Anthropologists Approach the Traditional Tale

Thus Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, could produce a 150-page ethnography of the Tsimshian of British Columbia, including food-gathering, marriage, social organization, religion, and other topics, based entirely on the data in a group of sixty-nine tales. The result is on display in Boas’s classic Tsimshian Mythology (1916). Recent anthropologists, if similarly motivated, have focused more narrowly. In his Enchanted Maidens: Gender Relations in Spanish Folktales of Courtship and Marriage (1990), James Taggart offers a commentary on newly collected versions of Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, and other tales as told by men and women, whose differing points of view shed light on marriage customs and gender roles. In between these two milestones, various anthropologists, ranging from Bronislaw Malinowski to Ruth Benedict, have rung changes on the theme of folklore as a key to understanding culture.

However, the term “anthropological school” as it pertains to folklore refers not to this mainstream but to a pre-Boas movement, largely British, culminating in the work of James G. Frazer and Andrew Lang. Much later in the nonetheless short, 150-year-old history of the discipline of anthropology we find two other engaging movements, the largely European structuralism, advanced by Claude L_evi-Strauss, and the American movement known as ethnopoetics, both very much concerned with folktales but only tangentially related to the usual concerns of social anthropology.

Those who represented the anthropological school, mentioned above, were reacting against a “philological” movement of the mid- and late nineteenth century, which treated folktales as broken-down remnants of an ancient lore belonging to the Aryan cultures of India and the Middle East. Friedrich Max M€uller, chief spokesman for the philological camp, saw in modern folktales the vestiges of old allegories drawn from nature. Detected especially were hidden references to the diurnal rising and setting of the sun. In contrast, Frazer and Lang saw folklore as built up (not broken down) from the lore of “primitive” cultures still alive in the non-European world. Members of both camps relied on a comparative method that took for granted what was sometimes spoken of as the psychic unity of the human species.

It should be noted that the ritual theory of myth, by which all myths are traced to ancient rituals, derives from Frazer’s masterwork, The Golden Bough (1890-1915), still regarded as a monument of anthropology. Among the many works inspired by Frazer was Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), in which she traced the medieval legend of the Grail-the dish used by Christ at the Last Supper-to a pre-Christian fertility cult. In the 1920s, turning away from these concerns, Bronislaw Malinowski and other “functionalists” used traditional tales to help explain how culture works. Based on field researches among the Trobriand Islanders of the western Pacific, Malinowski’s contribution to folklore study was the concept of myth as “charter.” That is, the purpose of the story is not merely to entertain but to legitimize the values of an entire society. In some cases the myth may be sufficiently detailed to serve as a practical guide to the activities with which it is concerned.