Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Folklore – History'

This thesis examines a range of folkloric customs and beliefs that play a pivotal role in Hardy's fiction: overlooking, sympathetic magic, hag-riding, tree ‘totemism', skimmington-riding, bonfire nights, mumming, May Day celebrations, Midsummer divination, and the ‘Portland Custom'. For each of these, it offers a background survey bringing the customs or beliefs forward in time into Victorian Dorset, and examines how they have been represented in written texts – in literature, newspapers, county histories, folklore books, the work of the Folklore Society, archival documents, and letters – in the context of Hardy's repeated insistence on the authenticity of his own accounts of these traditions. In doing so, the thesis both explores Hardy's work, primarily his prose fiction, as a means to understand the ‘folklore' (a word coined in the decade of Hardy's birth) of southwestern England, and at the same time reconsiders the novels in the light of the folkloric elements. The thesis also argues that Hardy treats folklore in dynamic ways that open up more questions and tensions than many of his contemporaries chose to recognise. Hardy portrays folkloric custom and belief from the perspective of one who has lived and moved within ‘folk culture', but he also distances himself (or his narrators) by commenting on folkloric material in contemporary anthropological terms that serve to destabilize a fixed (author)itative narrative voice. The interplay between the two perspectives, coupled with Hardy's commitment to showing folk culture in flux, demonstrates his continuing resistance to what he viewed as the reductive ways of thinking about folklore adopted by prominent folklorists (and personal friends) such as Edward Clodd, Andrew Lang, and James Frazer. This thesis seeks to explore these tensions and to show how Hardy's efforts to resist what he described as ‘excellently neat' answers open up wider cultural questions about the nature of belief, progress, and change.

This thesis originally came out of a term paper for Dr. John Troutman’s History 505 class in the spring of 2015, and at first, I was more interested in folklore itself than the organization charged with preserving it. But that soon changed, as did my purposes for writing. These purposes were several. First, to examine the Louisiana Folklife Program—its origins, its evolution, and its achievements—in order to see how it became what it is today. Second, to place the LFP in a national context by examining the factors that gave rise to its birth. Third, to explain why the LFP has endured while similar programs have struggled or faded away. And fourth, to examine the impact that political and academic opposition can and do have upon such programs. My methodology has changed little since I wrote the first page. Most of it entailed archival research coupled with secondary sources gleaned from libraries and Internet searches as well as oral interviews. What I learned in the course of my research has illustrated more than ever the fragility and value of Louisiana’s cultural heritage and the value of preserving it. Some of it was almost wiped out in the early twentieth century, when speaking French was forbidden in schools throughout the state. It is thus incumbent upon both the LFP and the people of Louisiana to each do their part in ensuring that their posterity will be able to enjoy the rich diversity Louisiana has to offer. Stories, recipes, and handicrafts are things that we should not allow to fade away. Once they are gone, there is no restoring them. The LFP has made tremendous advances in this regard, and I sincerely hope they continue to do so, for the sake of all the generations that come after us.

Jill Hemming Austin PERFORMING THE PAST: TWO PAGEANT TRADITIONS IN NAUVOO, ILLINOIS The founders of American historical pageantry were keenly interested in the social effect of pageant performance on audience and participants. Their vision for social transformation through performance endures into the present day with those who continue to promulgate the form. Examining two enduring pageant traditions in Nauvoo, Illinois affords a better understanding of how the formal features of outdoor historical pageant production and the social relations that underlie them are still potentially powerful for those who participate in their production and performance. This dissertation encourages serious study of pageants as a unique performance form particularly attuned to the tasks of building continuities and tradition, the reinforcement of group sentiment, and the propitiation of group myth. Nauvoo, Illinois is a historically contested site boasting two historical pageants dedicated to the portrayal of the Nauvoo story: The Grape Festival Pageant and The Nauvoo Pageant. Christened ?Nauvoo? by Mormon [LDS] refugees in the mid-19th century, the thriving city?s overwhelming social discord drove the Mormons west, and the town was resettled and reclaimed by new seekers and settlers. The legendary quality of Nauvoo continued to grow in the Mormon imagination, eventually leading to a reclamation process including heritage development. Competing claims on local history has led to a heightened historical consciousness among townsfolk and ongoing public presentation from multiple perspectives. The two pageants are cultural displays that influence this ongoing social process. Both derive from distinct traditions--the local drama squarely planted in American historical pageantry and the Mormon-sponsored pageant deriving from LDS social and religious culture. Historical pageants have some unique formal features that make them particularly interesting to folklorists. They depend heavily on sacred localities, tradition, legend, and large-group participation for their success. The story told gains power from familiarity and reinforcement of cherished group values. However, changing tastes and sensibilities have challenged the survival of pageants as a relevant cultural form into the present. Drawing on interviews, field observation, and historical research, the contemporary context of the town and its two performances is fleshed out in the voices of four individuals who have participated in the pageants.

