Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Religion and ritual from Tylor to Parsons: the definitional problem
- 2 Oral ‘literature’
- 3 The anthropologist and the audio recorder
- 4 Oral creativity
- 5 The folktale and cultural history
- 6 Animals, humans and gods in northern Ghana
- 7 The Bagre in all its variety
- 8 From oral to written: an anthropological breakthrough in storytelling
- 9 Writing and oral memory: the importance of the ‘lecto-oral’
- Appendix Folktales in northern Ghana
- References
- Index
5 - The folktale and cultural history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Religion and ritual from Tylor to Parsons: the definitional problem
- 2 Oral ‘literature’
- 3 The anthropologist and the audio recorder
- 4 Oral creativity
- 5 The folktale and cultural history
- 6 Animals, humans and gods in northern Ghana
- 7 The Bagre in all its variety
- 8 From oral to written: an anthropological breakthrough in storytelling
- 9 Writing and oral memory: the importance of the ‘lecto-oral’
- Appendix Folktales in northern Ghana
- References
- Index
Summary
In a well-known book, Darnton (1984) has taken the folktale as an example of ‘primitive thought’. I argue that the audience for these tales is not normally adult, but it is as if other societies were taking ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ as a representation of contemporary Britain. Folktales are often international and do not reflect any particular social system, except in a very peripheral way, as they are freely communicated.
In the first chapter on folktales of his book on French cultural history in the eighteenth century, Robert Darnton attempts to get at the mentalities, the consciousness, of a peasant population which is also seen as representative of a wider constituency, namely France itself. He compares and contrasts English and German folktales with a view to determining their Frenchness. This enterprise he distinguishes from ‘romantic rhapsodizing about national spirit’ or the notion of a Volksgeist, but an element of this type of generalization is nevertheless present. For example, he sees the folk stories as having a common style and exhibiting the theme of trickery that is considered to be an enduring feature of French culture. That characterization is often made of the French peasant but it could reasonably be claimed to be equally true of many other cultures, as Scott has argued. And in any case, as countless folklorists have observed, the similarities in tales across cultures are as significant as the differences.
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- Myth, Ritual and the Oral , pp. 70 - 83Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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