Fakelore
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===Fakelore as multicultural attire in children's literature=== | ===Fakelore as multicultural attire in children's literature=== | ||
| − | In recent years, children's readers and textbooks include alleged folktales from non-Western cultures. Unfortunately, few genuine folktales are really well suited for the purposes of the editors of the books in question. They are, after all, the products of non-Western cultures. They are often morally ambiguous and inconclusive. They may contain adult humor. | + | In recent years, children's readers and textbooks include alleged folktales from non-Western cultures, in an attempt to appear multicultural. Unfortunately, few genuine folktales are really well suited for the purposes of the editors of the books in question. They are, after all, the products of non-Western cultures. They are often morally ambiguous and inconclusive. They may contain adult humor. They may also refer to non-Christian [[deity|deities]] and polytheistic religious values. The gods of Greece and Rome were not chaste or non-violent, and neither are the gods of many other polytheistic religions. Compare the frequent omission or deliberate mistranslation of [[Shinto]] themes in commercially distributed English versions of children's anime, the removal of even innocuous nudity, and the alteration of [[gay]] and [[transgender]] characters.<ref>{{wpa|Sailor Moon (anime)}}</ref><ref>Allison, Anne (2000). "A Challenge to Hollywood? Japanese Character Goods Hit the US". Japanese Studies (Routledge) 20 (1): 67–88.</ref> "Real myths are usually complex, sometimes long, full of death, violence, retribution, hatred, sex, bodily function, and gruesome imagery. They are likely to have closure that is unfamiliar or uncomfortable."<ref name="Singer">Singer, Eliot. [https://www.msu.edu/user/singere/fakelore.html Fakelore, Multiculturalism, and the Ethics of Children's Literature], Michigan State University</ref> |
They do not share the ideas of contemporary Western educators about, say, the level of violence appropriate for children's reading. They do not share Western attitudes towards phlegm or excrement, or the appropriate treatment of such themes in children's literature.<ref>See Levi-Strauss, Claude, "The proper uses of excrement", in ''Mythologiques: The Naked Man'' (Univ. Chicago, 1990; ISBN 0226474968)</ref> Collected tales from an oral tradition are told using techniques appropriate to oral performance. The need to adapt these tales to the familiar narrative structures used in printed stories inevitably alters and distorts them.<ref name="Singer"></ref> | They do not share the ideas of contemporary Western educators about, say, the level of violence appropriate for children's reading. They do not share Western attitudes towards phlegm or excrement, or the appropriate treatment of such themes in children's literature.<ref>See Levi-Strauss, Claude, "The proper uses of excrement", in ''Mythologiques: The Naked Man'' (Univ. Chicago, 1990; ISBN 0226474968)</ref> Collected tales from an oral tradition are told using techniques appropriate to oral performance. The need to adapt these tales to the familiar narrative structures used in printed stories inevitably alters and distorts them.<ref name="Singer"></ref> | ||
| − | But educators wish to present non-Western and non-White material in their textbooks, the better to establish their [[multiculturalism|multicultural]] credentials. | + | But educators wish to present non-Western and non-White material in their textbooks, the better to establish their [[multiculturalism|multicultural]] credentials. To avoid the risk of material that may lead to actually stretched cultural horizons, the sources are [[censorship|bowdlerized]] and distorted, with frequent outright invention. The northwestern Native character "Mucus Boy" turns into "Clamshell Boy" in the hands of American textbook editors. Trickster figures generally don't make good role models; they suffer serious distortion at the hands of editors who want more conventional heroes. [[Coyote]] doesn't generally learn a moral lesson about laziness in authentic folktales, but he does when the folktale "Coyote Goes for Salt" is turned into the children's book ''Coyote and the Dancing Butterflies''. Ecological piety and other approved-for-children agendas are often written into traditional lore in a way that distorts them, as in the children's book ''The Prince and the Salmon People''. Its editors altered a traditional story about the relationship between humans and salmon into a "powerful, timely message" about "overfishing, concrete dams, polluted rivers, and hatchery fish".<ref name="Singer"></ref> |
Western editors of children's books make the source material comfortable, teachable, and conformed to Western narrative structures and Western received ideas about childhood. In doing so, they conceal the "[[other]]ness" of the non-Western cultures they supposedly represent.<ref name="Singer"></ref> | Western editors of children's books make the source material comfortable, teachable, and conformed to Western narrative structures and Western received ideas about childhood. In doing so, they conceal the "[[other]]ness" of the non-Western cultures they supposedly represent.<ref name="Singer"></ref> | ||
Revision as of 18:32, 26 November 2014
“” It is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected.... Whosoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty, to our thinking, of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.
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| —Charles Dickens, "Frauds on Fairies" (1853) |
| Gather 'round the campfire for |
| My grandmum used to say.... |
Fakelore is often intentionally quaint or old-timey, and not infrequently has some kind of moralistic or commercial agenda, while genuine folklore responds to live concerns among the people who circulate it, and is often "repetitive, clumsy, meaningless and obscene".[1]
Fakelore is also related to folklorism, which originally related to the use of folklore by commercial interests such as the tourism and movie industries. It refers generally to the use of folklore themes outside the context of the folk process, including the academic study of folklore itself.