The dominant narrative mode in Ainu studies today stresses an activist agenda that, although worthwhile, limits the potential for new research in the field. In this thesis, I analyze historical accounts of the development of Ainu bear carvings as a case study of the characteristics of the dominant activist mode and present an alternate narrative in order to demonstrate the need for a variety of approaches to Ainu research.

The activist narrative mode is structured to engender sympathy for Ainu people and respect for their cultural heritage. Activist accounts of Ainu bear carvings often claim that the carvers were pressured by the Japanese tourist industry to violate religious taboos against producing realistic depictions of bears. In this way, the carvings serve as a symbol of oppression of Ainu people under Japanese imperialism. At the same time, activist scholars state that the Ainu bear carvings followed a linear progression from tourist souvenirs to respected works of “fine art.” Thus, the carvings also reinforce optimistic projections regarding the future status of Ainu culture and socioeconomic condition.

My alternate narrative focuses on the complexities and ambiguities in the field and avoids judging events in moral or sympathetic terms. I explore a broad range of contextual issues, tracing the regional production of wooden bears from the paleolithic ancestors of Ainu people, examining the role of bears and woodcarving in Ainu culture, analyzing Ainu interactions with Japan, Russia, and other neighboring empires, and investigating the commodification of bear carvings as tourist souvenirs.

Activist narratives have contributed a wealth of valuable research to the field of Ainu studies and remain a useful tool for promoting social and cultural equality for Ainu people. However, automatic conformity to the dominant activist mode perpetuates the obfuscation of certain details in Ainu history, including the diversity within Ainu and Japanese cultures and institutions, instances of political cooperation between Ainu and Japanese communities, and unanswered questions regarding the complex development of Ainu cultural practices and beliefs. Although any historical account (including this thesis) inherently simplifies its subjects, varying our narrative approach helps us to identify and fill some of the gaps.

The story of Gilgamesh has been viewed as an example of several different narrative genres. This thesis establishes how scholarship in English published between 1872 and 1967 has described Gilgamesh as a myth, or denied Gilgamesh status as a myth and discusses new the meanings that the context of myth brings to the story. This thesis represents preliminary work on a larger project of exploring present day artistic meaning making efforts that revolve around Gilgamesh.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2009.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 13, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4805. Adviser: Richard Bauman.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2007.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-05, Section: A, page: 2108. Adviser: Richard Bauman. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 12, 2008)."

