Contexts of Folklore

Contexts of Folklore

Festschrift for Dan Ben-Amos
on His Eighty-Fifth Birthday

Simon J. Bronner and Wolfgang Mieder

EDITORS

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2019009405

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

ISSN 1528-6533

ISBN 978-1-4331-5648-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5649-6 (ebook pdf)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5650-2 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5651-9 (mobi)

DOI 10.3726/b13515

© 2019 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

About the editors

Simon J. Bronner is Dean of the College of General Studies and Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and held the Maxwell C. Weiner distinguished professorship in Humanities at Missouri S&T. He is the recipient of the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement award and Kenneth S. Goldstein Lifetime Achievement Award for Academic Leadership from the American Folklore Society.

Wolfgang Mieder is University Distinguished Professor of German and Folklore at the University of Vermont. He is the founding editor of Proverbium and editor of the International Folkloristics series for Peter Lang Publishing. He has also received the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement award from the American Folklore Society and the Europäischer Märchenpreis (European Folklore Prize) from the Walter Kahn Folklore Foundation.

About the book

Dan Ben-Amos famously ushered in the performance turn in folklore studies in the 1970s with his paradigm-changing definition of folklore as “artistic communication in small groups.” He went on to make profound contributions to issues of folktale, folk speech, genre, cultural memory, biblical and Jewish folklore, African folklore, and historiography, and gain renown around the world as a leading figure in folklore studies. In Contexts of Folklore, leading lights of folklore studies from many corners of the globe honor Ben-Amos by presenting original studies inspired by his insights. Their essays will assuredly be lasting, provocative statements of folklore research that will energize future generations of folklorists and other scholars of culture and communication.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Contexts of Dan Ben-­Amos

Simon J. Bronner and Wolfgang Mieder

1. Nondichao Bachalou, Museum Guide and Historian of Abomey, Benin

Clover Jebsen Afokpa

2. The Truth of Fervent Desire: Stories About the Deaths of Jewish Cultural Heroes During the Holocaust

Haya Bar-­Itzhak

3. Signing at Cross-­Purposes

Richard Bauman

4. Stephen Dedalus Sings “Little Harry Hughes”: Anti-­Semitism as Folkloric Performance in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Michael J. Bell

5. Israeli Political Humor: What Was There To Laugh About in 1967?

Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-­Rokem

6. The Bodies of the Narrator

Charles L. Briggs

7. The Jesus Movement as Folk Group

Gary Alan Fine, Stephanie Bliese, and Christopher Robertson

8. Performancing: The Enactor’s Reality

Ruth Finnegan←v | vi→

9. The Concept of Equal Validity in Narratives of Soviet Experience in the Former Finnish Karelia

Pekka Hakamies

10. Trapping the Intruder: A Narrative Pattern in Homer’s Odyssey

William Hansen

11. A Creole Narrative Grammar

Lee Haring

12. Religious Nationalisms Compared: The Curious Cases of India and Serbia

Frank J. Korom

13. Djuha at Home on the Isle of Rhodes, Italy, and in Georgia, United States

Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt

14. A Quantitative Cross-­Cultural Analysis of Folk Crafts in Relation to Foreign Aid in Developing Countries

Md Abdullah Al Mamun and Simon J. Bronner

15. “Ceci n’est point une fable”: Tale Type ATU 63, The Fox Rids Himself of Fleas, from Popular Tradition to Natural History (and Back Again)

Ulrich Marzolph

16. Folklore and the Emotional Brain

Jay Mechling

17. “Proverbs Are Worth a Thousand Words”: The Global Spread of American Proverbs

Wolfgang Mieder

18. Magic and Libel: Contexts for Muslim Memories of the Jewish Community of Herat, Afghanistan

Margaret A. Mills

19. “Do You Want to Hear a Secret?”: Secret-­Telling as an Oral Genre

Amos Noy

20. In Praise of Formalism: Teaching Samson’s Riddles in a Diverse Classroom

Dorothy Noyes←vi | vii→

21. Giuseppe Pitrè’s Sicilian Folktales: Text and Performance, Prose and Poetry

Joseph Russo

22. The Vernacular Sacred

Jack Santino

23. Tradition and Embodied Knowledge in an Artisan Community

Amy Shuman

24. Folk Narrative Genres, Liminality and Epistemological Uncertainty

Ülo Valk

25. From Wheccumquek to Quink-­Quankeo: “The Fals Fox,” “The Fox and the Goose,” and the Folk Ballad

Stephen D. Winick

26. From Ginzberg’s Legends of the Bible to Ben-­Amos’s Folktales of the Jews: Towards a History of Jewish Folk Narratives and Its Study

Eli Yassif

27. The Shepherd, the Well, and the Jug: National Memory and Symbolic Bridges to Antiquity in Modern Hebrew Culture

Yael Zerubavel

28. Motif as Symbol in Context

Juwen Zhang

29. Waking Henry Iliowizi, Or, How Jews and Gentiles Have Something to Learn from the Dead

Jack Zipes←vii | viii→ ←viii | ix→

Preface and Acknowledgments

Thanks largely to Dan Ben-­Amos, context is a familiar concept not only in folklore studies but also in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. He famously ushered in the performance turn in folklore studies in the 1970s with his paradigm-­changing definition of folklore as “artistic communication in small groups.” He went on to make profound contributions to scholarship on folktale, folk speech, genre, cultural memory, biblical and Jewish folklore, African folklore, and historiography. A devoted teacher, valued mentor, brilliant writer, skilled editor, and peripatetic lecturer, he gained renown around the world as an eminent figure in folklore studies. In this volume, leading lights of folklore studies from many corners of the globe honor Ben-­Amos by presenting original studies inspired by his work with the intention of catalyzing future generations of folklorists and allies in pursuit of figuring out the profound meanings of cultural expression and communication in context.

The plan for this volume unfolded at a special symposium in 2017 at Dan Ben-­Amos’s institutional home of the University of Pennsylvania marking his fiftieth year of teaching and guiding students. Simon J. Bronner served as master of ceremonies and sought a way to disseminate the insights shared that day to a wider reading audience. Bronner held that a festschrift for Ben-­Amos would serve to recognize his impressive scholarly achievements and witness the maturity of contextual approaches in the twenty-­first century. Bronner enlisted Wolfgang Mieder for the production and they enjoyed a robust response from a stellar cast of former students, colleagues, and admirers. Mieder pointed out that with the volume composed of eminent contributors from all over the world, it would well fulfill the mission of the International Folkloristics series at Peter Lang, as well as Dan Ben-­Amos’s organizational work, to globalize folkloristic scholarship. We are grateful to the many contributors to this volume for forming community with us quickly and working so well←ix | x→ in common cause. To highlight their participation, and show the continuity of various interweaving strands of text and context in folkloristic scholarship rather than separating out headings into isolated containers, we arranged the essays in alphabetical order by authors’ last names.

Wolfgang Mieder←x | 1→