The notion of orality, now widespread, has not proved a very effective heuristic tool, although considerations of orality remain an essential starting point in approaching the material. In France, various projects at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research) led by Denise Paulme, Genevi_eve Calame-Griaule, Veronika G€or€og-Karady, and others such as Jean D_erive, have published collective works on such topics as the theme of the tree, the family universe, and enfants terribles. Their focus has been to interpret tales in terms of the local sociology and perception. The French approach is more oriented to the structural/morphological approaches of Claude Levi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp than to the taxonomic methods of Germanic and Anglophone scholarship.
Michael Jackson (Allegories of the Wilderness, 1982) does attempt a similar task for the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, discussing a corpus of tales from the perspective of various social issues. Harold Scheub is one of the few American scholars to approach folktales formalistically. Working principally with materials from southern Africa, where he has done extensive fieldwork, he identifies a doubled structure in tales, in which the elements of the initial problem are duplicated, and often transformed, in the resolution to the tale. Scheub has also given us one of the few performer-centered studies, dedicated to a Xhosa narrator, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani (The World and the Word, 1992). American studies of African folktales were at first oriented to tracing connections between African folktales and their continuities in the New World (the Br'er Rabbit stories, among others), but in recent years have turned more to questions of performance context, following the methods of Richard Baumann (Verbal Art as Performance, 1977) and Dan Ben-Amos, who applied the principles to African folklore.
Classification of African tales is an unfinished enterprise. African tales are not as well represented as they might be in indexes of motifs and tale types. Over the years, a number of dissertations have attempted to provide tools for specific regions, but their value and availability are limited. As a further complication, while many African tales do show some resemblance to foreign analogues, they are also very thoroughly acculturated in the local context so that the resemblances sometimes need to be teased out. African folktales in general seem closer to Native American tales in their themes and content than to the bourgeois examples collected by the Brothers Grimm, which served as armature for the original indexes of tale types and motifs. Many of the trickster stories are very similar: one animal visits another and is fed magically; when the animal tries to reproduce the methods, it dies or is maimed; the trickster is taken for a ride by a bird, but is dropped. This line of inquiry has not been well explored.
Adding to the question of acculturation is a tendency (in the newly independent countries) to define folktales in nationalist terms as the part of a specific heritage; such chauvinism is hardly unique to the field but does discourage comparative work. African folktales are still being be told, often with new twists and modern settings, and new collections continue to appear. The focus is very much upon individual cultures and language groups. African scholars face great difficulties in their work (a lack of support for research, poor library resources for reference work, and almost no publication outlets), but there are a growing number of studies from within cultures. Outside Africa, the value of folktales for understanding the cultural dynamics of the continents' many peoples is not appreciated, and the problem is compounded by generalized visions that efface all the specific traits of groups and social contexts.
