Thinking of Myth and Folklore in 21st Century

(Valedictory Address delivered at the seminar, ‘Folk Philosophy in South Asia: Exploring Cosmic and Mundane in the Folklore’, organized by Banasthali Vidyapith and South Asian University at Banasthali, Rajasthan, 26 March 2017)

Vice President, Banasthali Vidyapith, Prof Siddharth Shastri; Former Vice Chancellor, V.M. Kota Open University, Prof G.S.L. Devra; Co-convenors of the seminar, Prof Preeti Sharma from Bansthlai and Prof Dev Pathak from South Asian University,

The Venue.  Image courtesy of Kaushalya Kumarasinghe, Department of Sociology, SAU

Let me begin by thanking the organizers for inviting me to deliver this Valedictory Address. I am particularly happy that my own institution, South Asian University and its Department of Sociology collaborated with Banasthali Vidyapit in organizing this seminar. 

Fundamentally, this is a conference on folk philosophy, the cosmic and folklore, over none of which I claim to have any expertise. But as an anthropologist dealing with the contemporary world, sometimes it becomes necessary for me to cross into the past as well. This allows me a certain vantage point to address all the main thematics that constitutes the title of this seminar. But I will do so from my own perspective. 

What I want to do today is to pose a simple question and answer that from my own perspective. My question is, what does folklore mean and how does its study -- including that of folk philosophy -- make sense to us at this time in the 21st century? Or, is the study of folklore a burden on our time?

Ritual Beginnings.  Image courtesy of Kaushalya Kumarasinghe, Department of Sociology, SA

To answer this question, I will travel to two plains of discourse: 

1) The first is the plain in which folklore travels from the past to the present over time, and is consumed within circumstances of the present. 

2) The second is the plain of the present itself in which folklore is given genesis and space for consumption. This has nothing to do with the past. This is about contemporary folklore.

But let me begin with a basic conceptual clarification. Some of our PhD candidates told me a few weeks ago that their abstracts for this seminar had been sent back for reconsideration as they apparently did not contain the words folklore, but instead contained words like myth and mythology. 

I was somewhat intrigued by this observation, and it remained in my mind. I could see that an epistemologically very restrictive understanding of ‘folk’ and ‘folk lore’ could lead to a position like this. But such conceptual reductionism has no place in human sciences in this century. For me, myth and folk lore are terms that are often used interchangeably. At other times, they can differ in their primary meanings too, but are nevertheless located in close proximity to each other. 

SAU Presenters.  Image courtesy of Kaushalya Kumarasinghe, Department of Sociology, SAU

To put it simply, in a broader structure of folklore, a number of mythic narratives might be embedded. I flagged this today for a reason. And that is, in my presentation, I will be using these terms more openly and sometimes interchangeably in the way they are used in contemporary human sciences, and not as closed, airtight, archaic and linear categories. In other words, I cannot talk of folklore without myth, or myth without folklore.

Let me now go back to my initial question, and attempt to unravel it. And that is, what does folklore mean and how does its study make sense to us at this time in the 21st century? And more importantly, what happens to narratives of folklore when they travel from the mythic or the historic past to the present?

There is a widespread assumption that folklore is a matter of the past, a matter of history and of mythic times, a matter of kings and queens, a matter of divine beings and their encounters with other mythic beings as well as humans, and therefore beyond interpretation and analysis. This is particularly the case if such folklore are centrally implicated in the realm of religion or in a nation’s imagination of its past and self-identity. 

This assumption suggests that folklore and its constituent linkages including folk philosophy and ideas of cosmology and so on, are to be recorded, compiled and incessantly narrated as unchanging references to heritage and tradition, but cannot come to the present via forms of reading or analysis. For me, this understanding is intellectually too limiting. But this is certainly one way in which folklore can be seen, as a corpus of knowledge from a different time that should merely be compiled, and be awed by. It seems to me much of what has been presented over the last two days falls within this understanding of folklore. 

