Question: religious groups

Question: Do you consider your "religious identity" as part of your "folk identity"? Why or why not.

Some answers to the "ethnic" question

Last week I asked the question "Do you consider yourself a member of an ethnic group? Why or why not?" Here are some of the responses they have been edited and are anonymous)

• I am part of a Lebanese ethnic group. My grandfather's family traveled from Lebanon to Sydney in the early 1900's. We are a large, close family who participate in many Lebanese traditions and customs that have been passed down over the years. The Cedar's Club is a Lebanese organization which is used for several functions such as holding Lebanese church services and it is also where my family's Christmas celebrations take place. We eat traditional Lebanese dishes on a regular basis and also have learned traditional Lebanese dance. Through keeping our Lebanese traditions alive, we have remained a close knit group which will be continued throughout future generations.
• To be honest I have never really thought of it before. I guess in part it is because I do come from Cape Breton where in my high school there was little or no diversity of culture. I come from a long line of Scots which make up a big portion of our Island so thinking about being a part of an ethnic group was never on my mind. When I think of it now I would say that I am part of an ethnic group, everyone on this planet is. However, I think living in a small isolated place where ethnic diversity is not as accepted it is hard to really think of myself a part of an ethnic culture even though I know I am.
• When I first read this question I had to try and figure out what an ethnic group really is. I found that being apart of an ethnic group means being apart of a group of people who are the minority in a much larger society, this group of people usually share common language, religion and culture. So to answer the question, from what I can understand, to some extent I think that I may belong to an ethnic group. My background is composed of both Irish and Scottish roots, so with this I would be apart of a group of people in a larger society composed of various other backgrounds. Usually when I think of an ethnic group I would think of Chinese, Italian, Japanese, etc.
• Ethnicity is defined clearly through ancestry with a different nationality. Anyone whom is related to a family member who has a different background from the other family members; for an example of one member maybe being native from their family members background distance wise or perhaps better more the mother or the father could be of a different race, so down the road if the couple were to have a child there if a very good chance of the child being born a color in between the mother and the father. I am not considered to be part of an ethnic group. My mother is a French, white Canadian and my father is a white Anglo-Saxon Canadian. Therefore I am not part of an ethnic group but, I do have a background of both French and English.
• Culturally, firstly, the foodways of the Chinese, the main starch Chinese have in every meal, besides breakfast, is rice, and the utensils used to eat is chopsticks. Secondly, the language difference: my first languages are Cantonese and Mandarin, and then English. Thirdly, Chinese are more like collective people, unlike the North American who is an individualist, we do thing focusing on the group. Even which major we choose in college we will consider in light of if it’s good for our family, for our parents. We have our own traditional festivals which mostly follow the Chinese lunar calendar, like Chinese New Year, Chinese Valentines Day, Chrysanthemum Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, etc. Each traditional festival has some special event to celebrate it. Like the Chrysanthemum Festival, every family will climb up to top of the hill or mountain, which will protect them against the danger. We have extremely different beliefs, religion, and values from Canadian, because we born in different culture. I think is the culture defines the ethnic group.

A variety of responses, most of which hinge on the perception of self in relation to a perceived "normative" ethnic group of the community. It is a marker both of difference from a larger group (either in number or, just as easily, in influence) and of similarity to and thus solidarity with others with whom, save for this shared characteristic made meaningful largely only in the context of co-presence with the larger group, one might otherwise have little common cause.

And the discussions of the week largely built on this category of difference.

REPOST from FOLK 201: Fourth Class: Tale Types and Motifs, and Indices for same

Stith, thy name resounds throughout the ages.

Today was spent trying to familiarise people with The Types of the Folk Tale by Antii Aarne and Stith Thompson, which tries to present describe and annotate every folktale type (an abstraction gleaned from comparison of known versions through which can be used to locate and identify subsequently encountered versions and locate them in a larger context of a narrative repertoire), in part through reference to their motifs (for which Thompson also created an index, The Motif-Index of Folk Literature). Much sort of hands-on things today.

REPOST from FOLK 201: Second and Third Classes

Unlike Folklore 101, this course is more framed by readings than by action. For Friday we read Bascom's "Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives." He advocates the reasonably-standard-but-not-without-its-detractors myth/legend/folktale split, and provides lovely rubrics and tables for starting to divvy them up. What must be borne in mind is that any analytic apparatus is ultimately a model which serves as an opportunity for insight into a concrete phenomena but is not an absolute representation thereof.

When we read of one way of distinguishing between the three genres being the groups 'belief' in the narrative, it allows a certain snapshot judgment to take place. But we impose a uniformity on the group that may not be present. The easiest example is of a parent narrating a tale to a child: the parent likely doesn't believe the events to be true, but the child might not be making the distinction between truth and falsity (especially given the authority of the storyteller). So we extrapolate from context what we imagine to be the position of belief of the group, and gloss over individual perspectives within said group. When one thinks of sacred narratives, one can easily imagine the same group of congregants maintaining their importance as narrative, but one considering them literal and the other metaphorical.

Today we talked about the difference between a type and a version. I hate to trot out first-year philosophy courses, but (I really shouldn't do this) think of good ol' Plato's discussion of 'forms': the form is the ideal of a thing - triangle, justice - against which all incarnate instances are measured and made determinate. (This is, of course, bullshit, and Aristotle quickly pointed out that just because we can contemplate an item both directly and abstractly does not mean that the two are separate.) So think of the Cinderella Type as the form, and the version told you by your gam-gam as the worldly manifestation.

Wow: was that a tangent. Oh well.

Next class: fun with Motif and Type.

REPOST from FOLK 201: First class

Oooh, the first day of classes for me is kind of like my first day at a new school: will they like me, will there be any bullies, am I wearing the right thing, etc. Except, instead of simply trying to assimilate and blend in (and I leave it to you whether that phrase is redundant) imagine having to spend your first day of junior high justifying to a group of strangers why they should be 'paying you' several hundred dollars each to talk at them for a few hours a week.

So it went reasonably well: as is my usual stance, I blathered on for far too long, but not because I am inherently a blatherer, but because people kept asking good questions, and I kind of like answering questions. This is how the semester progresses: that can be a threat or a welcome, depending on your sensibilities.

If you flip through these back pages looking for the syllabus, you can get the syllabus here.

Read Bascom for Friday.

And, remember, if you only take one thing from today's class: context defines how we interpret the story. Context is key.

Goodbye, Folklore 201 Blog

I've simply decided to get rid of that blog, since the course is over, and since I only ever made it to five posts. There were some good things on it, though, so I'm going to simply repost them here.

Adding stuff

I just updated Blogger to allow for some additional savviness, and lo and behold, the problem I had had with it earlier (and why I was maintaining a variety of blogs for each course) has been fixed. There are now labels attached to the posts, subcategories (OOOOOHH! OOH-OOH! GENRES!!) which indicate thematic links between posts, and a handy index to the right. For example, I've just added "Question of the week" as a label: I'll try to come up with others (maybe, for ease of comfort, "Off topic" will be one of them) as I go.

By the way, the bookstore is not the evil culprit in our ongoing struggle to get the Introduction: crazy evil bastards at the distributors are dicking us around. If we do not have an answer very, very soon, we may all get legally sanctioned photocopies of the book instead.