In his Bajo el árbol del paraíso: Historia de los estudios sobre el folclore y sus paradigmas (Under the Tree of Paradise: A History of the Studies about Folklore and Its Paradigms), Juan José Prat Ferrer aims to update, in Spanish, the Hispanic academic world on the conceptual development of internationalist folkloristics. Prat Ferrer feels, rightly so, that folklore studies in Spain, Latin America, and the Caribbean have been largely displaced by other disciplines such as cultural studies or anthropology. In Mexico, for instance, the word “folklore” is synonymous with “folklorized” cultural practices, and even prominent scholars who theorize cultura popular, or “folk culture” in U.S. parlance, maintain indifference at best or display ignorance at worst towards folkloristics, considering it an antiquated discipline still stuck studying “survivals.”
More broadly, folklorist Prat Ferrer uniquely contributes to the entire field of folkloristics by analyzing, chronologically and in encyclopedic fashion, 500 years of conceptual history. In these 471 pages, the author maps out an interconnected web of philological, historical, anthropological, psychological, sociological, and even biological perspectives from Europe and North America centered on folklore, revealing in the process the field’s interdisciplinary depth and scope. The book’s onomastic index is a superb resource in itself, consisting of twenty-four double-columned pages of contributors to the study of folklore—this index references 3,000 scholars from Aarne (Antti Amatus) to Zumwalt (Rosemary Lévy).
Prat Ferrer works with a clear and thorough definition of folklore. Conceptualized as a form of intangible heritage, folklore is the sum of expressive cultural elements, acts, and processes that are transmitted in variants within human groups in accordance with the rules of creation, transformation, and transmission that each community sets up and follows, forming part of their identity and patrimony. This definition, according to the author, does not totally break away from folkloristics’ past yet summarizes the discipline’s present and opens a path for the future (424).
In terms of the methodological approach to folkloristics’ conceptual development, the book combines a critical historical perspective with a solid analysis of key individuals who contributed to the discipline with ideas, constructs, paradigms, questions, and so on, from different positionalities. The key in this analysis is in contextualizing these different subject positions based on the premise that the predominant points of view or concepts of each epoch and the ideologies that each researcher adopted reflect different semantic and methodological conceptualizations of folk culture (15). In this sense, Prat Ferrer does an astonishing job in grounding folkloristics and related fields in their respective historical and political contexts, as their most dedicated and representative scholars grappled with the biggest intellectual issues of their time.
The volume is divided into four equal-length sections that follow a diachronic development of folkloristics. The first is titled, The Precursors of Folkloristics, and deals with research activities in the European context from antiquity through the medieval period, then the Renaissance, and up to the eighteenth century. It includes subsections, such as “Philology and Mythology,” “The Italian Antiquarian Movement,” and “The German Ideological Movements.” The second section, The Initiators of Folkloristics, gives an overview of the main contributors to the “science of tradition” in subsections such as “The Homeric Question,” “Folklore and Nationalism,” and “The Beginnings of Folkloristics in North America.” It also takes the reader through the field’s internationalization and professionalization processes, considering, for example, the influence of key publications and conferences in legitimating its subject matter.
The third section is designated, Folkloristics During the First Half of the 20th Century, and offers a combination of geographically-oriented subsections, such as “Folkloristics in the British Isles” and “The Soviet World,” with theoretically-centered subsections including “The Birth of Structuralism” or “Formalism and the Prague Circle.” The fourth and final section, Towards New Frontiers, covers the linguistic or performative turn in folkloristics and its ramifications in the English-speaking academic world. In order to contextualize current theoretical orientations, Prat Ferrer includes the influence of critical perspectives on the study of tradition stemming from post-modernism, post-colonial studies, and subaltern studies, among others. Subsections include: “Anthropology and Folkloristics,” “Feminism and Folkloristics,” and “The Challenge to Western Paradigms.”
Careful readers will find a few errors in biographical data. For instance, on page 296 Prat Ferrer mentions that folklorist Richard M. Dorson taught at the University of California Berkeley after working at Indiana University Bloomington (IU). This is not true, as Professor Dorson began teaching at IU in 1957 and continued there until the time of his death in 1981. A second example is found on page 298, where the book states that anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss died in 1990, whereas he passed away in 2009. But in general, these minor mistakes do not subtract from the strengths of Prat Ferrer’s oeuvre.
In conclusion, Under the Tree of Paradise is an excellent contribution to folkloristics. The book is especially useful for students seeking an introduction to the field, for although it contains descriptions of schools of thought, paradigms, theories, and other scholarly constructs, Prat Ferrer writes in a simple, clear, and engaging style. Moreover, the book is well-structured and organized, respecting whenever possible the chronological order of the material introduced. For these reasons and the others expressed in this review, I strongly encourage an English translation of this text and its wide distribution in electronic form as well, since it is not easy to find and obtain a personal copy of the Spanish edition.
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[Review length: 898 words • Review posted on January 12, 2016]