Narrating, Doing, Experiencing

Nordic Folkloristic Perspectives

Bibliographic Data

ID7433210
AuthorsUlf Palmenelt (University of Turku, corresponding author), Ulf Palmenfelt
EditorsAnnikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, Barbro Klein (0000-0002-9986-3118), SE Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences
Year2006
Pages185
Publication date2006-06-15
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueNarrating, doing, experiencing (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherSKS Finnish Literature Society (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.21435/sff.16
OpenAlexW380659006
Open LibraryOL21663558M
ISBN9789517467261
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited54

When folklore study was emerging as a fi eld in Europe during the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, a hierarchy of narrative genres was developed.Some genres, such as wondertales (or Märchen), myths, fables, ballads, fablieaux and saints' legends were at the center of interest while historical or supernatural legends were placed further down on the ladder.But many genres that folklorists recognize today, were not considered "real" folklore and were not recorded and investigated."True" or "authentic" folk narratives were thought to exist as recognizable, "traditional" types that, albeit with variations, followed given templates as they were handed down "from generation to generation" or were transmitted "from mouth to ear".Even as late as the 1960s, such genres as "local histories", "personal experience narratives", and "life stories" were not generally included within the domains of folklore study.They were regarded as residual forms or helpmates which, at best, could assist in the analysis of real folklore.Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many changes took place in the study of folklore in several parts of the world.These changes were perhaps more radical in the United States than elsewhere, where the spectrum of oral literary genres had arguably long been more inclusive than in folklore study in Europe.One of the reasons for this was that the study of Native American story-telling had been important in the United States from the very incipience of fi eld, not least due to the efforts of Franz Boas.North American Indian stories did not easily fall within the European genre divisions and, Barbro Klein Despite this, the interest in folklore study, in particular in narratives and narrating, remains quite strong and exerts infl uence on ethnology as a whole.This is true of Alf Arvidssons (1998) analyses of life history interviews, Inger Lövkrona's (1999) studies of eighteenth century court records, and Ulf Palmenfelt's analyses of nineteenth century legend collections in the light of performance methodology (1993a, 1993b).In Palmenfelt's contribution to this volume, "The Impact of the Un-Mentioned Event", there is also clear infl uence from conversation analysis, a linguistic sub-fi eld that is well developed in Sweden (Adelswärd 1996, Eriksson 1997, Norrby 1998), albeit with relatively few connections to folkloristics as a discipline.As is the case in many other countries, some of the Swedish work in conversation analysis concerns narration as a diagnostic and healing tool in medical discourses (Hydén & Hydén 1997).There are substantive links between this research tradition and Georg Drakos' article in this anthology, "HIV/AIDS, Narrativity and Embodiment". NarratingAll the contributors to this book agree, fi rst, that in narrating people express experiences, values, concerns and ideas that are important to them as individuals or collectives and, second, that they do so through the employment of stylistic techniques, tropes, tones of voice, and gestures.Furthermore, as already noted, most of the contributors work with the idea that in narrating people give events some kind of temporal order and some sort of marked beginning and ending (cf. Arvidsson 1998: 61). 8At the same time, the authors do not slavishly follow the idea of temporal order: all recognize that much narration may not be sequential at all.For example, some events and experiences can be so diffi cult to make sense of or so terrifying that people cannot make order of what happened although they strive to do so (Briggs, with Mantini-Briggs 2003: 77-80).Furthermore, all the contributors to this volume recognize that there are great numbers of verbal expressions that are not given narrative form just as there are many kinds of verbal art that are not narratives.In her article Barbro Klein analyzes the emergence in conversation of both non-narrative and narrative expressions that could be characterized as esthetically marked forms of verbal art.Another contributor, Anne Leonora Blaakilde, works with a broader understanding in which the word "narrative" includes a variety of verbal utterances, descriptions or reports.Blaakilde is interested in the ways in which people in their utterances draw upon and develop shared cultural tropes regarding grandmother-hood and ideas of individual boundaries.As emphasized earlier, it became clear in our workshops that while all the participants were open to such broad meanings, most of us nevertheless preferred to focus our analyses on more clearly bounded and recognizable narrative forms.In this context it should also be pointed out that many Nordic scholars have found it diffi cult to accept some of the tenets of North American performance scholarship, even though, in some respects, they have been infl uenced by

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