MFC-009

APPROACHES TO FOLKLORE

School of Inter-Disciplinary and Trans-Disciplinary Studies

(SOITS)
Indira Gandhi National Open University
New Delhi
Structural & Post
Structural Approaches
EXPERT COMMITTEE SOITS FACULTY
Prof. T.S. Satyanath, Formerly Professor, DU Prof. Shachi Shah, Director SOITS
Prof. Sadhana Naithani, Professor, JNU Prof. Nandini Sinha Kapur
Prof. Molly Kaushal, Mission Director, NMCM Prof. Boyina Rupini
Prof. Nandini Sahu, Professor of English, IGNOU Dr. Subhangi Vaidya
Dr. Sadanand Sahoo
Dr. Sushmitha Baskar
Dr. Deeksha Dava
Dr. V. Venkat Ramanan
Dr. Y.S.C. Khuman

PROGRAMME AND COURSE DESIGNED BY

Prof. Nandini Sahu
Professor English
School of Humanities, IGNOU

COURSE PREPARATION TEAM

Dr. Debmalya Biswas Dr. Pooja Mann
Dr. Pratibha Dr. Gunjan Gupta
Dr. Shivaji Bhaskar Dr. Pompi Basumatary
Dr. Suchitra Singh Dr. Shikha Rai
Dr. Sampayan Chakraborty Prof. Gopa Nayak
Dr. Mamta Sharma Dr. Nimeshika Venkateshan
Mr. Bhaskar Bhushan Dr. Charulika Dhawan
Dr. Gouri Nilakanthan Dr. Sarwarul Haque
Dr. Rudra Narayan Mohapatra Dr. Pushpa R Menon

COURSE EDITORS
Prof. Nandini Sahu
&
Dr. Debmalya Biswas

Secretarial Assistance:
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Asst. Registrar
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December, 2021
 Indira Gandhi National Open University, 2021
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2
 Syntagmatic Structuralism
MFC - 009
Approaches to Folklore
Indira Gandhi
National Open University
School of Interdisciplinary and
Trans-Disciplinary Studies

BLOCK 1
Structural & Post Structural Approaches 9
BLOCK 2
Psychological Approaches 101
BLOCK 3
Functional Approaches 167
BLOCK 4
Contextualizing the Semiotic Approaches 219
BLOCK 5
Indian Perspectives on Folklore 291

3
COURSE INTRODUCTION
Dear Students,
I welcome you to Course XIII of MA in Folklore and Culture Studies. In this
course, titled Approaches to Folklore, we will discuss structural and post-structural
approaches to folklores. There are topics like syntagmatic structuralism,
paradigmatic structuralism, Vladimir Propp and folklore of Russia, Post-
structuralism and the New Hermeneutic, Deconstruction and Postcolonialism,
that we will explore. This course deals with folk theories and their applications
in our interpretation of folk texts.
The theoretical positions that you may consider as your research points in this
course are:
 In semiotics, syntagmatic structuralism is the analysis of syntax or surface
structure.
 Paradigmatic structuralism encompasses the analysis of paradigms
embedded in the text, i.e., analysis by substituting words of the same
type or class to calibrate shifts in connotation.
 Vladimir Propp was a Russian philologist and structuralist who analyzed
the essential plot components of Russian folktales to identify their
simplest irreducible narrative elements. His research on fairytales
achieved world recognition as the first application of structuralism to
the humanities and created the foundation for new disciplines, such as
narratology, semiology, and structural anthropology.
 Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical, theoretical, and literary
forms of theory that build upon and reject ideas established by
structuralism.
 New hermeneutic is the theory and methodology of interpretation
(hermeneutics) to understand biblical texts through existentialism.
 Deconstruction is an approach to understanding the relationship between
text and meaning. It was formulated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida
(1930–2004), who defined this term.
 Postcolonial folk literature is the folk literature by people from formerly
colonized countries. It exists on all continents except Antarctica.
Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences
of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the
political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and
themes such as racialism and colonialism.
This course also deals with psychological approaches to folklore. Here, we will
study the main contributors in this regard, such as Sigmund Freud, C.J.Jung in
addition to some application-oriented approaches, folk forms, and psychoanalysis.
The psychologist Sigmund Freud used Greek myths such as the story of Oedipus
to help explain his theories of psychosexual development. Freud believed that
people have strong desires that are taboo, i.e.,the ones that society prevents from
being expressed, which play a vital role in the formation of folklore. His
collaborator Carl Gustav Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made it
impossible for him to follow his older colleague’s doctrine, and a schism became
inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the
establishment of Jung’s analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate
from psychoanalysis. They took the help of psychoanalysis as an approach to
folklore. Indeed, it is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques used to study
the unconscious mind, which together form a method of treatment for mental
disorders.
In unit (iv) of this block, the significant forms of folklore, such as folk songs,
folk tales, fairy tales, ballads, folk dramas, proverbs, charms, riddles, etc., are
vividly described.
This course also deals with chapters about functional approaches to folklore, as
Basic Concepts, Social Functionalists, Symbolic Functionalists, Linguistic and
comparative models.
Functionalism in social sciences theory is based on the premise that all aspects
of a society—institutions, roles, norms, etc.—serve a purpose and that all are
indispensable for the long-term survival of the society. The approach gained
prominence in the works of 19th-century sociologists, particularly those who
viewed societies as organisms.
Broadly speaking, Social Functionalism is an example of a macro perspective as
it analyses the way society as a whole fits together, whereas symbolic functionalism
is a micro perspective because it stresses the meaningfulness of human behavior
and denies that it is primarily determined by the structure of the society.
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development
of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more
languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating
backward to infer the properties of that ancestor.
Ordinarily, this method is used to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages; to
fill in gaps in the historical record of a language; to discover the development of
phonological, morphological, and other linguistic systems, and to confirm or to
refute hypothesized relationships between languages.
In this course, we also discuss contextualizing the semiotic approaches to folklore
through different units such as the semiotic approach to folk culture studies,
urban folklore, material culture, as well as the last unit on feminist, queer and
disability approaches.
Summarily, semiotics of culture is a research field within semiotics that attempts
to define culture from a semiotic perspective and as a type of human symbolic
activity, creation of signs, and a way of giving meaning to everything around.
Therefore, here culture is understood as a system of symbols or meaningful signs.
Because the main sign system is the linguistic system, the field is usually referred
to as semiotics of culture and language.
In the unit on Urban Folklore, we will study urban legend, urban myth, urban
tale, or contemporary legend as a genre of folklore comprising stories circulated
as true, especially as having happened to a “friend of a friend” or family member,
often with horrifying or humorous elements. These legends can be entertaining
but often concern mysterious peril or troubling events, such as disappearances
and strange objects. They may also be a confirmation of moral standards, or
reflect prejudices, or be a way to make sense of societal anxieties.
The third unit of this block is titled material culture, in which aspects of social
reality are is grounded in the objects and architecture that surround people,
including the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the
behaviours, norms, and rituals which also are discussed.
The last unit of this block is on feminist, queer and disability approaches to
folklore. Generally, feminist folklorists argued that there was more to study among
women than quilting, herbal remedies, and foodways. These folklorists eventually
expanded the range of possible genres available for folklore study by asserting
that many forms of women’s expression were, in fact, valid genres of interest to
folklorists.
The queer approach is the premise that the discipline of folklore must learn to
better address issues of sexuality and gender diversity. This approach both
strengthens and is strengthened by folklore research methods and analytical
frameworks.
Another disability approach touches the folklore in the wake of everyday life,
where individuals and communities routinely navigate the tenuous social
constructions that contextually define normalcy, the by-product of its brooding
inverse—stigma—simultaneously takes shape, colouring folk perceptions of what
is normal and abnormal, sane and insane. It is a collaborative effort and counter-
effort, etched in symbolic interaction and internalized, then reinforced, through
vernacular discourse. But “normal” is challenged, perhaps most spectacularly, in
notions of disability, mental illness, and trauma.
This course also covers the Indian perspective on folklore in three different units
such as folklore in vernacular traditions, folklore in Sanskrit, Prakrit and Persian
Texts, and Indian folk poetics. In Indian literature, the vernacular refers to the
temple songs, blues, ballads, sermons, stories, and, in our own era, hip-hop songs
that are part of the oral, not primarily the literate (or written-down) tradition of
black expression. The Vernacular encompasses the cultural creations of Indians
not simply as a form of catharsis or self-expression but as a means of resistance.
Indian folk expression has been defined by scholars as “double-voiced,” indicating
that folk songs, sermons, jokes, and other modes of expression retain a meaning
for the culture and a separate meaning for the outside world.
Indian poetry and Indian literature, in general, have a long history dating back to
Vedic times. They were written in various Indian languages such as Vedic Sanskrit,
Classical Sanskrit, Tamil, Odia, Maithili, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese,
Urdu, and Hindi. Poetry in foreign languages such as Persian and English also
has a strong influence on Indian poetry. The poetry reflects diverse spiritual
traditions within India. In particular, many Indian poets have been inspired by
mystical experiences. Poetry is the oldest form of literature and has a rich written
and oral tradition.
The first trace of folklore in Sanskrit is epic poetry, which can be seen in the
Vedic literature, besides some of the dialog hymns in the Rigveda, the Âkhyânas,
Itihâsas, and Purânas of the Brâhmanas. Originally songs of praise, these over
time developed into epic poems of increasing length, heroic songs centered around
a single hero or a single great event. Of these developments, whilst there may
have been many of them, only two have survived, the Mahâbhârata and the
Râmâyana.
During a large period of the first millennium, literary Prakrit was the preferred
language for fictional romance in India. The Jains used Prakrit for religious
literature, including commentaries on the Jain canonical literature, stories about
Jain figures, moral stories, hymns, and expositions of Jain doctrine. Prakrit is
also the language of some Shaiva tantras and Vaishnava hymns. Dandin’s Kavya-
darsha (c. 700) mentions four kinds of literary languages: Sanskrit, Prakrit,
Apabhramsha, and mixed. Bhoja’s Sarasvati-Kanthabharana (11th century) lists
Prakrit among the few languages suitable for the composition of literature. Mirza
Khan’s Tuhfat-al-hind (1676) names Prakrit among the three kinds of literary
languages native to India, the other two being Sanskrit and the vernacular
languages. It describes Prakrit as a mixture of Sanskrit and vernacular languages
and adds that Prakrit was “mostly employed in the praise of kings, ministers, and
chiefs.”
Non-native people brought Arabic, Persian, and Turkish to India. Since Persian
was the favourite language of rulers then, different creators of literary work used
this language to impress them. The Delhi Sultanate greatly promoted it. That was
the time when poetry enjoyed royal patronage. Influential people used to like it.
Amir Khusrau and Amir Hasan Dehlvi created excellent poetry in Persian. During
that period, folklore in Persian texts comprised specific pieces of writing.
This course is a queer amalgamation of theoretical, pedagogical, and application-
oriented folklore. I hope you enjoy reading the units, apart from studying folklore
as a part of your research.
Wish you happy reading!
 MFC - 009
Approaches to Folklore
Indira Gandhi
National Open University
School of Interdisciplinary and
Trans-Disciplinary Studies

Block

1
POLYGENETIC THEORIES OF FOLKLORE
UNIT 1
Syntagmatic Structuralism 13
UNIT 2
Paradigmatic Structuralism 36
UNIT 3
Vladimir Propp and Folklore of Russia 53
UNIT 4
Post-structuralism and the New Hermeneutic 67
UNIT 5
Deconstruction and Postcolonialism 88
BLOCK 1 STRUCTURAL & POST-
STRUCTURAL APPROACHES
The first Block aims to discuss the various facets of structural and post-structural
approaches to the study, analysis and interpretation of folklore. We will try to
understand the fundamentals of the structuralist approach by looking at the
Saussurean tenets with the help of examples and then move on to Vladimir Propp’s
influential framework of 31 functions for the structural analysis of folktales.
Thereafter, we talk about Claude Lévi-Strauss’s unique approach to the study of
folktales and myths, dissecting them into ‘mythemes,’ presenting a fresh way to
ponder over anthropological analysis. Correspondingly, we learn about both the
syntagmatic approach via Propp and the paradigmatic approach via Lévi-Strauss.
Alongside Lévi-Strauss, you will also read about Roman Jakobson and his
propositions of permanently dynamic synchrony and shifters in opposition to the
Saussurean binary of synchrony-diachrony and the tripartite schema of symbol-
index-icon of Peirce. Moreover, we will explore how Roland Barthes, under the
influence of Bertolt Brecht, further delimits the structure of Lévi-Strauss paving
the way for Derridean deconstruction.
In the final two Units, you will be made aware of the critical cogs in
poststructuralism covering Barthes, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari. Alongside
poststructuralist strands, there will also be a substantive discussion on
Hermeneutics with special focus on the New Hermeneutic, a significant theoretical
and methodological framework for the reading and interpretation of biblical texts.
To exemplify and better understand these, we will look at Panchatantra through
the post-structuralist lens and try to interpret the parable “Who Owns Whom?”
using the New Hermeneutic approach. In the concluding Unit, you will be
familiarized with the nuances of Derridean deconstruction and postcolonialism
as well as how these can be maneuvered in the study and practice of Indian
folklore.
We hope you find the Block useful and enjoy the delights of critical engagement
with folklore.
Structural & Post
Structural Approaches ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The material (pictures and passages) we have used is purely for educational
purposes. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of material
reproduced in this book. Should any infringement have occurred, the publishers
and editors apologize and will be pleased to make the necessary corrections in
future editions of this book.

12
 Syntagmatic Structuralism
UNIT 1 SYTAGMATIC STRUCTURALISM
Structure
1.0 Objectives
1.1 Background
1.2 What is syntagmatic structuralism?
1.2.1 Langue-Parole
1.2.2 The Sign
1.2.3 Signifier/Signified
1.2.4 System and Utterance
1.2.5 Difference
1.2.6 Synchrony/Diachrony
1.2.7 System/Process
1.2.8 Paradigm/Syntagm
1.3 Syntagmatic Structuralist Study of Folklore: Methodology
1.4 Syntagmatic Structural Study of Folktale: An Example
1.4.1 Contrastive Narrative Structure
1.4.2 Reward/Punishment Model and Didactic Moral
1.5 The way forward
1.6 Let us sum up
1.7 References and further readings
1.8 Check your progress

1.0 OBJECTIVES
After going through the points covered in this Unit and completing the exercises,
you will be able to:
 understand the basic idea of the syntagmatic structural approach to study
folklore;
 identify the key proponents of this approach, their key ideas and works; and
 exemplify the application of this approach

1.1 BACKGROUND
In this Unit, we are going to discuss syntagmatic structuralism as an approach to
studying folktales.
The study of folklore in general and folktales, in particular, has always been
diachronic rather than synchronic. The focus is on the origin and evolution of
folkloristic materials rather than the structure of these resources. Late-nineteenth-
century folklorists were more concerned with how folklore arose than with whether
folklore explanations were deemed adequate to describe the nature of solar
phenomena. According to mythologists, most folkloristic materials are poetic 13
Structural & Post translations of celestial occurrences such as the rising and setting sun. Following
Structural Approaches
the “eclipse of solar mythology,” as Richard M. Dorson puts it, came the
Anthropological School. According to the members of this group, folklore
originated from historical facts and primitive customs. In the fundamental path
of the unilinear development of all civilizations, there were preserved remnants
of archaic beginnings. These remnants were described as “survivals in culture,”
and the study of them was termed as “folklore” (Dundes, “Etic to Emic” 95).
Advocates of the myth-ritual hypothesis believe that every myth develops from
ritual, which has led to the current diachronic research. Because there is no effort
to explain the rite, it is clear that the issue of origin has been replaced with the
question of evolutionary progress. Similarly, issues of origin are avoided in the
most recent lore research, the so-called Finnish historical-geographical approach.
The goal of this approach is to trace the history of a particular narrative.
The adopters of the historical-geographical method strive to determine the routes
of diffusion and the development process of content. By putting together all of
the known versions of a story, it attempts to recreate the story’s potential initial
form. They make an effort to explain how this initial shape came to be. As a
result, there has been a shift away from an early interest in folklore and toward
an interest in the transmission and evolutionary process.
The mythological, anthropological, and historical-geographical approaches to
folklore are similar not just in that they are diachronic but also because they are
comparative. Because all three use materials from a variety of sources, folklorists
realised that for comparative studies, there needed to be some easy access to
specific portions or pieces of folkloristic objects as well as the wholes. Second, in
order to have a reliable comparison, it is necessary to work with similar units. This
was especially significant to the Finnish school since it was frequently the variations
between units of a specific folktale that were used to establish historical inferences.
Unfortunately, the system of units was designed to meet just the first requirement,
i.e., referring to both specific bits and pieces of folklore and bigger chunks of
folklore. Neither the motif-index nor the Aarne-Thompson (abbreviated as AT)
tale-type index was built with the criteria of having actual similar units in mind.
As a result, no matter how helpful the motif-index and story-type index are as
bibliographical aids or as a symbol shorthand, their fundamental units, namely
the motif and tale type, do not offer an appropriate foundation for comparative
research.
To recognise the limitations of the theme and tale type as units in the comparative
study of folktales, one must first understand what a fundamental unit should be
made up of. Units are utilitarian conceptual constructions of measurement that,
although obviously relativistic and arbitrary, make it easier to examine and
compare things in the natural and social sciences. It is critical that a single kind
of quantity define units (e.g., units of heat, length, and so forth). Units may be
thought of as abstract representations of separate things that can be merged to
create bigger units or broken down into smaller ones. Because units are man-
made categorical efforts to explain the nature of objective reality, there is an
infinite number of them. From a relativistic standpoint, it is clear that no matter
what unit is considered, alternative smaller subunits may be proposed. This is
what occurred historically in identifying the neutron as a sub-unit from the atom,
14 which evolved from the molecule. Therefore, a minimum unit may be defined as
the smallest unit suitable for a detailed analysis, with the implied knowledge Syntagmatic Structuralism
that, although a minimal unit can be split, doing so would be useless.

1.2 WHAT IS SYNTAGMATIC STRUCTURALISM?

Structuralism is a term that refers to a variety of discourses that investigate the
underlying structures of meaning. Signification happens whenever a significant
occurrence occurs or when a meaningful action is performed. As a result, the
term ‘signifying practices’ was coined.
Writing or reading a text, getting married, having a conversation over a cup of
coffee, or fighting a war are all examples of significant events. The majority
(though not all) of significant occurrences include a document or an interaction
that may be recorded. This is referred to as a “text.” A news broadcast, advertising;
an edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear; the instructions for a new washing machine;
the wedding vows; a feature film might all be considered texts.
All texts, all significant occurrences, and all signifying activities may be examined
for their underlying structures from the standpoint of structuralism. Such an
examination would show the patterns that characterize the system that allows for
creating such texts and activities. We cannot perceive a structure or a system in
and of itself.
Structuralism initially gained popularity as a distinct discourse thanks to the work
of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist who created a branch of linguistics
known as Structural Linguistics. Saussure died before he could publish his work,
but we have the carefully documented notes of many of his pupils from the second
semester, which took place from 1908 to 1909.
The hypothesis was still in its early stages at the time, and it has stayed in that
state ever since. Saussure’s hypothesis is not official, and it is still subject to
discussion and disagreement. Nonetheless, based on interpretations of his early
discoveries as recorded by his pupils, there has been an incredibly varied and
fertile spectrum of work, including several schools of thought in Eastern Europe,
the United States, and flourishing today in Japan. The Course in General
Linguistics is a recreation of his lectures. This is a must-read for anybody interested
in learning the foundations of structuralism and semiotics.
The most striking discoveries come from Saussure’s demand for comprehensive
linguistics. There had previously been numerous explanations of language, but
something was always lacking, resulting in the lack of a foundation to explain all
of the languages. Saussure’s explanation of language is sufficient for addressing
both real-world objects and fictitious objects and abstract concepts.

1.2.1 Langue-Parole
We now need to first look at the crucial distinction between langue and parole,
parallel to which there is Noam Chomsky’s formulation of competence and
performance.
The langue-parole and competence-performance dichotomies can be somewhat
understood on the line of systemic vs. applied linguistics. So how do we exactly
approach this? 15
Structural & Post Saussure’s la langue captures the abstract systematised and ideal form of a
Structural Approaches
language, on the basis of which utterances (or visual signs or tactile signs) become
comprehensible and acceptable. Parole represents these very utterances (or visual
signs or tactile signs) produced in actual situations by interlocutors to facilitate
linguistic exchanges in their particular contexts. So, while langue is systemic
and structural, parole involves application, activity and is contextual. Delving
deeper into this, we find that Saussure did not just explicate the langue-parole
dichotomy, but he also took into account langage, the species-specific human
faculty of Language (l in upper case; capitalised) that is different from language
(l in lower case). Therefore, Saussure effectively dealt with three perspicuous
notions – langage, langue, and parole:
langage: the unique human capacity that differentiates us as a species from other
sentient beings
langue: the abstract and ideal language structure held tightly together by the
different rules, laws, and prescriptive norms
parole: the real-world use of a language conditioned by the context in which the
interlocutors are situated, inclusive of interlocutor-specific modifications as well
as errors
To better appreciate this tripartite classification, let us look at what Saussure
himself stated in Course in General Linguistics: “But what is language [langue]?
It is not to be confused with human speech [langage], of which it is only a
definite part, though certainly an essential one. It is both a social product of the
faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted
by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty....” (1959: 9), whereas
for parole, he says that, “[s]peaking, on the contrary, is an individual act. It is
wilful and intellectual” (1959: 14), while clearly cautioning readers that “[i]n
separating language from speaking we are at the same time separating: (1) what
is social from what is individual; and (2) what is essential from what is accessory
and more or less accidental” (ibid).
Parallel to the langue-parole duality, runs Chomsky’s closely similar
differentiation between competence and performance. In the words of Chomsky,
quoted from his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965):
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a
completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language
perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as
memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors
(random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual
performance.... To study actual linguistic performance, we must consider
the interaction of a variety of factors, of which the underlying competence of
the speaker-hearer is only one....
We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-
hearer’s knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of
language in concrete situations). Only under the idealization set forth in the
preceding paragraph is performance a direct reflection of competence. In
actual fact, it obviously could not directly reflect competence. A record of
natural speech will show numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes
16 of plan in mid-course, and so on. (3–4)
Therefore, it becomes evident that Chomsky’s competence-performance is in Syntagmatic Structuralism
more than one way a 20th-century re-rendition of the Saussurean langue-parole
dichotomy.