Contents |
Examples
- Tall tales featuring the semi-legendary cowboy Pecos Bill[wp], who rode his horse Widow-Maker with a rattlesnake whip and once lassoed a tornado, actually first appeared in the Century Magazine starting in 1917. The character was in fact invented by Edward O'Reilly. He also appears to have influenced the rock song Who Do You Love by Bo Diddley.
- There is some evidence that the character of Paul Bunyan[wp] may have been originally an authentic folk figure. But his fame largely rests on promotional materials from the Red River Lumber Company starting in around 1916. These advertisements are the source of many of the stories.
- The famous folk song Follow the Drinking Gourd[wp] is thought to (rather transparently) code instructions for fleeing African-American slaves to travel the Underground Railroad. It was first published in 1928, though it was allegedly collected in the 1910s. It is not attested in any form before the American Civil War.[2]
- The widespread belief in pagan survivals has influenced folklore revivalism and altered the context and plot of surviving folklore. Neopagans in their early days were fond of inventing stories about how they had been initiated into ancient pagan traditions by conveniently dead relations; this body of lore is known generally among pagans as "Grandmother stories".[3]
- The Disney effect: for most people, the canonical representations of folktales such as Snow White[wp], Cinderella[wp], and Sleeping Beauty[wp] are the ones presented in the Disney films, which often alter and bowdlerize the source materials.
- Bobby Mackey's Music World is a nightclub in northern Kentucky, near Cincinnati, that has a hole in its basement floor that's supposed to be a gateway to Hell. The club promotes a completely fabricated history of events that includes a dance hall girl committing suicide, gunfights between Cincinnati mobsters, and secret satanic rituals.
- The character of the Slender Man was created on June 10, 2009 by Victor Surge on the Something Awful forums. He is a bugbear of the "Bloody Mary"[wp] or "Mary Worth" type, a story that previously inspired horror films like Candyman, and has become a figure invoked in children's "ostentation" (i.e. supernatural dare) play. Several acts of violence have been committed by children in his name.[4] [5]
In search of the primitive
Fakelore, unlike folklore, often has a fairly obvious motive. People seek to invoke the authority of immemorial tradition for whatever it is they're selling. Fakelore is also created by alternative medicine businesses, which often present their wares as being part of a tradition of natural healing; the idea being that their wares are concocted from herbs and plants that have been used in folk medicine.
A similar vein is found in some martial arts schools. Exposure to wuxia[wp] films or the Kung Fu television series leads some practitioners to mix fortune cookie spiritual platitudes, talk of bushidō[wp] and similar philosophies, and other orientalizing woo into the disciplines and exercises of the martial arts.
Native Americans have frequently been appropriated as mouthpieces for various sorts of fakelore, often with a conservationist or environmentalist agenda. The noble savage stereotype is the typical motivation for the creation of fake Native lore; the idea being that Natives live at peace and oneness with the earth and are repositories of ancient wisdom about ecology and herbalism.
Native American impostors and fakelore
Greenpeace's flag ship Rainbow Warrior was named after a bogus Native American prophecy that allegedly foretold the rise of the environmental movement.[6] The actual origin of the alleged prophecy is a 1962 book titled Warriors of the Rainbow by William Willoya and Vinson Brown. The book was in fact an evangelical Christian tract that aimed at the conversion of Native Americans to Christianity.[7] It follows the long tradition of attributing noble or sentimental words to Native Americans, such as:
- The famous Chief Joseph[wp] speech ("I will fight no more forever"), actually attributed to the Chief by a White lawyer covering the surrender.
- A similar, flowery speech on ecological piety ("Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people....") is attributed to Chief Seattle[wp]; it came from a television show from 1971, and was written by screenwriter Ted Perry.[8][9]
There is also a long tradition of Whites posing as Native Americans, often to deliver some kind of woo-laden message that would sound better in the mouth of a noble savage:
- Grey Owl[wp] was the name adopted by Archibald Belaney, a Canadian born in the U.K., who adopted an Ojibwe identity once in Canada and wrote a series of books espousing conservation platitudes in the 1930s. He went further than many of his successors, and actually bothered to learn the language.
- Iron Eyes Cody[wp], the famous crying Indian from the 'Keep America Beautiful' campaigns, was actually an Italian American actor born Espera DeCorti.
- In the 1970s, the tales of Carlos Castaneda[wp] concerning the drug-induced hallucinations of the shaman "Don Juan" later proved to be a hoax.
- "Hyemeyohsts Storm", author of Seven Arrows (1972), another fake-Native text popular among hippies, was also an impostor whose real name is Arthur C. Storm. He claimed to be Cheyenne; when his book appeared, the Cheyennes announced they'd never heard of him, and that his account of their traditions and religious beliefs was wrong. This did not prevent it from becoming a best seller.[10]
- Somewhat more sinister was the Indian impostor Asa Earl Carter[wp], a Ku Klux Klansman who, as "Forrest Carter", wrote The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Education of Little Tree.
