The Development of Soviet Folkloristics (RLE Folklore) by Dana Prescott Howell

Author:Dana Prescott Howell [Howell, Dana Prescott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317551812
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

D. The Identification of Social Class in Tale Material

Throughout these years, folklorists were necessarily beginning to deal with questions of social class, but few used the category of class explicitly. Class was among the factors used in bylina interpretation, but the elaboration of social groups contributing to the bylina tradition included non-class categories as well. The failure to distinguish class from other types of social groupings was a point of criticism raised with regard to Boris Sokolov’s work in subsequent years. Nonetheless, Boris and Iurii Sokolov both introduced the term “class” into their writing and considered their historical-sociological analysis to be “Marxist.”

In other areas of folklore study, the relationship of social class to culture was being described and studied. This took the form of analysis of the influences of the city upon the village, the interpenetration of oral and written traditions, and the mixing of cultural influences in settings like the factory. These aspects were also indicated in tale study but not pursued.

Attention to social class in tale material came later than in the study of other folklore genres for a number of reasons. First, the study of the tale was concentrated upon other factors, primarily the role of the individual performer as a personality, the distribution and regional variation in tale material, and poetic conventions of the genre. The focus of the genre as a performing art made poetic resources, specialized skills, and immediate context the aspects of greatest interest, although this focus was only partial; the tale as a whole was considered a genre intended for entertainment and open to invention.

Second, in looking at tale material, folklorists were largely studying material from a single social class. Although they recognized the existence of tales in other social classes, mostly this was a case of literary authors using the popular tale. It was only the discovery of literacy among narrators that opened the subject of inter-class influences as an active area of investigation and analysis. By contrast, the genre of bylina was identified primarily as a product of a different social class than the one possessing it at the time that folklorists were recording. The question of cross-class influence and change was inherent in the study of byliny As a result, it is not surprising that the class analysis of tale material was introduced by bylina scholars like the Sokolovs.

At the same time, folklorists were generally aware of the expression of class and political ideology in folklore. They had witnessed several periods of active class conflict during their careers, including the periods of the 1905 Revolution, the 1917 Revolution(s), and the years of the collectivization of agriculture. Each of these periods produced an abundance of political lore, and the conscious use of oral lore by different political factions. Folklorists recorded political lore beginning in the years between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions.

While they recognized the expression of political ideology in this contemporary lore, they were slower to identify political content in old traditional lore. Partly this was the result of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.