1.2.2 The Sign

Next, Saussure considers the sign to be the most fundamental component of
language. The connection between signals and their referents has long been used
to describe meaning. The pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, a key
pioneer in semiotics in the nineteenth century, identified three distinct kinds of
sign. In the sense that it refers by symbolizing its referent, the symbolic sign is
similar to a word. It does not have to look like it or have any natural resemblance
to it. A poetic symbol such as the sun (which may represent enlightenment and
truth) has a precise symbolic meaning. However, how do these kinds of
connections form?
Saussure has a reason for this. The indexical sign functions similarly to a signpost
or a finger pointing in a specific direction. An arrow may accompany the signpost
to San Francisco or “Departures.” A book’s index will include a list of
alphabetically sorted words, each with a page number following it. These symbols
have an indexical purpose. The iconic sign is more likely to look like a picture
since it alludes to its item by actually resembling it. Cinematic language often
uses the shorthand provided by famous signs. Most signs may be used in any or
all of these ways, and many of them can be utilized simultaneously. The ability to
separate the various functions is crucial.
By finding that language may be studied independently of its referents, Saussure
breaks with all prior conceptions of meaning (that is, anything outside language
that can be said to be what language refers to, like things, fictions, and abstractions.
This is because the sign includes both the signifying element (what you see or
hear when you look at a written word or hear one spoken) and the meaningful
content (what you see or hear when you look at a written word or hear one spoken).
There are two elements to the symbol cat that must be understood. The letters
“C,” “A,” “T”—which are all simply marks—combine to create a single word:
“cat.” At the same time, the meaning conveyed by this term reaches our
consciousness. At first glance, this seems to be an unusual way of thinking. The
definition of the term cat does not include any of the genuine feline creatures that
have been in the past or any that will undoubtedly exist in the future—a possible
infinity of cats. The definition of the word cat is that it can be utilized in a variety
of ways (e.g., in the sentence, “Your cat kept me up all night.”).
We also need to be able to utilize it an unlimited number of times. So, in a literal
sense, a cat has no particular meaning and instead functions as a sort of empty
space into which many pictures, ideas, or events may be poured. As a result,
Saussure could separate language from any actual occurrence in which it was
employed to refer to anything. This is because, although the meaning of a word
is established to some degree in everyday use, there is always something
indeterminate, something still to be determined about it.

1.2.3 Signifier/Signified
As a result, Saussure splits the sign into two halves. There is the part you can see
or hear first. In fact, you may conceive signals that are perceptible via all five
17
Structural & Post senses. So if you can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell anything, you can certainly
Structural Approaches
interpret it and find some significance in it. Saussure prioritizes audible and visual
signals since these are the kinds of indicators that make up most of our known
languages. These signals are referred to as “verbal” signs (from Latin verba
meaning “word”). The portion you see or hear is the sensible part of a verbal
indication (the part available to the senses). This is the symbol for it. You can
figure out a lot by looking at a word you do not understand—perhaps a term from
a language you do not know. Its signifier is all you get. The ma can get to a word
in an imagined foreign language: bluk. It’s a descriptor. However, note that a
certain degree of signifying happens already—the foreignness is already a part of
its signified, and the fact that we recognize it as a set of markings that may be
repeated already gives us a prospective signified. Furthermore, strangely enough,
even though we just saw the mark, we heard it in our minds as well—not literally,
but the portion of our brain that listens for sounds took one glance at a non-
existent word and heard something as well. What these visible/audible
characteristics signify to us is the signified. We all know that various individuals
interpret some markings differently at different times. As a result, the signified is
always something of an addition to the signifier. Usually, we do not have to put
much effort into deciphering signs. The foundation has already been laid, which
is why “cat” almost always means exactly what it says. Saussure’s description of
that foundation is one of the essential parts of his seminal Cours de linguistique
générale/Course in General Linguistics.

1.2.4 System and Utterance

There is no reason for the non-existent word bluk to sound the way it does. The
phonemes (sound components that make up words) do not correlate to the
graphemes (written word parts) in any natural or essential manner. The connection
has only developed through time and through frequent use, and it is continuously,
though subtly, evolving. Literate speakers of a particular language, on the other
hand, hear the connection right away. If it weren’t for the fact that the meanings
of words—the signified-s—attach to their signifiers in such an unstable manner,
this inexplicable connection between written and spoken markings would be no
great issue. Between signifier and signified, there is never a natural or essential
connection. According to Saussure, the connection is completely random. So,
where does its significance originate? What is the relationship between signifieds
and signifiers? We must move away from thinking about the changes that occur
in languages through time, according to Saussure. Before he came, language
studies primarily concerned tracking changes through time. This is referred to as
diachronic linguistics by Saussure. Instead, he suggests, we should concentrate
on what makes a language what it is at any particular time, ignoring time entirely.
He coined the term “synchronic linguistics” to describe this new branch of
linguistics. Synchronic linguistics is the study of what he refers to as “the langue”
(which is French for “language”). The linguistic system is what he is referring to.
In this instance, the term “system” refers to an arrangement of interconnected
components that explains how these elements interact. Signs are the components
of Saussure’s language system. It is only feasible to say anything because of the
particular manner in which these signals interact in the system. When we do say
anything, we are engaging in what Saussure refers to as parole (French for speech).
A parole occurrence is referred to as an utterance. Any meaningful occurrence
18 that has been made possible and controlled to some degree by a pre-existing
system of signals is referred to as an utterance. There is almost nothing in Syntagmatic Structuralism
experience, and definitely nothing significant, that can’t be classified as belonging
to one of these sign systems. Let’s take a look at several different kinds of
utterances. “Your cat kept me up all night,” a Shakespearen sonnet, Saussure’s
Course in General Linguistics, Beethoven’s fifth Symphony, my coat and tie,
and Alexander Pope’s Garden in Twickenham are all utterances. As a result,
there is a particular framework that underpins and, to some degree, regulates the
kinds of utterances that may be produced in each instance. What is the mechanism
that enables systems to function in this manner?

1.2.5 Difference
It may have been able to comprehend the components that make up this system,
the signals themselves, as real, perhaps even physical entities, until now. Get out
your dictionary, and there they will all be—a limited number, alphabetically
arranged, and clearly linked to one another. Let’s have a look at how this works
using the most basic symbol we have, “cat.” We search it up and discover the
following:
Etymologically: Middle English, from Old English catt, possibly from Late
Latin cattus, catta before the 12th century
1: a carnivorous animal (Felis catus) that has been used as a pet and to
capture rats and mice for many years. b: any member of the Felidae
family of carnivorous animals that are typically nocturnal and solitary
(as the domestic cat, lion, tiger, leopard, jaguar, cougar, wildcat, lynx,
and cheetah).
2: a vicious lady
3: a powerful tackle used to lift an anchor to a ship’s cathead.
Apart from the fact that the signifier seems to have three distinct signified-s
(carnivorous mammal, nasty lady, and powerful tackle), we discover that it is a
member of a family and has previously been in conflict with its traditional sparring
partner, the mouse (as in Tom and Jerry). You wouldn’t call a nasty guy a “cat”
either (though who knows these days), so it seems that some gendering has
occurred as well. Furthermore, any concerns you may have regarding any of the
terms used to describe cat may be addressed by consulting their own articles in
the same dictionary. You could spend days tracing the trail of cross-references if
you were extremely pedantic and stupid. These features, however, have little to
do with what keeps the system together as a whole. To do so, we must resort to
something we can’t even see, and here is where we enter the realm of paradoxes.
According to Saussure, there are no real positive existent words in a linguistic
system; thus, the dictionary must be a ruse! Well, it is in certain ways. Sure, the
markings are there—but our comprehension and perception of them are based
on something we can’t even imagine. That something is the distinction. “A
language is a system of distinctions with no positive words,” Saussure argues.
We recognize language marks because they are unique and distinct from all other
marks in the system. In reality, rather than the markings themselves, we recognize
them as marks because of the distinctions between them. This is easily
demonstrated by the fact that differences in handwriting and quite stark differences
19
Structural & Post in the font on a word processor make no difference to the function of the mark
Structural Approaches
itself—at best, they are purely aesthetic differences (not to say that aesthetic
differences aren’t important in and of themselves).
In terms of their being language system marks, we will recognize them positively
as long as a given mark isn’t bent so far as to become a different one, that is, as
long as they function within the elastic range that difference permits. Because of
their disparities, all potential marks have a chance. But what is the distinction?
That’s a difficult one. The signifier is the rational component of a sign, as we
have previously discussed. We also know that the signified is not perceptible in
and of itself. Contrary to “reasonable,” we could label it “mental” or “intelligible.”
The problem with distinction is that it is neither logical nor understandable.
Saussure had created a strange image like a seascape with the sky above the
horizon to represent the two worlds of the mental and the auditory. The image
was divided into separate parts by a series of vertical lines. He intended this to
show that without the articulation into segments that language offers, neither
sound nor thinking has any meaning and is simply a mass—a meaningless
continuity.
These segments are the signals or components of a linguistic system, which is all
very nice, but how do you imagine the difference that allows it all to happen?
You’ll never be able to tell the difference since you can’t see, hear, touch, taste,
or smell it. In the realm of perceptions, sense is trapped. However, if we agree
that differences are what allow signs to exist, and that the signifiers cat, bat, rat,
dog, and mouse have different characteristics as a result of their differences, then
meaning can only exist for us in the empty, undetectable distinctions between
signifiers. As a result, it is the system of distinctions that makes meaningful
experience possible and, to some degree, controls it.
Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale/Course in General Linguistics
influenced research in humanities and liberal arts in the twentieth century in a
variety of ways. His impact seems to be symptomatic of a very broad state since
he seems to have touched on so many different issues. Because his primary focus
is language, several erroneous assumptions regarding the consequences of
structural linguistics have been made. As though language itself controlled cultural
and even social experience, many have tried to establish a link between linguistic
and cultural structures. This mindset is known as linguisticism (the attempt to
explain everything according to an understanding of language and its structures).
Many post-Saussure tendencies seem to be based on the idea that there is no
social or cultural experience outside of the frameworks that language allows.
Despite Saussure’s claims, advances in linguistics demonstrate that the category
language cannot encompass what he was interested in. Because he chose general
rather than empirical linguistics, he had to look for explanatory words in
phenomena that were not limited to languages. If they relate to language, then
language is simply one of many phenomena that may be described using
structuralism.

1.2.6 Synchrony/Diachrony
There must be a difference established between how languages seem to us (as
they change through time) and how they are at any particular moment (governed
20
by systematic relations not affected by time passing). Synchronic linguistics is a Syntagmatic Structuralism
branch of linguistics that focuses on the systematic rather than the diachronic
features of language. This will not be the first time that an effort at a scientific
knowledge of anything will find it expedient to disregard time. There’s a lesson
to be learned here: disregard it at your peril.

1.2.7 System/Process
Structuralism believes that every process (such as speech) is governed by a set of
underlying laws. The system emerges as a result of a series of events (there are
no natural or necessary reasons for the relations within it to be as they are).

1.2.8 Paradigm/Syntagm
Two distinct poles, or axes, may be used to analyze language. The visible or
audible utterance itself is on the syntagmatic axis, for example, “the cat slept on
the couch.” The way our speech stays linked to and controlled by the system to
which it belongs is represented on the paradigmatic axis. The term paradigm is
derived from the Greek word paradeigma, which means “example.” An utterance
is an example of one of the many possibilities made available by the system.
“The dog sat on the mat,” I might have stated, for example. This would have
been an out-of-the-ordinary option, but one that was completely acceptable. “The
log sat on the carpet,” for example. My examples are related to one another
either by their signifiers (dog and log) or by their signifieds (dog and log) (cat
and dog). All conceivable connections between signifiers and signifieds are
governed by the system into which the paradigmatic axis dips. Poets, we’ve seen,
are frequently drawn to the unusual, since the more apparent your statement is,
the more it will seem like a cliché (the moon in June). The purposes of language,
according to Roman Jakobson, may be understood by looking at how the
paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language interact. We’ll go through it in
greater detail later. Let us look at the following sentences:
1. The cat slept on the couch.
2. The dog slept on the couch.
3. The laptop slept on the couch.
One of these phrases may be chosen from the syntagmatic axis. One of the other
two laying inert on the paradigmatic axis may be able to take the place of the
first. When we combine them, we obtain features of the paradigmatic axis
projected onto the syntagmatic axis. As a result, the systematic elements of
language need to be emphasized. If you disregard this, you may end up with a
picture of a cat, a dog, and a laptop sleeping on a couch.
Most texts may be understood by looking at how systematic features show
themselves on the syntagmatic axis.
Early in the twentieth century, several efforts at the scientific study of structure
were undertaken in the area of folklore studies. Axel Olrik created his epic laws
to draw attention to fundamental compositional principles.He believed that his
research would lead to a new line of investigation into the “biology” of folk
narrative (Dundes, Study 129-141).
21
Structural & Post Sir James George Frazer identified two fundamental principles of operation in
Structural Approaches
sympathetic magic in his seminal work The Golden Bough. Contagious magic
depends on contact between two otherwise unrelated things to create the desired
effect, while imitative magic relies on the capacity of one thing to influence
another like thing (12-13). Antti Aarne’s Verzeichnis der Marchentypen,
subsequently translated and expanded by Stith Thompson as The Types of the
Folktale, was designed with a classificatory goal to allow academics to carefully
examine characteristic differences among traditional folktales. This book was
certainly a watershed moment in folklore study, but it was hindered by an
inconsistent classification scheme. Russian academic Vladimir Propp, concerned
about the effect of such a system on future research, reciprocated with what is
now generally recognized as a groundbreaking formalist study.

1.3 SYNTAGMATIC STRUCTURALIST STUDY OF

FOLKLORE: METHODOLOGY
Vladimir Propp was a Russian philologist and structuralist who studied the core
plot aspects of Russian folktales to determine their most basic irreducible narrative
features. His work on fairy tales became known worldwide as the first application
of structuralism to the humanities, laying the groundwork for new fields like
narratology, semiology, and structural anthropology. Renowned today as a Russian
folklorist, Propp published Morphology of the Folktale in 1928. In this work,
Propp honors Joseph Bedier for being the first to identify the invariant and variable
components in folktales. Despite an effort to describe these linked components
graphically, Bedier, whose major work, Les Fabliaux, was published in I893,
was unable to establish the precise nature of the invariable units. Propp assigned
himself the job of identifying the invariable components of folktales using the
schematic method (between ATU classification 300-749 types, dubbed “Tales of
Magic” by Aarne). In stark contrast to the rest of folklore studies, Propp’s research
was synchronic.
According to Propp, 31 key structural elements (or ‘functions’) usually appeared
within Russian fairy tales, based on his examination of 100 folktales from
Alexander Fyodorovich Afanasyev’s corpus. He defined these 31 functions as
common to all fairy tales or wonder tales [skazka] in Russian folklore.Within
each narrative, these functions happened in a specified, ascending order (1-31);
however, not all functions within any tale were included.
The term “syntagmatic” refers to this form of folkloric structural analysis. This
emphasis on the events of a tale and their sequence differs from another type of
analysis, the “paradigmatic,” which is more characteristic of Lévi-Strauss’
structuralist theory of mythology. Regardless of the linear, surface syntagm, Lévi-
Strauss attempted to discover a narrative’s underlying pattern, and his structure
is generally represented as a binary oppositional structure. The syntagm, or the
linear structural organization of tales, is unrelated to their underlying meaning in
paradigmatic analysis.
Propp wanted to explain the fairy tale in terms of its basic components and to
show how these parts relate to one another and to the whole. He starts by creating
a new smallest unit, the function. He did this because he observed that the dramatis
22 personae’s names and characteristics changed, but their acts or roles remained
the same. As a result, according to Propp, “…the functions of the dramatis Syntagmatic Structuralism
personae are basic components of the tale, and we must first of all extract them”
(Morphology 21).
Propp identified that “five categories of elements define not only the construction
of a tale, but the tale as a whole” (Morphology 96):
1. Functions of dramatis personae
2. Conjunctive elements
3. Motivations
4. Forms of appearance of dramatis personae
5. Attributive elements or accessories
While not every story will have all of Propp’s narratemes, it is intriguing to
discover stories that have none, and several contemporary books and movies fit
appropriately into his categories.
Propp uses four different fairy tales to demonstrate how the dramatis personae
may be used to derive the function’s minimum component unit:
1. A king gives an eagle to a hero. The eagle carries the hero (the recipient)
away to another kingdom.
2. An old man gives Sucenko a horse. The horse carries Sucenko away to
another kingdom.
3. A sorcerer gives Ivan a little boat. The boat takes him to another kingdom.
4. The princess gives Ivan a ring. Young men appearing from out of the
ring carry him away into another kingdom and so forth. (Dundes, “Etic
to emic”100)
Clearly, the purpose is the same, regardless of the dramatis personae. It makes no
structural difference whether the item that transports the hero to another country
is an eagle, a horse, a boat, or men. Propp goes on to describe the function even
more precisely, and his formulation is one of the most innovative and significant
contributions to folklore theory in decades. “An action cannot be defined apart
from its place in the process of narration,” says Propp.
This one remark demonstrates the obvious error of thinking about folklore in
terms of individual themes. Only in the context of the narration process can an
action or function be defined. Honti, who had not seen Propp’s work, had said
that it was impossible to imagine a theme that was not part of a type, but Propp
went far beyond. The minimum unit must be regarded not just as part of a type
but also in relation to where it appears within that type.
In folktales, Propp is successful in differentiating between the constant and the
variable. “Functions serve as stable, constant elements in folktales, independent
of who performs them or how the dramatis personae fulfils them,” he says. Propp
was able to derive the following surprising findings after studying a randomly
chosen sample of 100 Russian fairy tales. To begin with, the fairy tale has a
restricted number of purposes. In fact, Propp found that there are thirty-one
different functions that may be performed. 23
Structural & Post Furthermore, the function sequence is always the same. This does not imply that
Structural Approaches
every fairy tale has all thirty-one functions, but rather that the lack of many
functions does not alter the order of those that remain. Propp may propose a new
unit to take the place of the Aarne-Thompson story type (abbreviated as AT and
followed by a number as per the listing of tales) in The Types of the Folktale, an
index compiled by Antti Aarne (in 1910) and enlarged by Stith Thompson (in
1928 and 1961).
Tales that demonstrate the same functions may be classified as belonging to the
same kind. On this foundation, an index of types may be constructed based on
precise structural characteristics rather than on plot elements, which are basically
vague and diffuse. Propp believed that all fairy stories, by their structure, belong
to one and the same kind after discovering that each of the 100 tales in his sample
fits into one formula.
The following is a list of Propp’s 31 functions derived from 100 magical folktales:

As a consequence, a formula emerges:

H I
ABC ‘! DEFG J K “! Pr-RsOLQExTUW
M N
A cunning hero wins the princess’ hand, a cunning lady shows herself worthy of
her spouse, or a smart peasant outwits the monarch. Sage counsel may lead to
success or, more often than not, catastrophe.
Some novellas deal with societal and marital issues, such as: a lowly peasant
inherits a wealthy man’s property; an innocent lady suffers unfairly, and a proud
wife is redeemed. Others attest to fate’s inevitability. Traditional stories and
episodes are mixed and matched in a variety of ways. Many complicated story
24
types are made up of a series of events that all revolve around a similar subject, Syntagmatic Structuralism
such as persecution, separation, or heroism. Animal stories and funny anecdotes
are often combined because they include the same cast of characters, such as the
fox and the wolf or the rogue and the dupe. Such combinations have the potential
to become commonplace.
“The Bargain Not To Become Angry,” AT 1000; “The Husband Hunts Three
Persons as Stupid as His Wife,” AT 1384; and “Clever Elsie,” AT 1450 are
examples of funny, complicated stories that consist of a frame into which numerous
short tales are placed. The pilgrimage in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; the house
party in Straparola’s The Pleasant Nights; the storytelling session set into a magical
tale (a version of “The Needle Prince,” AT 437) in Basile’s Pentamerone;
Shahrazad in The Thousand and One Nights are all examples of frame tales that
help to bring several literary collections of folktales together.
Modern literary writers sometimes use embedded narratives to balance the
requirement for realism with the need to tell a good story, creating a scenario in
which a character tells a folktale. Films have utilized the same technique to
separate the author from the story (for example, Dead of Night [1945]).
There are many local tales in Indonesia that are too unbelievable to be true.
Consider the Teluk tale, which is about function. The tale starts with the basic
scenario [] “Once upon a time......” This situation and scene suggest that the
primary character appears often, but not always, and that the plot centers around
them. The next stage is to recognize the hero [Q] (in this instance, the protagonist/
main character): “Once upon a time, the Prince went to...”
The third step is to depart []. It implies that the primary characters left their house
and travelled somewhere else: “The prince walked out in a direction he had no
knowledge about.” The fourth is the abolition of misfortune or a lack of it. It
alludes to the bad things that happen as a result of it.