The completion of History as Theatrical Metaphor, now submitted for consideration for the award of the degree of Doctor of Letters, represents an integration and culmination of a number of related strands arising from both my practice as a playwright over the last five decades and my relevant academic research. Susanne Kries has summarised a key approach underlying my writing of history plays as ‘deconstructing the ideological intent behind the very endeavour of writing history and of revealing the ways by which mythologies are formed’. Much of my related academic research shares this interest. A recurring theme of both playwriting and scholarly writing, central to the work submitted, is the significance of the interaction of drama, language – especially Scots and English – and history. The initial phase in exploring such themes was in my developing professional playwriting practice. In 1967, I wrote the first draft of Mary, eventually produced by the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company in 1977. In this first version I sought to address the theme of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, but in a revisionary way. The play’s first acts, before Mary arrives on stage, involved an unlikely affair between Mary of Guise, Queen Regent in Mary’s absence in France, and her Secretary of State, Maitland of Lethington, conceived as a cross between a Chief Minister and a Mafia consigliere, a relationship in which Mary of Guise achieved some form of Lawrentian ‘authentic’ sexual release and self-fulfilment through her relationship with a powerful Scots leader. This motif was developed when Mary arrived and proceeded to fall under the magnetic spell of the even more Lawrentian Bothwell, a transformation of her sexuality and identity marked by the fact that about half way through her scenes she stopped speaking in French-inflected English and started to speak in Scots. The play’s tendentiousness was further marked by its being written in Scots-language free verse. The decision to write in Scots was consciously, if superficially, ideological. It sought to reflect the vibrant language amongst which I grew up on a council scheme, although in my home the dominant language was Standard Scottish English. I also sought to take a revisionary view of Scottish history, seeking to avoid what I saw as the sentimentalisation of that history in plays by an older generation like that of Robert McLellan. What I was concerned to do was later outlined explicitly by Tom McGrath in a 1984 interview, talking of his own practice: I suppose at that time we were coming up with a different ideology. We were coming up with a different approach after all that work, work that had been done [by writers like MacDiarmid and McLellan] in Scots language. We were coming up with this street level sound of existentialist man in the street, "black man in the ghetto" type of writing. It just upset the applecart. (Later I would develop a contextual interpretation of the shift McGrath refers to, and which I sought to be part of, in arguing that the use of Scots on stage was key to supporting and enhancing the cultural prestige of Scots in the 2011 chapter, ‘Drama as a Means for Uphaudin Leid Communities’. This – in a continuing conscious intention to assert the potential and status of Scots – while academic in content, was written entirely in Scots.) In short, from the beginning of my professional playwriting, a key strand was experiment in and exploration of the relationship of drama, Scots language, community identity and history, particularly the interrogation of accepted versions of ‘history’. The first draft of Mary came by the early 1970s to seem to me to be unsatisfactory in its exploration of the interaction of drama, language and history. By then, it appeared in its sensationalist version of Scottish history to have fallen into a parallel trap to the earlier one of a sentimental and romanticised view of that history. It certainly had moved away from conventional treatments of Scotland’s past, but was rather tending to a simplistic dramatic interpretation pour épater les bourgeois. Indeed, its attempts at sexual directness made it unacceptable at that time, 1968-69, to the management of the Royal Lyceum. While its Literary Manager Alan Brown spoke positively of the play, he still felt the company could not present it. Within very few years my own view came to be that, while it might substitute a certain late-adolescent Scots-language raunchiness for earlier playwrights’ Scots-language sentimentalities, it was itself somewhat naïve and sentimental. Further, the use of Scots in a free verse form, rather than adding anything to the dramatic potential of Scots language, seemed to remove it from the everyday discourse which inspired me to use it in the first place. This change of critical perspective and creative intention arose from two related developments in my dramaturgy. One was the impact of a variety of late 1960s theatrical experiments which impressed me in dealing with historical and political material in a post-Shavian and post-Brechtian way. These included the 1964 film version of Peter Brook's production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, which I saw in 1968, John Spurling's MacRune's Guevara (1969) and Peter Nichols's The National Health (1969) in the programme of the National Theatre in London, New York’s Negro Ensemble Company's version of Peter Weiss's The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, which is concerned with Portuguese colonial exploitation, presented in the 1969 London World Theatre Season, and John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy's version of Horatio Nelson’s life and reputation, The Hero Rises Up, presented by Nottingham Playhouse at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival. I was further impressed by the theatrical techniques of the New York-based LaMama troupe, by its version of Paul Foster's Tom Paine (1967) and the popularised and commercialised exploitation of those techniques in Hair (1967). I had also read Foster's Heimskringla! Or The Stoned Angels (1970), written for LaMama and derived from Norse sagas. All employed varying metatheatrical techniques to deconstruct received versions of history and politics which extended my own understanding of what was creatively possible. The second development was that, as those plays affected my understanding of theatrical possibilities in exploring historically based themes, I was researching and beginning to draft my next play on a historical theme. This explored the life, business ethics and politics of Andrew Carnegie. On top of all of this, at this time, having showed Max Stafford-Clark, Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre, a first draft of Carnegie, begun during the autumn of 1969, I was invited by him to work, in my first professional theatre role, as a writing assistant on the first Traverse Workshop Theatre Company production, Mother Earth (1970), directed by Stafford-Clark when he ceased to be director of the Traverse itself. With his new company, he was developing the deconstructionist and improvisational rehearsal techniques that would later be more widely thought of as the creative method of his Joint Stock Theatre Company, into which the Traverse Workshop Company morphed in 1974. The dramaturgical lessons learned from the examples cited above and by working with such a creative and methodologically innovative director as Stafford-Clark were allied to my own quizzical view of Carnegie’s reputation. This was partly derived from the fact that my great-grandfather was a first cousin of Carnegie’s. There were family stories which, if they did not fully undermine his philanthropic reputation, suggested there were other sides to his career.

