Taken from Living Folklore - An Introduction by Stephen and Sims

1. Approaches to
Interpreting Folklore

2. Functionalism
• Folklore communicates: it is an ongoing process of expressing
information and beliefs within folk groups.
why and how it is important to the people sharing it
• One of the ways folklorists consider meaning is to examine the
way folklore functions in the community. It is a way to link
people with the items of their folklore.
• William R. Bascom (1965) identified four functions of folklore:
1. Education, particularly, but not exclusively, in nonliterate
societies.
2. To escape from limits or impositions the culture places on
us.
3. Maintaining conformity to the accepted patterns of
behavior.
4. Folklore validates culture.

3. • Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who looked
at culture and society as an organic whole. Bascom’s approach
suggested the natural or organic connection between people
and their expressive culture.
folklore is an important mechanism for maintaining the stability
of culture
• Bascom’s system ignores the way folklore questions, critiques,
protests, and sometimes undermines stability.
• If the function never changes, that implies the group never
changes. The functional approach is always conservative and
static; the functions themselves are conservative. Functional
analysis, then, is ahistorical, suggesting that the text was
used—or the performance occurred—for the same reason
regardless of context.

4. • Functionalism is the strategy or framework that requires us to make
meaning of folklore, so if there’s only one meaning, someone has to
decide what the one meaning is. Because folklorists assumed they
knew the meaning of everyone else’s folklore, the functionalist
approach maintained the old us/them dichotomy, which lends itself
to a view of “the folk” as uneducated and their culture as
unsophisticated.
• The term function refers to the role or purpose something or
someone plays in a given setting. Looking at an item from this
perspective allows us to explore what the object, verbal expression,
or practice communicates within the group in which it is significant.
It is not the only way to understand its value or assume that its
meaning is the same within different groups.
• Folklore and people are connected. The meanings of texts depend on
what a particular group of people does with a specific item of lore in
a specific situation. It’s always about what’s happening in the group
and the context. We can’t isolate meanings of folklore from folk
groups in the same way we can’t isolate folklore itself from people.

5. Structuralism
• Structure is more than the plot; it includes the characters and
the actions they perform, places, names, repeated words and
phrases—any basic elements that make the story
recognizable. We recognize the standard structure of fairy
tales; a princess, a prince, an evil female.
• F.A. de Caro explains, structuralism attempts to identify
characteristics that are essential in every individual example
within a given genre. He 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.

6. • Structuralism also works for jokes and riddles. Robert Georges and
Alan Dundes have pointed out that many riddles begin with a
“descriptive element” that consists of a topic, the object described,
and a comment, which gives more information about the topic.
Others offer a conundrum, in which something possesses opposite,
apparently paradoxical, characteristics.
• Early scholars studied that myths are usually presented as existing
outside time or before our own history, are usually believed to be
true within the group they belong to, and may even be considered
sacred. While tales, on the other hand, usually focus on a single
story that does not obviously relate to big, universal themes, and are
generally understood to be fiction.
• Vladimir Propp presented a system of describing tales according to
patterns of story events, a “morphology” that described the organic
nature of tale structure.
• Certain kinds of folktales in German, shared remarkably similar
internal features. In most of these stories, a young character must
overcome hardship, has an adventure (or adventures), is helped
and/or hindered by magical or supernatural beings, and eventually
triumphs in the end.

7. The rules structure the whole
• One major benefit of this approach is the emphasis on wholes,
rather than on parts, when describing and analyzing a text.
• This approach makes genre not just a label or name for
something, but a real form, which exists regardless of any
interpretation or classification. Structuralism has helped to
uncover basic elements that formed and clarified meaningful
genre and subgenre classifications.
• Many perceived the structural approach to folklore to be
useful in analyzing certain “universal” elements in many kinds
of verbal folklore. For instance, structure allows us to see that
many cultures share riddles that require mental agility and
cleverness.

8. • A system of ethnopoetics originated to describe not just the
structure of the narrative, for example, when someone
laughed or gestured, but also the structure of the sound of the
words and utterances, and how they contributed to the
overall narrative performance, similar to the way a poem is
presented on a page.
• Because structuralism required in many cases close analysis
of how things were said as well as what was said, this system
of notation has proved very useful for those studying
structures in linguistic terms. It allows analysis of structural
patterns, as well as analysis of performance styles and
techniques.
• More importantly, scholars can use an ethnopoetic approach
to discuss how expressive language works within particular
groups and performances, and can extend this discussion to
the holistic analysis of meaning and culture.