1.4 SYNTAGMATIC STRUCTURAL STUDY OF

FOLKTALE: AN EXAMPLE
As previously said, the question in a study of folktales, and stories in general, is
how structural characteristics of a narrative may be linked to its contents and
purposes. As a result, among the various structural patterns of tales identified in
previous folktale studies, this example will focus on the most common and striking
one – the reward/punishment model – and demonstrate how such a contrastive
narrative structure complements the educational, social function of instilling
psychologically significant themes or contents.
This, in turn,will look at structural analysis as a method, rather than a goal, to
explain the nature of tales in general, by illustrating the connection between
narrative structure (form), societal purpose (function), and story content (field).
For this purpose, we are using a tale with a didactic moral from a collection of
Myanmar (Burma) folktales, where folktales have been passed down the centuries
not just as a representation of a culture, but also as a method of instilling specific
ideas in the society.
The concept of the contrastive narrative structure must first be explained. 25
Structural & Post 1.4.1 Contrastive Narrative Structure
Structural Approaches
Here, we will apply Propp’s ideas of the event and distribution of narrative roles
to the characters in a story in order to analyze narrative structure in a text. There
are two characters in the chosen story, The Golden Crow (Aung, 1976), one of
which follows certain particular guidelines and is rewarded. The other gets
penalized for breaking these regulations. The following is a breakdown of the
four narrative roles in the story as analyzed by Lwin:
(1) Good-natured girl: Protagonist A
(2) Bad-tempered girl: Protagonist B
(3) Golden Crow: Donor
(4) Tray of paddy: Guide (72).
In the first half of the narrative, Protagonist A is the primary character, but in the
second half, Protagonist B is. They are both similar and diametrically opposed.
The donor role is shared among many individuals who put the heroes to the test.
This kind of story’s narrative structure may be described as two symmetrically
contrasted movements that are formally similar.
The structure of the sequence of events has been summarized by Lwin as:
Tasks Success  Reward
Tasks  Failure  Punishment (72).
In other words, the contrastive narrative structure or the Reward/punishment
model may be used for such a tale structure.
Furthermore, a story may be made up of more than one basic series of events. As
a result, the concepts of motion proposed by Propp (1968) and connectives
proposed by Jason (1977) must be addressed in order to understand the connection
between occurrences. Propp used the term “move” to describe a sequence of
occurrences. Jason offers a new unit – connective – for the study of narrative
structures in oral literature, based on Propp’s concept of motion. A connective is
defined as a “unit which connects parts of the narrative” (Jason 104).
There are two types of connectives as analyzed by Lwin:
a. An information connective: information is given
1. by one character in the tale to another,
2. by the narrator to the audience.
b. A transfer connective in (1) state, (2) time, (3) space:
1. transition in state (transformation from one state of being into
another),
2. transition in time (lapses of time without action),
3. transition in space (transportations in space) (72)
Connectives, like occurrences, should be considered another kind of basic
component that acts as a method for arranging stories into a well-organized
26
narrative. The fundamental sequence of events or basic narrative structure of Syntagmatic Structuralism
The Golden Crow may be described as shown in the following Table, directly
extracted from pages 73 to 76 of Lwin’s paper “Revisiting a structural analysis
of folktales: A means to an end?” using events, movements, and connectives as
the units of analysis.

27
Structural & Post
Structural Approaches

28
 Syntagmatic Structuralism

1.4.2 Reward/Punishment Model and Didactic Moral

The above analyses of parallel sets of opposing narratives demonstrate how good
acts are rewarded and bad ones are penalized. It elucidates one of the main
purposes of this kind of story, which is moral instruction. Despite its apparent
simplicity, the story explores topics and problems that are important to all of
mankind. Honesty, compassion, generosity, envy, arrogance, greed, and other
psychologically important topics are discussed. When the morally important
problems of what is right and its repercussions are contrasted with what is wrong
and its consequences, the morally significant questions of what is right and its 29
Structural & Post consequences are fore-grounded. As a result, the story’s contrastive narrative
Structural Approaches
structure may be considered to complement and reinforce the moral and ethical
lessons that lay underneath the story’s content.
In today’s society, folktales are generally thought of as children’s stories. They
definitely appeal to kids and aid in the development of critical, social, cognitive,
and language abilities. Similarly, it should not be forgotten that the ideas and
problems addressed in these stories may be relevant to people of all ages and
backgrounds. While there are numerous variations between folktales from various
civilizations, certain aspects may be justified in being shared by many or all
cultures. Although various cultures may give the protagonists different tasks or
tests, the fundamental message of what is morally or ethically good, what is
wrong, and what the repercussions may be, remains the same.
Aside from the similar social and moral issues that run through the stories, the
reward/punishment model or contrastive narrative structure is also found to be
prevalent in tales from many cultures for conveying moral lessons. To put it
another way, the connection between narrative form, purpose, and field in stories
and the didactic moral appears in folktales from all around the world. Just as
moral concerns like honesty, compassion, and generosity, as opposed to envy,
greed, and pride, are shown to be transcultural, if not universal, so is the contrastive
structural manner of expressing such concerns.
To examine additional stories from other cultures with a similar didactic moral,
one may refer to Drory (1977), who tried to develop a model for the narrative
structure of reward/punishment fairy tales like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
Drory claims that the reward-and-punishment fairy tale includes two
symmetrically opposed heroes who are challenged by ethical standards because
the narrative structure is made up of two symmetrically opposed movements that
are technically similar. To put it another way, the narrative roles’ acts are assessed
to some degree within the socio-religious system of general values and particular
norms.
Grayson (2002) showed that there is a significant collection of Korean folktales
that are comprised of parallel sets of opposing narratives demonstrating how
good acts are rewarded and bad actions are punished in recent research on Korean
folktales. The contrastive narrative form is said to be present in stories all across
East Asia and the globe. In addition to the general subject of rewards and
punishments, Grayson differentiates Korean stories from comparable tales in
China and Japan as an example of the Confucian idea of moral suasion. Grayson,
for instance, follows this technique while analyzing The Story of Hungbu and
Nolbu, a Korean reward/punishment folktale:
Act 1: The younger brother
Scene 1: The good actions of the younger brother
Scene 2: The younger brother’s reward
Act 2: The older brother
Scene 1: The evil actions of the older brother
Scene 2: The Punishment of the older brother (52)
30
It is comprised of two equal narrative parts or acts (c.f. movements in the Myanmar Syntagmatic Structuralism
story), each consisting of two scenes that balance each other with comparable
narrative material but come to a distinct end, or dénouement, similar to the
Myanmar folktale. The first act, or Move 1, makes a didactic moral argument by
demonstrating virtuous intentions and their effects, while the second act, or Move
2, contrasts the narrative material of the first act to emphasize the punishment
that results from evil motives.
The Korean story is distinguished by its typical Confucian undercurrent, which
emphasizes the younger brother’s moral ability to persuade his elder brother to
change his behavior (Grayson 2002). In Korean folktales, the significance of
moral suasion is said to be emphasized by inverting the protagonist and antagonist
roles.
Regardless of their singularity, these didactic moral stories may be argued to
demonstrate the connection between the contrastive narrative form, the narrative
substance of moral problems, and the social function of moral education. In other
words, the qualities of good ethics are stressed for the goal of moral education in
folktales via the use of a contrastive narrative framework.
The article’s analysis and debate propose a study of the connection between a
story’s narrative form, function, and field as a means of identifying the cultural
determination of narrative theme and social purpose of storytelling. It argues that
in the case of didactic moral tales, the contrastive narrative form aids in
establishing the ideas of good morals, which are deep and significant for all
mankind throughout cultures. The possibility of investigating the connection
between narrative form, function, and field in different kinds of tales is left
unexplored.
Investigating the connection among the underlying story structures, the narrative
contents conveyed, and the social purposes of storytelling in different kinds of
tales, may help us better understand the nature and power of stories. The structural
study of tales, with its emphasis on the connection of forms to contents and
functions, may still be a way of better understanding the nature and power of
stories in a post-structural, post-modern society.

1.5 THE WAY FORWARD

As academic engagement and political currents moved away from Formalism,
Morphology of the Folktale lost prominence in the Soviet Union. By the time
Propp’s work was released in the English translation, Claude Levi-Strauss’s
innovative approach to structural analysis had already created interest and debate
among academics.
One of the few American folklorists to undertake a comprehensive project
influenced by Propp’s approach was Alan Dundes, who authored the Introduction
to the second English edition of Morphology of the Folktale. Dundes consciously
selected source material that was different from the European fairy tale tradition
for his book, The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales (1964). He
devised a simpler system of motifemes (another name for functions that reflect
both their connection with motifs and their emic nature) based on contrasting
pairs. Such fundamental components, according to Dundes, remained constant 31
Structural & Post throughout time, even when characters, particular events, and narrative styles
Structural Approaches
transformed. Dundes also made a significant distinction between Propp’s method
and that of Levi-Strauss, whose examinations of myths offer a refreshingly unique
perspective of anthropological analysis.
Dundes suggests that Propp’s attention is on the syntagmatic elements of structure,
whereas Levi-Strauss emphasizes paradigmatic structuralism (Propp, Morphology
xi-xii). Saussure coined these two expressions to emphasize key aspects of
language. The position and connection of words and elements of language to
other components of a linear sequence, like a sentence or narrative, determine
some of their semantic worth. This feature of language was described as
“syntagmatic” by Saussure (the word is connected to the more familiar “syntax”).
The connection between groups of substitutable elements is another important
source of meaning in language. For example, a certain word in a poem may be
changed with any from a list of expressions that sound similar while maintaining
the rhyme pattern. It also belongs to a set of words with the same meaning, a
collection of words with the same grammatical function, and a variety of other
possible groups. The relationship within such categories and the importance of
the choices made from such sets in the composition process is the focus of
paradigmatic analysis (Scholes 18-19). It may be unjust to portray these concerns
of Propp and Levi-Strauss as polar opposites, but it is essential to recognize that
such differences have resulted in techniques and results that are tedious to reconcile
in a single, appropriate characterization of structuralism.

1.6 LET US SUM UP

In this Unit, we have provided a brief overview of the syntagmatic structural
approach to study myths. The key ideas to remember are:
 The structural theory was the most prominent theory in folklore studies in
the 1960s, and it still dominates contemporary developments in folklore
studies. Although the seeds of the structural or pattern approach can be found
in the works of Raglan, Olrik, von Sydow, André Jolles, and others, the
initiation was in 1928 with the publication of Russian formalist, V.J. Propp’s
famous and influential book Morfologiyaskázki [Morphology of the Folktale].
 Propp was fully aware of European folklore studies’ strong diachronic origins
and the danger it posed to synchronic studies, and therefore emphasized the
need of establishing a distinct line between the diachronic and synchronic
studies. His own research marked a clear shift from a diachronic and historical
perspective to a synchronic and structural one.
 Propp, guided by scientific thought, emphasized the need to describe a
folkloric phenomenon before attempting to identify its origin.
 Propp’s attitude was a significant theoretical development in and of itself: a
shift from atomistic to descriptive thinking, as well as a divergence from
folklore theory’s “devolutionary” assumption.
 Propp discovered that the fundamental elements or component parts of
folktales were not characters or dramatis personae but their continuous
32 activities or functions.
 Propp stressed that these acts only qualify as functions or constant components Syntagmatic Structuralism
if they have implications for the narrative progression of the storyline.
 As a result, Propp devised a technique for analyzing folktales based on the
functions of the dramatis personae. Consequently, function became the
fundamental unit of classification and analysis.
Before heading over to the next Unit, please ensure that you have completed all
the ‘Check Your Progress’ sections. This will help you revise the ideas that we
have discussed and put you through some much-needed practice in expressing
yourself in your own words. We hope that you have enjoyed learning about
syntagmatic structuralism through this Unit.

1.7 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS

Aarne, Antti, and Stith Thompson. The Types of the Folktale. Academia
Scientiarum Fennica, 1961.
Aung, Maung Htin. Folk Tales of Burma. Sterling Publishers, 1976.
Dorson, Richard M. “The eclipse of solar mythology.” The Journal of American
Folklore, vol. 68, no. 270, Oct.-Dec. 1955, pp. 393-416. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/
stable/536766.
Drory, Rina. “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves: An Attempt at a Model for the
Narrative Structure of the Reward-and-Punishment Fairy Tale.” Patterns in Oral
Literature, edited by Heda Jason and Dimitri Segal, De Gruyter Mouton, 1977,
pp. 31- 48.
Dundes, Alan. “From etic to emic units in the structural study of folktales.” The
Journal of American Folklore, vol. 75, no. 296, Apr.-Jun. 1962, pp. 95-105.
JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/538171.
Dundes, Alan. The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales. Folklore
Fellows Communications No. 195. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1964.
Dundes, Alan. The Study of Folklore. Prentice-Hall, 1965.
Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. Collier Books, 1950.
Grayson, James Huntley. “The Hungbu and Nolbu Tale Type: A Korean Double
Contrastive Narrative Structure.” Folklore, vol. 113, no. 1, Apr. 2002, pp 51-69.
JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1261006.
Harle, Peter. “Structuralism.”Folklore Forum, vol. 30, no. ½, 1999, pp. 9-17.
IUScholarWorks, scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/2318.
Jason, Heda. “A Model for Narrative Structure in Oral Literature.” Patterns in
Oral Literature, edited by Heda Jason and Dimitri Segal, De Gruyter Mouton,
1977, pp. 99-139.
Lwin, Soe Marlar. “Revisiting a structural analysis of folktales: A means to an
end.” The Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics, vol. 2, no. 1, Sep.
2009, pp. 69-80. ResearchGate,www.researchgate.net/publication/260563272_
Lwin_SM_2009_Revisiting_a_structural_analysis_of_folktales_A_means_to_an_end_
The_Buckingham_Journal_of_Language_and_Linguistics_2_1_69-80. 33
Structural & Post McCormick, Charlie T. and Kim Kennedy White, editors. Folklore: An
Structural Approaches
Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art. 2nd Edition. ABC-CLIO,
2011.
Phillips, John William. “Structuralism and Semiotics.” NUS Courses, 28 June
2021, https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/structuralism.htm.
Propp, Vladimir. Theory and History of Folklore. Translated by Ariadna Y. Martin
and Richard P. Martin, edited by Anatoly Liberman, University of Minnesota
Press, 1984.
—. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott, University of
Texas Press, 1968.
Scholes, Robert. Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. Yale University
Press, 1974.

1.8 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

1) Recall the fundamental hypothesis of solar mythologists and the myth-ritual
approach to the study of folktale.
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
2) How are mythological, anthropological, and historical-geographical
approaches to folklore similar?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
3) Differentiate between langue and parole as propounded by Saussure.
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
4) How do synchronic and diachronic approaches vary?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
5) What do you understand by syntagmatic and paradigmatic methods?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................

34 ........................................................................................................................
6) List the 31 functions identified by Propp for the syntagmatic structuralist Syntagmatic Structuralism
study of Russian folklore.
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
7) What is the fundamental difference between syntagmatic and paradigmatic
structuralist study?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
8) What are the two types of connective offered by Jason?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
9) Write a brief note on the Reward/Punishment Model.
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
10) What do you understand by a didactic moral?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................

35
Structural & Post
Structural Approaches UNIT 2 PARADIGMATIC STRUCTURALISM
Structure

2.0 Objectives
2.1 Warm up
2.2 What is paradigmatic structuralism?
2.3 R. Jakobson (1896-1982)
2.4 Claude Lévi-Strauss
2.5 Roland Barthes
2.6 Paradigmatic Structuralist study: Methodology
2.7 Let us sum up
2.8 References and further readings
2.9 Check your progress

2.0 OBJECTIVES
After going through the points covered in this Unit and completing the exercises,
you will be able to:
 understand the basic definition of the paradigmatic structural approach to
study folklore
 comprehend how it is different from the syntagmatic structural approach to
study folklore
 recall some of the key proponents of this approach, their key ideas, and works

2.1 WARM UP
In this Unit, we are going to discuss paradigmatic structuralism as an approach
to studying myths, its main proponents, their key ideas, and works. We will also
learn how paradigmatic structuralism is different from syntagmatic structuralism.
However, let us briefly recall what we have learned in unit 1.
 What do you understand by the structural approach to study folklore?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
 Recall and tabulate names of important proponents of syntagmatic
structuralism with their key concepts.
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
36
 Paradigmatic Structuralism
2.2 WHAT IS PARADIGMATIC STRUCTURALISM?
In the previous Unit, we understood that broadly speaking, structuralism is an
approach to comprehend the world in terms of underlying structural categories
within which ‘individual units’ (surface phenomena) are embedded and are ordered
by ‘rules.’ As described by Peter Barry, one of the beliefs fundamental to this
approach is that “things cannot be understood in isolation–they have to be seen
in the context of the larger structures they are a part of. . . . The structures in
question here are those imposed by our way of perceiving the world and organizing
experience, rather than objective entities already existing in the external world”
(Barry 38). For instance, in literary criticism, a structuralist analysis of a poem
would entail explication of the conventions of its concomitant genre than mere
close reading and enunciation of its formal elements.

Ferdinand de Saussure is known as the earliest exponent of structuralism in its

incipient form. He, as a linguist, in his synchronistic examination of language,
emphasized the structures and functions of language at a given time. This
proposition diverged from the then ubiquitous tendency to study language
diachronically in terms of its philological evolution. Subsequently, the structural
linguist framework of concepts was extended by structuralists to the analysis of
literary arts and even non-literary aspects of culture. Vladimir Prop applied the
linguist model to examine folktales, thus moving away from the existing atomistic
approach to a ‘morphological’ descriptive approach with the classification of
essential constant components of tales and their functions as fundamental
analytical units. These morphological elements were called narratemes. In his
study of Afanasyev’s Russian folktales, Propp explicates 31 functions that could
account for the totality of data of the 100 tales. When arranged chronologically
in a linear sequence, these morphological elements came to be delineated as
syntagmatic schema. A detailed explanation of the syntagmatic approach to the
study of folklore has been given in the first unit. Thus, the thrust of discussion in
this unit would be on the paradigmatic structural method, primarily associated
with anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Lévi-Strauss drew on the linguistic theories of Saussure and the anthropological

theories of Durkheim and Mauss to his structural analysis of myths and divided
them into ‘mythemes.’ Initially, he applied it to the Myth of Oedipus, later moving
onto Brazilian and South American mythology. The analysis was later extended
to the study of food, dress, and even kinship system. He emphasizes that mythic
phenomena must be understood by considering the underlying patterns reflected
in the totality of culture (as in the links/relations between many tales) and not in
isolation by separating form from content. In distinction to Propp, who focused
on the surface structures of folk tales and discerning the morphology in terms of
linear syntagmatic structures, Strauss advocates attention to deep structures in
myths and their arrangement into meaningful paradigms. Although Lévi Strauss’s
name is popularly associated with paradigmatic structuralism, some other
prominent proponents of this approach, like Roman Jakobson, preceded him,
and Roland Barthes and Jonathan Culler, have succeeded him. In the next section,
we will learn about them, their key ideas, and their theories.
37
Structural & Post
Structural Approaches 2.3 ROMAN JAKOBSON (1896-1982)
One of the most prominent semioticians of the twentieth century, Roman Jakobson,
who hailed from Russia, was one of the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle
in 1926. He is given credit for the coinage of the term structuralism, which had
an initial phonological context. Instead of the diachronic view that differentiated
words based on phonological rules, the synchronistic linguists insisted that words
should be differentiated phonetically. They approached language as a phonological
system to be comprehended in terms of binary oppositions. According to them,
the absence or presence of minimal sound units, called “distinctive features,”
were responsible for the differences between phonemes. The explication of the
binary model of language with the metaphor and the metonymic as its two poles,
operating at the irreducibly minimal level of linguistic structure, was taken as a
paradigm and applied in other fields by researchers such as in anthropology by
Claude Levi- Strauss, in Psychology by Jean Piaget and Jacques Lacan and in
poetics by Roland Barthes.
A linguist by training, Jakobson also drew from his study of phonetics,
folkloristics, poetics, and dialectology to advance the field of semiotics. Initially
a student of philology at the Moscow University in 1917, Jacobson took up
linguistics when Sergey I. Karcevskij introduced him to the work of Ferdinand
de Saussureand provided a detailed and systematic exposition of Saussure’s Cours
de linguistique générale. Between 1915 to 1920, Jakobson had become a leading
member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and The Society for the Study of Poetic
Language at Saint Petersburg. In 1939, after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia,
Jakobson, a jew by birth, left Prague to move to Scandinavia and then arrived in
New York in North America. Here he took teaching at Columbia University and
in 1949 was appointed to a chair at Harvard University. Hereafter, coming across
the work of North American linguist Charles Sanders Peirce, he advocated his
work to the extent that Peirce’s contemporary prestige within structuralist
semiotics is attributed to Jakobson’s efforts. Jakobson first drew parallels between
Saussure and Peirce’s work and later made use of the rhetorical and heuristic
opposition by juxtaposing the two. Three of the axioms given by Saussure that
Jakobson contested are as follows:
 Jakobson preferred to speak of “permanently dynamic synchrony” instead
of Saussure’s dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony. He
disregarded the linearity and sequentiality of the semiotic chain to argue
for the theory of poetic function, which admits the simultaneity of
equivalent terms (the one term that is chosen invokes the absence of
those not chosen but are present on the parataxis). According to this
function, the axis of selection (parataxis, metaphor) is projected onto
the axis of combination (syntaxis, metonymy). It is most evident in poetry
but is prevalent in all forms of discourse.
 Jakobson also objected to Saussure’s axiom about the arbitrary
relationship between the signifier and the signified by pointing out that
the semantic is linked to the acoustic or even dependent upon in
utterances, references to phrases such as “kith and kin” or “time or tide”
where the syntax of the sentence is partially determined by its rhythm or
38 alliteration or by other poetic features.This argument implied that a
 phoneme or even word might be selected for its place in the acoustic Paradigmatic Structuralism
chain and not exclusively for its place in the semantic chain of
signification. While Saussure took a very non-aesthetic use of language,
by contrast, Jakobson considered the poetic aspect of language, therefore
providing a resolution to the problem of onomatopoeia.
 Taking the classification of signs into the symbol, index, and icon (given
by Peirce), Jakobson pointed out that some words called “shifters” (that
cannot be understood without reference to both the message and the
speaker) operate even indexically, therefore, exhibiting existential relation
with the object represented by it. Peirce had established that words are
symbols as they operate within a conventional and arbitrary code, whereas
indexes and icons were pictorial instead of verbal or alphabetical signs.
An example of an index is – ‘an arrow that points’ signifying by contiguity,
and a photograph will be an example of an icon as it represents by
semblance. Though Peirce had made an exception about “indexical
symbols,” taking Peircean semiotic formulation as a point of departure,
Jakobson refutes Saussure’s proposition about arbitrary relation between
the sign and the signified highlighting the poetic function operational in
shifters, as they show both symbolic and indexical nature. Referring to
Peirce and other American linguists like Benjamin Lee Whorf, Leonard
Bloomfield, and Edward Sapir, Jakobson further argued that linguistic
signs must also be iconic. To explicate his theory of iconicity of language,
Jakobson cites Peirce: “Every algebraic equation is an icon, insofar as it
exhibits by using the algebraic signs (which are not themselves icons)
the relations of the quantities concerned.” Any algebraic formula appears
to be an icon, “rendered such by the rules of commutation, association,
and distribution of the symbols.” Thus, “algebra is but a sort of diagram,”
and “language is but a kind of algebra.” Peirce thus “vividly conceives”
the iconicity of syntax, that “the arrangement of the words in the
sentence…must serve as icons, in order that the sentence may be
understood.” Jakobson advances this to argue that if not each word, then
at least the arrangement of words is iconic: additionally, the syntax itself
does not accord to the law of unalloyed linearity.

