What Are Belief Narratives? An Introduction

Abstract

What Are Belief Narratives? An Introduction Ülo Valk (bio) Fluctuating Folklore Folklore and its kindred concepts have gone through substantial transformations since the early history of folkloristics in the nineteenth century. From an object-centered approach—discussing folklore as a set of cultural survivals— attention has shifted to subjects—to people whose minds, behavior, and expressivity bring folklore to life. The subjective dimension also involves reflexivity—the researcher’s critical awareness of their role in the process of making folklore through fieldwork and theorizing its results. Instead of understanding folklore as a set of textual items, it is today discussed as practice and “a type of social action” (Bronner 3). Even the living conditions of folklore have changed as the internet and new media have become its common environment, leaving it “in a constant, exhausting state of flux” and making theoretical innovations indispensable (Blank 3). Yet some strands of thought have remained persistent in the history of the discipline, for example, the observation that folklore is not made from the same substance—not like the water we drink or the air we breathe—but is an array of expressive modes and crafts, their products and effects. Along with proposing the new term “folk-lore” in 1846, William J. Thoms offered a short list of its forms (Thoms 11). Scholars all over Europe started to record its genres, some [End Page 175] of which spread transculturally, whereas others remained local. Thus, Jakob Hurt (1839–1907) in Estonia talked about distinct “sorts” of folklore, such as old songs, old tales, proverbs, riddles, place names, customs, children’s games, jokes, folk beliefs, and superstitions (85–88). When Alan Dundes outlined folklore in his seminal anthology The Study of Folklore, his sample list took more than a half a page and was incomplete, as the author noted (3). Discovering more and more vernacular terms and inventing new analytical categories to develop more elaborate maps of the field of folklore has been a persistent tendency in scholarship. Accuracy and analytical pointedness has led to multilayered systems of classification that are perhaps most useful in archiving, modeling primary study books, and in the division of labor among folklorists who often specialize in certain genres. Yet anybody who has done fieldwork or participated in folklore performances knows that uniform classification systems hardly succeed—unless the lived reality is quite robustly compressed into solid, ready-made compartments. If one considers the subtle nuances of artistic forms and the multiplicity of expressive modalities that are evoked in performance, the hybridity of folklore seems overwhelming. Folklore is constantly fluctuating, breaking the boundaries of specific types; analytical categories dissolve if we try to apply them not as conceptual tools but as containers of items. Dan Ben-Amos has addressed the problem of incongruity between ethnic genres and analytical genre categories by outlining them as “two separate systems which should relate to each other as substantive matter to abstract models” (215). What about belief narrative as a category? Is it a supplement to analytical taxonomies, a new compartment for a certain kind of story? The concept leads us to the heart of live folklore as a domain of building, transmitting, and shaping knowledge: to epistemic claims, uncertainties, suppositions, arguments and counterarguments—all that is related to belief formation in folklore as discourse and communication. Belief and Narrative Genres Belief narrative can hardly be considered as a container in which to lump together various assorted genres or stories. Rather, as a concept it aims to break the limits of existing classification systems and grasp the transgeneric dimension of folklore. The classical taxonomy of William Bascom outlines the forms of folk prose, [End Page 176] consisting of myths, legends, and folktales. As he notes, one of the distinctive features that differentiates these three genres is their relationship to belief. Folktales, according to him “are prose narratives which are regarded as fiction” (Bascom 4; emphasis in original). Myths and legends, however, are prose narratives that “are regarded as true by the narrator and his audience” (Bascom 4; emphasis in original). Bascom outlined the three as cross-cultural categories and noted that as stories spread from one society to another, “a myth or legend may be...