SAU Presenters.  Image courtesy of Kaushalya Kumarasinghe, Department of Sociology, SAU

But the question for me is, what can one do with this material, with this knowledge that is not from our time. Folklore cannot be understood merely in the context of the undifferentiated past from where they might have sprung up. How have they been seen over the years, and how are they seen today, and how will they make sense tomorrow? How are they remembered and how are they performed and what aspects of them are forgotten or under-emphasized, and why? These are the kinds of basic questions that interest me when looking at folklore from the perspectives of today and from my own disciplinary vantage points.

When thinking of these issues, I was reminded of Roland Barthes’ essay, Myth Today. While talking of ‘myth as a form of speech,’ Barthes says that “mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication” (Barthes 1993: 110). He says further, this is because “all the materials of myth (weather pictorial or written) presupposes a signifying consciousness, that one can reason about them while discounting their substance (1993: 110). 

In my mind, Barthes is talking about the obvious possibilities of myth as a transforming discourse in the process of making it intelligible in a given context. And this context would change in terms of politics, temporality, culture and so on making mythic speech also to change. This is not a matter of the basic structure of myth changing even though this also happens at times. It is more a matter of the contexts of its reception and interpretation changing, which also impacts its modes of reference in the present. 

This is what happens when myths and folklore travel from the past to the present. They get embedded in the present, but not as an un-transforming package from the past. Instead, by distorting their initial references, they attempt to make more sense in the new circumstances

Let me clarify this transformative and temporal travel associated with myth and folklore by taking it beyond theory. Lets think of Ramayana, which all of you are well aware of. As I grew up in the 1960s in Sri Lanka, I was familiar with the stories of Ramayana too. 

It was in our textbooks, and elders narrated renditions of it as bedtime stories. But in Sinhala folk traditions, it was never performed as was the case in many Indic and Balinese traditions. It was merely narrated as folk tales and mythic renditions of an undefined mythic past in which the cosmic and the mundane worlds intermingled at different plains. 

SAU Presenters.  Image courtesy of Kaushalya Kumarasinghe, Department of Sociology, SAU

The physical landscape of Sri Lanka is littered with references to places where Ram is supposed to have landed with his army, where he rested in the midst of battle, where Hanuman had dropped a piece of mountain he had plucked from the Himalayas in search of herbal medicines, places where Sita was imprisoned by Rawan and where Rawan’s famed flying machine is supposed to have landed.

But in our stories, which have circulated within the island for hundreds of years, Ram was not the Hero. It was Rawan. Local cultural theorists from the early 20th century right up to the 1960s proclaimed him to be the progenitor of the Sinhala people who supposedly spoke a language called Hela delinked from Sanskrit and Pali influences. In this argument, the Sinhala people were given a more local genesis than the time-tested story of an Indian lineage through yet another cluster of folklore where the hero is an exiled prince called Vijaya.

What does all this mean in the context of the question I had posed earlier? In so far as folk lore goes, it is hardly surprising that the story of Ramayana was known in Sri Lanka beyond the shores of present day India. This is simply because folklore, myths and other ideas circulated extensively within the region we call South Asia today and much beyond that also, as a result of the regular movement of people, sharing of cultural knowledge, collective practices of faith and so on. 

For me, this story is not necessarily a reference to evidence-based history as fact. It is not a matter of ancient international relations between Lanka and Bharat. This is too simplistic. But it is a clear reference to plains of relationships and knowledge, which were, culturally linked and shows the existence of a shared, living landscape embedded with a significant degree of cultural complexity that was known to and acknowledged by different people throughout our region.

That is why for me, the study of Ramayana, if undertaken cautiously might show how cultural knowledge travelled in South Asia at specific times creating a very particular experientially based and mythically informed cartography of the region. But this is hardly done in folklore studies today.