2.4 CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS

Reckoning Saussure’s models, and under the influence of Roman Jakobson, it
was the French Anthropologist Lévi-Strauss who emerged as the leading proponent
of structuralism. He extrapolated principles of structural linguistics, particularly
phonology, and applied them to the examination of culture as ‘structural
anthropology.’ According to him, structuralism posits universal principles that
subsist in the human mind and operate in language, myth, and even social
structures.
He was also majorly influenced by Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. Due to his
childhood interest in geology, avant-garde arts, and ethnology, from 1935 to the
onset of the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss spent time studying the indigenous
inhabitants of the relatively untouched territories of Brazil. He considered kinship
systems fundamental in understanding the social systems of tribal cultures. He
could gather tomes of data through his fieldwork but had not developed an 39
Structural & Post organizing principle to analyze the same. At this time, the shaping influence of
Structural Approaches
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book On Growth and Form is also noted by
Strauss’ biographer Patrick Wilcken. The book enunciated the idea that the various
shapes prevalent in nature can be rendered as mathematical constructs, i.e.,
morphology was at the core of nature’s variety.
Nevertheless, it was after Strauss met the Russian Formalist Roman Jakobson in
New York while teaching at École Libre des Hautes Études in New School for
Social Research during the Second World War, who suggested the study of
Saussure’s book Cours de linguistique générale (1915), that Strauss became
acquainted with the idea of langue (rules of speaking) and parole (individual
speech act). This he used beyond linguistics as an organizing principle to evaluate
kinship structures and the mode of analysis for his seminal work The Elementary
Structures of Kinship (1949). The early theoretical work emerged as an alternative
to British structural-functionalism, mainly propounded by Alfred R. Radcliffe
Brown. Instead of focusing on nomenclature and descent, he focused on an alliance
among groups based on marriage exchange as the foundation to understand society.
He also claims the incest taboo and its complementary directive to seek wives
elsewhere to be the universal feature of humanity.
Formalism appealed to Lévi-Strauss, whose journey into the social organization
may be understood as an attempt to construct a human society based on awareness
of difference rather than identification. Of particular interest to him were the
intricate marriage rules that generate persisting conditions of exchange of women
and commodities. For example, among the Kachin, group A always stands as
“wife giver” to group B, which plays this role for group C, and so on, until the
system achieves closure. Economic goods such as cattle or social prestige move
in the reverse direction to the interchange of women as wives. Like his predecessor
Émile Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss was attracted to aboriginal Australians. Considered
evolutionary antediluvians, their marital practices were as complex and
complicated as their primitive material culture. All primitive cultures, according
to Lévi-Strauss, can be defined in terms of a primary moiety system (further
expands into numerous divisions and subdivisions) based on which the reciprocity
permutations are enacted. The Kariera system, for example, is so complicated
that it necessitates a formal, quasi-mathematical model to explain it. Similarly,
his ideas on totemism discount the supposed identification between people and
animals, replacing it with proportional reasoning (raven:eagle::group A:group
B). To put it another way, totemic animals are “good to think” rather than “good
to eat,” as he famously proclaimed. He later applied it to Myth in The Structural
Study of Myth (1952) to demonstrate that all myths could be structured along
binary lines regardless of the origin of culture. He modified the concept of
phonemes to coin the term ‘mythemes.’ Organizing mythemes into paired
oppositions enabled to bring structure into the mass of numerous local myths
indicating a universality of human thought. By explicating temporal changes in
myths on the horizontal track and recurring themes on the vertical track, Lévi-
Strauss mapped the structure of mythologies worldwide in terms of bundles of
relations. In his approach, he emphasized the importance of structures of myths
instead of the symbolism or meaning of the myths. The myth was then considered
a language and mythmaker, the bricoleur, who was not the author but simply
constructed myths by putting together and recycling the existing elements. His
40 most revolutionary idea was that it was myth that worked the culture rather than
the other way around. Building on this, in the following years, from 1964 to Paradigmatic Structuralism
1971, the greatly acclaimed four volumes of Mythologiques were published.
Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation of the myth of Oedipus has been one of his most
well-known essays. In this essay, he employs Saussure’s langue and parole,
signifier and signified, syntagmatic and paradigmatic oppositions, and borrows
the depth model of meaning from Sigmund Freud for accessing the deeper levels
of meaning present inside the myth itself through an examination of the logical
structures embedded in it. While Sigmund Freud’s exegesis involved only a
reworking of an existing story, Strauss argues that the myth alludes indirectly to
a parallel tale outside of the myth and that gets repeated latently in the lives of all
boys. This implies that a myth can be read either syntagmatically or
paradigmatically. A syntagmatic reading would follow a linear interpretation from
beginning to end. Paradigmatic reading, on the contrary, requires contemplative
reorganization by the mind after reflection. As a result, we could see the parallel
structures of two occurrences that happen at different points of the text.These
parallel occurrences will have both similarities and differences. The differences,
of course, define the meaning of the relationship, which is an aspect of the myth’s
meaning system. Therefore, one can differentiate incest from parricide in the
Oedipus narrative as the overvaluation versus the undervaluation of blood ties.
Other changes and oppositions, such as the one between autochthony and reduced
mobility, are less evident. Lévi-Strauss’ interpretations of Oedipus or the Tsimshian
myth of Asdiwal are at least credible, and in the latter instance, they correspond
to what we know about other elements of culture. It is unmistakable that Lévi-
Strauss uncovered something elemental about the construction of at least some
myths.
In subsequent significant work, The Savage Mind addresses the central issue
posed by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) of cognitive relativism, which was
central to twentieth-century social thought: E. E. Evans-Pritchard had previously
attempted to disprove Bruhl’s claim that “savages” think differently than
“moderns.” Lévi-Strauss makes cognitive universality the cornerstone of his whole
theory in this work. Lévi-Strauss, like Evans-Pritchard, highlights the “savage’s”
exceptional verifiable knowledge and practical reason. This was supposed to
refute the claim that their minds are fundamentally different from ours. Strauss
demonstrates that “savages”can completely comprehend the corporeal component
of things, i.e., they understand when an object is “just” an object and when it is
being employed symbolically. This conflict between the symbolic and physical
aspects of things seems to be constructive, and it is the foundation of most rituals.
“Savage” cognition, according to Lévi-Strauss, is “the science of the concrete.”
He implies that tangible items, such as plants and animals, function as signs in
primitive cultures.
First, the barbarian has no option but to employ physical objects to represent
abstract notions since he lacks specific semiotic systems (such as writing,
arithmetic, symbolic logic, theology) other than spoken language. This is seen in
totemism. However, the corporeality and instrumental characteristics of these
real things are preserved; the two dimensions are, in some ways, bridged through
language. Second, every culture categorizes the world in its unique manner. (Lévi-
Strauss is simply repeating Marcel Mauss on this point.) These two characteristics
of “savage” thought lend it an enigmatic but comprehensible aspect. We can
41
Structural & Post understand the primordial mind, just like geology, if we discern its stratum at an
Structural Approaches
adequate depth.

However, the broader aim in his works was to investigate another dichotomy,
that of nature against civilization, which he thought yielded the fundamental
meaning of myth. The Raw and the Cooked (1969), for example, exhibits a clear
example of this conflict. Many Native American folktales are about culture against
nature or, perhaps, about culture as formed versus alternative possibilities on
some level. Nevertheless, this argument by Lévi-Strauss has been disapproved
for overreaching. North and South American civilizations shared a broad range
of mythic and artistic themes. However, their diffusion did not happen unimpaired
without transformation. The transfer of myths, like marriage, both connects and
opposes communities, and therefore in a formal sense, creates them. Lévi-Strauss
implements this principle in his study of Pacific Northwest masks by attempting
to prove the hypothesis. The argument is that when plastic forms are adopted
intact, their meaning and function are transposed, whereas masks from neighboring
groups having common qualities and meanings will be formally opposed, often
as mirror images of each other. The essential idea here is transformation, which
may be defined as a repeated, reversible, structurally accepted function in the
linguistic sense. The transition of a mytheme, like translating a declarative phrase
into an interrogative sentence, poses no danger to the system.

Inspired by his work, up-and-coming scholars such as Roland Barthes and Jacques
Derrida extended the structural analysis to other fields to form a cultural critique.
At the very least, the central figures of post-structuralism, such as Jacques Derrida
and Michel Foucault, use structuralism as a starting point. The work of Dell
Hymes (1981), among others, has clearly shown the value of structural studies of
myth.

2.5 ROLAND BARTHES

Roland Barthes was primarily a literary critic who combined semiotics, linguistics,
structuralism, anthropology, Freudian theory from Lacan’s seminars, and Marxist
criticism of post-war society in his critique of culture. He connected style to the
body in Writing Degree Zero (1953), and in Mythologies (1957), he paved the
path for post-structuralism by observing that myths may be emptied and filled
with any accessible material, and so were susceptible to a change in meaning
once the signifiers were altered. To overcome the limitations of semiotics, Roland
Barthes switched from semiology to structuralism. Moreover, he did it under the
influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Structuralism enabled Roland Barthes to
evaluate literature as culture and as a part of society. He did initiate a replacement
of a reasonably passive “technique” with a more active study of literature in
which the reader arbitrates with the text. In 1963, he wrote L’activité structuraliste
for Les Lettres Nouvelles, which was republished in his book Essais Critiques
(1964). The 1963 article by Roland Barthes was translated into English twice:
first by Stephen Bann for Form in 1966 as “The Activity of Structuralism,” and
again by Richard Howard in 1972 as “The Structuralist Activity.” Roland Barthes
described structuralism as “neither school nor movement,” rather “essentially an
activity, i.e., the controlled succession of a certain number of mental operations…”
42
By emphasizing its evolving and propagative nature, he questioned the enclosure Paradigmatic Structuralism

of traditional Modernist Structuralism. As Barthes explained,

The goal of all structuralist activity, whether reflexive or poetic, is to

reconstruct an “object” in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of
functioning (the “functions”) of this object. Structure is therefore actually a
simulacrum of the object, but a directed, interested simulacrum, since the
imitated object makes something appear which remained invisible, or if one
prefers, unintelligible in the natural object. (214)

This simulacrum is the intelligence added to the thing, a process of inventing the
world to make it understandable. This “activity” is a meditative imitation act.
The new category of object is functional, consisting of the construction of
meanings. According to him, fabrication, or the fabrication process within a
structure, takes precedence over the meanings themselves.Barthes was proposing
that writing is not about the writer; instead, it is located in the system of writing
within which the author is embedded. Barthes conducted close reading, which
meant he looked at the language system rather than the words themselves to see
what made meaning possible. According to him, privileging a unified structure
such as theme, narrative or closure circumscribed the meaning. Instead, he
emphasized the plural qualities of codes. Instead, he inquired as to how each
detail operates and what codes it was associated with to deduce its function.
Roland Barthes, therefore, switched the focus of the structuralist approach to
discourse: meaning as the source and consequence of codes and norms. Therefore,
according to Barthes, the “moral goal” of the reader is “not the decipherment of
a work’s meaning but the reconstruction of the rules and constraints of that
meaning’s elaboration.”

The traces of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas can be seen in Barthes’s notion of “activity.”

The structuralist activity involves two typical operations: dissection and
arrangement. To dissect the first object, the one which is given to the
simulacrum activity, is to find in it certain mobile fragments whose differential
situation engenders a certain meaning; the fragment has no meaning in itself,
but it is nonetheless such that the slightest variation wrought in its
configuration produces a change in the whole.

Both Lévi-Strauss and Barthes constructed charts and created clusters of terms
in the manner of Ferdinand de Saussure. However, the rigidity of the structure
employed by Lévi-Strauss becomes more flexible under Barthes. Barthes thus
belonged to the second stage of structuralism. He is situated somewhere between
Lévi-Strauss’approach of making careful structure or charts and Jacques Derrida’s
deconstruction of the text. The now-famous international symposium, titled “The
Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” at the Johns Hopkins Center,
in 1966 is a significant event. This symposium was in literary theory, ushering
out structuralism and introducing Derrida’s Deconstruction, as in this symposium
Jacques Derrida decimated the very idea of the structure in his paper “Structure,
Sign and Play.” At that time, Barthes was a visiting Professor at John Hopkins
University, Baltimore. During the event, he presented “To Write: An Intransitive
Verb?” where he articulates the notion of “readerly” and “writerly” texts, with
43
Structural & Post corresponding French terms: lisible (straightforward and demands no special
Structural Approaches
effort to understand) and scriptable (those whose meaning is not immediately
evident and demand some effort on the part of the reader), respectively. Here,
Barthes also proposed the idea of “semio-criticism” based on the fusion of
literature and linguistics. In the paper, he referred to Lévi-Strauss by explaining
his term “homology” or the structure of similarities, but indeed, this very paper,
given by Barthes, sought to place a middle term between reading and writing–
the reader as the writer. In retrospect, one can see that Barthes, by then without
realizing, had already been presaging deconstructive analysis. He had struggled
for years with his proclivity towards binaries, which he discovered always required
him to introduce a third term.
Derrida’s critique of structuralism influenced Barthes, as seen by his publications.
In his 1973 study of S/Z, he began by describing the contradiction between reading
and writing with the middle term. It is in this book, he enunciates the writerly
and the readerly texts. Roland Barthes’s neologisms, lisible and scriptable,
distinguish between traditional literary works such as the classical novel and
twentieth-century works such as the new novel, which defy realism’s conventions
and thus force the reader to produce a meaning or meanings that are inevitably
non-final or “authorized.”
Another significant text by Barthes specifically relevant to folklore, “Myth Today,”
evidently shows the influence of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). The essay contains
elements of Brechtian thinking. Brecht’s “Epic Theater,” which purported
Verfremdungseffekte, or the “alienation effect” or, as Brecht abbreviated it, V-
effekt, inspired Barthes to render accepted wisdom–social myths–”strange” once
again. Brecht employed formalism to examine Nazi literature, revealing their
heinous worldview through his careful reading. His main argument was that
language could never be neutral or innocent. Barthes converted a strict and non-
political style of Formalism to a more flexible and critical method of reading
texts via a Structuralist approach, opening it to social critique. Barthes and those
who followed him exposed the inherent contradictions within structuralism leading
the way for deconstruction. Structuralism had successfully destroyed the fiction
of the individual literary “creator” but had perpetuated logocentrism or the
metaphysics of presence. Barthes frequently purported the idea of multiple
meanings entrenched in a text. The plurality is a consequence of the presence of
connotations that lend themselves to the active reader. Because of the multiplicity
of meaning, a plural reading is always incomplete. Demonstrating the active and
productive reading, he identified the trope of castration as the fundamental motif
in the S/Z. Several “voices” at work in the codes that build the story actually
fragment the text. As a result, the meaning of Honoré Balzac’s short story gets
destabilized from the inside. The stable meaning was likewise reliant on ostensibly
deliberate and purposeful meaning sources. After establishing this, Roland Barthes
wrote The Death of the Author in 1968, which stopped the practice of authoritarian
readings reliant on meaning originating from a single source of interpretation (a
critic). The singularity was, in turn, reliant on the author’s life or apparent
“purpose,” that privileged one interpretation to the detriment of others. Barthes
asserted here was not so much the “death” of the author, rather the “birth” of the
reader. However, these “births” and “deaths” also call into question the work of
art itself; a task Barthes took up in 1971 in From Work to Text.
44
 Paradigmatic Structuralism
2.6 PARADIGMATIC STRUCTURALIST STUDY:
METHODOLOGY
The structural methodology includes the idea of transformation, what constitutes
a binary opposition, the idea of myths as sets and meta-sets, etc. The process of
actually interpreting the myths and breaking them down into digestible
components so that a structural approach can be applied is referred to as technique.
Step 1: Note Binary Oppositions
The first step is to make a list of all the binary oppositions in the tale. This
technique is based on structural theory’s assertion that the human mind works
with pairs of opposites. However, the precise concept of what defines a binary
opposition is vaguely articulated. The distinction between a binary opposition, a
simple opposition, a difference, and a qualitative distinction has not been
thoroughly explicated. It seems in certain situations that the two poles of the
opposition must be entirely opposed (night/day, dry/wet, up/down, etc.).In certain
situations, it appears that opposites may not need to be totally opposed in all
qualities, but just in one or two key ones. For no other reason, a turtle can be the
polar opposite of a monkey. One of these is a land inhabitant, while the other
lives in the water. Nevertheless, if in the narrative the turtle is on land at the base
of a tree and the monkey is in the tree withholding food from the turtle, the
relevant opposites may be: high/low, has food/has no food, benevolence/
greediness, etc. Usually, the analyst relies solely on what Lévi-Strauss refers to
as binary oppositions and what the reader believes qualifies as such. The ambiguity
is easy to override when working with a single element but poses complications
when dealing with more extensive sequences. For instance, there is a sequence
that occurs in Bisayan myth: Contained  Free = Life. This is to be read as a
motion from containment or restriction towards freedom results in life. Now, if
one tries to create a binary opposition of this sequence, which one of the following
equations (among a, b, and c) would it be? That is, while all of the following
reversals qualify as oppositions, which of them would be considered the accurate
binary? Will there be just one, or will all of them be considered true binaries?
a. Free  Contained = Death (reverses all the elements of the sequence but
agrees with the idea that confinement is unfavorable and freedom
favorable)
b. Contained  Free = Death (reverses the last term only, but the movement
results in the opposite result)
c. Free  Contained = life (reverses the first two elements, but as the
outcome is the same, it also qualifies as an opposition)
In most instances, the myth includes the polar aspects of the opposition, although
this is not always the case. One element is sometimes suggested but not explicitly
stated. In other instances, one of the pair’s elements is present, but the other is
not clearly specified. Therefore, it does not become apparent until we read another
myth. While reading myths, the analyst should always keep a few crucial binary
oppositions in mind. Nature/culture, raw/cooked, consanguineal kin/affinal kin,
life/death, earth/air/water (any two of them), hunting/agriculture, do something/
do not do something, high/low, and so on are examples of these concepts. The 45
Structural & Post analyst should always be on the lookout for Levi-Strauss’ sensory codes. These
Structural Approaches
are codes that are based on tangible properties that our sense organs detect. A
gustatory code (hot/cold food, raw/cooked, vegetables/meat, cannibalism/animal
flesh, carrion/fresh meat, rotten/fresh) exists, as does a tactile code (hard/soft), a
visual code (seeing/not seeing, whole/fragmented), and an auditory code (hearing/
not hearing).
The search for mediating words accompanies the search for binary oppositions.
In the work of Lévi-Strauss,we once again find some uncertainty in the notion of
mediation. An item or a person that brings two extremes together without taking
on the nature of either is one sort of mediating factor. The rainbow, which serves
as a bridge between many civilizations, is one such example.
The synthesis in the Hegelian thesis—antithesis—synthesis process resembles
the second kind of mediator. This sort of mediator combines the characteristics
of both opposing components. As a result, the contradiction is resolved. Two
instances will be given. Man is the polar opposite of the jaguar in certain South
American mythologies. Between the two, there is no reciprocity. The monkey is
the mediator between the two, even though he does not feature in any of the same
stories as the man or the jaguar. He is similar to a man because he was once
caught by a jaguar at the top of a tree. He is similar to a jaguar in that he is a fire
master. The second scenario demonstrates why a woman can act as a mediator
between a man and a jaguar. Women are seen as less cultured than males in the
folk taxonomy of the South American Indian (and many other cultures across the
world). To a great extent, she is still considered a natural entity, and its nature is
not harmed by limiting its manifestation to the context of marriage. At the same
time, she is more civilized than the jaguar since she is married and utilizes cultural
objects. As a result, we may see her as a component that unites two binary
opposites.
The myth’s binary oppositions and mediators should all be noted on the myth’s
comment sheet. Any binary opposition that appears in several myths should be
written at the top of an index card, followed by the names and numbers of all
myths that include that opposition. This card should be saved in its own folder. A
separate card should be created for any mediators that recur in other myths and
should be kept in a separate file. Every time a new myth is investigated, both of
these files should be consulted. This will lead to the opportunity to connect myths
that may appear to have nothing in common at first glance.
Step 2: Find Mythemes
Myths must be broken down into syntagmatic sequences, into “gross constituent
units,” or my themes. Although the precise definition of a mytheme is unknown,
Lévi-Strauss recommended the following as a general guide:
How shall we proceed in order to identify and isolate these. . .my themes?
We know that they cannot be found among phonemes, morphemes’or
sememesÿ but only on a higher level. Therefore, we should look for them on
the sentence level. The only method we can suggest at this stage is to proceed
tentatively, by trial and error, using as a check the principles which serve as
a basis any kind of structural analysis: economy of explanation; unity of
solution; and ability to reconstruct the whole from a fragment, as well as
46 later stages from previous ones. The technique which has been applied so far
 by this writer consists in analyzing each myth individually, breaking down Paradigmatic Structuralism
this story into the shortest possible sentences, and writing each sentence on an
index card bearing a number corresponding to the unfolding of the story.
Practically, each card will thus show that a certain function is, at a given
time, linked to a given subject. Or, to put it otherwise, each gross constituent
unit will consist of a relation. (Structural Anthropology, 207)
Each mytheme is not written on its own card; instead, we simply list them on the
remark sheet. The mythemes should be the simplest feasible version of the myth.
It is usually better to aim for mythemes with a subject, a verb, and a direct object.
When formulating a myth, an analyst should not be hesitant to leave out a
significant portion of the body of the myth.
Step 3: Find Individual Myth Message
When we consider how to explain a myth, two approaches are valid in structural
analysis. The first is to demonstrate that a single myth’s mythemes are variants
on the same theme:
The true constituent units of a myth are not the isolated relations but bundles
of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to
use and combined so as to produce a meaning. Relations pertaining to the
same bundle may appear diachronically at remote intervals, but when we
have succeeded in grouping them together we have organized our myth
according to a time referent of a new nature . . . namely, a two dimensional
time referent which is simultaneously diachronic and synchronic. (Structural
Anthropology, 207-208)
Here, scholars might take different approaches, which are equally effective. Some
students may create their own deck of mytheme cards and tinker with them until
they discover a pattern. Others might use their thoughts to manipulate them.
There appears to be no limit to the number of bundles in which the mythemes
can be placed. It appears that an even number is the only one that makes sense. In
the Oedipus myth, Lévi-Strauss discovered four bundles, which appears to be
the most prevalent number. There are, however, anecdotes of six bundles also.
Any figure more than six should be regarded cautiously; the analyst has most
likely not reached the fundamental concepts. Unfortunately, there are no rules
dictating how to determine which relations belong to which bundles or what
each bundle should be called. This is a trial-and-error process, and one gets better
at it with time.
At times there will be myths that appear to have no message or myths with such
few mythemes that attempting to convey a message would be a waste of effort.
While one should acknowledge the presence of such myths (which must be
explained by procedure two), one should not become accustomed to discarding
myths with unclear messages as myths with no internal messages. Messages that
are difficult to understand at first should be given much attention. It is sometimes
feasible to combine mythemes into more than one message. Each of these
messages should be taken into consideration. It is unclear where these alternative
messages stand. When Lévi-Strauss speaks of discovering the true meaning of a
tale, it appears that he is implying that there is just one message. At other times,
he appears to acknowledge that the myth may have many messages. 47
Structural & Post In finding the message, the student should number each of the mythemes he/she
Structural Approaches
wrote out in step 2 and arrange these numbers in columns. Underneath each
column should be a label.
An example:
1 2
3 4
5 6 7
8 9
Conjunction Disjunction Life Death
Step 4: List Links to Other Myths
This phase incorporates the above-mentioned second process. We attempt to
connect the different myths in this area of the comment sheet by breaking them
down into logical parts. To begin, we make a list of all binary oppositions and
mediators that the tale has with other myths. The names and numbers of these
myths are documented, and remarks are noted on how the oppositions or mediators
are utilized. Second, we look for syntagmatic sequences that appear in several
myths. These are either direct duplications of episodes or transformations. By
transformations, we imply instances in which two sequences have the same
relations and actions, but the actors or objects engaged in those relations are
different. Assume M1 has a sequence in which a monkey and a turtle participate,
and the monkey is penalized for eating the turtle’s food. Now, in M2, there may
be a scene with a lady and a dog in which the woman is punished for talking to
the dog and forcing it to respond to her. The following transformations connect
the two:
Ml M2
Monkey  Woman
Don’t eat  Don’t talk
Turtle  Dog
When we come across sequences like this, we can explain both myths regarding
their shared logic and relationship. While the two files on those things can help
us locate binary oppositions and mediators similar to many tales, finding common
syntagmatic sequences is slightly more challenging. It necessitates recalling the
sequences involved in many myths. This inquiry is aided by frequent re-reading
of myths. We do not have the means to get around this haphazard technique,
even if the sequences are not perfect. In this part, there is a little difficulty with
bookkeeping. Every time we see a link between the myth we are now studying
and a myth we have previously studied, we must note it on both myths’ comment
pages. We attach a separate page to each myth to avoid underestimating the amount
of space required to document these relationships.
Step 5: General Comments
This final part is for whatever the analyst thinks is noteworthy about the myth. In
48 practice, this part serves as a place to forecast future connections with myths that
have yet to be read, as well as a list of unique characteristics of the myth that the Paradigmatic Structuralism
analyst believes warrant additional investigation or explanation. Predicting the
sequences of unread myths is a valuable technique for narrowing down the search
for the final myth in a series that completes it.
We may send a worker through the corpus of myths at our disposal, seeking only
a few traits to understand the prospective framework of a future tale. We must
make no predictions regarding future sequences since the logical possibilities
are vast. Of course, finding out that we can forecast myth sequences and then
finding myths that match the prediction is a good sign that our research is on the
correct path. With each good prediction, the structural analysis of myths is also
given some support.
Some points to remember
All animal and plant elements that feature in myths should be stored in a separate
file. On the top of an index card, write the element’s name, and under it, write all
of the myths in which the item occurs. It should be stated on this card if the item
is antagonistic to another animal or plant—this file aids in determining the
semantic location of any particular animal or plant inside a specific context. Rather,
an animal’s or plant’s role may change from tale to myth, but a precise logic of
specific features will limit these variations. It also helps if all of the flora and
animals’ scientific names are listed on the card. This should be in addition to a
detailed description and, if feasible, a photograph of the item. Any ethnographic
information should be written on a separate card.

