Morphology of the Igbo Folktale

THIS paper will consider the relevance to the Igbo folktale of the syntagmatic model of structural analysis discussed in Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928).' As a corollary to this, an attempt will be made to examine the ethnographic, historiographic and aesthetic implications of the recurrence of certain motifemic elements and patterns in analyses based on the model. Essentially, therefore, an attempt will be made here to go beyond the original taxonomic goals of the Proppian model towards an understanding of its potential practical value in ethnohistorical reconstruction and in the study of some aspects of the poetics of the oral narrative art. Propp's Morphology of the Folktale is well-known to comparatists in the field of oral literature across the world. Originally devised for the analysis and classification of the Russian fairytale, volsebnaja skazki the scheme has been found to apply, in varying degrees, to folktales of the same generic class in many other different cultures. Propp's purpose in constructing the model was to displace the taxonomic scheme of Antti Aarne (in what is widely known today as the Aarne-Thompson Index)2 in which tales are classified according to their dramatis personae. In the Morphology, Propp focuses attention, not on the dramatis personae, but on certain highly stylized and recurrent types of action which regularly occur in fixed (generally predictable) patterns and which are fulfilled by many different kinds of characters in a wide variety of situations and setting. To these recurrent types of action, Propp gives the name 'Functions' of the dramatis personae. From his very careful anatomy of 100 Russian tales from the famous Afanas'ev collection,3 Propp surmized that the 'Functions' of the dramatis personae are not only the basic buildingblocks of the fairytale but that they are limited in number. For the Russian fairytale tradition, he identified 31 functions, to each of which he assigned an alphabetical or graphic code, as follows

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnography · Igbo · Linguistics · Literature · Morphology (biology · Sociology · Anthropology · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy

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