Heda Jason, Motif, Type and Genre. A Manual for Compilation of Indices & A Bibliography of Indices and Indexing.
FF Communications No. 273. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (Academia Scientiarum Fennica), 2000. 279 pp.
Hard (ISBN 951-41-0878-7), FIM 160,-
Soft (ISBN 951-41-0879-5), 135,-
Available at the Tiedekirja Bookstore,
Kirkkokatu 14, 00170 Helsinki, Finland
(tel.: +358 9 63177; fax: +358 9 635017;
e-mail: tiedekirja@tsv.fi).
The philological avenue to folklore has an honorable history, inaugurated by the Grimms first at Göttingen, then Berlin, and ramifying into other fields, for example the historical-critical theology of D. F. Strauss and scholars at Tübingen (to become a center for folklore studies eighty years later). Succeeding generations practiced “normal science”, applying existing insights and principles to previously untreated areas and data and calling that practice the study of folklore. Philology, like the folkloristics that develops from it, claims all products of human culture as its territory. To rule over the territory, it proposes to discover and contain those products and minds through language alone.
Because for the majority of the world’s peoples, verbal narration occupies the center of the territory, and because narratives are so numerous, folklorists produced bibliographies, classifications, indexes, and finding lists. These tools of the philological folklorist are awkward to use until they become familiar. All who have traced for themselves an obscure path through the Aarne-Thompson Types of the Folktale or Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature have their adventures to narrate afterwards. Recurrently they ask themselves, Would it be possible to rationalize these procedures, for instance by creating a new method? In response, Heda Jason writes, “A re-indexing and re-arranging of the materials according to a new classification scheme of folktale types would be too costly…” (p. 14). Other scholars have thought of revising and updating the type index, for example, Hans-Jörg Uther in “Indexing Folktales: a Critical Survey”, Journal of Folklore Research 34, 3 (1997): 209-20. Heda Jason proposes, “What the discipline needs is more indexing of materials and adequately compiled indices” (14). In Motif, Type, and Genre, this author provides an ambitious and comprehensive set of guidelines. She urges these on her colleagues, to enable them to make each index accessible and to ensure that it is comparable to others.
The author has devoted most of her professional career to the comparative study and analysis of oral literature, especially the themes and patterns in Near Eastern and Jewish folklore. She has the qualities necessary for indexing and analysing: great patience, a willingness to tolerate tedious, time-consuming tasks, an insistence on thorough processing of materials, and a demand for corpora large enough to support proper generalisations.
Motif, Type and Genre assumes that folklorists need to be able to locate and compare items and repertoires. To that end, the author says, indexes should follow certain criteria, which are the substance of the six parts of her “how-to-do-it” book. Partly verbal and nonverbal forms are noticed but not treated; this book confines itself to Erzählforschung, which is one segment of the huge field of folklore. The six parts are subdivided, in scientific style; tables, charts, and sample analyses support the author’s recommendations. She points to the “Euro-Afro-Asian” area (41) as the one most adequately studied and as more or less unified in oral and folk literature, though not in other culture elements.
Part A describes the author’s concepts. She distinguishes literary works by composition and transmission (oral? written?), cultural status (folk? high?), and patterns of composition (analogous to what Aristotle called manner: verse, prose, or drama). She gives an unusually precise, new definition of motif (23), rethinks the concept of tale type, discusses ethnopoetic genres and repertoires, and distinguishes several levels of indexes, touching here on the difficulty of fitting “non-Euro-Afro-Asian” materials into older classification schemes. The term ethnopoetic, in this author’s usage, refers to “works of literature, transmitted by performers in an improvised presentation on the basis of fixed literary canons” (Jason, Ethnopoetics, a Multilingual Terminology, Jerusalem: Israel Ethnographic Society, 1975: 3-4). It does not refer to either the American school of poetics, headed by Jerome Rothenberg, or the imitation in print of performance qualities, practiced by Dennis Tedlock and Dell Hymes.