This dissertation charts historical changes in the ceremonial institution that the Cora people of the town of Santa Teresa refer to as their costumbre, and links these changes to recent violence in that town. This cultural history begins with a description of the ceremonies through which cognatic descent is reproduced in Santa Teresa today. The performance of these mitote ceremonies positions core ceremonial participants both spatially, in relation to a meaningful territory, and temporally, in relation to sets of still-active deceased ancestors and ancestral deities, as members of distinct "maize-bundle groups". During the Lozada Rebellion of the 19th century, after a relatively brief mission period, Catholic-derived ceremonialism was integrated with this mitote ceremonialism by the ancestors of today's living Coras. This integrated costumbre expanded and reoriented the symbolic connotations produced in maize-bundle group ceremonies, creating a sense of hierarchical and synecdochical inclusiveness between particular descent groups and the "higher" courthouse officials of the community as a whole. After the fall of Manuel Lozada's military confederacy, these community-level ceremonial traditions became a battleground within a long-term factional struggle between intruding non-indigenous people (and their Tereseno supporters) and the other Teresenos who opposed the policies of these outsiders. This relatively clear-cut political factionalism splintered after the Instituto Nacional Indigenista entered into this factional conflict during the 1960s. This federal agency pushed through a series of political initiatives and development projects with little or no input from Teresenos, and so also eroded the willingness of local people to put out the effort required to properly continue their ceremonial traditions. In recent years Teresenos have responded to this community-level political vacuum, and the drunken violence that has come with it, by retreating from the "dirty" community-level ceremonial festivals to the more private and orderly mitote ceremonies celebrated by their own maize-bundle groups. In this way, the costumbre has acted as a fault-line dividing and fracturing the community; the ancestral ceremonial traditions that once established an inclusive territory and ancestry linking all Teresenos are now helping to produce a series of cleavages that are driving the splintered Tereseno community ever more apart.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2003.
A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, School of Humanities, 2003. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.
The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on November 1, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

Anthropology
Ph.D.
An ethnography based on research carried out between 2009 and 2010 in the vicinity of Bor Town, the capital of Jonglei State, in what was then Southern Sudan, this dissertation is primarily concerned with people's reflections on making agreements with one another during a period when the nature of belonging was being publically discussed and redefined. It examines historical narratives and discussions about how people ought to relate to the past and to each other in the changed circumstances following the formal cessation of hostilities between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Army in 2005. This dissertation departs from much of the literature on Southern Sudan by focusing on the common place, the nature of promises and ordinary talk, as opposed to state failure and armed conflict. After 21 years of multiple and overlapping conflicts in Sudan, a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed in January of 2005. The agreement stipulated national elections during a six-year Interim Period, at the end of which, the people of Southern Sudan were to hold a referendum on self-determination to decide whether to remain united with Sudan or to secede. This dissertation examines questions where were on many people's minds during Sudan's national elections and the run-up to the referendum, a time when questions of history, belonging, and place were very salient. The dissertation begins with a discussion of jokes and other narratives in order to sketch out some popular attitudes toward speech, responsibility and commitments. Most of the body of the dissertation is concerned with everyday talk about the past and with sketching out the background necessary to understand the stakes at play in discussions about citizenship and the definition of a South Sudanese citizen: Did it depend upon one's genealogy or one's place of birth, or one's commitments to a particular place, or their having simply suffered there with others?
Temple University--Theses

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2009.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 6, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3989. Advisers: Sandra K. Dolby; Roger Janelli.

The aim of this thesis is to study the practices and background of Voodoo in New Orleans through a holistic lens. This holistic lens includes researching the history of Voodoo in New Orleans, previous research done on Voodoo practice in New Orleans, contacting current practitioners and performing informal interviews, and participant-observation of New Orleans Voodoo rituals. This work is divided into three sections; the first delves into the history and current state of Voodoo of New Orleans. The second section discusses how Voodoo has influenced other cultural areas in New Orleans. The third section discusses how Voodoo and tourism interrelate with one another. The conclusion of this work addresses how through out history, influences on other areas of New Orleans culture, and tourism, the original ideas of Voodoo in New Orleans has stretched out beyond the original spectacle of Voodoo into the various ways individuals think about Voodoo. This also influences how practitioners view their own practice by reacting to how non-practitioners view Voodoo. It is like the metaphor of the snake eating his own tail, how Voodoo is practiced and then perceived by outsiders keeps feeding into each other.

