Gillian Bennett (1939-2023)

Folklorist Gillian Bennett passed away on December 13, 2023. A vocal advocate for valuing female perspectives, she produced influential work on the supernatural and on complexes of belief dealing with the integrity of one's body. Her work was also central to the emerging attention of “contemporary legend” as a behavioral phenomenon.Bennett's academic career began at the University of Sheffield's Center for English Cultural Tradition and Language. Her doctoral dissertation, supervised by John Widdowson, was an ethnography of Manchester-area elderly women discussing “contemporary supernatural beliefs.” It became the basis of her first book, Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural, published in paperback by Penguin Books in 1987. A revised and expanded version, titled Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse was published in 1999 by Utah State University Press.Challenging academic prejudices, Bennett held that to reify vernacular beliefs as “folklore” (and hence as fallacies) neglected their positive functions in contemporary life. Applying David Hufford's reflexive approach, she argued that traditions of belief need to be valued as deeply felt means of finding order in a disorderly world. Through close reading of verbatim transcriptions, Bennett highlighted belief traditions as they emerged from narratives, particularly when they clashed with official traditions of disbelief, which she showed were often based on classist prejudices masked as “rationality.” Personal experience supernatural narratives told by aging women, she contended, provided comfort during bereavement and affirmed feminine values of knowledge.Bennett was a central figure in the “contemporary legend” seminars begun in 1982 at the University of Sheffield. In the pieces that she contributed to these events (notably Bennett 1988), she emphasized that most legend records were cleaned-up summaries, from which folklorists derived meanings in an unsystematic, impressionistic way. Using close readings of verbatim performance texts, she showed that legends were not formless but followed recognizable structures based on social consensus of what constituted a “proper story.” These structures were negotiated at the time of telling and influenced by tellers’ intentions and their audiences’ reactions. Some variants emerged as strongly believed personal experiences, while others took carnivalesque forms, resembling humorous folktales (Bennett 1989, 1993). Attempting to determine a unitary “meaning” or “function” behind all performances of a given legend type, she argued, was quixotic.Her oral presentations at the Sheffield contemporary legend seminars in the 1980s were key to a paradigm shift in legend studies. “Legend” became understood as a behavioral, context-specific phenomenon rather than as a distinctive variety of oral narrative. In these meetings, I can attest from personal experience, her polite but skeptical reactions to issues being raised sparked lively give-and-take discussion, generating collegial disputes that spilled out into the adjacent pub and went on long after the seminar's end. These engaging discussions led to the founding in 1988 of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR), a group that continues to advocate for scholarship in this area.Bennett, working with Paul Smith, the seminars’ convener, took on the task of editing the proceedings of these meetings for print (Bennett, Smith, and Widdowson 1987; Bennett and Smith 1988, 1989, 1990).1 The Bennett/Smith team later produced an annotated bibliography, a select reader of legend scholarship, and an internationally based sampler of legend texts (Bennett and Smith 1993, 1996, 2007).2 The impact of these works on legend and belief scholarship has been credited for the vigorous revival of British folklore research in the contemporary global academic world.Still, as with many female folklorists of her time, Bennett faced sharp opposition from senior folklorists, particularly for her challenges to traditional legend theoretics. Alan Dundes, for instance, complained that research on “contemporary” legend was destined “to instant obsolescence” (see his introduction to Bennett and Smith [1993:xi]). In the 1990s, she retired from the academic hurly-burly, stating that she no longer found disputes over theoretical issues intriguing. Nevertheless, as co-founder of the British Folk Studies Forum, a network of young British folklorists, Bennett continued to encourage grassroots research with an informal publication titled Dear Mr. Thoms (1986–1994).3 Subsequently, she served as editor of Folklore (1994–2003), the flagship journal of the United Kingdom's Folklore Society. Working with her daughter Kate Mary Bennett, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool, Gillian Bennett also returned to her original focus on a female-centered concept of death and dying, discussing supernatural beliefs as a crucial stage in the grief process (see G. Bennett and K. M. Bennett 2000; K. M. Bennett and G. Bennett 2000–2001).Her final published work as a folklorist was Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend (2005). Her choice of topics—animals invading one's body, sex used as a deadly weapon, and ritual sacrifices of children—led Bennett to disturbing cultural aspects of death and dying, sickness and health, and gendering and childbirth. Legends are hardly trivial, she argued, for they are the way that humans discuss visceral issues, and they have done so in different ages and in widely separated cultures. Bodies was courageous in confronting stereotypes about what folklorists should discuss and who should do the discussing. Her work on vernacular medical beliefs influenced Diane Goldstein's Once Upon a Virus (2004), and the chapter in Bodies dealing with negative stereotypes of women prompted Andrea Kitta's title chapter in The Kiss of Death (2019).Recognition came late in her career. In 2003, she participated in a select international Rockefeller Institute conference in Bellagio, Italy, on the social role of rumor and legend. From 2009, she was a full member of the Folklore Fellows of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. In 2014, she was given ISCLR's Lifetime Achievement Award, in company with her collaborator Paul Smith, and in 2018, the Folklore Society presented her with the Coote Lake Medal, the society's token of outstanding research. In the same year, she was inducted into the Fellows of the American Folklore Society as an International member.Bennett's scholarship remains important to understanding the role of folklore in the fields of public health and disease, the paranormal, and the impact of feminine perspectives in society. Her most substantial legacy is the ongoing research in these areas

Art · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · History

• The Kiss of Death

  Andrea Kitta•Kiss of Death•2019

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• Once Upon A Virus

  Diane E Goldstein•Once upon a Virus•2004

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• The presence of the dead

  Gillian Bennett, Kate Mary Bennett et al.•Mortality•2000

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• And there's Always this Great Hole Inside that Hurts”

  Open Access•Kate M Bennett, Kate Bennett et al.•OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying•2001

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• Perspectives on Contemporary Legend

  William Fox, William S Fox et al.•Journal of American Folklore•1987

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