Thus Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, could produce a 150-page ethnography of the Tsimshian of British Columbia, including food-gathering, marriage, social organization, religion, and other topics, based entirely on the data in a group of sixty-nine tales. The result is on display in Boas's classic Tsimshian Mythology (1916). Recent anthropologists, if similarly motivated, have focused more narrowly. In his Enchanted Maidens: Gender Relations in Spanish Folktales of Courtship and Marriage (1990), James Taggart offers a commentary on newly collected versions of Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, and other tales as told by men and women, whose differing points of view shed light on marriage customs and gender roles. In between these two milestones, various anthropologists, ranging from Bronislaw Malinowski to Ruth Benedict, have rung changes on the theme of folklore as a key to understanding culture.
However, the term “anthropological school” as it pertains to folklore refers not to this mainstream but to a pre-Boas movement, largely British, culminating in the work of James G. Frazer and Andrew Lang. Much later in the nonetheless short, 150-year-old history of the discipline of anthropology we find two other engaging movements, the largely European structuralism, advanced by Claude L_evi-Strauss, and the American movement known as ethnopoetics, both very much concerned with folktales but only tangentially related to the usual concerns of social anthropology.
Those who represented the anthropological school, mentioned above, were reacting against a “philological” movement of the mid- and late nineteenth century, which treated folktales as broken-down remnants of an ancient lore belonging to the Aryan cultures of India and the Middle East. Friedrich Max M€uller, chief spokesman for the philological camp, saw in modern folktales the vestiges of old allegories drawn from nature. Detected especially were hidden references to the diurnal rising and setting of the sun. In contrast, Frazer and Lang saw folklore as built up (not broken down) from the lore of “primitive” cultures still alive in the non-European world. Members of both camps relied on a comparative method that took for granted what was sometimes spoken of as the psychic unity of the human species.
It should be noted that the ritual theory of myth, by which all myths are traced to ancient rituals, derives from Frazer's masterwork, The Golden Bough (1890-1915), still regarded as a monument of anthropology. Among the many works inspired by Frazer was Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920), in which she traced the medieval legend of the Grail-the dish used by Christ at the Last Supper-to a pre-Christian fertility cult. In the 1920s, turning away from these concerns, Bronislaw Malinowski and other “functionalists” used traditional tales to help explain how culture works. Based on field researches among the Trobriand Islanders of the western Pacific, Malinowski's contribution to folklore study was the concept of myth as “charter.” That is, the purpose of the story is not merely to entertain but to legitimize the values of an entire society. In some cases the myth may be sufficiently detailed to serve as a practical guide to the activities with which it is concerned.
Meanwhile, an important German school, including Paul Ehrenreich, Eduard Seler, and Konrad T. Preuss, had been making solid contributions to cultural studies while still operating within the long shadow of Max M€uller. At a surprisingly late date, Preuss could bring out a collection of tales from the Witoto of Colombia, explaining that the fictional characters represented the moon in its monthly phases (Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto, 1921-23). Against this background the British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown proposed that the doings of human characters identified with the moon, the sun, or wind in traditional stories should be regarded as allegories not of natural phenomena but of social experience (The Andaman Islanders, 1922), thereby standing nature mythology on its head.
Like Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, Ruth Benedict in her influential Patterns of Culture (1934) brushed aside the quest for universals that had occupied Lang and Frazer as well
as M€uller. For her, each culture created its own pattern, or personality. With regard to stories in particular, the point was elaborated in Benedict's Zuni Mythology (1935): Folktales are never generic, she declared; rather, they express the values and practices of one culture (compare the earlier work of Joseph Jacobs). Like many anthropologists (though not Malinowski), Benedict used the term myth interchangeably with folktale, especially in non-Western contexts.
Striking out in new directions, the twin approaches of structuralism and ethnopoetics, which gained currency in the 1960s, de-emphasized the manifest content of folktales. Structuralists found a hidden geometry in verbal art, detecting binary oppositions such as male and female, old and young, or raw and cooked, while practitioners of ethnopoetics concentrated on style, discovering couplets, stanzas, pauses, and other features that revealed the narrative as a kind of poetry. Two Americanists took the lead in developing ethnopoetics: Dennis Tedlock, who studied live performance (Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, 1972), and Dell Hymes, who specialized in textual analysis (“In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, 1981). Anthropological approaches to folklore that have most easily crossed the divide between science and art are those that may be deemed the least anthropological. Ethnopoetics has inspired such poets as W. S. Merwin and Gary Snyder, not to mention numerous linguists, whose work has been showcased in volumes edited by the poet and literary historian Brian Swann. In the field of criticism, L_evi-Strauss himself has used structuralism to illuminate Baudelaire's sonnet “Les Chats” (“The Cats”). As for the work of Frazer and Weston, which inspired T. S. Eliot's master poem The Waste Land, though grounded in anthropology, it would eventually be associated with literary approaches to folklore.
