Expressions Of Folklore Research Articles

Protection and Administration of Folklore in Nigeria

Discussions on intellectual Property rights recently extended to traditional Knowledge issues and the protection of folklore. Generally, globalisation and the information Technology revolution have pushed the demand for intellectual property protection beyond the borders of sovereign nations. In the same trend, liberalization, international treaties, tourism, the media and the steady shift to free market economies enables greater movements of goods across the world and the need for better intellectual property protections. Complaints by American and European companies about rampant intellectual property piracy and counterfeiting in developing countries are an indication of the extent to which the world famous brands and Hollywood cinema and music has penetrated foreign lands, supplanting and in some cases even obliterating the traditional culture and custom of different people in the process -particularly in the cities. On the other hand many developing countries complain that lots of copyrights and patents emanating from the developed world are unauthorized exploitation of their Traditional Knowledge and Folklore. Technological advances have only fanned this fire. Indigenous motifs are used to sell every thing from Japanese automobiles like the Mazda Navajo to Barbie dolls and back-to-school clothes. Indigenous art has been reproduced and sold as art reproduction and as craft items, but more commonly, it has been reproduced and sold as cheaper commodities, such as T-shirts, tea, towels and other souvenirs. Indigenous arts has also been reproduced and used in advertising and marketing. Thus, we are seeing indigenous designs more often and in new contexts. In essence traditional knowledge has attracted widespread attention from an enlarged audience; and other traditional-based creations, such as expressions of folklore, have at the same time taken on new economic and cultural significance with a globalised information society. This has brought to fore an increased agitation at the international level for a system of protection for folklore. Opinions are however sharply divided on the nature and framework of protection to be accorded to folklore. While some favour protection under the conventional intellectual property subjects, others believe that an entirely new system is required.

Money Talks: Folklore in the Public Sphere

This article examines “currency chains”—messages and petitions written on paper money—as folkloric expressions and rhetorical acts that critique or commend dominant American public discourse. After a general description of currency chains, it considers two categories in detail. First is the “St. Lazarus” variety that flourished in the United States in the late 1990s, having migrated from Europe. Second are political money chains that engage with a social or political order, often in protest. This article observes the condemnation of currency chains as an irrational phenomenon, and regards them as viable means for often marginalised groups to foster participation in a public sphere.

Alan Dundes (1934–2005)

Alan Dundes died at the University of California, Berkeley, on 30 March 2005, doing what he loved--teaching folklore theory and methods to a group of advanced folklore students. He was widely recognised as one of the most important folklorists of all time. He did not limit himself to a single aspect of folkloristic enquiry--indeed, Wolfgang Mieder noted there is no folklore genre that [Dundes] has not (Mieder 1994, 3). Professor Dundes's studies of fairy tales, legends, jokes, songs, folk belief, gesture, obscenity, folk expressions, rhymes, ritual, riddles, games, Xerox-lore and national character, and the history and theory of the discipline, are all well known and often cited. He is also remembered as the most eloquent champion of psychoanalytic approaches to the study of folklore. Alan Dundes was born in New York, the son of a lawyer and a music teacher. He attended Yale University, graduating with both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in English, where he also studied music. After receiving his bachelor's degree, he served in the Navy aboard the USS Mississinewa, which was stationed in Italy. This early contact with Italy was renewed in his classic study, with Alessandro Falassi, of the Palio of Siena (Dundes and Falassi 1975). During his early graduate work, Professor Dundes found himself drawn to the stories--the myths, the folk tales, the legends--behind the literature. Realising that he wanted to explore folklore rather than literature, he left Yale, and went to study at Indiana University, under the tutelage of Richard Dorson, in the early 1960 s. Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale had just been published in English translation, and Professor Dundes was quick to realise the importance of structural study for all genres of folklore. He finished his graduate work in three years, and after a one-year appointment in the English department at the University of Kansas, joined the anthropology faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1963. In 1965, along with his colleagues William Bascom, Wolfram Eberhard, Bertrand Bronson and Joseph Fontenrose, he founded the MA program in at Berkeley. Professor Dundes's first book, Morphology of the North American Indian Folktales (1964), is a structuralist tour de force that has had a lasting impact in the field. By the time the book appeared he had already published over thirty of his two hundred and fifty or so books and articles, and had begun laying the groundwork for his important structural and psychoanalytic contributions in the analysis of folkloric expression. In his mind, it was imperative that, if folkloristics were to advance as a science, folklorists had to formulate accurate definitions of the materials of folklore, definitions based upon formal morphological features (Dundes 1964, 112). Based in part on the syntagmatic structuralism of Vladimir Propp, and drawing on Kenneth Pike's work on the concepts of emic and etic, his morphology proposed several important advances in the structural study of folk expression, among them the concepts of the allomotif and the motifeme. Professor Dundes was interested both in the mechanics of variation and the possible explanations for those variations. These explanations were rooted in an understanding of individual psychology, and cultural and performative contexts. Many of Professor Dundes's studies engaged the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. Perhaps best known of these studies are his considerations of the Earth-diver myth (Dundes 1962), the Bullroarer (Dundes 1976), and Little Red Riding Hood (Dundes 1988). His compendium of essays, Parsing through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist (Dundes 1987a), provides an excellent overview of his work in this area, while essays such as The Psychoanalytic Study of Folklore (Dundes 1985a) and edited volumes such as Oedipus: A Casebook (Dundes and Edmunds 1984) present the complexities of this critical approach to folklore. …