9. • The major problems with the structuralism approach have to do
with some of its perceived benefits. Overemphasis on genre resulted
in much scholarly energy being spent on defining what things are,
rather than analyzing how they operate within groups.
• de Caro points out, one way, “perhaps the major way human beings
create order and structure reality, is by creating categories and
placing entities within those categories”. Breaking out of categories
allows us to consider how folklore works within a group—and to
consider the effect of the blurring and overlapping that often takes
place. An over-emphasis on structure highlights what texts look or
sound like, but not what it mean to a group, or when, where, and
why they exist.
• Thus, structuralism suffers the same problems of functionalism;
making assumptions about all people that apply in all cases de-
emphasizes the importance of individuals and groups, and ignores
some of the dynamic processes of folklore. It focuses almost
exclusively on constants, things that apply in all cases in a particular
culture, rather than on the shifting aspects of meaning that depend
on group dynamics and contexts.

10. • Because structuralist studies at first focused almost exclusively on
verbal folklore, the approach became associated for some time with
only verbal genres.
• Then, the heavy emphasis on genre classifications limited, at least
when it was used more for identifying rather than analyzing.
• Lastly, the danger of relying too heavily on a reductive search for
overarching meanings created concern that structuralism was too
simplistic.
• Recent folktale scholars have continued this approach, advocating
integrated interpretations of folktales that combine analysis of
structure, social contexts and symbolic meanings.
• Structural approach application has been in performance analysis
and contextual studies. Any consideration of framing, or “markers”
of performances, for example, is by nature a structuralist enterprise:
frames shape—structure—the social and artistic spaces that
surround performance, and within which performance occurs. The
principles and theoretical applications established by structuralism
remain a valuable analytical tool for folklorists.

11. Psychoanalytic Interpretation
• Psychoanalytic analysis involves the interpretation of symbolic
meanings within texts that illuminate shared developmental
and life experiences of all humans. Psychoanalysts think a
culture’s folklore presents a look at its collective psychological
concerns. Though psychoanalytic interpretation has been
employed by some folklorists in some specific situations, yet
has often been dismissed by others.
• Dundes 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. The key Freudian
concepts Dundes finds important to folklore study are the
range of concepts such as ‘projection’ and ‘family romance’.

12. • Among the major criticisms is that psychoanalytic theory is
too broad, much like the functionalist approach: it assumes
that all human beings share exactly the same experiences, and
that particular texts express that experience in the same way.
• Another limitation to the psychoanalytic approach is that it is
most frequently applied to verbal texts, and is difficult to
apply to the study of groups, performance, materials and
customs.
• For some folklorists, psychoanalysis provides insight into the
more symbolic, psychological aspects of folklore that other
approaches may not address in as much depth. Such
interpretations are difficult to uncover because the meanings
and symbols are often hidden within the text. As Fine says,
“folklore provides a socially acceptable outlet for meaning
that cannot be displayed otherwise. If the meaning was overt,
the text would have to be repressed”.

13. • Fine suggests two specific criteria that he believes should be
applied by folklorists to evaluate the effectiveness of
psychoanalytic interpretations: “Is the analysis internally
consistent? And is the analysis externally valid?
• The goal of folkloristics is not to understand the text, but to
understand people. Psychoanalytic not only applicable relating
to sexuality, but also power, in particular gender-based; racial
or ethnic conflict; or the Oedipal complex.
• If folklorists choose this approach, though, careful textual
analysis and good fieldwork are important, a more “hybrid”
form of analysis, combining different approaches that can
create a system of checks and balances.

14. Post-Structuralist Approaches
• Post-structuralist approaches 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.
• Because of their concern with the marginalization of groups,
social hierarchies and construction of identity, folklorists
interpret the processes of fieldwork and analysis using
multiple lenses.

