Course Glossary

People in speech communities develop words to categorize and express distinctions. These words and their meanings also affect our perceptions: when we have a word in our lexicon, we are likely to interpret an event in its terms or distinguish or appreciate a detail or phenomenon. The strongest expression of this property of language is called "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis": a language's structure affects a speech community's perceptions.

In this course our speech community has developed terms and specialized meanings for words that are different from their denotations in ordinary language use. In class discussion, in writing assignments, and on exams, we'll be using these specialized terms. These words are part of the instrumentalities (to use a Dell Hymes term) of professional jargons in folktale study and sociolinguistics. The listing below is to help students review for course examinations; however, reviewing topics listed in reading assignments and class notes are also important helps.

Aesthetics

Concepts of well-formedness. Our course has worked to get a sense of the assumptions of well-formedness, folk aesthetics, that cause delight and appreciation within a folk group.

Analytical category

Term or concept developed by scholars to categorize or identify a folklife form or structure. See ethnic category.

Anecdote

Single episode legend about a specific individual. Students in the folk group of our class now tell stories about Thomas McGowan, the teacher.

Criterion of belief

William Bascom's typology divides oral narratives into myths, legends, and folktales, using whether a group believes a story as true or interprets it as fiction as a classification criterion. Our course has explored the ways narrators play with belief in a story performance.

Bolicks

The family of Glenn Bolick in the Bailey's Camp community near Blowing Rock. McGowan valued their special maintaining of Blue Ridge farm and lumbering folkways and their continuing the Jugtown-Seagrove pottery traditions from the Owens family. Included in their folklife are a ground hog kiln using a wood fire for curing pottery, sacred and oldtime music traditions, farm and pottery building architecture, basic pottery forms and practices, and many artifacts and practices that consciously maintain a link with the Blue Ridge past.

Collecting

The process of recording folklore in some form. In our course students collected stories from informants, usually by tape recording a performance.

Communicative Event

Sociolinguistic concept that every speech discourse isn't just words, but an interaction between speakers or a speaker and an audience. Hymes's SPEAKING model helps us realize aspects of a story, performance, or group swapping tales as communicative event.An extension of this concept is our talking of the "folk event," the performance or encounter with folklife in its natural context with an appreciation of its connotativeness and levels of context.

Connotation and connotativeness

The associated meaning of words, objects, and practices in folklife. A goal of our course has been to make us more sensitive to the powerful set of associated meanings that exists in the folklife of high context groups.

Context

The physical and social environment in which a folklore item is performed. We have distinguished "natural context," the normal setting of a performance, from "induced natural context," the environment that a collector might establish as helpful to making a performance normal, even though the collecting situation introduces some artificial relations. Dundes recommends we include context, in addition to text and texture, in our analysis of folklore items. Oring distinguished four major levels of context: cultural, social, individual, and comparative (135-37), and we've applied them in different ways in our course.

Cooperative principle

Paul Grice's theory that ordinary conversations depends on the four maxims of quality, quanity, relation, and manner. McGowan claims that tall tales and other folktales play with these maxims.

Customary folklore

Practices and beliefs that are traditional to a group. Youngsters often make "legend trips" to sites of local supernatural legends. Legend trips are part of the customary folklore of young people's folk groups. Brunvand distinguishes three basic forms of folklore: customary folklore, material folk traditions, and oral folklore.

Dialect

A variety of a language used by a group or speech community. An instrumentality used by Orville Hicks in his performance was his Appalachian dialect. Certain features of dialect are categorized as folk speech. E.g., Orville uses the old form "cloomb" as his past tense form of "climbed."

Elaboration

Development of details in a narrative. Part of our esthetic enjoyment of a narrator is his ability to elaborate details in developing a story. Orville Hicks's embellished personal experience story "The Hardest Whipping" included elaboration on the new store sign, his brother's car, and even the drink selections of his brother and sister. Colonel Wolf used cartoon comparisons as part of the elaboration in his Vietnam war story, which we viewed on videotape.

Emic

Pertaining to distinctions that member of a folk group make about their folklife. "Dirty joke" is a genre that many American folk groups use to categorize one kind of humorous narrative. Orville Hicks and other local tellers call their long stories about the hero Jack, Jack Tales. "Whopper" is a term in some folk groups for a short tall tale structure.All these are emic classifications.

End

Dell Hymes's term for the purposes and outcomes of a communicative event. See function.

Ethnic category

A term or concept that members of the group use themselves to classify an item of folklife.

Esoteric

Pertaining to a group's ideas about itself or about what it thinks other groups think about it. Mr. McGowan's joke narrative about an Appalachian student and a Western Carolina student plays on the esoteric and exoteric factors.High context groups possess much esoteric understanding and meaning.

Ethnic category

Term or concept used by members of a folk group to distinguish significant concerns or structures in their folklife. See analytic category.