- Unsubstantiated claims of Native American ancestry have been made by a number of public figures, including Johnny Cash, Ward Churchill, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.[11]
Native American and similarly exotic themes were favored by the makers of patent medicines. Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills[wp] were sold with a tale of a fictitious "Dr. Morse", who spent three years among the Natives and returned with their traditional herbal remedy secrets. No Dr. Morse was ever affiliated with the business. The celebrated Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company of Connecticut hired many Natives (not many Kickapoos, though) to stage Wild West shows to promote their concoctions. They, too, were vaguely alleged to derive from Native herbal knowledge.
Fakelore as multicultural attire in children's literature
In recent years, children's readers and textbooks include alleged folktales from non-Western cultures, in an attempt to appear multicultural. Unfortunately, few genuine folktales are really well suited for the purposes of the editors of the books in question. They are, after all, the products of non-Western cultures. They are often morally ambiguous and inconclusive. They may contain adult humor. They may also refer to non-Christian deities and polytheistic religious values. The gods of Greece and Rome were not chaste or non-violent, and neither are the gods of many other polytheistic religions. Compare the frequent omission or deliberate mistranslation of Shinto themes in commercially distributed English versions of children's anime, the removal of even innocuous nudity, and the alteration of gay and transgender characters.[12][13] "Real myths are usually complex, sometimes long, full of death, violence, retribution, hatred, sex, bodily function, and gruesome imagery. They are likely to have closure that is unfamiliar or uncomfortable."[14]
They do not share the ideas of contemporary Western educators about, say, the level of violence appropriate for children's reading. They do not share Western attitudes towards phlegm or excrement, or the appropriate treatment of such themes in children's literature.[15] Collected tales from an oral tradition are told using techniques appropriate to oral performance. The need to adapt these tales to the familiar narrative structures used in printed stories inevitably alters and distorts them.[14]
But educators wish to present non-Western and non-White material in their textbooks, the better to establish their multicultural credentials. To avoid the risk of material that may lead to actually stretched cultural horizons, the sources are bowdlerized and distorted, with frequent outright invention. The northwestern Native character "Mucus Boy" turns into "Clamshell Boy" in the hands of American textbook editors. Trickster figures generally don't make good role models; they suffer serious distortion at the hands of editors who want more conventional heroes. Coyote doesn't generally learn a moral lesson about laziness in authentic folktales, but he does when the folktale "Coyote Goes for Salt" is turned into the children's book Coyote and the Dancing Butterflies. Ecological piety and other approved-for-children agendas are often written into traditional lore in a way that distorts them, as in the children's book The Prince and the Salmon People. Its editors altered a traditional story about the relationship between humans and salmon into a "powerful, timely message" about "overfishing, concrete dams, polluted rivers, and hatchery fish".[14]
Western editors of children's books make the source material comfortable, teachable, and conformed to Western narrative structures and Western received ideas about childhood. In doing so, they conceal the "otherness" of the non-Western cultures they supposedly represent.[14]
See also
External links
- Folklore and Fake Lore, Richard M. Dorson
- The Difference between Fakelore and Folklore, John Devere
- Fakelore, Multiculturalism, and the Ethics of Children's Literature, Eliot A. Singer
Notes
- ↑ Dorson, Richard M. (1963). "Current Folklore Theories". Current Anthropology 4 (1): 101.
- ↑ Kelley, James. "Song, Story, or History: Resisting Claims of a Coded Message in the African American Spiritual 'Follow the Drinking Gourd'". The Journal of Popular Culture 41.2 (April 2008): 262-80.
- ↑ See generally Adler, Margot (1979). Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-3237-9.
- ↑ Romano, Aja. (2012) The definitive guide to creepypasta—the Internet’s scariest urban legends. The Daily Dot.
- ↑ Gabler, Ellen (June 2, 2014). "Charges detail Waukesha pre-teens' attempt to kill classmate". Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
- ↑ Brown, Michael (1989). The Greenpeace Story. Dorling Kindersley. pp. 12–13. ISBN 978-1879431027.
- ↑ Tarleton, John. Interview with Michael Niman
- ↑ Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens & Chief Seattle, Museum of History and Industry; Seattle, Washington, June, 1990.
- ↑ Chief Seattle did allegedly make an elaborate speech that was recorded in 1891, but that too is believed to have been a literary invention by a White amanuensis.
- ↑ Hyemeyohsts Storm, psiram.com
- ↑ Chavers, Dean (Jsn. 17, 2013) Around the Campfire: Fake Indians. Native American Times
- ↑ See the Wikipedia article on Sailor Moon (anime).
- ↑ Allison, Anne (2000). "A Challenge to Hollywood? Japanese Character Goods Hit the US". Japanese Studies (Routledge) 20 (1): 67–88.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 Singer, Eliot. Fakelore, Multiculturalism, and the Ethics of Children's Literature, Michigan State University
- ↑ See Levi-Strauss, Claude, "The proper uses of excrement", in Mythologiques: The Naked Man (Univ. Chicago, 1990; ISBN 0226474968)