This thesis is a cultural tour of the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia. It is concerned with the way in which Europeans employed stories to claim land and, conversely, their fears that the land would claim them.The stories considered are taken from literature and folk legend. The concept of liminality is important to the work because the mountains are a threshold, a demarcation between the city and the bush. Allied with the notion of liminality in the mountains is that of the uncanny (as defined by Freud). The work is divided into four sections. The first section, A POCKET GUIDE, introduces the terrain to be traversed. Section 2, FOUND, centres around the notion of foundation. Section 3, PASSAGE, links LOST and FOUND. LOST is the converse of FOUND. It explores our fears that the land will consume us.This fear is often expressed in the notion that the bush, beneath a surface beauty, has a dark and dangerous aspect and that it will swallow up the unwary. This idea is evident in the notion of possession - that a certain place can take hold of a person and induce a prescribed response from them - and of haunting, in which a spirit is tied to a specific location.
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

A study of the effects upon the village community of various areas of social and economic change. Based upon detailed examination of seven villages within the Leicestershire Vale of Belvoir, the thesis considers varied responses to legislative changes. such as those in employment regulation and education, to economic change such as that in agriculture and in the means of transport, and to social pressures for change as in the fields of religious allegiance or public recreation. Census evidence of changing population levels, and of variations in the composition of the population in terms of age, sex, and occupation, is discussed, and causes and effects of such changes suggested. The evidence of migration from and amongst the villages is explored, with an examination of possible motivation for it. Changing class relations are explored; while small-scale land ownership is shown to have been relatively unimportant in creating status or economic stability, the continuing influence of the great landowners, notably the Duke of Rutland, is recognised, but set against evidence of a decline in deferential attitudes and a growing challenge to aristocratic political influence. The village middle class of farmers and tradesmen is shown to have increasingly assumed a leadership role, but it is suggested that the conservatism of the village population helped to preserve elements of traditional village life, and above all, the sense of an integrated community.

A distinctive subset of late medieval drama are those customs which involved an element of subversion or inversion on the occasion of a calendar feast. These customs, which may generically be labelled as misrule, have long been a source of interest to antiquarians, local historians and students of medieval drama and popular culture. One particular view which has dominated the discussion and interpretation of misrule is the approach which sees such practices as a conservative force in late medieval society, that is, by temporarily challenging authority these customs merely reaffirm it in the long run. It is the contention of this thesis that although this model has raised the important question of the relationship between misrule, politics and social structure in this period, it is inappropriate both as a metaphor and as a tool for the analysis of these themes. I review the scholarly literature on misrule over the past twenty-five years in Chapter One, drawing attention to the problems of previous approaches. In Chapter Two I put forward what I believe to be a more appropriate vocabulary and framework in which those calendar customs with a transgressive element can be discussed. I suggest that misrule is more constructively approached as an instance of symbolic inversion, which enables functionalist terms like 'safety-valve' to be replaced by a neutral language that does not prejudge the function of a custom. I use this new methodology to undertake a series of case-studies in Chapters Three to Six, each of which examines the function of a particular custom. I am able to show that misrule could have a variety of functions in the late medieval town, playing a part in local change as part of wider strategy of resistance, as well as being one means through which social status could be accumulated and articulated.

This dissertation examines twentieth-century Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains through oral traditions (anecdotes, jokes, songs, poetry duels) as remembered by Muslims and Jews in the twenty-first century. Jews had lived in these predominantly Berber-speaking regions for over one thousand years; yet these rural Jewish communities had almost completely disappeared by the early 1960s, due to mass emigration, largely to Israel. Despite the totality of the rupture, Jews and Muslims retain vivid memories of their former neighbors. Drawing on my fieldwork with Muslims still living in Moroccan villages and with Jews in Israel who had emigrated from those same villages over half a century earlier, I use the anecdotes and songs that animate these reminiscences as my primary sources. My analysis is further informed by extensive research on Moroccan history and culture. My study reveals that Berber oral traditions functioned in the past—and continue to function in present-day reminiscences—as forms of creative acknowledgment of both difference and affinity between Jews and Muslims. Analyzing examples from this corpus illuminates aspects and nuances of the intricacies of daily life rarely addressed in other sources, facilitating a deeper understanding of the paradoxes and possibilities of Jewish/Muslim co-existence in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, and perhaps beyond.