15. Feminist Interpretations
• women’s folklore: examining both the images of women and
the genres through which women’s creativity has been viewed
and by suggesting genres and approaches not previously
recognized. It is to understand the unique characteristics that
set women’s folklore apart from male experience and culture.
• Jordan and Kalcik point out that both gender and experience
can bias fieldworkers toward a certain perspective in their
observations, and are likely even to affect what the researcher
perceives as important or worth noting.
• The feminist perspective that developed through all this work
encouraged studies focusing on women’s expression in a
number of different contexts.

16. • The collaborative nature of women’s communication allows
folklorists to see collaboration as a legitimate way of making
meaning. Folklorists can be intensely theoretical in an up-from-
under sort of way, becoming virtuoso listeners who know better
than to accept any construction of listening as passive. By listening
to and talking to each other, folklorists and their consultants create
meaning and interpret folklore together.
• Feminism opened 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.”
• Feminist folklore scholarship led to investigations of the
intersections of multiple factors, such as gender, age, class, race, and
other characteristics.
• Feminist theories about women’s communications as collaborative
acts allowed folklorists to acknowledge the value of incorporating
the “insider” consultants’ perspectives within their interpretations.

17. Reciprocal Ethnography
• Reciprocal ethnography assumes that not only do people know
what they are trying to communicate through folklore, but
they know best what it means. folklorists recognized that
placing their own interpretive spin on the analysis of a text
could be ethnocentric, because it often placed the text (or at
least the interpretation of it) in the cultural context of the
folklorist-researcher, not in the context of the group who
communicated through it.
• The hierarchical implications of work in which the folklorist’s
interpretation is the only interpretation, or the only right
interpretation, conflict with the basic premise of folklore as a
process of learning and communicating attitudes, beliefs, and
values that are significant to the group sharing them.

18. • Rather than interpret folklore performances themselves in
scholarly isolation, folklorists ask group members about
meanings and connections. After they have written about
their interpretations, they may share their work and analyses
with their consultants, and offer the opportunity for them to
comment on the folklorist’s interpretations or present their
own.
• Reciprocal ethnography is both an interpretive approach and a
method for analyzing and presenting observations about
folklore. As a result of this perspective, most folklorists
incorporate their consultants’ observations and commentary
into the analysis of the texts and performances they study. For
many, this process of reciprocal ethnography involves
providing consultants with drafts of written accounts (essays,
articles, books), and requesting their feedback.

19. • Honest, thorough interpretations of folklore do not occur in a
vacuum. They are negotiated articulations of meaning that
performers, creators, group members and scholars form
together, as part of an ongoing dialogue or discussion.
• Reciprocal ethnography is a way of acknowledging the
collaborative process of folklore, both in the ways it is created
and shared among group members, and how it is interpreted
and presented by scholars. Ethnographic documents are not
the result of a single voice, and like all representations, they
are negotiated. To explore new forms for discursive
representation and interpretation, we need to experiment not
only with forms of documentation but also with the process of
working with ‘Others’.

20. Intersectionality
• Folklorists look deeply into the intersections of social and
political forces, along with personal, physical, psychological
and emotional characteristics, that shape the underlying
values and relationships we often express through folklore.
• 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.
• Analyses of intersectionality attempt to describe and examine
the ways multiple experiences operate within people and
society in a kind of synergistic relationship. Intersectionality
considers the interplay of simultaneous experiences that make
us who we are.

21. • Scholars who are interested in intersectionality 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.”
• Intersectionality provides a way to theorize about kinds of
complex interactions among the social dynamics of the
performer, performance, audience and observers.
• Intersectionality offers folklorists a way to deepen the study of
the interplay between specific performance contexts and the
forces within larger social contexts that influence
performances and texts. Folklorists look at non-mainstream
experiences and expression, and investigate how those
perspectives comment on, critique, or challenge mainstream
social or cultural values while solidifying and/or
communicating group identity.

22. Conclusion
Current approaches to folklore study focus on people, and how people
communicate with each other within the particular contexts that
shape their cultural expression. At the center of interpretive strategies
in folklore are the texts and contexts, reflective thinking, and the
complexities of the interactions and intersections of performers,
audiences, groups, researchers and society. Thinking about folklore
from so many different perspectives has also provided a way to
understand larger concepts related to social and cultural forces, and
how those forces mold and inform the ways we express ourselves
informally, artistically, creatively. Analyzing folklore allows us to share
with others our own understanding of the complexities of how and
why folklore conveys meanings.