Anthropologists Approach the Traditional Tale

Meanwhile, an important German school, including Paul Ehrenreich, Eduard Seler, and Konrad T. Preuss, had been making solid contributions to cultural studies while still operating within the long shadow of Max M€uller. At a surprisingly late date, Preuss could bring out a collection of tales from the Witoto of Colombia, explaining that the fictional characters represented the moon in its monthly phases (Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto, 1921-23). Against this background the British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown proposed that the doings of human characters identified with the moon, the sun, or wind in traditional stories should be regarded as allegories not of natural phenomena but of social experience (The Andaman Islanders, 1922), thereby standing nature mythology on its head.

Like Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, Ruth Benedict in her influential Patterns of Culture (1934) brushed aside the quest for universals that had occupied Lang and Frazer as well

as M€uller. For her, each culture created its own pattern, or personality. With regard to stories in particular, the point was elaborated in Benedict’s Zuni Mythology (1935): Folktales are never generic, she declared; rather, they express the values and practices of one culture (compare the earlier work of Joseph Jacobs). Like many anthropologists (though not Malinowski), Benedict used the term myth interchangeably with folktale, especially in non-Western contexts.

Striking out in new directions, the twin approaches of structuralism and ethnopoetics, which gained currency in the 1960s, de-emphasized the manifest content of folktales. Structuralists found a hidden geometry in verbal art, detecting binary oppositions such as male and female, old and young, or raw and cooked, while practitioners of ethnopoetics concentrated on style, discovering couplets, stanzas, pauses, and other features that revealed the narrative as a kind of poetry. Two Americanists took the lead in developing ethnopoetics: Dennis Tedlock, who studied live performance (Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, 1972), and Dell Hymes, who specialized in textual analysis (“In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, 1981). Anthropological approaches to folklore that have most easily crossed the divide between science and art are those that may be deemed the least anthropological. Ethnopoetics has inspired such poets as W. S. Merwin and Gary Snyder, not to mention numerous linguists, whose work has been showcased in volumes edited by the poet and literary historian Brian Swann. In the field of criticism, L_evi-Strauss himself has used structuralism to illuminate Baudelaire’s sonnet “Les Chats” (“The Cats”). As for the work of Frazer and Weston, which inspired T. S. Eliot’s master poem The Waste Land, though grounded in anthropology, it would eventually be associated with literary approaches to folklore.