Ethnicity

Special sense of identity, solidarity, and difference felt by members of a group, particularly a national, regional, or racial group. Oring stresses ethnicity implies "a consciousness of kind," shared traditions that are "historically derived," and a sense of descent. Our course has investigated the ethnicity of Portuguese-Americans in festival at Jesus Savior Catholic Church in Newport, RI; the sense of Blue Ridge ethnicity expressed by Glenn Bolick in his work and shaping of homeplace; African-American call-and-response social interaction; and many other examples.

Etic

Pertaining to distinctions made by outsiders, including scholars, about folklife in a group. Our scholarly use of the terms "legend" has an etic meaning not shared by tellers of legends.

Exoteric

Pertaining to a group's ideas about other groups and people.

Folk Group

A community of individuals who share some sense of tradition, speech, and informal culture. Dundes defines this unit as "any group of people . . . who share at least one common factor" (Oring 1). We've recognized family, occupational, religious, regional, gender-differentiated, and ethnic groups. The definition of "folklife" proclaimed in Public Law 94-201, the enabling act for the American Folklife Center, emphasizes types of groups and forms of folklife. Anthropologist Robert Redfield proposed a strong definition of "folk society" that Oring suggests we apply in relative ways.

Folk Society

Term constructed by Robert Redfield to describe Latin American peasant groups. Characteristics include isolation, little communication with outsiders, intense communication among members, strong similarities, little change over generations, economic independence and self-sufficiency, few secondary tools, absence of technology, and shared physical, behavioral, and ideological similarities (Oring 13-14). Folklorists see Redfield as defining an ideal society (i.e., a real group with exactly these characteristics doesn't exit), but apply his concepts productively in relative ways to ethnic groups.

Folklore

Items in a group's culture passed on informally by word-of-mouth or example. Brunvand's definition: "Those materials in culture that circulate traditionally among members of any group in different versions, whether in oral form or by means of customary example, as well as the processes of traditional performance and communication." Ben-Amos's definition: "artistic communication in small groups." Our course is always interested in the emphases and directions of such definitions; Oring considers some of these emphases, arguing not for a definition, but an orientation toward the values of communal, common, informal, marginal, personal, traditional, aesthetic, and ideological.

Folktale

Traditional oral narratives told as fiction, i.e., not told as true in belief. Orville Hicks's "Little Jack and Big Jack" is a folktale, told to us as fiction and not with any validity claims as true.

Function

Purpose of a folklore item. William Bascom proposes four functions: escape, validating culture, education, and maintaining conformity within a group (279-82). In our course, we often analyze more specific purposes within these large categories. For example, a Sunday school teacher might tell märchen to entertain children, but also to foster cooperative attitudes among different individuals, a form of conformity with Christian cultural values. Same as Hymes's term "end."

Genre

A kind of folklore. See Hymes's SPEAKING model. Our course has developed both emic and etic genres distinctions, particularly terms for oral narrative types. Often a narrative opening includes keys that are clues to genre so an audience knows how to approach the performance. Orville Hicks is extremely skilled at playing with genre and our expectations.

Gesunkenes Kulturgut theory

Idea that folklore is items of past elite culture that have been adapted and popularized in folk culture. Both German Romanticism and British nineteenth-century popular antiquities see folklore as remnants of past culture.

High context group

Group in which "meaning and action are more directly related to context than to the simple denotations of words" (Toelken 57). Folk groups are high context groups. Our class has developed associations with jokes so that simply mentioning a word may draw on these connotations, which are beyond the basic denotational meaning of the word,

Dell Hymes

Sociolinguist whose SPEAKING model is a basic analytic tool for our course because it forces us to see different aspects of folklife as communicative events.

Jack Tale

Important local märchen subgenre studied in our course. Each tale presents the episodic adventures of Jack, a youngest-best hero who seeks his fortune. Jack succeeds by luck, cleverness, or good nature, and McGowan argues that his adventures offer a maturation narrative emphasizing steps in growing up. Narrators of Jack Tales in our course will include Orville Hicks; Ray Hicks; and schoolteacher Marshall Ward. Tales may include "Jack and the Heifer Hide," "Jack and the Doctor's Daughter" (and a film adaptation by Tom Davenport, "Cat 'n' Mouse," and "Hardy-Hard Head" (and Ray Hicks's scatological variant "Hardy-Hard Ass). Many performers of the local Beech Mountain tradition associate the tales with a noted ancestor, Council (Counce) Harmon, who handed the tales on.

Joke

Short humorous fictional tale. Our course emphasized appropriate incongruity as a form that evokes laughter.

Legend

Oral narratives told as true and set in historical time, generally about secular subjects.We've looked at local placename legends, local character anecdotes, and urban legends.

Legend trip

Custom of visiting the site of the action of a supernatural legend, which is a popular practice among American teenagers.

