steve a
02-02-2008, 08:06 PM
"Notes on the Role of Folklore in Hominology"
By Dr. John Colarusso, Anthropologist
Dmitri Bayanov has pointed to folklore as an important source of information on possible relict hominoid creatures. He suggests that one may infer from such a creature in a tale the existence, present or former, of a real hominoid in the environment of the talebearers. In fact, however, since the elements in a folktale serve largely an emotive or expressive function, a folktale is only useful in suggesting facts about relict hominoids just in so far as its hominoid creatures fail to show folkloric traits, exhibiting instead mundane details that have crept into the tale from the real world. Often, such fact-like details are relatively obvious, but for others a team of experts is needed to ensure proper evaluation. Two tales, one from the Ubykh of the Caucasus, the other from the Bella Coola of British Columbia, are briefly examined for both fact-like and fantastical elements regarding hominoid creatures.
Dmitri Bayanov, one of the world's foremost experts on "relict hominoids,'' has recently called attention to the value of folklore for the study of such relict forms (Bayanov 1982). This is only his latest restatement of a position previously put forth by him and his colleague, Igor Bourtsev (Bayanov and Bourtsev 1976). In short, their position is this: given the recurrence of hominoid figures in many of the world's folkloric traditions, these bodies of lore should be scrutinized more carefully by a host of experts to extract what, if any, information may lurk therein regarding relict men or man-like creatures.
A very simple and seemingly compelling example, which they put forth is that of the figures of wolves and bears in folklore. Their conclusion is that such figures exist in a given lore precisely because such animals are part of the experience of the bearers of this lore. A similar inference must be made for hominoids. In part, I think that they are clearly right, and are performing a highly useful function in calling the attention of experts to a source of information which, in many (if not most) cases, may be the only source of information on relict hominoids in a particular area. On the other hand, their example of the wolves and bears of folklore is, I feel, misleading. One needs to look very carefully at exactly what types of information folklore can provide regarding matters of the real world and the creatures in it.
First, put quite simply, there are many figures that are frequently found throughout the world's folklore which no one would assume directly refer to a counterpart in the real world. Thus, one finds witches and sorcerers, demons and ogres, angels and good fairies. The list could be quite long.
Some of these figures, such as those of witches, sorcerers, and ogres, may reflect deep seated fears, perhaps arising during childhood, as in our own lore, or, in some cases, active daily concerns on the part of more "primitive" peoples. Thus, a witch may stand for the fear and revulsion a child feels toward a particularly unfortunate old woman that he may have met. Many "primitive" cultures call strangers "demons" or "devils." For such peoples, strangers actually are demons in that they violate the customs of the tribe, customs used to define humanness in the face of inhumanity. The racial slurs and epithets of our own time are dim reflections of such earlier loathings.
In short, a monster with man-like properties need not suggest that the lore in which it appears in some way bears testimony to the existence, present or former, of a relict hominoid in the environment of the lore-bearers. In certain cases, as with "primitive" peoples, demons, ogres, etc. may actually exist as perceptual categories into which certain peoples are placed, but such existence is of interest to the student of culture, not to the student of relict hominoids. Roughly speaking, folklore is expressive, not assertive. It depicts the feelings and reactions of a people to a multitude of things in their world. Such lore, be it the heritage of a "primitive" or a "sophisticated" people, does not come with an index listing the things in the world to which specific folkloric figures stand as emotional expressions.
For example, when we find tales containing wolves, we infer that wolves are, or were, part of the fauna with which the taletellers must have dealt. We do so because we all know, from firsthand experience, that wolves are real animals. Even if the wolf talks and carries on a wily dialogue with Little Red Riding Hood, we are not surprised because we realize that, s is part of the expressive, narrative role of folklore. Thus, folklore represents a mode of expression in which fact and feeling, animal and man, animate and inanimate, nature and society, are all made to assume dramatis personae to take part in the narrative. As characters on a stage, the creatures, people, and elements of the world do not fall into the categories that we ("sophisticated" peoples) have come to feel reflect the objective world. They may bear traces of their objective properties, but as dramatis personae they carry non-natural (to us) features and traits, aspects directly related to the feelings and fears of the people bearing the lore.
Given this emotive and expressive aspect of folklore, one may feel that no useful information may be obtained from tradition. Perhaps we should simply ignore the mass of material on the Sasquatch that Suttles has listed (1972, 1980). In short, this seems to be exactly what many investigators have done. Both Suttles and Bayanov suspect that this is just the reason that so little of the lore on relict hominoids has found its way into ethnographic accounts and compilations. In my own case, working as a linguist, I did not know what to do when I came upon material dealing with a montane forest man, as he is called in Circassian, and if it had not been for the purely fortuitous fact that a conference on human-like "monsters" was held a few years after I had come upon this account, I might never have published my own paper on the topic (Colarusso 1980).
