After you collect a folklore text, what can you do with it (besides storing a copy in your personal archive)?

Lynn McNeill offers a summary of eleven approaches to folklore analysis.

This course will explore all eleven approaches: You can pick and choose your favorites!

Reading

Estimated time: ~20 minutes

Lynne McNeill (2013)., "Analyzing Folklore" (sub-section of Chapter 2) in Folklore Rules pages 29-34.

UW Library : Permalink to Folklore Rules

Rationale: It's useful to know all of these analytical perspectives, regardless of your personal objectives in folklore studies. You should write down some information about your "source," for example, because future readers won't know the information that seems obvious to you, the fieldworker.

Lecture 4 (23 minutes)

It's often a challenge to document folklore that you know is there. But can you collect folklore that you didn't even know existed? - Yes, if you follow rigorous methods of collecting. In the lecture, I summarize a recent discovery by Latvian folklorists:

When they systematically asked people in a farming community to remember annual cycles of calendar customs and work, for example, they discovered a unique folksong tradition tied to one particular work tradition, the spring "talka".

The next step after discovering a vanished tradition is figuring out what it was, back when people did the tradition. Descriptions of folklife, and the texts that we know they said or sang back then: Those are bridges into their world. This lecture offers an attempt to cross that bridge of folklore texts, to enter other people's traditions.

Optional Expansion

Read my field notes, and listen to a recording of the example mentioned in the lecture: A talka song by Anna Mežale and group, recorded by Martin Boiko, August 17-18, 1991.

[transcript & translation and audio:

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