Central to my theoretical concerns, therefore, are interreligious cultural production and boundaries. Berber cultural traditions in particular offer a unique framework (for both participants and researchers) for addressing issues of boundaries and difference, while simultaneously elucidating the shared cultural worlds of Jews and Muslims in which oral traditions played a crucial role, and out of which came creativity, humor, and community. It was the engagement with difference, rather than its erasure, that fostered community and a rich intercultural life.

I begin with an investigation of the phenomenon of Arabic-speaking Jews among Berber-speaking Muslims, which also illuminates Jewish participation in Berber oral—and other cultural—traditions. Rather than a unidirectional acculturation of the minority into the majority culture, Berber cultural forms engaged by Muslims and Jews reflect a dynamic interchange. I posit the idea of Muslim-Jewish “co-productions” for many of the shared Berber oral traditions, particularly for the poetic duels. In my analysis of the recounted anecdotes and poems, I explore how Muslims and Jews not only speak of each other but also through each other’s voices. Through adaptation of Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts of dialogism and polyphony, I show how speaking in one another’s voices allows Muslim and Jewish narrators to express multiple and often contradictory meanings simultaneously. Throughout my analysis, I investigate how boundaries did not always fall neatly or predictably into religious categories, nor did the complex socio-political stratification fit into a simplified majority-minority binary.

The nuanced views of Jewish-Muslim relationships that my project presents serve as a model for exploring such intercommunal relations beyond the temporal and geographic focus of my dissertation. My study serves as a corrective to simplified and polarized views of Jewish-Muslim relations prevalent in public spheres, media, and still, though to a lesser degree, in academia, and leads to an appreciation of the complexity and diversity of such relationships.

Descended from Celtic goddesses and the fairies of folklore, the literary character of Morgan le Fay has been most commonly perceived as a witch and a one-dimensional villainess who plagues King Arthur and his court, rather than recognized as the legendary King’s enchanted healer and otherworldly guardian. Too often the complexity of Morgan le Fay and her supernatural abilities are lost, her character neglected as peripheral. As a literary figure of imaginative design this thesis explores Morgan le Fay as a unique “window” into the medieval mindset, whereby one can recover both medieval understandings of magic and female magicians. By analyzing her role in key sources from the twelfth to fifteenth century, this thesis uses Morgan le Fay to recover nuanced perceptions of the supernatural in medieval England that embraced the ambiguity of a pagan past and remained insulated from continental constructions of demonic witchcraft.

This study examines stories from the 1800s about the Swedish folklore creature Näcken with the purpose to define what kind of view on gender they are presenting. The geographical area in focus is the Swedish south province Småland. The ambition is to see how the stories describe the thinking, acting and meaning about gender and authority. This will also be studied in relation to the norms and ideals of gender that dominated in the 1800s. Former studies has shown that the view of folklore and gender interacted and carried each other in the 1600s and the 1700s. There are also research that indicate that the creature Näcken maintained gender patterns in the 1800s. This research determines more general patterns concerning gender and has not done a more firmly analysis in relation to the change in the view on gender which took place between the 1700s and the 1800s, which this study intend to do by using Yvonne Hirdman’s gender system as a theoretical framework. The result has shown that the understandings of Näcken had a role to play in the context of social control, seeing as the understandings affected the behavior of people. The most clear message the stories expresses is that men had more capacity to act than women, which is in line with the 1800s ideals about gender that derived from a polarization norm. This can also be seen in the context in which the meeting with Näcken took place, namely the in the context of work and other activities, but not in connection to physical places in line with the polarization norm, in which the women should have met the creature closer to the farm and the men’s meeting should have more distance from the farm. The stories also expresses a valuing of characteristics which were highly valued as norms in the 1800s. The characteristics also have a moral dimension. Men with highly valued characteristics were more likely to succeed with their attempts and had bigger chances of escaping Näcken. Within the moral spectrum one can find a Christian motive as well, since warnings about neglecting the religion takes place. For women though, the stories’ moral dimension spoke about precepts and the negative consequences which could follow if the women did not practice restraint and carefulness. From the 1600s and 1700s to the 1800s Småland, there is also a continuity regarding sexual relationships between women and Näcken to be found. Those kinds of relationships are rare to find in the sources.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore, 2006.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0288. Adviser: Henry H. Glassie. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 8, 2007)."

