Legend and belief: dialectics of a folklore genre

Abstract

Legend and Belief. Dialectics of a Folklore Genre. By Linda Degh. (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2001. Pp. viii + 498, illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth) This monumental work represents an effort to write definitively on the nature and cultural contexts of the legend, one of the most controversial and difficult topics in folkloristics. Linda Degh, together with her late husband Andrew Vazsonyi, has devoted much of her scholarly career to documenting this genre and encouraging younger scholars' work in this area. An updated anthology of her classic works would have made a fitting capstone to her career. Yet she has gone beyond expectation in producing a massive new work, responding to the latest generation of research. Thus we have a major theoretician's attempt to synthesize folkloristic concepts originally developed in response to marginal, rural traditions with the flood of attention given recently to socalled or contemporary and the increasing role of the Internet in disseminating them. A major work, Legend and Belief will influence research in this area for some time. The book is divided into five comprehensive chapters, dealing each in turn with existing scholarship on the genre, with the social context of legend-telling, with the nature and personality of active legend-tellers, with the broader belief landscape out of which emerge, and with the ways in which real-life actions-even criminal acts-can constitute texts. Degh makes a number of important contributions in this work: the summation of her work on Indiana haunted house beliefs and in Chapter 5 provides a much broader and insightful view of supernatural worldviews than, for instance, Lynwood Montell's efforts in his book on death lore in nearby Kentucky (1975). And her presentation in Chapter 4 of a series of personal experience stories by Bloomington spiritualist/exorcist BarBara Lee (a pseudonym) demonstrates how some persons specialize in legend-telling, just as others do in tale-telling, becoming adept both in interpreting others' supernatural experiences and in creating their own. Lee's taped account of her visit to Stepp Cemetery, a notorious legend-trip site in southern Indiana, to contact the earthbound spirits is a highlight of this section. The book's chief fault is its effort to do so many things well. One could not wish for a more comprehensive survey of European and Anglo-American philological theories on legendry than Degh's lengthy Chapter 1. However, even she concedes that it becomes a repetitious, tedious listing of routine definitions (24). Its highlight, a detailed analysis of folklorists' sloppy use of memorate, concludes, justly, that there is no hope for validating any part of [the concept] (79). She also accurately notes that the past two decades of research in so-called urban legends have not as yet produced consensus on how this subgenre should be defined or even if is an distinct from of other times and other places (86-96). As incisive as her analysis is, however, one often wonders what she has to offer as a practical alternative to the fussy, rarefied theoretics she demolishes. This dilemma is heightened, since she regularly stresses that should be collected, analyzed, and interpreted only according to folkloristic principles. She dismisses recent efforts to exchange concepts with sociologists and anthropologists, insisting that the method of situating texts in their natural context cannot be borrowed from another discipline; it must use the unique resources of folkloristics (203). But in demonstrating how shoddy the pillars are that support folkloristic research in this area, Degh, like Samson, threatens to bring the entire edifice down about her own head: even her own characterization of legend tends to become as slippery as those of the scholars she chides. …