The introduction orients the reader to the eight major areas of folklorist Lauri Honko’s many areas of research. Parenthetical notes in the text of this review provide page numbers in the book under review here.
What is folklore and why does it exist? Who keeps it going? Where did it come from, who needs it, and for what? What does it mean? What are its component parts? What is its function? These fundamental questions about folk arts, practices, and sciences have found a number of answers. Two hundred or more years of research have led into classification systems, ethnographic techniques, and encyclopedic compendia. Lauri Honko, born in 1932, died suddenly in 2002. He was one of the foremost pioneers in folklore; his research and commentary pointed out and displayed new and insightful approaches and analytic methods. The editors have chosen articles in this collection for their then-innovative qualities and for their relevance as guides to the evolution of various research strands still dominant today.
Articles fall into three primary categories: 1) folkloristics and epistemology, 2) constellations of meaning, belief, tradition, and identity, and 3) myth-related laments and epics, particularly the Kalevala. All articles and commentary are in English. Readers should note that, while Honko’s definition of folklore is widely inclusive, encompassing narrative, myth/belief, material culture, festival, and music, a good bit of his commentary relies for its grounding on narrative analysis.
From Honko’s early studies of function in folk medicine he moved into the related areas of belief, function, and meaning. He was among the first to do so (9, 16-24). Among other rebels of the 1960s Honko challenged the genre classifiers and historical motif-analyzers, whose leaders came from his own native Finland. Drawing generic lines, for instance, was not enough for him. By the 1980s he was asserting that all folkloristics really amounted to a search for meaning, a term that had remained closeted for too long (18). By the 1980s performance theory had taken center stage among folklorists, in a movement led in part by Honko. His studies of variation and tradition led to the notion of “tradition ecology,” the dialectics of environmental morphology and tradition morphology. Finally, no researcher of national or nationalistic epics can afford to bypass Honko’s studies of the Kalevala, which had presented his native land with much of its history and identity. His cultural-identity research led streams of other researchers into this area (23).
Is the ur-epic in its exclusively oral form short or long? Honko divided epics into these two categories, then proposed that a Kalevala-like epic in northern Russia’s Karelia, a short epic, had once been long by nature, even though extant records consisted of fewer than 500 lines. He postulated that a ten-thousand-line epic, such as those researched by Parry and Lord, could only survive by the transmission and composition methods they uncovered. Shorter epics did not require such drastic techniques and lengthy training.
Honko insisted on a rich ethnographic base for his inquiries into tradition and variation dialectics, including especially “organic variation,” that variation that takes place within a single culture from one performance to the next (19). For him fieldwork came first, then analysis. His interest in belief, i.e., vernacular religion, which began with folk cures and medicine, led him into the related areas of belief, meaning, and function. Such things as genre theory, Ingrian superstitions, myth-based epics, mythic actualization in rites, and the underlying beliefs became for him systems, systems that existed in interactive tension with each other. He saw the performer of a lament, for example, as a psychopomp, a spirit guide capable of crossing boundaries between this world and the next, and guiding others as well (23).
Part of Honko’s legacy is his willingness to work with large, ponderous institutions such as UNESCO in establishing an official definition of the term “cultural creation” and the rights of folk practitioners. He stayed with it even though by then individual creations and their creators were less important to his research than the systems involved in the creation process. The term “dialogical anthropology” characterizes this approach (32). The reader can find more about the UNESCO experience and the importance of systems and sources of folklore on pages 30–36.
The chapter on genre covers Honko’s evolution as a researcher and theorist, 1968-1989. In settling on categories and methods for drawing genre lines he crossed swords with other folklorists, most prominently Dan Ben-Amos, Kurt Ranke, and Alan Dundes. Again, dialectic surfaces as a useful approach. It is interesting that the skirmishes as well as major battles all seem to center on narrative genres, without much mention of material culture or music. Honko particularly objects to a “polar” definition of individual genres by compare and contrast methods, whereby the most radically differing exemplars, rather than the extant ones, take center stage; the grounded, rather than abstract, exemplars that emerge in fieldwork may tend to cross genre boundaries or blur them (61).
It would be helpful to learn, perhaps in a later book, more about Honko’s specific ethnographic research methods, his speeches, his field notes, the Folklore Fellows’ Summer School sessions, and other events of his life, cut short so tragically.
--------
[Review length: 860 words • Review posted on October 15, 2014]