Folklore Past and Present

This course moves from Serbia and Bosnia, to Ukraine and the Czech lands, through Poland to Russia and Finland and then on to the southern Siberian steppes and finally the Russian Far East. Along the way, the course is divided into three major thematic and theoretical units.

Epics and Ballads: History, Performance, Identity 

Our first focus is on historical songs in the context of Romantic nationalism. We will explore why people (philologists) began to write these down, and how they were they edited and organized into print books. We discuss what these publications meant in the context of Romantic nationalist movements for political autonomy from the Ottoman or Hapsburg Empires. Given the stakes, some scholars were (maybe too) creative with their material. We will ask: What makes an epic text authentic, as opposed to an invented tradition, or even a fake? Throughout, we will pay attention to how traditions of oral performance were learned and transmitted within specific communities of artists, such as Ramadan performers, upper-class Bosnian women, and Ukrainian minstrels.

Words in Context: Poetry, Power, Positioning

Our second unit begins with the theoretical redefinition of folklore in the 20th c. Folklore is no longer defined by who performs it (e.g. peasants), but by its characteristics of variation and localization. We begin with a genre that anyone can perform—the proverb. To understand the power of small forms we need place them in their real-world context. We learn about ethnographic interviewing methods aimed at eliciting the local meanings of folklore. We consider relationship between the body and verbal folklore in south Siberian shamanism and in the performance of charms by folk healers in Russia and Finland. In order to bring the study of folklore home, to us at Columbia, we consider campus legends and folklore of the COVID-19 pandemic. This unit provides students with the tools needed to design and carry out their own mini-ethnography, which serves as the final project for the course.

Oral Narrative: Legends, Fairytales, Cross-Cultural Motifs

Our last major unit is dedicated to folk narrative—the memorate (personal narrative), the legend and the fairytale. We begin with Russian memorates about nature and house spirits. Narratives told as true events (memorates, legends) are contrasted with the genre of the fairy tale. We learn about how fairy tales were typically performed