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A thought for Saturday:
There are people behind #folklore of any sort. These people have told their stories, practised their rites, maintained their traditions because they believed in them, and because the folklore was theirs.
When we begin to view these people’s folklore as a means to our end (which nearly always means the extraction of filthy lucre, directly or otherwise), our practice removes us from the people who developed the folklore; we are rather conducting capitalistic, and ultimately colonialistic, #exploitation.
Is that who we want to be?
@SimonRoyHughes @folklore I think this applies to many of the features of folklore (like dress, food, custom) but I'd always make the exception for stories, because those stories are delivery mechanisms for wisdom - like that is what the technology was invented for. Of course they'd be better intelligible with appreciation for their origin but if they are at all comprehensible outside that culture, dissemination propagates that wisdom, which can't be a fail.
Motive is important in determining whether someone acts righteously in propagating a tale but I don't think it determines whether the world benefits from it being better known - I think this happens irrespective of intent. Similarly tales are memes that move through populations rather than cultural artefacts limited by scarcity, so even if a group of tellers of a tale want to keep it for themselves, I don't think this is possible or desirable.
who are "the people themselves" and how do you assess their opinion in any legitimate way given that folktales crosspollinate across cultures, changing each time in the telling?
The only possible owner of a folk story is anyone who knows it, the teller in the moment and the listener who brings new ears to it. I stand by my point, it's not possible or desirable to control those "new ears", and even if you could, there's no way to determine ownership sufficient to be able to circumscribe dissemination.
Fully agree, let's explore that: how should we think about it? What thought are we pausing for and how do we decide to proceed or not with dissemination? What does it mean to "make it our own"? (if I change it, is it a new story or am I bastardizing? how much change is a new story? does the teller change it demographically even if the story is identical). I support the call to learn and tell stories consciously. How would you apply this?
@SimonRoyHughes@beige.partyI have little interest in exploring the topic, but let me give an example of what I'm talking about.
Beginning in the late 1500s, the Sami population in Norway was subjected to a protracted campaign of erasure by sucessive Danish then Swedish then Norwegian governments. It began with accusations of witchcraft, with accompanying trials and executions, and ended with children being removed from their parents, and the imposition of the Norwegian language on the whole nation. The Sami religion was sinful. The Sami culture – singing, music-making, dress, housing, manner of life – was weird. The Sami language was incomprehensible and thus ridiculed and feared.
In the midst of all this violence – methods that have subsequently been defined as genocidal, and admitted as such by recent governments – the Norwegian academic, Just Qvigstad, began to collect Sami folktales and legends. Much of his material was sent to him by other Norwegian teachers, rather than recounted directly by the Sami. He eventually published four volumes of these folk narratives – in Norwegian, rather than in Sami.
These stories were recorded from Sami raconteurs by Norwegians, sent to another Norwegian, then published in Norwegian. (I have yet to determine whether Qvigstad translated everything, or whether his Norwegian middlemen did so before sending the narratives to him.) Qvigstad received all manner of accolades for his work. A number of the Sami raconteurs’ names have been recorded, but at the same time Qvigstad was conducting his work, the state for whom he worked was busy erasing the culture of his object of study.
Now, the stories Qvigstad published are all available to me, a translator of Norwegian. They are as wonderful and delightful as of those of any collection of folklore. I could translate them for an English audience. But doing so would entail removing the tales and legends one degree further from the people they originally belonged to. Translating the tales as uncritically as I have translated Norwegian folktales and legends would mean turning a blind eye to all the injustice and pain the Sami have suffered at the hands of the nation state they (and I) call home. Should I ignore the genocide, just to bring some entertaining stories to the Anglophone world? Or should I rather wait for these stories, which ought to have initially been recorded in Sami languages, to be published by the Sami themselves?
I think you can understand what my conclusion has been.