This thesis is based upon my artistic interaction and response to the 5,000-year-old myth of the Sumerian deity, Inanna. The main element of this thesis consists of a body of artwork that evolved out of the interweaving of textual, psychological, and artistic research. The artwork is an artist's response to a particular juncture in the descent portion of Inanna's myth . . . the moment of her transformation. This amalgamation of artistic and textual artifacts documents the power of an ancient story, from a long-dead culture, to reach through time and touch an individual life. The written documentation draws from diverse areas of study such as alchemy, mythology, depth psychology, women's spirituality, and women's studies. Through readings, conferences, workshops, one-on-one conversations, active imagination, and art-making I have woven together a glimpse, perhaps a momentary perspective, of an encounter with a divine feminine archetype. I am a visual artist and my lens is that of a 21^st century woman and a maker-of-things. I gather, experience, and express my knowingness from this point of view and my thesis reflects my perspective.

The thesis consists of an introductory chapter, three chapters of family history and three of tale study, two appendices, the first containing sixteen stories in all known versions and the second seventy eight stories recorded by me, based on field recordings fran Alec, Belle and John Stewart and Willie MacPhee, 1978-84. The introductory chapter examines theories of the origins of Highland travellers and sets out the historical, psychological and aesthetic concerns of the tale study. The family history sets out the material recorded frcm informants. The first chapter deals with Belle's early life in Blairgowrie which is the geographic focus of the family's later history. The second traces the fortunes of the Stewarts in Perthshire and Ireland, showing how they adapted to altered circumstances when they returned to Scotland. The third chapter covers the period since the Second World War, during which Alec's family became well-known through the Folk Revival and their children began to integrate with the settled community and lose their oral culture. The historical tale study shows the links with Gaelic tradition to be found in the story collection. The psychological chapter reveals the functions the stories had in travellers' lives: teaching ancestral wisdom, strengthening kinship ties, reinforcing values, passing on skills for survival, containing fears. The aesthetic chapter looks at the structuring of stories and demonstrates the use of signal words and phrases to guide the listener's ear, as well as giving story tellers a means of recreative transmission. Styles and versions are compared and aesthetic principles deduced frcm the use of different kinds of language and imagery.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore, 2007.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-05, Section: A, page: 2108. Adviser: Beverly Stoeltje. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 9, 2008)".

The folklore collections amassed by Jean-François Bladé in nineteenth-century southwestern France are problematic for modern readers. Bladé's legacy includes a confusing combination of poorly received historical works and unimportant short stories as well as the large collections of proverbs, songs, and narratives that he collected in his native Gascony. No writer has ever attempted to study any of Bladé's informants in detail, not even his most famous narrator, the illiterate and "defiant" Guillaume Cazaux. Rather than dismissing Bladé as a poor ethnographer whose transcripts do not reflect what his informant Cazaux said, I propose taking Bladé's own confusion about authenticity seriously. This confusion suggests that Bladé was trapped between three competing models that depicted the authenticity of folklore as residing in either the audience or folklorist, or the tradition, or the performer. The texts of Cazaux's legends that Bladé published were not just invented by Bladé, but forged in a dynamic interaction between the folklorist, Cazaux, and the force of tradition. When Cazaux described his beliefs in witchcraft to Bladé, he did not just reveal his own worldview; he also relied on the power of anonymous forces and silence to threaten and coerce the folklorist. The legend texts that Bladé published are not simply monovocal re-writings of some things Cazaux said; they enact a conversation between the two men about place and time. This conversation is a very limited example of an important question that has occupied historians: the "modernization" of the rural population by national forces. Although Bladé and Cazaux had very different backgrounds and education and only knew each other for ten years, their memories are intertwined for posterity.

The Cache Valley Shoshone are the survivors of the Bear River Massacre, where a battle between a group of US. volunteer troops from California and a Shoshone village degenerated into the worst Indian massacre in US. history, resulting in the deaths of over 200 Shoshones. The massacre occurred due to increasing tensions over land use between the Shoshones and the Mormon settlers. Following the massacre, the Shoshones attempted settling in several different locations in Box Elder County, eventually finding a home in Washakie, Utah. However, the LDS Church sold the land where the city of Washakie sat, forcing the Shoshones to adapt quickly. Much of our knowledge of the massacre stems from either white American sources or the oral histories that circulate among one Shoshone family group. This leaves the information incomplete. Adding the voices of more individuals expands our knowledge of the massacre itself and the adaptations the Shoshones continue to make in order to survive.