2.7 LET US SUM UP

In this Unit, we have provided a brief overview of the paradigmatic structural
approach to study myths. The key ideas to remember are:
 Roman Jakobson, a linguist by training, used his knowledge of phonetics,
folkloristics, poetics, and dialectology to develop semiotics and initiated the
paradigmatic structural study in folklore by contesting some of Ferdinand de
Saussure’s axioms.
 Lévi-Strauss is considered the main proponent of the paradigmatic structural
approach to study myths. In his structural study of myths, he broke the myths
into “mythemes.” In doing so, he borrowed Saussure’s linguistic ideas as
well as Durkheim and Mauss’ anthropological theories. He first used it to
study Oedipus’s Myth, then moved on to Brazilian and South American
mythology. The investigation was eventually expanded to include food,
clothing, and even the kinship structure.
 In the tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure, both Lévi-Strauss and Roland
Barthes developed charts and word clusters. However, under Barthes, the
rigidity of Lévi-Strauss’ structure becomes more flexible. Barthes belonged
to structuralism’s second stage. His work “Myth Today,” which clearly
demonstrates Bertolt Brecht’s impact, is especially pertinent to folklore.
Barthes and many who followed him uncovered structuralism’s intrinsic
inconsistencies, paving the way for deconstruction. Barthes was a frequent
proponent of the concept of plurality of meanings embedded in a text.
49
Structural & Post Before heading over to the next Unit, please ensure that you have completed the
Structural Approaches
Check Your Progress section. This will help you revise the ideas that we have
discussed and put you through some much-needed practice in expressing yourself
in your own words. We hope that you have enjoyed learning about the importance
of paradigmatic structuralism in the study of folklore.

2.8 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. 4th ed., Manchester University Press, 2017.
Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays. Northwestern University Press, 1972.
Bouissac, Paul. Encyclopedia of Semiotics. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Clarke, Simon. The Foundations of Structuralism: A Critique of Lévi-Strauss
and the Structuralist Movement. The Harvester Press, 1981.
Dundes, Alan. “Structuralism and Folklore.” Meaning of Folklore: The Analytical
Essays of Alan Dundes, edited and introduced by Simon J. Bronner, University
Press of Colorado, 2007, pp. 123-153.
Gray, J. Patrick. “Structural Analysis of Folktales: Techniques and Methodology.”
Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 1978, pp. 77-95. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/
stable/1177584.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology, vol. 1. Translated by C. Jacobson
and B. Schoepf, Basic Books, 1963.
—-. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated by J. Harle Bell and J. R.
von Sturmer, edited by R. Needham, Beacon Press, 1969.
—-. The Raw and the Cooked. Translated by J. Weightman and D. Weightman,
Octagon Books, 1970.
—-. The Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press, 1966.
—-. The Way of the Masks. Translated by S. Modelski, University of Washington
Press, 1982.
Willette, Jeanne. “Roland Barthes: Structuralism” Art History Unstuffed, 24 June
2021, https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/roland-barthes-structuralism/.

2.9 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

1) How do you interpret the idea of paradigmatic structuralism?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
2) What do you understand by Jakobson’s “permanently dynamic synchrony”?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
50 ........................................................................................................................
3) What does Jakobson mean by “shifters”? Identify “shifters” in your own Paradigmatic Structuralism
linguistic context.
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
4) What are mythemes?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
5) Briefly talk about Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation of the myth of Oedipus.
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........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
6) Why and how does Lévi-Strauss investigate the dichotomy of nature against
civilisation?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
7) How did Barthes question the enclosure of traditional Modernist
Structuralism?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
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8) Which of the following is not a text by Lévi-Strauss?
a) From Work to Text
b) The Savage Mind
c) The Elementary Structures of Kinship
d) Mythologiques
.................................................................................................................
.................................................................................................................
.................................................................................................................
9) Who defined structuralism as an activity?
a) Roman Jakobson
51
Structural & Post b) Lévi-Strauss
Structural Approaches
c) Roland Barthes
d) Jonathan Culler
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.................................................................................................................
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10) Briefly describe the steps of the structural study of myths.
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52
 Paradigmatic Structuralism
UNIT 3 VLADIMIR PROPP AND FOLKLORE
OF RUSSIA
Structure

3.0 Objectives
3.1 Introduction
3.1.1 What is folklore?
3.1.2 A few definitions
3.2 Vladimir Propp: Life and Works
3.3 Functions
3.4 Let us sum up
3.5 References and further readings
3.6 Check your progress

3.0 OBJECTIVES
The objectives of this unit are to introduce and make you understand some of the
definitions of folklore and life & work of Vladimir Propp
; 29 April, 1895 – 22 August 1970) who was a Soviet folklorist and scholar
who analyzed the basic structural elements of Russian folk tales to identify their
simplest irreducible structural units. You will be introduced to the theory/ basic
functions of a folktale proposed by Propp, which he applied on some of the
famous Russian folktales collected by Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev
(23 July, 1826 — 5 October, 1871) who
was a Russian Slavist and ethnographer. Further, you will also be learning about
the structure of some of the Russian folktales. While paying attention to the
structure of some of these folktales, we shall also discuss Propp’s work-
Morphology of the Folktale (31 basic functions of a folktale) which was originally
proposed by him in 1928. With the help of these theoretical aspects, you will be
able to analyze folktales from your native language and culture with better
understanding.

3.1 INTRODUCTION
3.1.1 What is folklore?
After knowing the Objectives of the present Unit, let us try to understand and see
how different scholars and folklorists have defined folklore in their words. By
understanding the definitions of folklore by various scholars, you will be able to
comprehend the wider meaning of folklore. Further, by doing this, you will be
able to express the meaning of folklore in your own words too.
Now, let us pay attention to some of the definitions of folklore by some of the
eminent folklorists:
Folklore is the traditional art, literature, knowledge, and practice that is
disseminated largely through oral communication and behavioral example. 53
Structural & Post Every group with a sense of its own identity shares, as a central part of that
Structural Approaches
identity, folk traditions–the things that people traditionally believe (planting
practices, family traditions, and other elements of worldview), do (dance,
make music, sew clothing), know (how to build an irrigation dam, how to
nurse an ailment, how to prepare barbecue), make (architecture, art, craft),
and say (personal experience stories, riddles, song lyrics). As these examples
indicate, in most instances there is no hard-and-fast separation of these
categories, whether in everyday life or in folklorists’ work.
The word “folklore” names an enormous and deeply significant dimension of
culture. Considering how large and complex this subject is, it is no wonder that
folklorists define and describe folklore in so many different ways. Try asking
dance historians for a definition of “dance,” for instance, or anthropologists for a
definition of “culture.” No one definition will suffice–nor should it.
In part, this is also because particular folklorists emphasize particular parts or
characteristics of the world of folklore as a result of their own work, their own
interests, or the particular audience they’re trying to reach. And for folklorists, as
for the members of any group who share a strong interest, disagreeing with one
another is part of the work–and the enjoyment–of the field, and is one of the best
ways to learn.
But to begin, below we have cited several folklorists’ definitions and descriptions
of folklore, given in the order in which they were written and published. (One of
them uses the word “folklife” instead, which American folklorists, following
their European colleagues, have used more frequently of late.) None of these
definitions answers every question by itself, and certainly none of them is the
American Folklore Society’s official definition (we don’t have one), but each
offers a good place to start. From time to time we’ll add the views of other
folklorists.

3.1.2 A few definitions

One thing you will note about these definitions and descriptions is that they
challenge the notion of folklore as something that is simply “old,” “old-fashioned,”
“exotic,” “rural,” “peasant,” “uneducated,” “untrue,” or “dying out.”
“Though folklore connects people to their past, it is a central part of life in the
present, and is at the heart of all cultures–including our own–throughout the world”
(Martha C. Sims and Martine Stephens. Living Folklore: An Introduction to
the Study of People and their Traditions, pp. 1-2. Utah State University Press,
2005).
“Folklore is many things, and it’s almost impossible to define succinctly. It’s
both what folklorists study and the name of the discipline they work within. Yes,
folklore is folk songs and legends. It’s also quilts, Boy Scout badges, high school
marching band initiations, jokes, online avatars, chain letters, nicknames, holiday
food, and many other things you might or might not expect. Folklore exists in
cities, suburbs, and rural villages; in families, work groups, and residents of college
dormitories. Folklore is present in many kinds of informal communication,
whether verbal (oral and written texts), customary (behaviors and rituals), or
material (physical objects). It involves values, traditions, and ways of thinking
and behaving. It’s about art. It’s about people and the way people learn. It helps
54
us learn who we are and how to derive meaning from the world around us.” Vladimir Propp and
Folklore of Russia
(Martha C. Sims and Martine Stephens. Living Folklore: An Introduction to
the Study of People and their Traditions. pp. 1-2. Utah State University Press,
2005)
“Folklore is a metacultural category used to mark certain genres and practices
within modern societies as being not modern. By extension, the word refers to
the study of such materials. More specific definitions place folklore on the far
side of the various epistemological, aesthetic and technological binary oppositions
that distinguish the modern from its presumptive contraries. Folklore therefore
typically evokes both repudiation and nostalgia.” (Dorothy Noyes. “Folklore.”
In The Social Science Encyclopedia. 3rd edition. Adam Kuper and Jessica
Kuper, editors. pp. 375-378. Routledge, 2004)
“‘Folklore’ has four basic meanings. First, it denotes oral narration, rituals, crafts,
and other forms of vernacular expressive culture. Second, folklore, or
‘folkloristics,’ names an academic discipline devoted to the study of such
phenomena. Third, in everyday usage, folklore sometimes describes colorful
‘folkloric’ phenomena linked to the music, tourist, and fashion industries. Fourth,
like myth, folklore can mean falsehood.” [P. 5711](Barbro Klein. Folklore.
In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Volume
8. pp. 5711-5715. Elsevier, 2001)
“What is folklife? Like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, folklife is often hidden
in full view, lodged in the various ways we have of discovering and expressing
who we are and how we fit into the world. Folklife is reflected in the names we
bear from birth, invoking affinities with saints, ancestors, or cultural heroes.
Folklife is the secret languages of children, the codenames of CB operators, and
the working slang of watermen and doctors. It is the shaping of everyday
experiences in stories swapped around kitchen tables or parables told from pulpits.
It is the African-American rhythms embedded in gospel hymns, bluegrass music,
and hip hop, and the Lakota flutist rendering anew his people’s ancient
courtship songs.
Folklife is the sung parodies of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the variety
of ways there are to skin a muskrat, preserve string beans, or join two pieces of
wood. Folklife is society welcoming new members at bris and christening, and
keeping the dead incorporated on All Saints Day. It is the marking of the Jewish
New Year at Rosh Hashanah and the Persian New Year at Noruz. It is the evolution
of vaqueros into buckaroos, and the riderless horse, its stirrups backward, in the
funeral processions of high military commanders.
Folklife is the thundering of foxhunters across the rolling Rappahannock
countryside and the listening of hilltoppers to hounds crying fox in the Tennessee
mountains. It is the twirling of lariats at western rodeos, and the spinning of
double-dutch jumpropes in West Philadelphia. It is scattered across the landscape
in Finnish saunas and Italian vineyards; engraved in the split-rail boundaries of
Appalachian “hollers” and the stone fences around Catskill “cloves”; scrawled
on urban streetscapes by graffiti artists; and projected onto skylines by the tapering
steeples of churches, mosques, and temples.
Folklife is community life and values, artfully expressed in myriad forms and
interactions. Universal, diverse, and enduring, it enriches the nation and makes 55
Structural & Post us a commonwealth of cultures.” (Mary Hufford. American Folklife: A
Structural Approaches
Commonwealth of Cultures. p. 1. American Folklife Center, Library of
Congress, 1991)
“Folklore,” though coined as recently as 1846, is the old word, the parental concept
to the adjective “folk.” Customarily folklorists refer to the host of published
definitions, add their own, and then get on with their work, leaving the impression
that definitions of folklore are as numberless as insects. But all the definitions
bring into dynamic association the ideas of individual creativity and
collective order.
Folklore is traditional. Its center holds. Changes are slow and steady. Folklore is
variable. The tradition remains wholly within the control of its practitioners. It is
theirs to remember, change, or forget. Answering the needs of the collective for
continuity and of the individual for active participation, folklore…is that which
is at once traditional and variable.” (Henry Glassie. The Spirit of Folk Art. pp.
24-31. Abrams, 1989)
“Surely no other discipline is more concerned with linking us to the cultural
heritage from the past than is folklore; no other discipline is more concerned
with revealing the interrelationships of different cultural expressions than is
folklore; and no other discipline is more concerned, or no other discipline should
be more concerned, with discovering what it means to be human. It is this attempt
to discover the basis of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human
existence, that puts folklore study at the very center of humanistic study.” (William
A. Wilson. “The Deeper Necessity: Folklore and the Humanities.”Journal
of American Folklore, vol. 101, no. 400, 1988, pp. 157-158.)
“Tradition is … understood to mean not some static immutable force from the
past, but those pre-existing culture-specific materials and options that bear upon
the performer more heavily than do his or her own personal tastes and talents.
We recognize in the use of tradition that such matters as content and style have
been for the most part passed on but not invented by the performer.
Dynamic recognizes, on the other hand, that in the processing of these contents
and styles in performance, the artist’s own unique talents of
inventiveness within the tradition are highly valued and are expected to operate
strongly. Time and space dimensions remind us that the resulting variations may
spread geographically with great rapidity (as jokes do) as well as down through
time (good luck beliefs). Folklore is made up of informal expressions passed
around long enough to have become recurrent in form and context, but changeable
in performance.” (Barre Toelken. The Dynamics of Folklore. p. 32.Houghton
Mifflin, 1979)
“…modern American folklorists do not limit their attention to the rural, quaint,
or “backward” elements of their culture. Rather, they will study and discuss any
expressive phenomena–urban or rural–that seem to act like other previously
recognized folk traditions. This has led to the development of a field of inquiry
with few formal boundaries, one with lots of feel but little definition, one both
engaging and frustrating.” (Barre Toelken. The Dynamics of Folklore. p. 2.
Houghton Mifflin, 1979)
“Folklore comprises the unrecorded traditions of a people; it includes both the
56 form and content of these traditions and their style or technique of communication
from person to person. The study of folklore (or “folkloristics”) attempts to analyze Vladimir Propp and
Folklore of Russia
these traditions (both content and process) so as to reveal the common life of the
human mind apart from what is contained in the formal records of culture that
compose the heritage of a people.” (Jan Brunvand. The Study of American
Folklore: An Introduction, 2nd edition. p. 1. W.W. Norton, 1978)
Folklore is the traditional, unofficial, non-institutional part of culture. It
encompasses all knowledge, understandings, values, attitudes, assumptions,
feelings, and beliefs transmitted in traditional forms by word of mouth or by
customary examples.” (Jan Brunvand. The Study of American Folklore: An
Introduction, 2nd edition. pp. 8-9. W.W. Norton, 1978)
“No song, no performance, no act of creation can be properly understood apart
from the culture or subculture in which it is found and of which it is a part; nor
should any “work of art” be looked on as a thing in itself apart from the continuum
of creation-consumption.”(Edward D. Ives. Joe Scott, the Woodsman-
Songmaker. University of Illinois Press, 1978)
”[Folklore study is] the study of communicative behavior with an esthetic,
expressive, or stylistic dimension.”(Dell Hymes. Foundations in
Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Perspective. p. 133. University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1974).
“…folklore is artistic communication in small groups.” (Dan Ben-Amos.
“Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context.” The Journal of American
Folklore, vol. 84, no. 331, 1972, p. 13.)