However, despite its fundamentally expressive form, folklore does offer a source, sometimes the only one, for interesting information about a people's world, and it should be recorded and scrutinized not merely for its literary value, but also for its factual content, however masked that may be. Such scrutiny is clone simply by looking for non-emotive factors in the tale. Such fact-like elements will be there not because they in some way serve the basic function of the tale, but because they have leaked in, so to say, from the world of brute fact, albeit filtered through the perceptual sieve of the culture involved. I shall now give a simple example of a fact-like hominoid account and an emotive hominoid account taken from the Caucasus.
The Ubykh are a people, now living in Turkey, who formerly lived on the east coast of the Black Sea, up against the Caucasus Mountains, with their kinsmen the Abkhazian people to the south and the Circassians to the north. Their language is on the verge of extinction, and consequently has been the object of intensive efforts to record it during most of this century. By chance, one of the tales recorded contains accounts of both a fact-like hominoid and an emotive one (Dumézil and Namitok 1955: 30-33). A hunter goes up into the mountains, slays a deer, and prepares to cook it over his campfire. After placing his food on the fire, he hears a loud cry from the depths of the forest. Climbing into a nearby tree for safety, and not forgetting to take his food with him, the hunter nevertheless leaves behind his shaggy wool cloak, which he has draped over a tree. To his great shock and fear, a wild man emerges from the forest. This being is said only to be covered all over with hair. Nothing else is said by way of description. This wild man pounces upon the cloak of the hunter, at which point the hunter fires his pistol at the wild man. Whether or not he wounds the thing, its pelt catches fire and it runs off into the forest from whence it came.
There are a number of presumptive facts that one can extract from this account. First, there are hair covered man-like hominoids that live in the deep forest of the Caucasus, or lived there until recently. They are attracted by either the light of a campfire or the smell of cooking meat. They announce their approach by screaming loudly. Perhaps some territorial behavior is involved. They engage in actual combat. The wild man seems to have mistaken the shaggy cloak of the hunter for either a man in a cloak, or, more interestingly, for another wild man. In the latter case, this would imply that wild men use fire and cook meat.
By Dr. John Colarusso, Anthropologist
Dmitri Bayanov has pointed to folklore as an important source of information on possible relict hominoid creatures. He suggests that one may infer from such a creature in a tale the existence, present or former, of a real hominoid in the environment of the talebearers. In fact, however, since the elements in a folktale serve largely an emotive or expressive function, a folktale is only useful in suggesting facts about relict hominoids just in so far as its hominoid creatures fail to show folkloric traits, exhibiting instead mundane details that have crept into the tale from the real world. Often, such fact-like details are relatively obvious, but for others a team of experts is needed to ensure proper evaluation. Two tales, one from the Ubykh of the Caucasus, the other from the Bella Coola of British Columbia, are briefly examined for both fact-like and fantastical elements regarding hominoid creatures.
Dmitri Bayanov, one of the world's foremost experts on "relict hominoids,'' has recently called attention to the value of folklore for the study of such relict forms (Bayanov 1982). This is only his latest restatement of a position previously put forth by him and his colleague, Igor Bourtsev (Bayanov and Bourtsev 1976). In short, their position is this: given the recurrence of hominoid figures in many of the world's folkloric traditions, these bodies of lore should be scrutinized more carefully by a host of experts to extract what, if any, information may lurk therein regarding relict men or man-like creatures.
A very simple and seemingly compelling example, which they put forth is that of the figures of wolves and bears in folklore. Their conclusion is that such figures exist in a given lore precisely because such animals are part of the experience of the bearers of this lore. A similar inference must be made for hominoids. In part, I think that they are clearly right, and are performing a highly useful function in calling the attention of experts to a source of information which, in many (if not most) cases, may be the only source of information on relict hominoids in a particular area. On the other hand, their example of the wolves and bears of folklore is, I feel, misleading. One needs to look very carefully at exactly what types of information folklore can provide regarding matters of the real world and the creatures in it.
First, put quite simply, there are many figures that are frequently found throughout the world's folklore which no one would assume directly refer to a counterpart in the real world. Thus, one finds witches and sorcerers, demons and ogres, angels and good fairies. The list could be quite long.