Also, the ways in which Ramayana was and is understood in parts of India will not work in attempting to understand how it was sensed and understood in Sri Lanka at different times. This is because the mythic speech in the sense suggested by Barthes changes over time and in different places. Today, Ramayana is not in our textbooks and most young people would have forgotten that Rawan emerged from the narratives of Ramayan.

But Rawan has reemerged over the last few years. The only way in which these Sri Lankan manifestations can be understood is by situating the original story of Ramayan and its varying and different local emphases in the realm of very contemporary local politics. 

And now, the local stories and places associated with Ramayan have been rearranged across the country’s landscape as part of the country’s tourist discourse mandated by the state. This is part of the process of decision-making within the realms of economics and tourism. Over the last seven years or so, the government has invented something called the ‘Ramayana Trail’ targeting affluent and often naïve middle class Indian tourists. They are taken to see local places supposedly associated with Ramayana. For a long time, they were never taken seriously by local people except as pointers to local stories. 

But now, these mythic references from folklore are defended by local people as historic and archaeological facts because they have been turned into a bread and butter issue. A forgotten folklore has been reinvented as local fact squarely in the midst of economics. 

Let me now refer to the second issue I flagged at the beginning very briefly. 

That is, the plain of the present in which folklore is given both genesis as well as the space for consumption. This has nothing to do with the past. This is about contemporary folklore. So far, I talked about what happens to folklore when they travel from the past and get enmeshed in contemporary conditions. What I have in mind now is folklore that is invented in the present.

Politicians of our time, university students with what they write on the walls of toilets and on library tables are all in the process of creating contemporary folklore. And most of these are rooted in the experiential realities and fantasies of the present, and have nothing much to do with the past.

As many of us interested in the formal study of folklore would know quite well, one of the best known scholars who professionalized the study of folklore was Alan Dundes (1934-2005) at University of California, Berkeley. His book, The Study of Folklore (1965), established widely accepted definitions of folklore, including what is meant by the term ‘the folk.’ 

Prof Dundes was quite aware that the study of folklore could become obsolete, if its practitioners were perennially enamored by a need to link folklore to the past, and be guided by outdated ideas of what constituted “folk.” In his essay, Who Are the Folk, Dundes observed with reference to the United States, “it would be absurd to argue that there is no folklore in the United States and that industrialization stamps out folk groups and folklore --- Industrialization has in fact created new folklore, for example, the folklore of computers” (1980:7). 

As we know, while the affects of industrialization, urbanization and globalization swept across the world, many folklorists throughout the 20th century perceived the introduction of modern technology as the apocalypse for folklore and its study. Dundes’ ideas were in many ways ahead of his times. He said, “Technology isn’t stamping out folklore; rather it is becoming a vital factor in the transmission of folklore and it is providing an exciting source of inspiration for the generation of new folklore. The rise of the computer symbolizes the impact of technology upon the modern world. My point is that there is folklore of and about the computer” (1980:16-17). 

While we lament on the demise of folklore studies in our times and in our region, and lament on our younger generations’ forgetfulness of folklore from our ancient past, how many of us have thought of compiling and interpreting contemporary folklore? As far as I can think of, there is no serious attempt in South Asia to study newer versions of folklore seriously or to study folklore from the past in the newer conditions they find themselves in. And as a result, our attempts in understanding contemporary times are straddled with significant lapses, leading to a situation of intellectual malnourishment. We are shackled by the past and blinded to the present. And in the end, our understanding of both the past and the present is incomplete.

Let me conclude with a suggestion for your consideration. We can take for granted thst folklore from the past as well as the present will always be with us. That is a given.

In that context, while you come to the end of this seminar, the basic question you should ask from yourselves is this: how would you bring the study of folklore to the 21st cetury, and situate folklore in the midst of contemporary times, in the midst of psychoanalysis, in the midst of semiotics and in the midst of historiography but within the realms of reasonable interpretation. 

Thank you for your time.