Part B sets forth in detail the elements the author demands in a proper index. She makes recommendations about choosing a corpus, what to include in one’s introduction, what language to write in, and how to label the material to show its origins and sources. Much rigorous thinking has gone into her exposition of the segmenting of narratives, the numbering and ordering of motifs, and the need to follow Thompson’s Motif-Index closely. Despite the notorious faults of Aarne’s scheme for narratives, the author is loyal to it. She even recommends motif and type indexing of “written folk literature”, such as detective stories and bandes dessinés (46), but she recommends against type indexing of Aarne’s kind for non-Euro-Afro-Asian materials (48).
Even more detailed are the author’s criteria for assigning texts to types and creating new ones. She includes directions for avoiding problems in tale type descriptions (71-75). Genre is crucial, because it is the “outcome of all [the] literary qualities [of a work] and of its relations to social and cultural contexts” (85). She asks for two kinds of bibliography as well.
Part C asks the indexer to provide “auxiliary registers”: these include listings of texts with motif and type classification, subjects, proper names, place of origin, ethnic or religious group, cultural-historical period, language of communication, and information about performers.
In Part D, the author presents three sample analyses of texts from the Israel Folklore Archives, two of which she herself collected. With one incident in common, the three are otherwise different, so that the author can connect their incidents to existing and newly invented tale types.
Part E, recapitulating some of the author’s earlier work, lists the ethnopoetic genres in the huge Euro-Afro-Asian culture area. Among these she distinguishes realistic, fabulous, and symbolic modes; within each she catalogs a large number of genres. Romantic epic, for example, exemplifies the realistic, the sacred legend exemplifies the fabulous, and proverb or riddle are symbolic.
Part F is most ambitious, assembling 339 indexes of folk literature from around the world, indicating language and ethnic group, motif and type indexes, and marking the entries to allow integrating the indexes into the Human Relations Area Files. Follows a list of 284 books and articles discussing problems of classification. These two lists are then analyzed under ten headings (“Level of indices, ethnopoetic genres, medium of composition…”). The book ends with a list of the author’s abbreviations, a list of her references, and a table of contents.
… for whom?
The context of Motif, Type and Genre is a publication series, FF Communications, of limited circulation, directed to readers of this journal and Fabula. (This review is part of its context. As one of the scholars who rely on fieldwork done by others, I find two questions coming up: where does the book reside in the landscape of contemporary folklore studies, and what are its prospects?)
Manipulating multiple traditions as they do, folklorists today have contrasting concerns and priorities. For some, the extent to which what they call folklore is mediated, or indeed created, by the folklorist is a serious issue. Konrad Köstlin declares, “Scholarly treatment creates a new object and produces new attitudes toward it. Our normality consists of this reflexivity”, in “The Passion for the Whole”, Journal of American Folklore 110 (1997): 266. Related to this reflexivity is another concern, highlighted by the Americans Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs: the “metadiscursive practices” that regulate how the arts of the word are brought into scholarly discourse and how those arts are withdrawn from the persons, scenes, and events of production. A third folkloristic concern, which must arise as one reads a manual so occupied with textuality, is “the tendency of language to produce not a simple reference to the world `outside’ language but a multiplicity of potentially contradictory signifying effects…” (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Irena R. Makaryk, University of Toronto Press, 1993: 641). These concerns, I presume, are not unknown to the author, but she tacitly regards them as lying outside the scope of the systematic, painstaking treatment of folk literature. Her book speaks to philological concerns and priorities. Some folklorists are bound to find irrelevant a book that does not address what they regard as the current issues in their field. Some will find it a relief, others a chill, to come upon such a vigorous assertion that the politics of folklore can be left aside.
As to the book’s prospects, there is no question that the author speaks authoritatively as part of her interpretive community. Neither author nor reviewer can predict how it may be used. Such a manual usually gains currency by being warranted by some organisation with authority to decree its use: a professorial supervisor or a scholarly journal. University instructors who train folklorists will want to recommend this book to students who show an interest in archival research or in surveying the collected materials from a particular people or language. Perhaps using it can be a prelude to fieldwork. Given the limits of scholarly publication and the worldwide activity of folklorists, it is certain that future indexes of folklore will be created and updated electronically. Heda Jason’s comprehensive manual should also find a place on the electronic bulletin board.
Lee Haring
Saugerties, NY
FF Network No. 21
(March): 20-22