SLFK 212, January 22, 2004
Review:
The three areas are useful for making the material manageable, but there is not only a great deal of correspondence, lots of overlap
Ritual towels are material culture - but, of course, used in ritual, like wedding and funeral, as well as used to protect the home
Bread is material culture - also used in wedding and funeral, as well as just an any old regular meal
Where rituals take place in the house is important
Baby and stove
Laying out deceased in icon corner
What is folklore?
When you look at material culture, there are all sorts of houses and clothing and food
A Lean Cuisine dinner is not folk food
What I live in is not a folk house and neither are the UVa dorms
The clothes we all are wearing are not folk clothes
Though many folk principles apply to them - outside of the principle of composition
Similarly, certain actions are ritual and others are not, even if they are structured and repetitive
Certain songs are folk songs, but what Brittney Spears sings is not
Stories about courtship are folk stories but reports about Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are not
What is the difference and how can you tell?
Five criteria of folklore
Traditional
Anonymous
Exists in variants
Transmitted orally or by custom and practice
Tends to be formularized
What does this mean?
Lets take material culture again
Traditional - all houses in Central Ukraine, until you get to around Poltava, are painted white and blue
Most embroidery is red and black on white
Grannies with ass kerchiefs
Pins over heart
Anonymous - you know who built Did Vasyl's and Baba Polia's house
You know who built Baba San'ka's house
But you have no idea who came up with the idea for this house type
You know who made a particular dress, but not who started this dress type
You know who told you a particular joke - but not who made up the joke in the first place
And many jokes are VERY OLD jokes reworked to fit the contemporary situation
Jewish Samurai
Variants - if I told the Jewish Samurai joke a second time, I what I said would probably NOT be an exact repetition of what I had just told
If I told to a different audience, etc.
Houses - all houses in Iavorivka have the same basic floor plan, but no two houses are alike
Rushnyky have a certain limited number of pattern types, but no two are alike, even when you have similar renditions of the tree of life cum trinity
Formularized - basically means structured
The symmetry in the house between male/female areas
Birth and death
Clean and unclean
Human and animal in farmstead
Show on rushnyky, eggs
Transmission orally or by custom and practice - someone shows you a recipe; you don't get it out of a cookbook
Someone tells you a story and you tell someone else; you don't read the story
Someone shows you how to build a house; you don't follow and architect's plans
How do you know what to wear?
You could read magazine, and many people do
But also the comments of other people, both sexes
What people actually wear
How do you know that UVa has "the Grounds" rather than a campus
1st, 2nd, 3rd year students rather than freshmen, sophomores, juniors, etc.?
Why know the five criteria?
You may not be folk, although most folklorists would say that you belong to a certain type of folk group, but a great many of these principles apply to you
There is a certain consistency to ALL Charlottesville housing, even if it was built by professional builders and that housing sends certain messages of which you may not be aware - remember the Slavic intimacy - not here; ideal of each kid having own room
House faces street, welcomes strangers, including welcome mat
Dolls like Barbie and body ideal
Clothes that reveal the belly = you must have flat belly
You have some purely folk stuff like cooking
Although there is an anti-folk or at least an anti-flexibility movement
Old versus new Lego
Much oral stuff is purely oral and purely folk - like stories that people tell each other
Blond jokes - women who are too interested in sex are stupid
Women who take risks are going to get punished - tendon slasher, internet date with dad
Women are interested in beauty and thinness, perhaps to excess - tapeworms, tanning excess (cooked from the inside)
2 point - the folk method of information transmission is extremely effective and gives some very desirable skills
Technical excellence
Examples of people who are esp. good at this sort of knowledge
The accuracy of the house in Iavorivka
Dropping a pipe
Cutting trees
Other desirable features: Creativity
Ability to come up with something new and TRAINING to produce new things
To adapt - not to give up when you don't have quite the right stuff, but to come up with what will work with what you got
Folk versus cookbook cooking
Work with what you got
Follow recipe EXACTLY
Folk method of transmission is hard to detect (you are not aware of the fact the information is being transmitted to you) and this information affects you deeply
The information you acquire this way is hard to shake
Like the body ideal I told you about
Like the insistence of feeding visitors to home
Color schemes in my brother's home, in mine
Market research, subliminal cuts, product placement reason for prejudice against this learning?
More on how this works:
Within a single system, like a single culture
All of the pieces fit and make sense
The items of material culture, and social, and oral/verbal
You look at it from outside and you say WHAT are these people doing and why?
Bend it like Beckham
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
And Americans dealing with Slavs - or people from other cultures for that matter
Offering food
Mistake of not continuing to offer
Mistake of not accepting
Sleeping in same room, even same bed
Complimenting a woman on being corpulent
Alex and the corduroy shorts
Even language issues
You have to see this movie
Peter and rubber
Peter and warm plates
The stuff I do on Brama
Wedding toasts
What is korovai, rushnyk
Baby shower
Even number of flowers
Tattoo
Bit more on village life - parallel Tian-Shanskaia
Map - my work, the Minyonoks, the Klaus expedition
Two videos with Greg