3.2 VLADIMIR PROPP: LIFE AND WORKS

Vladimir Propp (1895–1970) was a Russian folklorist who analyzed the basic
plot components of selected Russian fairy tales in order to identify their simplest
irreducible narrative elements. His Morphology of the Folktale was published in
Russian in 1928. It was only after thirty-years that most European and American
scholars read it in English translation in 1958. It not only represented a
breakthrough in both folkloristics and morphology by influencing folklorists,
linguists, anthropologists, and literary critics, but also his analysis was applied to
all types of narratives be it folklore, literature, film, television series, theatre,
games, mimes, cartoon strips, advertisements, dance forms, sports commentaries,
film theory, news reports, story generation and interactive drama systems etc.
Many attempts at structural analyses of various folklore genres have been made
throughout the world since its appearance in English translation. In this Unit we
look at Morphology of the Folktale, by outlining the thirty-one functions that he
proposed for the structural analysis of folktales and recent trends in the
applicability of Proppian taxonomic model. It is also emphasized that Propp’s
taxonomic model disregards and excludes the reader and is unable to look beyond
the surface structure thereby missing upon essential historical and contextual
features.
Vladimir Propp analyzed many of the Russian fairy tales in order to identify
common themes within them. He broke down the fairy tales into thirty-one
“functions” that comprised the structure of many of the fairy tales. His study was
published as Morphology of the Folktale in1928. First of all, the word “folktale” 57
Structural & Post in the title of text is misleading. He basically analyzed “fairytales” and since
Structural Approaches
fairy tales are considered to be a subcategory of folktales in general, the word
“folktales” stuck. Nonetheless, his work is applicable to not just folklore genres
but all types of narratives. After the publication of Morphology, folklorists around
the world realized that there is a unique element to all stories in the sense that
they can be replicated. Same or similar stories, with identifiable plots, characters
and situation can be found in many parts of the world. Propp’s Morphology is
therefore useful not only in understanding folktales but narratology in general.
Propp based his study on Alexander Afanasyev’s collection. Afanasyev collected
around 600 Russian Fairy and Folktales of which Propp used only 102 tales
(Number 50-Number 151). He also shed slight on the fact that most scholarly
literature on the study of folktales is of informational rather than of an investigatory
nature. He laments the lack of scientific research in this area where lots of folktales
are available for investigation, but most folklorists lack the scientific basis of
analysis.
He feels that the enigma of the similarity of tales throughout the world can be
resolved by “correct morphological study. . . If we are incapable of breaking the
tale into its components, we will not be able to make a correct comparison. And
if we do not know how to compare, then how can we throw light upon, for instance,
Indo-Egyptian relationships, or upon the relationships of the Greek fable to the
Indian, etc.?”
Propp states that for the sake of comparison the component parts of fairy tales
shall be separated by special methods; and then, the tales will be compared
according to their components. He says, “The result will be morphology (i.e., a
description of the tale according to its component parts and the relationship of
these components to each other and to the whole)”. Propp begins his
morphological method by comparing four events in folktales:
I. A tsar gives an eagle to a hero. The eagle carries the hero away to another
kingdom.
II. An old man gives a horse to Súcenko. The horse carries Súcenko away to
another Kingdom.
III. A Sorcerer gives a boat to Iván. The boat takes Iván away to another kingdom.
IV. A princess gives Iván a ring. The ring takes Iván away to another kingdom.
Thus, both constants and variables are present in the preceding instances. “The
names of the dramatis personae change (as well as the attributes of each), but
neither their actions nor functions change. From this we can draw the inference
that a tale often attributes identical actions to various personages. This makes
possible the study of the tale according to the functions of its dramatis personae”.
He defines functions as, “Function is understood as an act of a character, defined
from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action”. Propp’s
structural model is based on the following criteria:
I. Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale,
independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the
fundamental components of a tale.
58
II. The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited. Vladimir Propp and
Folklore of Russia
III. The sequence of functions is always identical.
IV. All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure.
He enumerates the functions of the dramatis personae in the order dictated by the
tale itself. Let us see how these 31 functions are valid in a particular folktale.

3.3 FUNCTIONS
After the initial situation is depicted, any folktale/ wonder tale will be composed
of a selection of the following 31 functions, in a fixed, consecutive order:
1. ABSENTATION: A member of the hero’s community or family leaves the
security of the home environment. This may be the hero himself, or some
other relation that the hero must later rescue. This division of the cohesive
family injects initial tension into the storyline. This may serve as the hero’s
introduction, typically portraying him as an ordinary person.
2. INTERDICTION: A forbidding edict or command is passed upon the hero
(‘don’t go there’, ‘don’t do this’). The hero is warned against some action.
3. VIOLATION of INTERDICTION. The prior rule is violated. Therefore,
the hero did not listen to the command or forbidding edict. Whether committed
by the Hero by accident or temper, a third party or a foe, this generally leads
to negative consequences. The villain enters the story via this event, although
not necessarily confronting the hero. They may be a lurking and manipulative
presence or might act against the hero’s family in his absence.
4. RECONNAISSANCE: The villain makes an effort to attain knowledge
needed to fulfill the plot. Disguises are often invoked as the villain actively
probes for information, perhaps for a valuable item or to abduct someone.
They may speak with a family member who innocently divulges a crucial
insight. The villain may also seek out the hero in their reconnaissance, perhaps
to gauge his strengths in response to learning of their special nature.
5. DELIVERY: The villain succeeds at recon and gains a lead on the intended
victim. A map is often involved in some level of the event.
6. TRICKERY: The villain attempts to deceive the victim to acquire something
valuable. They press further, aiming to con the protagonists and earn their
trust. Sometimes the villain makes little or no deception and instead ransoms
one valuable thing for another.
7. COMPLICITY: The victim is fooled or forced to concede and unwittingly
or unwillingly helps the villain, who is now free to access somewhere
previously off-limits, like the privacy of the hero’s home or a treasure vault,
acting without restraint in their ploy.
8. VILLAINY OR LACKING: The villain harms a family member, including
but not limited to abduction, theft, spoiling crops, plundering, banishment or
expulsion of one or more protagonists, murder, threatening a forced marriage,
inflicting nightly torments and so on. Simultaneously or alternatively, a
59
Structural & Post protagonist finds he or she desires or requires something lacking from the
Structural Approaches
home environment (potion, artifact, etc.). The villain may still be indirectly
involved, perhaps fooling the family members into believing they need such
an item.
9. MEDIATION: One or more of the negative factors covered above comes to
the attention of the Hero, who uncovers the deceit/perceives the lacking/
learns of the villainous acts that have transpired.
10. BEGINNING COUNTERACTION: The hero considers ways to resolve
the issues, by seeking a needed magical item, rescuing those who are captured
or otherwise thwarting the villain. This is a defining moment for the hero,
one that shapes his further actions and marks the point when he begins to fit
the noble mantle.
11. DEPARTURE: The hero leaves the home environment, this time with a
sense of purpose. Here begins his adventure.
12. FIRST FUNCTION OF THE DONOR: The hero encounters a magical
agent or helper (donor) on his path, and is tested in some manner through
interrogation, combat, puzzles or more.
13. HERO’S REACTION: The hero responds to the actions of his future donor;
perhaps withstanding the rigors of a test and/or failing in some manner, freeing
a captive, reconciles disputing parties or otherwise performing good services.
This may also be the first time the hero comes to understand the villain’s
skills and powers and uses them for good.
14. RECEIPT OF A MAGICAL AGENT: The hero acquires use of a magical
agent as a consequence of his good actions. This may be a directly acquired
item, something located after navigating a tough environment, a goods
purchased or bartered with a hard-earned resource or fashioned from parts
and ingredients prepared by the hero, spontaneously summoned from another
world, a magical food that is consumed, or even the earned loyalty and aid of
another.
15. GUIDANCE: The hero is transferred, delivered or somehow led to a vital
location, perhaps related to one of the above functions such as the home of
the donor or the location of the magical agent or its parts, or to the villain.
16. STRUGGLE: The hero and villain meet and engage in conflict directly,
either in battle or some nature of contest.
17. BRANDING: The hero is marked in some manner, perhaps receiving a
distinctive scar or granted a cosmetic item like a ring or scarf.
18. VICTORY: The villain is defeated by the hero – killed in combat,
outperformed in a contest, struck when vulnerable, banished, and so on.
19. LIQUIDATION: The earlier misfortunes or issues of the story are resolved;
objects of search are distributed, spells broken, captives freed.
20. RETURN: The hero travels back to his home.
21. PURSUIT: The hero is pursued by some threatening adversary, who perhaps
seeks to capture or eat him.
60
22. RESCUE: The hero is saved from a chase. Something may act as an obstacle Vladimir Propp and
Folklore of Russia
to delay the pursuer, or the hero may find or be shown a way to hide, up to
and including transformation unrecognisably. The hero’s life may be saved
by another.
23. UNRECOGNIZED ARRIVAL: The hero arrives, whether in a location
along his journey or in his destination and is unrecognised or unacknowledged.
24. UNFOUNDED CLAIMS: A false hero presents unfounded claims or
performs some other form of deceit. This may be the villain, one of the villain’s
underlings or an unrelated party. It may even be some form of future donor
for the hero, once he has faced his actions.
25. DIFFICULT TASK: A trial is proposed to the hero – riddles, test of strength
or endurance, acrobatics and other ordeals.
26. SOLUTION: The hero accomplishes a difficult task.
27. RECOGNITION: The hero is given due recognition – usually by means of
his prior branding.
28. EXPOSURE: The false hero and/or villain is exposed to all and sundry.
29. TRANSFIGURATION: The hero gains a new appearance. This may reflect
aging and/or the benefits of labour and health, or it may constitute a magical
remembering after a limb or digit was lost (as a part of the branding or from
failing a trial). Regardless, it serves to improve his looks.
30. PUNISHMENT: The villain suffers the consequences of his or her actions,
perhaps at the hands of the hero, the avenged victims, or as a direct result of
his or her own ploy.
31. WEDDING: The hero marries and is rewarded or promoted by the family or
community, typically ascending to a throne.
Propp also concluded that all the characters in tales could be resolved into 7
abstract character functions, such as:
i) The villain- an evil character that creates struggles for the hero.
ii) The dispatcher- any character who illustrates the need for the hero’s quest
and sends the hero off. This often overlaps with the princess’s father.
iii) The helper- a typically magical entity that comes to help the hero in his
quest.
iv) The princess or prize, and often her father- the hero deserves her throughout
the story but is unable to marry her as a consequence of some evil or injustice,
perhaps the work of the villain. The hero’s journey is often ended when he
marries the princess, which constitutes the villain’s defeat.
v) The donor- a character that prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical
object, sometimes after testing him.
vi) The hero- the character who reacts to the dispatcher and donor characters,
thwarts the villain, resolves any lacking or wrong hoods and weds the princess.
61
Structural & Post vii) The false hero- a figure who takes credit for the hero’s actions or tries to
Structural Approaches
marry the princess.
These roles could sometimes be distributed among various characters, as the
hero kills the villain dragon, and the dragon’s sisters take on the villainous role
of chasing him. Conversely, one character could engage in acts as more than one
role, as a father could send his son on the quest and give him a sword, acting as
both dispatcher and donor.

3.4 LET US SUM UP

Since the appearance of the English translation of Vladímir Propp’s Morphology
of the Folktale in 1958 (The Original Work was published in Russian
in 1928, there has been an ever-increasing interest in
attempting structural analyses of various folklore genres. In view of the enormous
impact Propp’s study has had on folklorists, linguists, anthropologists, and literary
critics, Propp’s Morphology has been revisited by academicians of all disciplines
as a storehouse of inspirations owing to its potential in being used in a wide
range of narratives. Even though Propp’s morphological framework has been
found to be limited owing to its focus on the fixities of structures, the significance
of his work extends far beyond the study of folktales and its power lies in its
potentiality in being applied to various narratives thereby making it an important
point of reference in the study of construction as well as interpretation of narratives.
His concepts of functions continue to stimulate theoretical interests in scholars
from a wide range of disciplines.
First of all, there seem to be at least two distinct types of structural analysis in
folklore. One is the type of which Propp’s Morphology is the exemplar par
excellence. In this type, the structure or formal organization of a folkloristic text
is described following the chronological order of the linear sequence of elements
in the text as reported from an informant.
The other type of structural analysis in folklore seeks to describe the pattern
(usually based upon an a priori binary principle of opposition) which allegedly
underlies the folkloristic text. This pattern is not the same as the sequential
structure at all. Rather the elements are taken out of the “given” order and are
regrouped in one or more analytic schema. Patterns or organization in this second
type of structural analysis might be termed “paradigmatic”. Generally speaking,
the syntagmatic approach tends to be both empirical and inductive, and its resultant
analyses can be replicated. In contrast, paradigmatic analyses are speculative
and deductive, and they are not as easily replicated.
The intellectual shift from “myth as charter” to “myth as model” is surely one
significant consequence of synchronic structural analysis.) However, the emphasis
upon context is rather one of application of the results of structural analysis than
one inherent in the paradigmatic approach. The problem is that Propp made no
attempt to relate his extraordinary morphology to Russian (or Indo-European)
culture as a whole.
Clearly, structural analysis is not an end in itself! Rather it is a beginning, not an
end. It is a powerful technique of descriptive ethnography in asmuch as it lays
62 bare the essential form of the folkloristic text. But the form must ultimately be
related to the culture or cultures in which it is found. In this sense, Propp’s study Vladimir Propp and
Folklore of Russia
is only a first step, albeit a giant one.
“The members of a family are enumerated” or Function l, “One of the members
of a family is absent from home”) and ends finally with the formation of a new
family (Function 31, “The hero is married and ascends the throne”)? Whether
this is so or not, there is certainly no reason in theory why the syntagmatic structure
of folktales cannot be meaningfully related to other aspects of a culture (such as
social structure).
Many other fruitful areas of investigation are opened up by Propp’s study. To
what extent is Propp’s Morphology an analysis of Russian fairy tales (as opposed
to the fairy tales of other cultures)? Many, if not all, of the tales are Aarne-
Thompson tale types and thus Propp’s analysis is clearly not limited to Russian
materials. On the other hand, Propp’s Morphology provides a useful point of
departure for studies attempting to identify oicotypes. Von Sydow’s notion of
oicotype (1948:243) meaning a recurrent, predictable cultural or local variant
must be amended in view of Propp’s work to include oicotypes of structure as
well as of content. Thus in addition to local penchants for specific content (motifs)
within stable cross-cultural frames (such as Aarne-Thompson tale types), there
may be culturally favored structural patterns (motifemic sequences) as well (cf.
Dundes 1962b, 1964b: 99-100).
Some of the other questions arising from Propp’s work include: to what extent is
Propp’s analysis applicable to forms of the folktale other than the fairytale? The
English title Morphology of the Folktale is misleading. Propp limits his analysis
to only one kind of folktale, that is, to fairy tales or Aarne-Thompson tale types
300-749. What about the other Aarne-Thompson folktale types? If, for example,
Von Sydow is correct in grouping Aarne-Thompson tale types 850-879 under
what he calls chimerateS (the major portion of which are Aarne-Thompson types
300-749), then presumably Propp’s analysis should also apply to this group of
tales (cf. Von Sydow 1948:70). There is also the question of whether Propp’s
analysis might be applicable to non-Indo-European folktales. Attempts to study
African tales (Paulme) and American Indian tales (Dundes 1964b) suggest that
parts of Propp’s Morphology may be cross-culturally valid.

3.5 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS

Andreev, A. and Tsygankov, D. Imperial Moscow University: 1755–1917:
encyclopedic dictionary. Russian Political Encyclopedia (ROSSPEN), 2010.
Dogra, Sapna. “The Thirty-One Functions in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of
the Folktale: An Outline and Recent Trends in the Applicability of the Proppian
Taxonomic Model.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities,
vol. IX, no. 2, Aug. 2017, pp. 410-419. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary
Studies in Humanities, www.rupkatha.com/V9/n2/v9n241.pdf.
Gruel-Apert, Lise andCévin, Evelyne. Du côté des frères Grimm et d’Alexandre
Afanassiev: Quelques collectes de contes europeìens. Bibliothèquenationale de
France, 2013.
Kyryliuk, Aleksandr Sergeevich. Anti-Propp: Criticism of Vladimir Propp’s
Theory on Genesis of Magic Fairy Tales’ Structure. Invaz-CheUnsa, 2009. 63
Structural & Post Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Structuralism.” Literary Theory and Criticism, 23 June
Structural Approaches
2021, https://literariness.org/2016/03/20/structuralism/
Nikolaevich, Aleksandr. Russian Folk-tales. Translated by Leonard A. Magnus,
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1915.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd ed. Translated by Laurence
Scott, edited by Louis A. Wagner, University of Texas Press, 1975.
Propp, Vladimir. Theory and History of Folklore. Translated by Ariadna Y. Martin
and Richard P. Martin, edited by Anatoly Liberman, University of Minnesota
Press, 1984.
Riordan, James. “Russian Fairy Tales and Their Collectors.” A Companion to
the Fairy Tale, edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri, D.S. Brewer,
2003, pp. 217-226.
Tatar, Maria. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. W. W. Norton & Co., 2002.
Zipes, Jack, editor. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Oxford University
Press, 2000.
“Alexander Afanasyev.” Wikipedia, 21 June 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Alexander_Afanasyev.
“Introduction to the Second Edition.” Excerpts from: Vladimir Propp Morphology
of the Folktale 1928. Translated by Laurence Scott, The American Folklore
Society, 1968. MIT, https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/propp.pdf.
“Propp, Vladimir Yakovlevich.” Celebrities, 21 June 2021, https://persona.rin.ru/
eng/view/f/0/36098/propp,-vladimir-yakovlevich.
“Propp, Vladimir Iakovlevich.” Encyclopedia.com, 21 June 2021, https://
www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/
propp-vladimir-iakovlevich.
“Propp Vladimir.” The Study of Religion in Russia in the 18th – first half of the
20th cent., 21 June 2021, https://relstud-hist.spbu.ru/en/articles/en-propp-vladimir-
german-voldemar-akovlevic.
“The Story behind Sita Haran.” ApniSanskriti, 23 June 2021, https://
www.apnisanskriti.com/story/the-story-behind-sita-haran-828.
“Vladimir Propp: from “Morphology” to “History” (in Honor of the 75th
Anniversary of the First Edition of the “Historical Roots of the Wondertale”).”
CyberLeninka, 23 June 2021,https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/vladimir-propp-ot-
morfologii-k-istorii-k-75-letiyu-opublikovaniya-istoricheskih-korney-
volshebnoy-skazki.
“Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale.” Miami University, 23 June 2021,
https://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/Propp.htm.
“Vladimir Propp.” Wikipedia, 21 June 2021,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Vladimir_Propp.
“What is Folklore?” American Folklore Society, 22 June 2021, https://
64 www.afsnet.org/page/WhatIsFolklore.
 Vladimir Propp and
Folklore of Russia
23 June 2021, http://
chitaem-vmeste.ru/zvyozdy/books-of-my-life/o-skazkah-serezno-klassifikatsiya-
skazochnyh-syuzhetov-vladimira-proppa.

3.6 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

Dear learners we hope that by understanding the above discussion on various
aspects of the work of Propp, as analysed by some of the western scholars, it will
help you in appreciating the overall significance of Propp’s work on structuralism
and his contribution to the field of folkloristics.
Based upon the functions proposed by Propp, you may also apply them in the
folktales of your region or language. This exercise will help you in understanding
the cross-cultural validity of Propp’s work.
Now, try to answer the following questions which are based on the unit:
1) What is folklore? How would you define it in your own understanding of
folkloristics?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
2) How did Propp define and shape the study of folkloristics in the world?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
3) How does Propp define functions?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
4) What are the criteria on which Propp’s structural model is based?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
5) What are the functions Propp discussed in his work Morphology of the
Folktale?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................ 65
Structural & Post 6) Briefly write about interdiction and violation of interdiction as Proppian
Structural Approaches
functions.
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
7) How do receipt of a magical agent and transfiguration as Proppian functions
introduce the supernatural?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
8) What, according to Propp, are the abstract character functions into which all
the characters in tales can be resolved?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
9) Do you think that the functions, Propp discussed in his work, Morphology of
the Folktale, are also present in the folktales from all over the world?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
10) Describe with any one example from the repertoire of your own region’s
famous folktales where all 31 or some of the functions of folktales as proposed
by Propp, are present.
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................

66
 Vladimir Propp and
UNIT 4 POST-STRUCTURALISM AND THE Folklore of Russia

NEW HERMENEUTIC
Structure

4.0 Objectives
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Post-structuralism (Differences from structuralism)
4.3 Tenets of Post-structuralism
4.3.1 Death of the Author & From Work to Text: Roland Barthes
4.3.2 Intertextuality: Julia Kristeva
4.3.2 Rhizome; A Thousand Plateaus: Deleuze and Guattari
4.4 The New Hermeneutic
4.4.1 Development of the New Hermeneutic in Hermeneutics
4.4.2 What does the New Hermeneutic do?
4.4.3 The function and process of the Hermeneutic Circle
4.4.4 How does the New Hermeneutic get applied to the Bible?
4.5 Reading Panchatantra through a poststructuralist lens
4.5.1 Death of the author / Absence of the author
4.5.2 Intertextuality in Panchatantra
4.5.3 Panchatantra as a rhizome
4.6 Reading an Indian parable through the New Hermeneutic
4.7 Let us sum up
4.8 References and further readings
4.9 Check your progress

4.0 OBJECTIVES
After Reading this unit, you will be able to
 Understand the move from structuralist to post-structuralist reading of
folklores
 Have an awareness of different developments in post-structural methods of
studying folklores
 Get insights into ways of reading a folktale from different post-structuralist
strategies.
 Have a working idea of development of the New Hermeneutic
 Apply the New Hermeneutic as an approach to read folktales/folklores.