Level of culture

Brunvand has classified three cultural levels: elite, popular or normative, and folk. Elite culture is high culture and is usually acquired by education. Popular culture is the mass culture that is spread across groups by mass media such as television and magazines. Folk culture is the traditional culture handed on informally within a group.

Local character anecdote

Short legend illustrating the special characteristics of a special local person. Thomas McGowan's story of Dr. Wiley Smith, the retired psychology professor who opposed razing Watauga Hall, is a local character anecdote at Appalachian. McGowan argues that character anecdotes establish norms for conduct in a culture by showing the exaggerated or on-the-edge behavior of noted individuals. This kind of interpretation emphasizes the cultural context of the story.

Märchen

Scholars' term for long, multi-episodic folktales involving supernatural or magic happenings and often a child hero. The Jack Tales we've studied in the second half of our course are märchen. ("märchen" is both a singular and a plural noun and is pronounced roughly as "mareshun.") Jack Tales are märchen; we've been interested in the wide functions and meanings that can carry from Frank Proffitt, Jr.'s class struggle interests in "Jack and the Doctor's Gal" to Orville Hicks's sense of father-son relations in the same tale.

Material folk traditions

Objects and artifacts that are handed down by tradition within a folk group. A family might hand on a clock or quilt because it carries important senses of identity and continuing of relationships.

Memorate

A first-person report of unusual happenings. Memorates may develop into supernatural legends if when other narrators tell a traditional variant of the story.

Multiformity

McGowan supports Barre Toelken's emphasis that folklife motifs occur in different genres with different functions. A creative aspect of folklife is the adaptation and mixing of motifs in performance. Toelken argues that this "tendency toward multiplicity and overlapping assures that the total quantity of folklore in a person's repertoire will be highly variable [and] these variations will be as much a function of the person's own taste as they are of differences in people from whom the traditions were learned and the ages at which they were picked up" (195).

Myth

Classification in Bascom's typology for narratives told as true about god-like characters in a preternatural past. Cherokee stories of the creation of animals are myths.

Narrative

Verbal art with a plot, a recounting of an event or series of events.

Narrator

Teller of a story. Narrators perform and present a self or narrative persona in the communicative event of a story.

Oral folklore

Classification for spoken traditional culture, including proverbs, narratives, and other genres of discourse.

Oral formula

Phrase repeated by a teller or in a story tradition and used as a basic building block of a story discourse. Orville Hicks uses the formula "dead as a hammer" in some of his stories.

Oral transmission

The passing on of a tale, belief, or other item of folklore by word-of-mouth. Orville Hicks tells Jack Tales first heard from his mother, Sarah Harmon Hicks, and Ray Hicks, which Orville learned by oral transmission. American Folklore Society founder William Newell defined "folklore" as "oral tradition and belief handed down from generation to generation without the use of writing" (Oring 8), a definition that gives special attention to oral transmission.

Performance

Event in which a speaker takes responsibility for communicative competence. Telling a story always involves a sense of performance because of the narrator's concern with the form of discourse and expectations of the audience. McGowan takes many of his concepts about performance from Richard Bauman, including his observation that "performance usually suggests an aesthetically marked and heightened mode of communication, framed in a special way and put on display for an audience" ("Performance," Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments [New York: Oxford UP, 1992], 41).

Play

The flexibility and delightful variation that folk artists and tradition bearers apply to the performance of processes and items.

Repertory or repertoire

The folklore items known and practiced by a tradition bearer. In his repertory, Orville Hicks has a number of preacher tales, and he also carries on a set of Jack Tales, learned from his mother, Sarah Harmon Hicks, and his cousin and neighbor, Ray Hicks.

Reported speech

Imitation of the speech within an oral narrative, an important part of the artistic performance of an oral narrative. Orville Hicks quotes the speech of the characters in "MuleEggs," much to our delight.

Supernatural legend

A narrative that supports superstitions or folk beliefs. Ghost stories are supernatural legends.

Tall tale

Folktale involving exaggeration, often featuring the combination of concrete detail and ludicrous images as a technique.

Text

The words of a folklore item. Our course is concerned with how text, texture, context--Dundes's triad--help us understand a performed tale, song, or other form more fully.

Texture

The special linguistic and paralinguistic features of a performed narrative, e.g., pauses, intonation, imitation of speech, and gestures. A textural feature of Orville Hicks's performances is his laughter.

Tradition

The persistence of a structure over time or space. McGowan emphasizes the special dynamic in folklife that combines tradition and innovation. In one example, he presented the Rhode Island clam shack as a traditional building, whose basic forms and features individual owners and workers play with and innovate with in specific landscapes.

Urban legend

Story of unusual and reportable happenings that occur in contemporary time and place. Urban legends often express modern anxieties if we approach their cultural contexts.