The Protection of Expressions of Folklore Through the Bill of Rights in South Africa

This paper uses the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996 and the jurisprudence that has developed in the course of its application to demonstrate that a human rights framework for the protection of expressions of folklore is a viable, or relatively better, framework than protection through existing intellectual property and sui generis regimes.

The hand that sets the table... The political economy and self-reflexive project of intellectual property law in relation to traditional knowledge

The article critically examines the political economy of intellectual property (IP), and the encounter within TRIPS between traditional knowledge holders and a Western-led international IP law regime that is turning ever more global. Patents, copyright and trade marks are protected by intellectual property rights. The international regime which governs these is based on Western thinking around ownership and has most recently culminated in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). TRIPS is an attempt to harmonize and enforce intellectual property on a global scale. But this globalizing IP regime has difficulty accommodating the more localized interests of developing countries and indigenous communities who find themselves rich in traditional knowledge (TK). For a number of reasons, TK is not easily accommodated by Western IP law categories. Therefore, TK often remains unprotected by law, and this can lead to uneven commercial and cultural exploitation of agricultural, medicinal and biodiversity-related knowledge, as well as of expressions of folklore in music, dance, song, designs, stories, artwork and handicraft. The article calls for a renewed focus on moral philosophy in addressing the power relations and the negotiations between different IP interests. A brief history of Western IP law is included to illuminate these interests, and global IP law is challenged to develop novel self-reflexive identities to reflect heterogeneity and difference. At the same time, the interests of traditional knowledge holders are discussed, and an attempt is made to group these into categories including articulations for remuneration, recognition, and return of traditional knowledge. The article suggests that these various articulations themselves use, directly or indirectly, traditional Western categories of intellectual ownership and protection. The article further argues that in circumstances in which the international IP law regime is associated with an over-homogenized legal self-identity, and with legal-legislative imperialist practices, a global regime should build cultural bridges and incorporate legal hybridities and heterogeneous identities.

Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales (review)

Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales. Edited by Marguerite Gordon. New York: Norton, 2002. 144 pp. The American publication of this volume follows its earlier release in South Africa under a slightly different title. It is a beautiful book: large, squareformat pages on glossy white paper, with colored graphics and headers and frequent, charming illustrations. It consists of thirty-two folktales in English, collected from a variety of African countries and cultures, and retold or translated by writers, folklorists, and journalists. The tales are by and large well and attractively told, with a mixture of oral and literary voices, and with frequent sophistication despite being aimed at a young reader. They are also immediately familiar: despite the differences in setting and nomenclature, their situations and characters are those of a thousand Western tales. Part of their familiarity to a Westernized reader is, obviously, the result of the common motifs found in folkloric traditions across cultures. The collection offers an impressive selection of origin myths, beast fables, trickster heroes, cautionary tales, christening curses, monster husbands, and magical brides, and it exemplifies the usual folkloric concern with pattern, repetition, and simplified quest-plots revolving around essentially domestic objects. This is indeed an effective and enjoyable children's collection, but it is also a fascinating text, offering in its bright and pretty pages a neat but essentially unreflecting encapsulation of many of the tensions and debates that surround folkloric writing in our time. The collection's packaging immediately betrays its two most obvious marketing focuses: children and a notion of African heritage centered on black identity and history. In its format and the naive appeal of its illustrations, the book is clearly aimed at children, a tendency reinforced by the association with Nelson Mandela's name, and hence the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. (Interestingly, the Mandela association completely elides the identity of the book's actual editor, whose name appears only on the copyright page. However, the book's jacket does not at any point suggest that the Children's Fund or any other Mandela foundation receives any revenue from sales.) Approving comments from Bill Cosby are also prominently displayed on the front and back covers, strengthening the association with family values. Mandela's foreword to the collection expresses the wish that all the children in the world may experience the wonder of books, and ... the magic of stories (8). The association of children with fairy tale, which bedevils folkloric expression from the Victorians onward, is here operating at full force, to an extent that tends to overshadow the collection's simultaneous, Grimm-style notion of folklore as cultural heritage. This dual focus of the collection is underlined by the fact that Mandela and Cosby are even more powerfully icons of black identity, their invocation obviously chosen to authenticate the origin of the tales while providing recognizable and highly regarded points of identification for an American market. The importance of fantasy for children is interwoven with the notion (in easy, popular terms) of African heritage: the foreword and jacket blurb return again and again to the notion of the authenticity of these tales and their roots in African oral tradition. However, in many ways the collection's claim of African-ness is shakily grounded, betraying something of a conceptual slippage: most of these tales are from southern Africa, largely marginalizing the rest of the continent. The elegant map at the beginning of the volume identifies tales from Morocco and Nigeria, with the identifying flags becoming more thickly clustered down the length of Africa, to huddle cozily in South Africa, source of fourteen among the collection's thirty-two tales. Solitary tales pop up from Central African states such as Uganda and the Congo; Botswana and Zimbabwe are better represented. …

The Politics of Origins: Collective Creation Revisited

The Politics of Origins:Collective Creation Revisited Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, Ph.D. candidate (bio) Is collective creation a figment of the nineteenth-century imagination? Have folklorists long since surpassed communal theories of creativity? That, at least, is the official position of the United States government. Who knew the government even has a position on the origins of folklore? That, in and of itself, warrants further exploration. More important, this position carries consequences that extend to international politics and trade. These consequences illustrate the nexus between theory and policy, to which folklorists (in spite of appointments to public offices) have long been remarkably indifferent. Theory and practice are divorced in a bifurcated field, rendering the political articulations of folklore theory all but invisible.1 What follows is an attempt to render visible the political dimension of concepts of creativity that are widely accepted (yet rarely articulated) among folklorists in the United States. The official U.S. position on the origins of folklore was put forward at the fourth session of the Intergovernmental Committee on Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and Folklore at the Geneva headquarters of WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) in December 2002.2 In her opening statement, the head of the U.S. delegation (Linda Lourie of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) questioned the notion that folklore is "communally developed," referring to the reports prepared by the WIPO Secretariat for this meeting that indicate traditional knowledge "is generally understood as being the result of creation and innovation by a collective originator: the community" (WIPO 2002c:31).3 The chief delegate of the United States scoffed at what she described as "nineteenth-century notions" and claimed that, on the contrary, folklore is "always individually created and then adopted by the community" (author's notes, December 9, 2002). Her statement gave this folklorist pause. Perhaps a little context will help explain why. Some ninety-four national delegations,4 eighteen intergovernmental organizations,5 [End Page 300] and fifty-four nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)6 were represented at the meeting of this committee, the purpose of which was to evaluate the need for legal protection of folklore and traditional knowledge at the international level and, if the need is recognized, to propose mechanisms for providing such protection.7 The problem that the committee was to address is that, although intellectual property rights (copyright, patents, industrial design protection, and so forth) offer strong protection to creations that are original, novel, and attributable to an individual creator/owner (person or corporation), they systematically exclude products of the creativity of a large part of humankind—creations that may be considered traditional.8 A great number of member states have frequently brought this matter up in the organizations of the United Nations in the past three decades, but so far to little avail (cf. Brown 1998). Despite the official Model Provisions for National Laws on the Protection of Expressions of Folklore against Illicit Exploitation and Other Prejudicial Actions adopted jointly in 1982 by WIPO and UNESCO and the equally official (and equally nonbinding) Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore from UNESCO in 1989 (Honko 1990a, 1990b; Seitel 2001), next to no progress has been made at the international level.9 To be sure, copyright and other intellectual property regimes have been globalized through various treaties and accords signed during this period, but they still exclude all creations that cannot be considered original/novel and whose origination cannot be attributed to a specific person or company. Meanwhile, ever greater parts of collective imaginaries, traditional knowledge, and technology formerly held in common have been privatized through intellectual property regimes as the reach of those regimes is extended and the protection they offer is deepened (e.g., Coombe 1998; Lessig 2001; Vaidhyanathan 2001; McCann 2003; also noteworthy is an old "dialogue" between Gershon Legman and Charles Seeger in Western Folklore [Legman 1962; Seeger 1962]). WIPO's Intergovernmental Committee was set up as a compromise between "developed" and "developing" countries, with the former pushing for global enforcement of intellectual property rights and the latter demanding equitable protection for their traditional know-how and expressions of culture. The idea was to keep these concerns of the developing countries out...