The ubume is a ghost of Japanese folklore, once a living woman, who died during either pregnancy or childbirth. This thesis explores how the religious and secular developments of the ubume and related figures create a dichotomy of ideologies that both condemn and liberate women in their roles as mothers. Examples of literary and visual narratives of the ubume as well as the religious practices that were employed for maternity-related concerns are explored within their historical contexts in order to best understand what meaning they held for people at a given time and if that meaning has changed. These meanings and the actions taken to avoid becoming an ubume and to avoid interacting with one create a metanarrative that contributes to our understanding of the historical experience of women.

The trickster is a powerful figure of transformation in many societies, including Native Canadian and Maori cultures. As a demi-god, the trickster has the ability to assume the shape of a variety of animals and humans, but is typically associated with one particular form. In Native Canadian tribes, the trickster is identified as an animal and can range from a Raven to a Coyote, depending on the tribal mythologies from which he/she is derived. In Maori culture, Maui is the trickster figure and is conceptualised as a human male. In this thesis, I discuss how the traditional trickster is contexualised in the contemporary texts of both Native Canadian and Maori writers. Thomas King, Lee Maracle, Witi Ihimaera, and Patricia Grace all use the trickster figure, and the tricksterish strategies of creation/destruction, pedagogy, and humour to facilitate the decolonisation of culture within the textual realms of their novels. The trickster enables the destruction of stereotyped representations of colonised peoples and the creation of revised portrayals of these communities from an indigenous perspective. These recreated realities aid in teaching indigenous communities the strengths inherent in their cultural traditions, and foreground the use of comedy as an effective pedagogical device and subversive weapon. Although the use of trickster is considerable in both Maori and Native Canadian texts, it tends to be more explicit in the latter. A number of possibilities for these differences are considered.

This thesis looks at the role and function of the dragon in the saint's encounter with the monster in hagiographic texts, written primarily in the vernacular, between 1200 and 1500. Those connotations accrued by the dragon which are relevant to this thesis are traced from their earliest beginnings. Although by the middle ages the multi-valency of the dragon is reduced to one primary symbolic valency, that of evil and significantly, the evil of paganism, the dragon never loses completely its ancient associations and they help to colour its function within the narrative. The symbolic use of the dragon in vernacular saints' lives is generally consistent, although allowing for different didactic emphases. However, the two legends on which this thesis concentrates are those of St George from Caxton's Golden Legend and St Margaret from the Katherine Group. Each reveals tensions within the text when the dragon's role departs from the familiar hagiographic topos. Firstly, the role of the hagiographic dragon is identified by a comparison with that of the dragon in romance. Allowing for cross-fertilization, this thesis focuses on the significance of the hero's dragon-fight and the saint's dragon encounter to differentiate between the ethos of the romance and hagiographic genres respectively. Tensions are created in the hagiographic text when the romance topos of the dragon-fight is used in conjunction with the hagiographic dragon encounter, as in the legend of St George. Finally, in the legend of St Margaret, the dragon's appearance unbalances and unsettles the perspective of the narrative when its role and function are deployed in the promulgation of virginity.

You could only bury a body so deep before the seasons decided you would join it . Topsoil so desperate for affection it shakes to remind me that I was once and am loved . I linger in the southwestern sky , burgundy to violet , with Neil Young playing faintly in the distance as my father calls me home .

The primary objective of this M. A. thesis is to correct some false assumptions found in both older and more recent secondary literature on North American Indian narratives. Many folklorists base their folktale criteria on terms of cultural differences instead of similarities which results in an ethnocentric point of view that holds the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen as a standard against which all other folktale collections falls short. If we want to strive for a world view that will embrace all types of literature, while respecting the individuality of each culture, then we must focus on the essential similarities among world literatures and not the differences. The purpose of using another culture as a comparison, such as that of the North American Indians, is to question the ethnocentric definitions of folktales and fairy tales which have often been too rigid. Perhaps those cultural values exhibited by North American Indian folktales could prove to be beneficial to the world's multi-cultural society, in that these values could enrich and rejuvenate some Western values, such as respect for animals and the environment. These values may offer solutions to urgent contemporary world problems. Through a comparative analysis of the animal suitor motif found in the Grimms' fairy tales and North American Indian folktales, I hope to call attention to the stark cross-cultural similarities in universal folklore and to bring to light the multiplicity of cultural values which are deeply rooted in fairy tales and folklores around the world.