Contents

Idaho Librarian
Vol. 58, No. 1/2

Review

Teachers of folklore are ever on the lookout for textbooks that will interest our students, present materials for classroom discussions and exercises, and provide guidance for student projects and papers. In my folklore courses at Idaho State University I have used several texts, all with merits, but none of them perfect. The main choices at an introductory level, Jan Harold Brunvand’s The Study of American Folklore (4^th ed., 1998) and Elliott Oring’s Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction (1986), become more out of date every year, leaving a real need for a revised or a new folklore text. Consequently, I was hopeful when I began to read Sims and Stephens’ Living Folklore.

Sims and Stephens offer readers a competent overview of folklore, both as a body of traditional materials and as the discipline that studies them. An advantage of the book is that the authors include a few developments more recent than do Brunvand’s and Oring’s texts. The discussion of authenticity, for example, is a helpful corrective to the everyday view of folklore as static and unadulterated. In the chapter on interpreting folklore Sims and Stephens include Elaine Lawless’ reciprocal ethnography and offer as a possible new trend “intersectionality,” although without providing any solid evidence that folklorists have embraced that idea as a major school of thought.

Rejecting Brunvand's encyclopedic genre-by-genre approach to organizing his textbook, and Oring's group and genre approach, Sims and Stephens present folklore first with a working definition, and then through definitions and examples of folk group, tradition, ritual, and performance, the latter three categories overlapping ones. While many folklorists would present performance as a theoretical approach, Sims and Stephens treat performance as “an expressive activity” that can be analyzed as a larger-than-genre-size unit of folklore. In their theory chapter they group approaches to analyzing and interpreting folklore under the broad categories of functionalism, structuralism, psychoanalytic interpretation, and post-structuralist approaches.

Sims and Stephens end their book with a chapter guiding students in folklore fieldwork and a chapter of extended examples of folklore projects completed by folklore students and teachers. These two sections of Living Folklore are the book’s best chapters. The advice is more detailed than one usually sees in introductory texts, and the projects are also detailed and interesting, providing students with a sense that they are capable of making a contribution to the field even in their undergraduate fieldwork. The ethics of doing fieldwork is discussed using the example of Barre Toelken's collection and eventual relinquishment of taped narratives by the Navaho storyteller Yellowman, a case that forces readers to grapple with major, painful ethical issues.

In spite of my appreciation of the authors’ attempt to portray the field comprehensively, and in spite of the usefulness of the book’s last two chapters, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it for classroom use. Living Folklore is hampered in its appeal to students and general readers by a writing style that vacillates between too simple and too technical. The style is also weighed down with quotations, many from earlier textbook writers rather than from sources more primary to the topics being addressed. 

The authors are sometimes too general and even vague in their presentation of both examples of folklore and theoretical positions. Many interesting examples are pointed to rather than developed. Paul Bunyan, for instance, is suggested as a well-known example of commercially-written stories that have moved into oral tradition, but Sims and Stephens do not let their readers, presumably beginning folklore students, in on the specifics of the case, nor do they provide a citation to the scholarship about Bunyan (87). The description of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord’s oral formulaic theory is so vague that it is doubtful whether an uninitiated reader would understand their important contribution to the study of oral epic (25).

It is also unsettling that a few of the greats in folklore studies are missing both from the text and the bibliography. We do not hear about Linda Dégh’s contributions to European folktale and American legend scholarship, nor does John Miles Foley’s important and recent work with meaning in oral poetry make an appearance. Even the final two chapters have weaknesses: the fieldwork chapter gives very short shrift to secondary source searching, and the sample projects are written less as fieldwork reports than creative non-fiction essays in which interviews become dialogue.

While teachers of introductory folklore courses may not want to adopt Living Folklore as a textbook, the book should be considered for acquisition by public, school, and college libraries serving communities where folklore is part of the curriculum. However, those libraries should also retain the older standard textbooks. Brunvand, Oring, Barre Toelken's Dynamics of Folklore (revised ed. 1996), and Alan Dundes’ Interpreting Folklore (1980) remain important and fundamental statements by major folklore scholars.