Landscaping Death

This article explores the cultural construction of death and revival in Cornwall. In examining the ways in which these issues intertwine with the affirmation of local landscape identities, it surmises that an obscure and diffuse sense of `deathliness' exists that generates collective and contested topographical memories and perceptions. By offering ethnographic interpretations of how people relate to contemporary burial places as well as a material culture analysis of prehistoric and derelict industrial environments, the article reveals three ways in which Cornishness rests in iconographical settings and material elegies. (1) from a prehistoric pedigree, where death and ancestry connect to expressions of folklore and custom; (2) through the ties that mortality has with the past's dangerous local industries; and (3) from the symbolic death brought about by the extensive emigrant diaspora or the dissipation of identity from tourism and immigration. These factors illustrate that enduring tangible aspects of identification are perpetuated by a partial relating back to dying-out ways of life. I thus propose that the prominence of death itself becomes a significant yet ambivalent material metaphor - a motif for shaping personhood and advocating solidarity.

Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America (review)

Reviewed by: Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America Deanna M. Kingston Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America. Ed. Tad Tuleja. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997. Pp. x + 335 , acknowledgments, illustrations.) The stated purpose of the collection Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America is to modify Hobsbawm and Ranger's thesis in the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Whereas the latter demonstrated that tradition invention was used by those in power to create homogeneity and continuity in a disparate nation, the intent of the authors of this collection is to show that the "politically powerless may also have the power to invent, to apply the creative impulse to their own private heritages" (p. 3). The essays show that groups of people, no matter their size or constitution (whether ethnic, occupational, organizational, or regional), creatively utilize past practices as manipulatable markers of a common identity (p. 3). In other words, the authors turn our attention from a macrolevel, national view of tradition manipulation and identity creation to a microlevel, subnational perspective. In addition, according to Tad Tuleja, the authors also draw theoretically on Frederick Barth in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Little, Brown, 1969) and contemporary folklore approaches that highlight context and performance. First, following Barth, they see ethnogenesis as a social and political dynamic. Second, they see folklore "not as a thing but as a practice," as a "malleable mobile expression of social identity" (p. 6). Thus, the authors base much of their work upon these theoretical underpinnings in order to show that small groups manipulate and use folkloric expressions to present themselves to themselves and to others. All of the examples, as the title implies, are from groups of people living in North America. Groups include the Navajo, Texans, Mexican Americans, Polish Americans, Canadians, Newfoundlanders, African American women, Jewish Americans, Boy Scouts, Mormons, martial artists, Appalachians, New Englanders in Maine, and American supporters of American victims and servicemen overseas. It is this eclectic mix of groups that gives the volume its strength. First, it focuses our attention on groups at home, within the larger nation-states of the United States and Canada. Thus, the collection is timely in that, recently (1998-99), the Anthropology News, the newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, reminded scholars that they did not have to go abroad to find interesting research sites. Second, the collection demonstrates the broad range and variability of peoples who live in North America. In doing so, it shows that no matter how a large nation-state might exert a homogenizing influence, its people resist by finding ways to create smaller, community-level interactions with one another. As Tuleja states, actual communities are "moved to rechannel the streams of their peculiar expressivities by the very forces that threaten to stop their flow" (p. 15). The other strength of this collection is the range and variability of the group expressions that are employed by collectives to differentiate themselves from others. Thus, arts and crafts, myths, legends and narratives, uniforms, license plates, food, calendrical rites, skits, drinking customs, and yellow ribbons are among the many creative responses that groups use to express themselves. This list, of course, is not exhaustive; instead, the variety of expressions in this collection suggests that there are endless possibilities of creative traditions that can be manipulated by groups as identity markers. Thus, the largest contributions that this collection gives to the study of folklore, cultural studies, and anthropology are to demonstrate both the diversity of groups in North America and the diversity of group expressions that are the bases of their identities. In this regard, it does fulfill its stated goal of demonstrating that [End Page 95] the politically powerless do creatively manipulate their pasts. However, the idea that people are social agents, actively engaging and responding to outside perspectives and pressures, is not new. In other words, after reading the essays, I did not learn much in the way of theoretical understandings of identity creation and maintenance. Perhaps I was expecting too much. Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable read because of the diversity of examples. It made me think of...

Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture.

Grounded in Charles Joyner's unique blend of rigorous scholarship and genuine curiosity, these thoughtful and incisive essays by the eminent southern historian and folklorist explore the South's extraordinary amalgam of cultural traditions. By examining the mutual influence of history and folk culture, Shared Traditions reveals the essence of southern culture in the complex and dynamic interactions of descendants of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. The book covers a broad spectrum of southern folk groups, folklore expressions, and major themes of southern history, including antebellum society, slavery, the coming of the Civil War, economic modernization in the Appalachians and the Sea Islands, immigration, the civil rights movement, and the effects of cultural tourism. Joyner addresses the convergence of African and European elements in the Old South and explores how specific environmental and demographic features shaped the acculturation process. He discusses divergent practices in worship services, funeral and burial services, and other religious ceremonies. He examines links between speech patterns and cultural patterns, the influence of Irish folk culture in the American South, and the southern Jewish experience. He also investigates points of intersection between history and legend and relations between the new social history and folklore. Ranging from rites of power and resistance on the slave plantation to the creolization of language to the musical brew of blues, country, jazz, and rock, Shared Traditions reveals the distinctive culture born of a sharing by black and white southerners of their deep-rooted and diverse traditions.

The Garden of Scopic Perversion from Monet to Mirbeau

In his attempt to give ocular disorders a psychoanalytical interpretation Freud cited the tale of Lady Godiva. This beautiful legend, he wrote, tells how all the town's inhabitants hid behind their shuttered windows, so as to make easier the lady's task of riding naked through the streets in broad daylight, and how the only man who peeped through the shutters at her revealed loveliness was punished by going blind.1 For Freud, the fate of the renegade voyeur illustrated how scoptoor scopophilia (the love of looking) is punished by the ego with blindness or, in the term popularized by his teacher Jean-Martin Charcot, with scotomization (from the Greek skotos, meaning groove or cut; signifying partial, distorted, or peripheral vision within the field of ophthalmology). Moving beyond the studies of hysterical vision made by Charcot and Pierre Janet between 1887 and 1889 that merely identified characteristic symptoms such as color blindness, dilated pupils, strabismus, or the twisting of the orb to reveal the whites of the eye, Freud inferred the law of lex talionis (Urteilverwerfung), literally, retaliation, in the condemnation of a visual representation deemed sexually culpable by the faculty ofjudgment. This verdict of guilty, strangely recalling the old wives' tale that masturbation leads to blindness, also evokes as its corollary the equally proverbial notion of turning a blind eye. For Freud, however, these sayings were the folkloric expressions of a malady that was not only individual, but also collective. If in the private world of the self the punishments for Schaulust imposed by the ego assumed the form of hysteria, in the public realm they signaled a crisis of judgment, an imbalance in the careful treaty made by civilization between sexual drives and their institutional sublimation. Charcot's scotome scintillant, characterized as an eblouissement de te'nbres (dazzle of shadow) clouding the eyes of his female hysterics, became a privi-

Folklore Expressions and Superstitions in the Sports

Folklore Expressions and Superstitions in the Sports