4.1 INTRODUCTION
Now that we have learnt previously about the application of structuralist approach
in folkloristics in detail, it is very justifiable to shift beyond the structuralist 67
Structural & Post reading of folk and culture and thus. In the first section of this unit, we will learn
Structural Approaches
foremost about the differences between structuralism and post-structuralism and
enter into the application of post-structuralism in the study of culture and folklore.
In this unit, we will examine folklore and its various forms as a text in coherence
with the post-structuralist methods of reading. The post-structuralist manner
suggests a deconstruction of text and practices to its farthest extent and creates the
possibility of multiple interpretations fulfilling the quest of individual explorers.
While providing chances of multiplicities in the ambient of the text and its
surroundings, we will see how cultural studies also form the part of text and hence
its need to include the subjectivity into the objective realm of reading a text.
The second section of this unit, builds upon the discussion in the previous section,
moves towards the New Hermeneutic which has been defined as “a method for
theory of interpretation of the written texts, especially biblical interpretation”,
which moved beyond the arena of written text to the oral scriptures and narrations
as well. After having read post-structuralism, it will be naturally coherent to
understand the methodologies of the exponents of the New Hermeneutic. The
New Hermeneutic, though has been concerned with Biblical interpretation and
creating understanding by examining the pre-conditions of achieving the stage
where we can say that we have understood the text, can be further applied to
other scriptures and forms of oral dissemination such as parables of different
civilizations and beliefs.
After acquainting ourselves with the post-structural and the New Hermeneutic
theories and its stipulations, we will move towards applying these approaches
into reading a few forms of folklore. This will equip us to further enquire about
other forms of culture, texts and even folkloristic practices.

4.2 POST-STRUCTURALISM (DIFFERENCES

FROM STRUCTURALISM)
Post-structuralism, a literary criticism movement in late twentieth century, is
defined in oxford dictionary as “an extension and critique of structuralism,
especially used in critical textual analysis” which does not limit itself to the
corridors of literature but attempts to investigate the self-sufficiency of the
structures of the society, culture, media, art and political treaties. Though, post-
structuralism finds its roots in the brief structuralist movement, which posed
language as a self-sufficient entity revealing the meanings through its relational
distribution in the body of text. It challenges structuralism against its own claims
and postulations. To understand the difference between the two, we need to have
a prior knowledge of the basic enunciations of structuralism and then we will
move forward to discuss a few post-structuralist theorists who brought significant
shifts in the process of reading and understanding any written or oral text.
Ferdinand De Saussure, a Swiss linguist, defined the language as a system of
differences, “it is a set of relations of difference and similarity, rather than a set
of terms that are differentiated”. The four principal doctrines of Saussurean
Structuralism as summarized most coherently by Levi-Strauss are:
1. Structural linguistics does not treat terms as independent entities, instead
it takes relations between the terms as its basis of analysis.
68
 2. Its movement from the inquiry of conscious linguistic phenomena to Port-structuralism and
the New Hermeneutic
study of their unconscious infrastructure as suggested by Saussure that
“people use their language without conscious reflection, being largely
unaware of the laws which govern it”. And hence, structuralism delves
into the unconscious functioning of the laws and terms of language as
objective phenomena. (See langue and parole).
3. The third doctrine suggests language as a system wherein all the elements
fit together to reveal the meaning of any one element with reference to
simultaneous order of all the other elements.
4. The fourth and most controversial doctrine, and perhaps the heartland of
the rise of post-structuralism states that it aims at discovering general
laws, either by induction “or… by logical deduction, which would give
them an absolute character” (Harcourt 3-5).
The intent of discovering general laws and assigning absolute (universal) character
led Strauss to formulate his structuralist readings. His readings indicate the
elements of the particular system(s) in binaries which projects universalism and
gave -meta- character to the terms in the binary which possessed a hierarchical
influence for the second term. Structuralism considered language as a system of
signs which upon studying them with reference to other signs could reveal the
“truth” having universality. Whereas post-structuralism challenged this idea of
assigning single truth or meaning and suggested the possibility of multiple
meanings or truths. For a post-structuralist, the meaning does not lie stable into
the structure or system of language in the text, rather it depends on the interpreter’s
language of mind which draws its own signifiers from other determinants of her/
his existence. The unacceptability of the single meanings or truth revealed by
the language led post-structuralists to venture into the ambiguities, gaps and
fissures in the structures of meaning between signifiers and signified. It attempts
to not simply unearth the meanings but move further to dissect the “discovered
meaning” as how this meaning came to be defined and accepted in a given time
and historical moment.

4.3 TENETS OF POST-STRUCTURALISM

The endeavour of continuous interrogation of language system, texts, society
and culture brought various theoretical criticism tools such as decentring the
authority of author in a text and positioning the reader at the centre. It also
expanded the work’s scope (written or oral) to the arena of more objective
definition as a text. The search for meaning moved beyond the author’s reference
and towards the contemporaneous texts through the references in the text in order.
Locating the references in text also revealed the multiple meanings hidden in the
gaps and absences in the face of the present system of words in the text. To get an
insight into a few of the post-structuralist methods of reading, let us discuss
some major post-structural theoreticians such as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva
and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari with reference to their interventions.

4.3.1 Death of the Author & From Work to Text: Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes, a French theoretician and critic plays a pivotal role in the
development of post-structuralism in twentieth century and has brought seminal 69
Structural & Post shift in the philosophy and methods of dealing with text(s) through his enunciation
Structural Approaches
of Death of the Author (1967) and theory From Work to Text (1977).
Death of the Author challenged the classical reading of texts attributing the creative
genius of ‘auteur’ as the primary means of understanding the meanings in the
text. Through this bold proclamation he decentered the primacy of author in the
text as a voice of reason; instead, it brought the reader/interpreter in the center to
unveil the meanings of the ‘words’ and chose the signified as per her/his own
genius. He posited that the author does not create masterpieces consciously; rather
he replicates the emotional patterns through the elements of language (signifiers)
which itself undergoes a continuous revision once entering into the writing process.
Hence a writer is no more than a scripter, a craftsman just very well acquainted
with the craftsmanship of reproducing the words from a dictionary in a systematic
pattern producing a text. Thus, the meaning of the text can be located in multiple
dimensions as it calls off the hidden meaning and references, prone to limiting
itself as the final meaning or intended meaning by the creation of the writer.
Thus, Barthes opposes the omniscient god like author’s presence in the text and
meaning hence, it opposes the primacy of a single meaning. Opposition to the
status of singular meaning further refutes the singular methods of reading and
opens the text to multiple reading techniques by the reader who is absent from
the text. Reader acts [on] the text in a linguistic system of his own through decoding
the signs of texts and its meaning attributed in specific discourses. Moving beyond,
in folk and cultural studies the role of writer as a scripter or craftsman is taken
upon by the narrator, actor or the scribe who acts just as a messenger of the
words knitted in a specific manner, carrying its own meanings rooted in the
discourse of its travel but waiting to be received and decoded by the interpreter.
With challenging the auteur(s) from its primal position embedded in the reading
of their works, Barthes further argued a simultaneous shift in the relation between
writer, reader and observer (critic) as the work(s) also moved to be read through
the presence of multiple texts (within particular discourses and methods) into
one instead of reading work into its holistic structure referred to the author. He
has considered work in its traditional Newtonian fashion and has enlisted seven
differentiating factors, i.e., method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and
pleasure in favor of texts. These seven factors have been discussed as follows:
1. The primary assumption to be shed off was the text to be determinable
which cannot be materially separated from work. He posited text as “a
methodological field” instead of “a portion of the spaces of books” which
is work. Like Lacan’s distinction between “reality” and “real”, work can
be seen in physical forms while text is to be spoken, demonstrated as per
specific rules and held in language, caught in a discourse which gives it
a mobility to traverse across the work(s).
2. Text challenges the hierarchical divisions and classification of genres
through its subversive nature. The construction of text is always woven
at the limits of old classifications and challenges the limits of genres at
its very birth through intertextual and paradoxical constructs of ever
moving signifiers and signified.
3. The work is said to be the sign naturally representing an institutional
category of the civilization to which text can be seen as a reaction. The
70
 text always functions beyond the sign, in the space between signified Port-structuralism and
the New Hermeneutic
and signifier through multiple deferments at the end point of meaning
the ‘signified’. In other words, work is described as moderately symbolic
while text as radically symbolic like language due to its structured as
well as off-centered, but without closure, attribute.
4. Plurality of the text distinguishes itself from the work which is albeit
monistic in its formulation. Plurality of text does not aim at an
interpretation rather dissemination of multiple interpretations not driven
by the ambiguity of its contents but by its “stereographic” plurality of its
weave of signifiers revealing a complex network of signs.
5. Filiation is one of the several other drawbacks; at the behest Work acts
in favor of Text. Considering the literary science, Barthes says that it
teaches us to respect the Work and to respect the author’s intention in
the Work, but Text can be read without entertaining the looming figure
of the father of the work (author) and can see the author as only a textual
element if the author exists in the Work. Author functions merely as a
symbol if so in the language which is the primary conversationalist to
the reader, not the author himself.
6. For Barthes, to read a Work is simply a matter of consumption while, to
read a Text is a pleasure indicating that Text(s) can be created while
reading the Work. He believed that reading the Work brings consumptive
pleasure through extraction of meaning while reading a Text brings a
pleasure of participation with the weaving process of text and discovery.
Thus to read a Text becomes an act of play, activity, production and
practice, eliminating the distance between writing and reading leading
to a space transcending hierarchical social (Author, reader, observer/critic)
and language relations (Barthes, 57-63).
The text being the utopian sphere which unravels the signified meaning underlying
the system of signs and signifiers proposes a continuous search and references to
other texts. As Barthes suggests in both Death of the Author and From Work to
Text; in literature, cultures, media, folk and cultural studies all the texts are
intertextual in their structure. This attribution of intertextuality to the creative
and theoretical productions pushes us forward towards discussing Julia Kristeva
who formulated the theory of intertextuality as a subversive tool in an attempt to
harmonize Saussure’s study of signs with Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogism.

4.3.2 Intertextuality: Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality extending the Bakhtian dialogism
which assumed that meaning of a text is a process of interactions amongst the
author, text, reader/listener and the contexts. She suggests that texts are a matrix
of provisional and plural meanings in relation to other texts. In her formulation
any text is an ‘intertext’- junction of multiple texts and exists dynamically in
relation with those texts.
The concept of intertextuality refuted the structuralist and early post-structuralist
idiom that a text can be read and understood through the linguistic structure of
the text and nothing lies outside the text i.e. all the meanings of the text reside in
the interpretation and revisiting the interpretation of the text only and nothing 71
Structural & Post lies outside it. In Kristeva’s intertextuality the attention is also paid to the human
Structural Approaches
subject i.e., the agency of socio-cultural being making the utterance which has
been found rather absent in structuralist domain which argued in the favor of
objectivity of language that myths, oral, literary and cultural productions can be
analyzed scientifically and are self-sufficient to achieve the meaning and the
process of meaning production.
In Word, Dialogue and Novel (1980) she analyses the Bakhtian Carnivalesque
discourse and hypothesized that “any evolution of literary genres is an unconscious
exteriorization of linguistic structures at their different levels. The novel in
particular exteriorizes linguistic dialogue” (Kristeva).This linguistic
exteriorization of text further suggests that the novel is constructed of already
existing cultural, linguistic and discourses of meanings. Thus in Kristeva’s words
a text is a permutation of [other] texts, and intertextuality in the space of the
concerned text where “several utterance taken from other texts, intersects and
neutralizes one another” and hence is never the authentic creation of the authors
mind but a compilation of pre-existent texts and contextual performances and
socio-cultural interactions.
While charting the development of post-structuralist movement in literary and
cultural studies, it is very important to note the contribution of French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze’s and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari’s combined text Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, a two-volume work consisting of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A
Thousand Plateaus (1980). In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari
introduce a new concept of the Rhizomatic structure, a botanical term for literature
and culture describing the relations and connectivity of things.

4.3.2 Rhizome; A Thousand Plateaus: Deleuze and Guattari

Rhizome is a biological term used in philosophical and ontological fashion to
indicate ‘substantive multiplicities’ referring to a kind of “subterranean stem”
such as bulbs, tubers, couch grass. With multiple directions, it has no specific
beginning or end but there might be possible breaks which many a times reappear
and create new ramifications as opposed to the idea of tree which has been at the
centre of Western Ontology, showcasing one central tap-root giving rise to all the
structures in binary division. Rhizome forms an assemblage when understood in
the terms of relations between things and a vast plane of surroundings.
Deleuze and Guattari have contested the structuralist idea of hierarchical and
vertical mode of learning and have suggested existence of ideas, practices, cultures,
literary and oral productions on a horizontal plane. This horizontal plane has no
specific direction, while it grows, consistently in all the directions without any
hierarchy and takes into account all the multiplicities of possibilities and references
in interaction which participate in its system.
To illustrate a better picture of such rhizomatic assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari
come up with six principles:
 First two principles posit the principle of connectivity and Heterogeneity
which suggests that every part of a Rhizome is connected to every other
part in any possible manner. Here they oppose the idea of “Tree or root
which plots a point and fixes an order” and criticize Chomsky’s
72
 grammaticality which creates a dichotomy of grammatical correctness Port-structuralism and
the New Hermeneutic
and hence excludes the wider agency of “collective assemblage that
connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements,
to collective assemblage of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the
social field”. To explain heterogeneity, they refer to Weinreich, another
Polish-American linguist, that language is “an essentially heterogeneous
reality”. The idea of a mother tongue language has been refuted and
seen as “a power takeover by a dominant language within political
multiplicity”, which can also be situated as a point of interest and
interrogation in Indian linguistic history of various languages and
transformation of multiple dialects. “Language stabilizes around a parish,
a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean stems
and flows along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of
oil”.
 Principle of multiplicity states that by the reason of “substantive” in the
multiplicity of the relations between the things that the multiple “ceases
to have any relation to the One, a subject or object, natural or spiritual
reality, image and world”. In rhizome, multiplicity does not adhere to
any subject or object but showcases various dimensions, magnitudes
and determinations which are in connection to each other and follow the
mathematical expressions of permutation and combinations like of n3.
One is connected to three and those three are connected to the other
three in their respective modalities and so on. “Multiplicities are defined
by the outside: by the abstract lines, the lines of flight or
deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect
with other multiplicities resulting in re-territorialization and the process
keeps on”.
 The fourth principle is of asignifying rupture: It suggests that a rhizome
can be broken, shattered, faded and if it is interrupted, it will resurface
somewhere else in some other function but will never cease to be. This
has been explained through the relation between orchid and bees which
participate in reproductive system of each other while belonging to
entirely different nature and deterritorialize and re-territorialize in turns.
“The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp;
but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless
deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus.
But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and
orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome”.
 Fifth and sixth principles are cartography and decalcomania which
proposes rhizome as not acquiescent to any structural or generative model.
Here, these two principles challenge the idea of trace in favor of treating
rhizome as a map in which one can enter at any point and from any
direction or specific point but cannot trace the beginning or end because
it has no end (Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari 7-12).
Deleuze and Guattari have also challenged the conventional mode of looking at
books as an inherent instrument of secularism. It is an ambivalent, material reality
enlightenment by illustrating that book is a fraught and ambivalent material entity
which is extensively entwined with other books and refutes its limited association 73
Structural & Post with semiotic and subjective mode of reading. They have deconstructed books
Structural Approaches
into three types which are:
1. Root Book which is the classical form of book “imitating the world as
art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that reflects what nature
cannot or can no longer do.”
2. Fascicular root is the second type of book which goes hand in hand with
the map of modernity’s development and imitation wherein “natural
reality is what aborts the principal root, but the root’s unity subsists, as
past or yet to come as possible.”
3. Rhizomatic Book is the third type of book which suggests a book as
either a system or anti system. It is an assemblage along the horizontal
plane without centre or any central motif, it is in constant connection
and communication with heterogeneous spaces and events. “It [ Book]
forms a rhizome with the world, there is a parallel evolution of the book
and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but
the world affects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn
deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can)” (Ibid).
Concurrent to the developments in the post structuralist movement in literature,
critical and cultural studies, another theory concerned with the reading and
understanding of the text was in motion which is called the New Hermeneutic. In
the upcoming sections we are going to make an attempt to understand this new
application of critical observation and reading.

4.4 THE NEW HERMENEUTIC

New Hermeneutic is one of the many strands of Hermeneutics which extends its
usage in common language till the beginning of 17th century and defines itself as
the study, theory and practice of the art of interpretation which was initially applied
to the study of sacred texts i.e., Bible, Quran, Vedas etc. Hermeneutics has also
been referred to as the study of general principles of biblical interpretation as it is
rooted in the western epistemology. For both Christians and Jews through the
whole of their history, the foremost purpose of hermeneutics, and of exegetical
methods employed in interpretation, has been to discover the truths and values
expressed in the Bible.

4.4.1 Development of the New Hermeneutic in Hermeneutics

In Modern times, hermeneutics has moved beyond just being the art of
interpretation and has included the interrogation of the art of understanding and
communication as well. Friedrich Schleiermacher (Romantics Hermeneutics and
Methodological Hermeneutics) is the pioneer who brought Hermeneutics into
the art of understanding and interpretive process. He has been followed by
various hermeneutics scholars giving rise to newer fields of studies such as
Wilhelm Dilthey (Epistemological Hermeneutics), Martin Heidegger (Ontological
Hermeneutics, Hermeneutic Phenomenology and Transcendental Hermeneutic
phenomenology), Hans-Georg Gadamer (Ontological Hermeneutics), Paul
Ricouer (Hermeneutic Phenomenology), Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch
74 (Marxist Hermeneutics), Jacques Derrida (Radical Hermeneutics i.e.,
Deconstruction) etc. Conventional Hermeneutics limited itself to the process of Port-structuralism and
the New Hermeneutic
interpretation of the written texts especially in the area of religion (Christianity),
law and sacred literatures, primarily holding the sacred view of the divine
revelation as the word of God and hence it should be understood literally because
word of God is complete and explicit. However, the quests for deeper spiritual
meaning of the Biblical words were also prevalent. Thus, in the annals of biblical
interpretation there are four major hermeneutic methodologies that have been
recorded, i.e., literal, moral, allegorical, anagogical. Modern philosophical
exercises brought in all sorts of communications and issues related to verbal,
nonverbal texts, process of interpretation, position of human agency in context to
their past and present. Simultaneously, the prior factors surrounding communication
and meaning generation such as presupposition, pre-understandings, meaning and
philosophy of language and Semiotics were also being examined. This modern
philosophical intervention in the exegetical reading of sacred texts and bible has
come to be known as the New Hermeneutic. And few of the major exponents of
the New Hermeneutic are Rudolf Bultmann, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ernst Fuchs
and Gerhard Ebeling who have been translated and are available in public domain
to understand the biblical and religious texts in written or oral form.

4.4.2 What does the New Hermeneutic do?

The scholars of the New Hermeneutic elucidate that the primary juncture for
understanding any text is the acceptance of the common humanity and historicality
of the text’s author and the text’s interpreter. The sacred, divine nature of Biblical
words as the word of God has put the theological scholars in a position to express
the delusion of the presupposed preaching and consider atheists as the target
listener/reader of the Bible with whom the process of understanding and
communication can be examined.
Here the presupposed preaching has been exposed by Fuchs such as: “The
proclamation loses its character when it anticipates (i.e., Presupposes) confession”.
Concurrently, Ebeling asserts, “the criterion of the understandability of our
preaching is not the believer but the non-believer. For the proclaimed word seeks
to affect faith, but does not presuppose faith as a necessary preliminary” (Thiselton
308). The modern listener/reader of sacred/ religious texts is situated at the long
end of a humongous tradition of sacred interpretation propagated over a large
spatio-temporal region and history which has moulded his own attitude and
whatsoever possible, in the moment the present understanding towards Bible or
specifically concerned texts.
Thus, to preach the text in the actual language in which it has been narrated at the
first time may put the text in a radically different frame and hence it will not be
“nothing more than just a tradition, a mere form of speech, a dead relic of the
language of the past”. This problem of narration and deliverance of the appropriate
message of the divine word led Fuchs and Ebeling to move in favor of
Hermeneutical translation as well. While not refuting the importance of linguistic
translations, Ebeling asserts that hermeneutic translations “only consist in
removing hindrances in order to let the word perform its own hermeneutic
function”(315).
The New Hermeneutic is primarily concerned with the Bible and “how the new
testament may speak to us anew” as the words of Jesus “single out the individual 75
Structural & Post and grasps him deep down” (321). The modern listener inherently cannot
Structural Approaches
understand the new testament in its literal utterance as “the literal repetition of
the text cannot guarantee that it will “speak” to the listener”. And in the same
instance, text is itself meant to live as said in the Bible as well as postulated by
post-structuralists. To answer this Wilhelm Dilthey further explored and developed
Schleiermacher’s idea of “hermeneutic circle” suggesting the inherent paradox
in the process of understanding that a reader/ listener cannot understand any part
of the text if s/he does not have a prior sense of the total text (whole Text) in
discussion, while the whole of the text cannot be understood until the parts are
understood. Thus, a beforehand life-relation to the text or the subject matters in
the text is a preliminary condition as Bultmann correctly emphasises that “there
cannot be any such thing as presuppositionless exegesis… Historical
understanding always presupposes a relation of the interpreter to the subject-
matter that is… expressed in the texts.” And, this pre-understanding and presence
of presupposition does not imply a “prejudice, but a way of raising questions.” In
such a viewpoint of having a presuppositional understanding on the part of the
interpreter, it is right to adhere with Scheiermacher’s urging that the “modern
interpreter must make her/himself contemporary with the author of a text by
attempting imaginatively to re-live her/his experience.” This historicality between
the author and the interpreter dismissed the objective, scientific interpretive
approach towards theology. It brings forth the dialogue through the interpreter’s
questions from the text defined by her/his own linguistic, cultural, psychological
and historical limitations and experiences a shift in her/his linguistic, cultural,
psychological and historical condition. And, as the series of questions are
structured upon the new answers received by the interpreter, and hence the newer
answers emerge again, and the circle of reason and enquiry keeps continuing
infinitely which is termed as ‘hermeneutic circle’.

