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in 1926. When a prominent scholar sums up a “method,” one can be quite
sure that it is mature or even over-ripe, and such is the case here. the
method had been developed by Krohn’s father, Julius Krohn, while he
tried to come to grips with the numerous variants within Kalevala-style
poetry (an inadvertent connection between folkloristics and myth, since
such poetry is essentially mythological). to be sure, the folkloristic (or
finnish, after its origin) method looks rather like classical text philology,
in that it works to posit an archetype through comparing extant versions and
essentially posits that change is the result of “mistakes” – not scribal error or
editorial intervention, but rather through a series of “rules” or “laws” of oral
transmission posited by Krohn and no longer taken seriously. However, it
differs in the very large amount of material that the scholar must ordinarily
consider. thus I think it is fair to say that the field of folkloristics has long
been comfortable with large data sets.
the “performance turn” in folkloristics emerged in the 1970s. It con-
ceived of folklore not as static “items” but as event or process and thus
represented a fundamental break with the so-called “folkloristic method” as
formulated by Krohn and practiced by many. this fundamental insight –
not only that within tradition itself “items” exist only as part of a process,
but further that performance can function as a paradigm for thinking about
culture within communities – now animates virtually all folkloristic analysis.
Performance is where stability and variation intersect. Even on the stage, with
fixed text, staging, and lighting, no two performances are the same, as any
theatre person will tell you.
for a performance to succeed, the performer and the audience must share
a common view of what can and cannot happen in the performance, what it
is for, why it is valuable, and so forth. Whether folklorists study an actual
performance or use the paradigm of performance to analyze other situations,
one of the things they are always interested in is the shared competence of
performers and audience, to put the matter simply. We may call these shared
views “cultural competence.” In light of this approach to tradition, I argued
in my “Challenge” piece that we should think more about what I would call
the “cultural competence” of the authors, scribes, readers of, and listeners to
medieval written literature.
Let me now take up this point in connection with the study of myth and
religion. this is a subject in which I have been deeply immersed for the last
FOLKLORISTICS, MYTH, AND RELIGION