POSREDNICI FOLKLORA U KULTURI

U potrazi za definicijskim obilježjem folklora autor preispituje još jednom povijest termina. Osvrćući se na raniji vlastiti prijedlog da se atribut tradicije zamijeni pojmom umjetničke komunikacije u malim grupama, ispituje osnovne kulturne pojmove koji posreduju između stvarnosti i kategorije umjetnosti: kontekst, izvedbu (performance), okvir i sistem. Analiza pokazuje da postoje podaci o postojanju umjetnosti u mnogim društvima, pa je tako i definicija koja ovisi o pojmu umjetnosti prihvatljiva. lako je ideja o umjetnosti potencijalno univerzalna, ipak je njezina primjena ograničena sistemom komunikacije svakog pojedinog društva. To dovodi do teškoća u razlikovanju folklora i drugih umjetničkih oblika. Industrijalizirana društva obnavljaju tradicije, ali iako su pjesme i priče po obliku iste, njihova je društvena osnova izmijenjena. Takve bi pojave morale postati predmetom folklorističkog istraživanja

Story Telling in Benin

One of the most significant traditions of African artists is that of the storyteller. This traditional figure remembers the legends and history of the tribe and village and passes them on to later generations in a linking of oral continuity. Modern phenomena are destroying the social cohesion in which this art form flourished, and although linguists and anthropologists are now endeavoring to record as many stories as possible, many, it is feared, have already been lost

Editorial

Nous remercions vivement notre ami, Dan Ben Amos, d\u27avoir accepté la responsabilité de ce numéro et d\u27avoir réuni tous les articles qui y figurent. Notre seule contribution à ce travail a consisté à réviser les traductions françaises

On Demons

The year was 1966. The sixties were at their height, though we did not know it then. It was two years after the Beatles had landed in New York, and a year before the Six Day War. The Democratic convention in Chicago was still two years away. A group of us, all Israelis, came to UCLA, each for his own reasons. Ruth Kartun-Blum and her husband Amos were there, and so were Ella and Dan Almagor. Professor Joseph Dan, Yossi to his friends, who was the most academically senior among us, came to teach in the Near Eastern Languages and Literatures Department, substituting for Professor Arnold Band who was at the Hebrew University that year. This was Yossi\u27s first visit to the United States. I had just returned from Nigeria and had a one year appointment in the Anthropology Department at UCLA. We all knew each other, at least casually, from the Giva\u27at Ram campus of the Hebrew University and from the Hebrew Literature Department. In Los Angeles we became friends

Folklore

Four interrelated qualities distinguish Jewish folklore: (a) extended history depth, (b) continuous interdependence between orality and literacy, (c) national dispersion of the nation, and (d) linguistic diversity. The Hebrew Bible, the earliest Jewish written text, contains evidence of older oral tradition. Once canonized, its ritual reading spawned new oral exetical and metaphorical oral narratives and its retelling retrieved traditions that literacy excluded. The written records of Jewish traditions of Late Antiquity also include folklore of that era. With the rise of the Diaspora Jewish communities had their own regional folklore that synthesized local with Jewish traditions and was performed in new languages that were spoken in these communities, such as Judeo-Arabi, Judeo-Spanish, and Yiddish. During the long history of the Jewish Diaspora, geographically and linguistically distinct Jewish communities formed, and their experience generated new folklore themes and forms. In the land of Israel, during the Yishuv period and later after the establishment of the State of Israel, the emerging new folklore corresponded, in part, to the ideology of cultural revival and, in part, to the new cultural contacts of ingathered exiles and to the encounter with the Near Eastern Arab culture. The folklore of the Jews, like that of other people, is represented not only in words, but also in behavior, music, dance, and visual art. Modern scholarship on Jewish folklore started anew at least three times in the 19th century, in the recordings of Leopold Weisel (b. 1804-d. 1870), a non-Jewish country physician who recorded tales in the Old Jewish Town in Prague (J. Dolezelova, Questions of Folklore in the Legends of the Old Jewish Town Compiled by Leopold Weisel, 1804-1870, Judaica Bohemiae 12 (1976), 35-50), with the article of Moritz Steinschneider, Über die Volkliterature der Juden, Archiv für Literaturgeschichte 2 (1872): 1-21, and with the circular letter that Max Grunwald (b. 1871-d. 1953), then a young rabbi in Hamburg, Germany, sent in 1896, together with a questionnaire, urging its recipients to engage in field collection of Jewish folklore (F. Talmage, ed., Studies in Jewish Folklore [Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies, 1980])

Review of Bertel Nathhorst, \u3cem\u3eFormal or Structural Studies of Traditional Tales: The Usefulness of Some Methodological Proposals Advanced by Vladimir Propp, Alan Dundes, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Edmund Leach\u3c/em\u3e

While formalism and structuralism became key concepts in linguistics, literary criticism, and the social sciences during the first half of the twentieth century, they appeared in folklore research only in the late fifties and early sixties, as a direct result of the publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss\u27 The Structural Study of Myth (Journal of American Folklore, 68 [1955], 428-444) and the 1958 translation of Propp\u27s Morfologija skazki (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928). Since then, structural studies in folklore have multiplied by the dozens, encompassing such genres as proverbs, riddles, ballads, and chants. Alan Dundes and Edmund Leach were among the first to elaborate upon the research of their predecessors, applying, respectively, the theories of Propp and Lévi-Strauss to new bodies of literature, and developing new analytical methods

The Death of the Baal Shem Tov

Legend, not history, tells the life story of the Baal Shem Tov. The chroniclers of his day hardly noticed the folk healer from Medzhibozh who wandered around the 18th-century Jewish communities of the Ukraine, and later achieved fame as the founder of the Hasidic movement. The rabbinical authorities made no mention of him in their writings and the community leaders did not consider him a force to reckon with. But there he was: a Besht (abbreviated from of Baal Shem Tov, a master of good name ) traveling with his small retinue of amulet writers from one small Jewish community to another, offering his mystical powers to cure the sick and the barren

Review of Mabel H. Ross and Barbara K. Walker, \u3cem\u3e On Another Day... Tales Told among the Nkundo of Zaire\u3c/em\u3e

From the end of 1972 until the middle of 1974, Mrs. Mabel H. Ross, a missionary, traveled in Central Zaire among the Nkundo people, recording their oral narratives. The present volume includes the English translation of these tales, supplemented by two texts translated from the Flemish and one from Lonkundo that appeared in A. de Rop, De gesproken woordkunst van de Nkundo (Tervuren: Museé Royale du Congo Belge, 1956) and in G. Hulstaert and A. de Rop (eds.), Rechtspraakfabels van de Nkundo (Tervuren: La Commission de Linguistique Africaine, 1954), and by eighteen texts translated from Lonkundo that were first published in a school reader, Bekolo Bemo Bendemba Ba-Nkundo (1957), compiled by three anonymous(?) mission-school teachers

Old Yiddish and Middle Yiddish Folktales

History and Territorial Boundaries. The Yiddish language emerged around the tenth century among the Jewish communities in Lotharingia in the Rhine valley. From there it spread to Northern Italy, Northern France and Holland with newly established Ashkenazi colonies, and under the impact of the Crusades to Central Europe and then eastward, to Slavic countires.33 Old Yiddish (1250-1500), primarily a spoken language, functioned as the language of oral tales, songs, fables, and proverbs. From that period scattered glosses and phrases are extant, the earliest of them is a blessing inscribed in an illuminated prayer book of Worms dated from 1272. The earliest document of literary activity in Yiddish dates from 1382. It was discovered in a cachet of manuscripts (genizah) in Cairo, and now it is housed in Cambridge University library