Some of these figures, such as those of witches, sorcerers, and ogres, may reflect deep seated fears, perhaps arising during childhood, as in our own lore, or, in some cases, active daily concerns on the part of more "primitive" peoples. Thus, a witch may stand for the fear and revulsion a child feels toward a particularly unfortunate old woman that he may have met. Many "primitive" cultures call strangers "demons" or "devils." For such peoples, strangers actually are demons in that they violate the customs of the tribe, customs used to define humanness in the face of inhumanity. The racial slurs and epithets of our own time are dim reflections of such earlier loathings.
In short, a monster with man-like properties need not suggest that the lore in which it appears in some way bears testimony to the existence, present or former, of a relict hominoid in the environment of the lore-bearers. In certain cases, as with "primitive" peoples, demons, ogres, etc. may actually exist as perceptual categories into which certain peoples are placed, but such existence is of interest to the student of culture, not to the student of relict hominoids. Roughly speaking, folklore is expressive, not assertive. It depicts the feelings and reactions of a people to a multitude of things in their world. Such lore, be it the heritage of a "primitive" or a "sophisticated" people, does not come with an index listing the things in the world to which specific folkloric figures stand as emotional expressions.
For example, when we find tales containing wolves, we infer that wolves are, or were, part of the fauna with which the taletellers must have dealt. We do so because we all know, from firsthand experience, that wolves are real animals. Even if the wolf talks and carries on a wily dialogue with Little Red Riding Hood, we are not surprised because we realize that, s is part of the expressive, narrative role of folklore. Thus, folklore represents a mode of expression in which fact and feeling, animal and man, animate and inanimate, nature and society, are all made to assume dramatis personae to take part in the narrative. As characters on a stage, the creatures, people, and elements of the world do not fall into the categories that we ("sophisticated" peoples) have come to feel reflect the objective world. They may bear traces of their objective properties, but as dramatis personae they carry non-natural (to us) features and traits, aspects directly related to the feelings and fears of the people bearing the lore.
Given this emotive and expressive aspect of folklore, one may feel that no useful information may be obtained from tradition. Perhaps we should simply ignore the mass of material on the Sasquatch that Suttles has listed (1972, 1980). In short, this seems to be exactly what many investigators have done. Both Suttles and Bayanov suspect that this is just the reason that so little of the lore on relict hominoids has found its way into ethnographic accounts and compilations. In my own case, working as a linguist, I did not know what to do when I came upon material dealing with a montane forest man, as he is called in Circassian, and if it had not been for the purely fortuitous fact that a conference on human-like "monsters" was held a few years after I had come upon this account, I might never have published my own paper on the topic (Colarusso 1980).
However, despite its fundamentally expressive form, folklore does offer a source, sometimes the only one, for interesting information about a people's world, and it should be recorded and scrutinized not merely for its literary value, but also for its factual content, however masked that may be. Such scrutiny is clone simply by looking for non-emotive factors in the tale. Such fact-like elements will be there not because they in some way serve the basic function of the tale, but because they have leaked in, so to say, from the world of brute fact, albeit filtered through the perceptual sieve of the culture involved. I shall now give a simple example of a fact-like hominoid account and an emotive hominoid account taken from the Caucasus.
The Ubykh are a people, now living in Turkey, who formerly lived on the east coast of the Black Sea, up against the Caucasus Mountains, with their kinsmen the Abkhazian people to the south and the Circassians to the north. Their language is on the verge of extinction, and consequently has been the object of intensive efforts to record it during most of this century. By chance, one of the tales recorded contains accounts of both a fact-like hominoid and an emotive one (Dumézil and Namitok 1955: 30-33). A hunter goes up into the mountains, slays a deer, and prepares to cook it over his campfire. After placing his food on the fire, he hears a loud cry from the depths of the forest. Climbing into a nearby tree for safety, and not forgetting to take his food with him, the hunter nevertheless leaves behind his shaggy wool cloak, which he has draped over a tree. To his great shock and fear, a wild man emerges from the forest. This being is said only to be covered all over with hair. Nothing else is said by way of description. This wild man pounces upon the cloak of the hunter, at which point the hunter fires his pistol at the wild man. Whether or not he wounds the thing, its pelt catches fire and it runs off into the forest from whence it came.
There are a number of presumptive facts that one can extract from this account. First, there are hair covered man-like hominoids that live in the deep forest of the Caucasus, or lived there until recently. They are attracted by either the light of a campfire or the smell of cooking meat. They announce their approach by screaming loudly. Perhaps some territorial behavior is involved. They engage in actual combat. The wild man seems to have mistaken the shaggy cloak of the hunter for either a man in a cloak, or, more interestingly, for another wild man. In the latter case, this would imply that wild men use fire and cook meat.