous and
Thucydides. Writing no doubt does encourages deliberate reflection and accurate
statement. A scrupulous historian must prize these qualities dearly in other men’s
depositions about what happened in the past. But at the very fast best, not every
valuable eye-witness or participant in historically significant events has had time
or inclination to write down what he knows, not even if he has known how to
write and what writings is, and every historian has sometime had to admit evidence
someone’s oral account of historical happenings. Nor does one necessarily need
to bend the usual rules of historical evidence to accept such oral accounts as
good history.

1.3.3 The Question of Objectivity

On the question of objectivity, Carr takes a bold stand and makes some extremely
sensible observation. It can thus be concluded that although one has to be more careful
with oral materials as sources of history because it has no proof written somewhere
and was transmitted orally mostly, the problems and methods for treating such materials
are basically the same as with written materials. To quote Bymun again:
Some of the problems and methods of dealing with oral history are, then, not
different from those familiar to Western Historiography since Thucydides whose
own sources of history were often oral. If there is any greater or unique difficulty
about oral sources of historical information as contrasted written or archaeological
ones, perhaps it is only those oral sources so soon become unrefusable. Properly
speaking, oral sources are people, in a short time they die, and there is no dependent
able way on consulting them once they are dead.

1.3.4 History and the ‘Non-Literate’ Communities

The wish to understand historical events rationally is (not) an exclusive property of the
historians; on the contrary, all mankind manifestly shares it with them. The problem is
only that one man’s reason is another man’s prejudice or superstitions, and one man’s
history is another man’s fable. Raglan states that the peasants and non-literate peoples
have no concept of history and thus can have no interest in it.
History is the recital in chronological sequence of events which are known to have
occurred. Without precise chronology, there can be no history, since the essence of
history is the relation of events in their correct sequence.

1.3.5 Reconstructing History from Tradition: The African Ex

perience
As we have seen in the previous sub-section, the non-literate communities do have
history as well as a sense of history—although of a different kind—in spite of the fact
that European ethnocentric thinking has persisted in denying this fact. Of course,
scholars—particularly anthropologists and folklorists—have endeavored to highlight 201
Folklore and the important of utilizing the oral traditions of non-literate peoples for the purpose of
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history-writing.
This fundamental belief in the continuity of life is an essential element of traditional
African historiography. All over sub-Saharan Africa, the relevance of the dead to the
life of the present and future generations is a common feature. There is a deep-seated
belief that each community was founded by an ancestor or group of ancestors and the
community owed all their possessions to them.
Each community—family, clan, village, town or state—however large or small, had an
established tradition concerning its origin. The community might split up, migrate and
assimilate new elements, or be conquered by others or absorbed by new immigrants.
At each stage of transformation, the tradition was recrystallized to accommodate
changed conditions, and a new tradition of origin was formulated by the new community.
This tradition became the core of the community’s view of history. The very process of
tradition-making and acculturation in the community, and of transmission of tradition to
succeeding generations developed a consciousness of history that became widespread
in Africa.

1.3.6 Oral Tradition as Valid Material for Historical Research

Historian and folklorist can find common ground in the area of traditional history. Such
history may include personal, family, neighborhood and township historical traditions.
In countries where literacy, formal school and printed publications dominate the culture,
traditional history is slighted or scorned by professional historians. Yet in these societies,
large numbers and groups of people still possess their own traditions. They differ
markedly form conventional written history.
A distinguished professor of history and folklore, Dorson, knew what he was talking
about. What he calls the ‘folklore tradition’, and which is also designated as the ‘oral
tradition’ is definitely a potential source from which historical material can be culled
with profit. However, it should be made clear that the connection between history and
the oral tradition is not a direct one but the dependence has some special significance
in literature. Oral tradition encompasses a variety of components, and thus, they must
be treated with appropriate methodologies to extract historical material. But there is
another specific field which is quite close to oral tradition, though not always a part of
it. Known as ‘oral history’, this field has a limited scope compared to, oral tradition
and as the nomenclature it suggests, it comes almost directly under the purview of
history. We shall now try or illumine the respective natures of these two fields form the
academic point of view.

1.3.7 Oral History

According to one definition, oral history is essentially an account of first-hand historical
experience, recalled retrospectively and communicates to an interviewer for historical
purposes. Another definition state that “oral history is the recording and interpretation
of spoken testimonials about an individual’s past.”
Oral history itself has a long history, dating back to the time of the ancient Greeks,
when historians like Thucydides collected memories of the experiences of the individuals
for the purpose of historical records. Oral history is considered to be an ideal method
for holding the mirror up to the experiences, attitudes and ideologies at the grassroots
level in the recent past. This method has been characterized as the recovery mode by
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some—since it helps in the recovery of experiences of those who are marginalized. Historicizing Folklore
Oral history may take more than one form. Oral testimonial may be used for the purpose
of giving a detailed account of a person’s life: it is then called life history of personal
narrative. When it is used for historical reconstruction and analysis of social change,
cross-analysis is resorted to. Life history interviews are structured or semi-structured.
When cross-analysis is done on oral testimony, larger samples with more structured
interviews are brought into play. While oral history accounts were in the form of written
transcripts, the coming of sound recording by the end of the 19thcentury changed the
picture. Today, of course, the tape recorder and the video camera have revolutionized
the field.

1.3.8 Oral Tradition

We had the occasion to say something on tradition in a preceding section in another
context—that of the association of tradition with the historical sense. Etymologically,
tradition is traced back to the Latin word, tradition which means transmission or handing
down. Francis Bacon is known to have used it in the sense expressing and transferring
knowledge as far back as 1605. However, tradition came to be associated in the 18th
century more intimately with folklore material like songs, ballads, tales, proverbs,
customs and so on, when romantic nationalism prompted societies to look back with
nostalgia at their respective national heritages. Such folklore material, it was agreed,
belonged to the oral tradition.
R.M. Dorson, in his Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, suggests some important
criteria for evaluating the historical validity of oral traditions, which are listed below:
a) Identification of folklore material grafted onto historical settings;
b) Allowance for personal and emotional bias coloring a tradition;
c) Cross-checks of multiple traditions;
d) Corroboration of a tradition from printed records;
e) Corroboration of a tradition from geographical landmarks;
f) Corroboration of a tradition from material culture; and
g) Knowledge of the character of an informant.
If such guidelines are carefully followed, then it is possible for the historian to handle
historical traditions effectively and profitably. Oral traditional fiction, observes Bynum,
is always a rich and ready source of reasonable explanations for past experience.
Historians have deplored this fact, while literary people have reveledin it, but whether
they like it or not, it is a fact, and a fact of central importance to both the humanities and
social sciences.

1.4 LET US SUM UP

In the course of this chapter, a humble effort has been made to establish that folklore
and history—although apparently removed from each other—have much common
ground in various respects. Co-operation between the folklorist and the historian is not
only a possibility but also a necessity, in the interest of a fuller and better comprehension
of the past as related to the present. In India, where the two levels of the classic and
the folk have been operating in a close symbiotic relationship since ancient times, this
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Folklore and co-operation assumes all the more significance. It focusses on Indian folklore and
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Indian history which is largely not given that much importance till now but the recent
trends assume the implication of it in larger interest. And more so in regions like the
African continent and even North-East India which offer such a great wealth of material
to work with in terms of the written and the unwritten, the tangible and the intangible,
the believed and the documented, etc. It opens up the prospects of a meaningful dialogue,
not only between folklore and history, but also encompassing several others disciplines
such as cultural anthropology, archaeology, social work, tribal studies and linguistics,
which seem to be very bright indeed.

1.5 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Crooke W. An Introduction to Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern
India.Delhi, Low Price Publications.
Datta, Birendranath. Folklore and Historiography. National Folklore Support Centre,
2002.
Dorson R.M. Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction.Chicago and London, The
University of Chicago Press.
George, Robert A. Folkloristics: An Introduction. Indiana University Press.
Thapar R., J.M. Kenoyer, M.M. Deshpande, S. Ratnagar. India: Historical Beginnings
and The Concept of the Aryan. National Book Trust, India 2007.

1.6 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

1. What is the role of oral traditions in historical research?
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2. How has folklore evolved as a discipline in India?

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3. Write a note on the history offolklore as a discipline.

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4. What do you mean by folkloristic perspective in academics and research? Historicizing Folklore

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5. How relevant is oral tradition in an illiterate society?

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6. What do you mean by history and historiography?

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7. How does one clarify the validity and relevance of folk traditions for historical
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8. Write a short note on the relationship between folklorists and historians?

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9. Critically analyses the role of folklore in history as a discipline.

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Folklore and 10. What are the major challenges for the folklorists in relatingto history in the academic
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