4.4.3 The function and process of the Hermeneutic Circle

In the ‘Hermeneutic circle’ the interpreter and the author of the text develop a
‘mutual understanding’ which as per Fuchs acts at a pre-conscious stage. This
‘mutual understanding’ between the text-author-interpreter brings in the existential
‘I’ at the centre for each individual interpreter, which is constituted of
psychological and linguistic juncture which is explained as “the new place at
which this text, without detriment to its historical individuality meets us” in our
present while restructuring it simultaneously. At this particular moment the
interpreter becomes the object for the text which propels us to gain insight into
our daily lives with reference to the Biblical/sacred text’s propositions. A.C
Thiselton quotes Ebeling’s insistence that “The Text… becomes a hermeneutic
aid in the understanding of the present experience and the basic phenomenon in
the realm of understanding is not the understanding of language, but understanding
through language” (315).
Following the above arguments of historicality between the author of the text
and the interpreter, mutual understanding, paradox of presupposed inkling of the
‘whole’ to reveal the ‘parts’, and understanding the ‘parts’ to reach the ‘whole’
and the position of the language as a medium in hermeneutics; we move further
to situate the new worlds in the language which brings us to Fuchs and Martin
Heidegger’s treatment towards parables.
As the writer of the text and the interpreter arrive in a shared space of altering
76 each other’s sensibilities, where the interpreter’s historical position in his world
of language gets challenged by the ‘new coming-to-speech’ which pushes and Port-structuralism and
the New Hermeneutic
breaks the conventions and limits of the old “everyday world”. This is the moment
of language event in the text and since the New Hermeneutic is inherently
concerned with examining the understandability for modern listeners, Fuchs and
Heidegger consider the “language-event of the parables of the Jesus corresponding
to the establishment of a new world through language.” Few of the major themes
of Heidegger’s views are somewhat like following expositions which will be
further discussed through the viewpoint of Fuchs, Gadamer and Ebeling:
1. Man’s historicality in his present time creates an egocentric functionalism
which suggests that he views the things of the world from his self-centered
perspective, relegating the world into purview of his own purposes and
relations to the objects. Thus, man’s language both reveals, creates and
sustains this perspective. For example, time is always referred to as being
in continuity; instantaneousness and the time as history have been long
gone for its explanation.
2. Heidegger refers to Plato’s dualism to explain the schism between the
being and appearing wherein appearance was disconnected from the
existential being and was just limited to the visual appearance hence
degraded. While ‘Being’has been pedestalized to a “suprasensory realm”,
man tends to look objectively at the outside world and looks at it as the
material reality of his own construction. Hence, man himself becomes
the measure of his knowledge by peering out from his own schismatic
perspective.
3. Under the collaborative impact of these two, man’s language and its
usage undergo a continuous fragmentation and circularity. The circularity
and continuous fragmentation of man’s language lead him to “an artificial
correspondence between man’s concepts and what he supposes to be
“reality”, but which is in fact another set of his own conceptions” (318-
32).
To these problems of man’s understanding and the lack in the linguistic and
hermeneutical understanding, Ebeling even goes to the extent saying that “With
the dawn of the modern age… the path was clear for an unrestricted development
of the mere sign-function of the language… Words are reduced to ciphers… and
syntax to a question of calculus.” For him Language has mistakenly become a
mere “technical instrument”. To which Fuchs illustrates the intermingled, closely
knitted relation between language and reality that there is no possibility of finding
the “reality” outside the language.
Heidegger and Fuchs both attempt to resolve this mesh of “reality” and language
by urging the language wherein it gives voice to the “undivided being” instead of
approaching the fragmented set of human concepts created by him and his
viewpoint to look into the world around him. Fuchs declares that “language
...makes being into an event” while echoing Heidegger that “the essence of
language is found in the act of gathering”. This act of gathering proposes the aim
of sharing and participating in a common world but, Heidegger and Fuchs insisted
that this “common world” gathering can only be achieved if the man accepts his
position of the ‘listener’, instead of an examiner scrutinizing the “object” (Bible,
and other sacred texts) which in Hermeneutics in turn adopts a role of subject
77
Structural & Post and the man becomes an object as discussed above. To achieve this position of a
Structural Approaches
listener whose job is to nurture an attentive and “receptive” openness to “being”
an incessant process and to which Heidegger insists that “we should do nothing
but rather wait”. Thus, in this manner, the New Hermeneutic calls for the listener/
interpreter to first strike the text dead in order to understand the language of the
text and then with an openness to listen the word of the God through the concerned
text, as the word of God in Biblical preachings and text relates to “the meaning
of being” (shared world and common understanding) through the “call of being.”

4.4.4 How does the New Hermeneutic get applied to the Bible?
Now, as we are at the end of our endeavour to understand the New Hermeneutic
as an application in Folkloristics we should come to think of the shared world
and how and what is the meaning of being, call of being and word of God with
particular reference to the Bible. The shared world suggests an idea that Jesus
has created the world and enters by means of image part or picture half in a world
(world discussed in the specific parables) which is in reality the domain of human
activity and wherein Jesus comes into man’s horizon and indulges in a dialogue.
But everyday routine assumptions and meanderings are disturbed and challenged
by God’s message which further challenges the listener to move towards God’s
side and learn to see everything with God’s eyes.” Thus the parable of Jesus or
any other divine being in various cultures becomes a creative work of art and the
divine being’s love and kindness in opposition to the “flat cognitive discourse.”
To understand the relation between above mentioned coordinates of the New
Hermeneutic, we should take a look at Fuchs’ engagement with the parables of
the Bible. Fuchs’ formulated following three principles to illustrate his approach
towards the parables as a justful means to understand the interpretative process
of Bible:
 The image half or picture half in the parable is not just a creative, didactic
instrument to make a lesson/message more vibrant. Rather it is a means
to create a similar/common world in which Listener and Jesus partake.
“We find identifiable aspects of the world wherever an understanding
between men is disclosed through their having a common world.”
 Challenge to everyday reality and presumptions through the parables as
something novel and creative must rescue man from the circularity and
fallenness of his language and world and in this context, bible is the text,
i.e., the word of God, the creative word and person of Jesus. “Thus in the
parable of the labourers in the vineyard (Matt. 20: 1-16) at first “we too
share the inevitable reaction of the first. The first see that the last receive
a whole day’s wage, and naturally they hope for a higher rate for
themselves.” But then comes the shock: “in fact they receive the same
... It seems to them that the lord’s action is unjust.” Finally comes the
verdicts on the assumption which has been brought to light: “Is your eye
evil because I am kind?” The word of Jesus thus “singles out the
individual and grasps him deep down.” For the hearer, by entering the
world of the parable, has been drawn into an engagement with the verdict
of Jesus. “The parable affects and demands our decision.” It is not simply
“the pallid requirement that sinful man should believe in God’s kindness.
Instead, it contains, in a concrete way ... Jesus’ pledge.” Jesus pledges
78
 himself to “those who, in face of a cry of ‘guilty’, nevertheless found Port-structuralism and
the New Hermeneutic
their hope in an act of God’s kindness.”
 Christology and the status of Jesus, God’s word is one of the other
important principles to understand the parables of the bible
hermeneutically. Thus, in the above discussed parable Jesus has acted as
God’s representative “especially in his conduct and proclamation”. Jesus
gives us “to understand his conduct as God’s conduct”. “Jesus’
proclamation ... went along with his conduct.” Finally, if I respond in
faith, “I am not only near to Jesus; in faith I await the occurrence of
God’s kindness together with Jesus” (321-23).

4.5 READING PANCHATANTRA THROUGH A

POSTSTRUCTURALIST LENS
Panchatantra, (Pañcatantra, Sanskrit) meaning five treaties, belongs to the oral
narrative tradition of India which has been circulated for the longest time without
referring to any authorial command. It dates back to 200 BCE-300 BCE, and is
one of the most translated works in the world. This text has five sections: Mitra
Bheda or the loss of friends (the lion and the Bull), Mitra-Labha or The winning
of friends (The Dove, Crow, Mouse, Tortoise, and Deer), Kakolukiyam or Of
Crows and Owls, Labdhprasham or Loss of Gains (The Monkey and The
Crocodile) and Apariksitakaraka or Ill-considered Action (The Brahmin and The
Mongoose). As name of the sections of this text suggest, it is a compilation of
interrelated fables of anthropomorphized animals and has mentioned an elderly
Brahman named Vishnu Sharma as the author of these tales but has been contended
by many scholars such as Patrick Olivelle, a professor of Sanskrit and Indian
religions, mentions that it is unclear if Vishnu Sharma was a living person or
himself a literary invention. Southeast Asian versions of these tales in Panchatantra
mention Vasubhaga as the writer and as the name and contents have been located
various times in other texts belonging to ancient and medieval era centuries,
makes it believable that most probably Vishnu Sharma himself is a fictitious
character.

4.5.1 Death of the author / Absence of the author

This absence of a single authorial voice itself is the rooting of the much-celebrated
post-structuralist death of the author in quite the literal sense. And, this is the
first cue of post-structuralist deliberation into the text in our exercise. In Indian
tales, positioning an individual as the creative authority of the text is not so oft
found characteristic, with an exception to Jataka Tales which have been attributed
with an ‘individuation’ referring to Buddha as the narrator. But, that cannot also
be strictly adhered to because fables in Jataka tales have also been narrated by
many of his followers calling upon— ‘Thus I have heard’ at the beginning of the
tales.
Thus, in Indian fables, another narrative technique has been opted for, which
introduces any character as the author of the initial fable in the text. This is a
functional device to use the author’s fictional presence as one of the other signifiers
in such tales. This leads to Barthes’ prominent essay ‘Death of the Author’ which
questions the authorial intent and the position of the author over the text in an
attempt to rescue the text and reading from the author’s control and move beyond 79
Structural & Post the dichotomised reading (i.e., self and other). According to Barthes’ contentions
Structural Approaches
in literary and cultural theories, assigning and accepting the authorial command
of the author over a text, limits the possibility of its various readings by the
reader by assigning it with single and fixed meanings. Barthes’ also suggests the
inclusion of the author as a “guest” who has a role to play in the happenings of
the text instead of defining the borders and meanings (Manna, Nirban & Ishita
Verma 18).
. . . it can be broken (this is exactly what the Middle Ages did with the two
authoritative texts, the Scriptures, and Aristotle). The text can be read without its
father’s guarantee: the restitution of the intertext paradoxically abolishes the
concept of filiation. It is not that the author cannot come back into the Text, into his
text; however, he can do so only as a guest, so to speak (From Work to Text 418).
In Panchatantra also an anonymous character introduces Vishnu Sharma to the
readers; one of the counselors of king recommends his name to tell him that he is
the only worthy scholar who could be assigned with the task of educating the
three princes, “Now there is a Brahman here named Vishnu Sharma, with a
reputation for competence in numerous sciences. Entrust the princes to him. He
will certainly make them intelligent in a twinkling.” Thus, Vishnu Sharma becomes
the in-charge of and functions as the “scripter” of the text, one describing the
knowledge of various subjects through narratives of animal characters in fable
forms. “He is the learned master who has studied the cream of all the Arthasastras
in the world” (Manna, Nirban & Ishita Verma 18).
Moving beyond the authenticity/lack of authenticity of Vishnu Sharma as the
author of this text, it has also been witnessed that it unravels several levels of
authorial presence, both real and fictional. On the one hand the real author narrates
the universe of animals and birds who can communicate in human language and
manner and on the other, fictionally there are webs of intertexts narrated by these
speaking animals and birds to convey the hidden lessons for the princes.
In the historical and exhaustive reading of references of Panchatantra, several
levels of authorial interventions have been recorded such as the narrative units
and thousand odd verses, many of which are real have been found in Jatakas,
Dharmashastras and the vast pool of Indian oral traditions out of which
Panchatantra may have been drawn. Thus, due to multiplicity of such creative
interventions it is very tedious and difficult to locate one single composer of the
text. In the second stage, several scholars have compiled the text from its pre-
existing forms i.e Pahlavi and Tantrakhyayika etc. By the endeavour of these
unidentifiable authors a simpler version of these fables came to its physical form.
The third version of these fables takes us to the version compiled by Purnabhadra,
a Jain monk who “compared, corrected and added his own creations and materials
borrowed from other sources like Tantrakhyaika and Brihathtkathamanjari. And,
at last, the fourth form of text, which we read today shows the authorship of
Vishnu Sharma himself. However, he has been termed different from other authors
of text as he has been credited with the creation of five subdivisions of
Panchatantra and brought it to its current form. “The Panchatantra, is like a
number of texts from Sanskrit literature like the Mahabharata or the
Brihathkathamanjari is impersonal and indifferent to the author.”
Readers of Panchatantra hold the reign of the meanings and lessons to be drawn
from it, as absence of the omniscient narrator frees the text from the opinions
80
and intentions of an individual voice. Rather, it passes on the text and its contents Port-structuralism and
the New Hermeneutic
with the references and reflections of “truths” experienced and realised in our
own spatio-temporal and historical reality “which transcends the individual and
reflects upon some deeper communal verities” and substantiates the position of
readers’ meaning.

4.5.2 Intertextuality in Panchatantra

As we have examined the position of author in Panchatantra, the next post-
structuralist sign in this text is the presence of intertextuality in the narrative and
tales and its study. As we have already discussed the various stage construction
of the tales found in the current version of Panchatantra, we are aware that it is an
amalgamation of numerous tales and references have been taken from other fables
such as Jataka Fables. Along with that, there are innumerable references present
in this text relating it to different Shastras, the Vedas and the Upanishads.All the
discourses pertaining polity, art of war, statutes of living a justful, and satisfying
life propagated in this text are borrowed from various Vedas, Upanishads, epics
like the Mahabharata, and Arthashastra by Chanakya also. For instance, in the
third section of the book “Of Crows and Owls”, several tales are drawn from
Chanakya’s Arthashastra (how to deal with the powerful enemy and the need of
a king to have a well-organised army). In Arthashastra, Chanakya writes about
the ways of dealing with a powerful enemy in somewhat following fashion:
...whoever goes with his small army to fight perishes like a man attempting to
cross the sea without a boat. Hence a weak king should either seek the protection
of a powerful king or maintain himself in an impregnable fort.
And a similar idea has been proposed by the Crow-king’s minister Live-again
when he says
Never struggle with the strong
(If you wish to know my mind)
Who has ever seen a cloud
Baffle the opposite wind? (21).
With this brief example of intertextuality in Panchatantra, we can assume the
further possibility of the intertextual study of this text by the scholars to gain
deeper insights and learn about various crossovers between different texts.
Third and last post-structuralist method studied in this unit is the rhizomatic
structure of a text, suggesting the decentering of the narratives in Indian fables
by situating the lens of locating the root book, fascicular book and rhizomatic
text. Thus, let us move towards an endeavour to check the efficacy of reading
Panchatantra as a rhizomatic book.

4.5.3 Panchatantra as a rhizome

In the narrative of Panchatantra, the structure of the tales brings it closer to the
prost-structuralist aspect of the tale. Panchatantra resembles the structure of a
rhizome, as similar to rhizome, it has no definitive beginning or any end; this
text appears to be an assemblage as described by Deleuze and Guattari in Thousand
Plateaus. It has a main frame tale followed by the other five frame tales and 81
Structural & Post several embedded tales without any uncompromising rules about reading it, these
Structural Approaches
tales can be entered into from any end and any juncture, in the middle. The
arrangement of the tales are in such a manner that their position in the text is not
fixed and this supplements the reader to choose his reading strategy individually
to each fable. “A reader can start reading the tales from Book II or Book III as
easily as he can start reading it from Book I.” And this possibility in a text is what
rhizome seeks in its undefinable structure. The rhizome spreads by multiplying
its root in adventitious roots and creates “detachable, connectable, reversible,
modifiable and has multiple entry ways and exits and its own lines of light.” The
adventitious roots of this text can be located in multiple texts as discussed above
(27-29).
One of the other aspects of rhizome is the non-hierarchical, centre-less flat system
in which the individual nodal points can, and are, connected to one another over
a vast plane of heterogeneous locations and events. And this characteristic of
rhizome as a reading lens can also be found in Panchatantra. As this text constitutes
numerous tales from all over the genres of texts over a vast geography, and the
multiple layers of woven tales within each one, erases the possibility of a singular
motif around which the text might be located.

4.6 READING AN INDIAN PARABLE THROUGH

THE NEW HERMENEUTIC
India is a land of various religious beliefs, spiritual sects which alludes it with a
mystical aura in the west and at home with pride, incessant trust into the spiritual
philosophies emerging here. And historically, to promulgate the various spiritual
and philosophical teachings and sects numerous spiritual gurus, philosophers
and practitioners have also appeared time and again in this mecca of spiritual
awakening. Interestingly, as opposed to the western epistemology of dichotomy
between the ‘reality’ and ‘beingness’ as separate realms; Indian philosophies, as
witnessed in myriad of philosophical and spiritual movements functioned as an
unified practice and preaching of everyday reality and beingness (Spiritual). To
examine the formulations of the applicability of the New Hermeneutic in the
Indian context, we are going to discuss two brief parables from (1) A Poet’s
Parables by Kailash Vajpeyi, and (2) “The Parable of the Mustard Seed” from
Buddhist Preachings. Buddhist philosophy is something which is more or less
part of our subconscious upbringing and literate circle while it is important to
know about Kailash Vajpeyi whose compilation of parables is under the scope of
discussion.
Kailash Vajpeyi (1936-2015) was a poet, thinker and distinguished person in the
Hindi literary circle. He has been described as a seeker who could converse as
easily with Jaina Muni, Naga Sadhus as with Buddhist Monks, Krishna Devotees
and Sufi Pirs while creating poems and texts amalgamating histories, philosophies
and societies. He was also a performer at All India Radio (AIR) and BBC Hindi
and had participated in various poetry sessions in all corners of the world. He has
also been awarded the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 2008 for his poetry
collection ‘Hawa mein Hastakshar’.
A Poet’s Parables is a compilation of his various expressions at home and on the
stage called world, collected by his wife Rupa Vajpeyi after his demise. This
82
eclectic collection ranges from Sufi stories to Zen-Koas, tales from many different Port-structuralism and
the New Hermeneutic
parts of India combining Qissa-Katha-Kathanak, a mélange of narrative forms.
Thus, this text is inherently deconstructive in its construction, as the poet who
narrated these did not script them and even he has collected them from various
beliefs and philosophical systems which is further mediation of thousands of
years and is transforming each day and finally written and translated by a third
person transcriptor who is not the narrator and again supplements these parables
with Sanskrit and other language verses which further have incessant history of
intertextuality and centuries of modifications.
The Parable in consideration is Who Owns Whom? And the story goes something
like this:
Sheikh Farid was sitting with his friends and followers when a man passed
by, trying to drag a cow by a rope tied around its neck. But the reluctant cow
refused to budge.
Farid asked his followers. “Who is tied to whom?”
His followers replied, “Evidently, the cow. There is a rope round its neck.”
“Between the two, who is the owner?” Farid asked.
His followers said, “You ask strange questions. Obviously, this man is the
cow’s owner.”
“What happens if the rope is untied?” Farid asked.
“The cow will run away,” the followers said.
“And the man?” Farid asked again.
“He will run after the cow.” And as they answered, the followers understood
who was bound to whom and who the real master was.
Following the New Hermeneutic methodology as propounded by Fuchs, Ebeling,
Gadamer and Heideggerian concepts of text, author and interpreter we are going
to first seek the historicality of the text and narrative persona in this text. Sheikh
Farid was one of the founding fathers of Sufism in the twelfth century, and given
the times of agrarian as well as somewhere nomadic life, the imagery of man
pulling the cow befits the philosophical allusion of material in modern linguistics
and reality. While in the narrative, presence of followers surrounding Farid also
posits the “gathering’’ as precondition of substantiating the beingness of the
characters in the story. And, as readers, who are reading it in a literary circle also
enjoy the feeling of their “beingness” through their common association with
their own community of literature (language, literature, culture, folkloristics, etc.).
Coming back to the story, once the reader has identified the Voice of reason from
the character of Sheikh Farid, his historicality and beingness in the follower’s
character; s/he has to identify his/her own historicality, material reality and spiritual
location in this universe. This identification takes place while s/he is reading it at
a pre-conscious stage which is later realized if meditated upon enough. And thus,
in the parable, the cow alludes to the material reality of this mortal world while
the rope signifies the connection between the matter (existence) and his own
‘being’, the struggle to fetch the cow signifies the Heideggerian “waiting” while
realizing the temporality of cow’s existence and its function in his life. 83
Structural & Post The followers are the representation of the interpreters, who are already aware of
Structural Approaches
Farid’s sufi inclination and have accepted Farid as the voice of mystic reason
(medium), and are waiting upon to seek the answers through the process of
dialogue and altercations in between. And similarly, the present interpreter/s
accept(s) their position of being the recipient and has/have the openness to
understand the text linguistically and philosophically is in continuous waiting
(process) of entering into Farid’s world of thought and finding the correlation
with her/his world and to hear the meanings further alluded through the text.
In the later section of this parable, the following verse has been included:
lalkjrkinX/kkuka=;ksfoJkfUrgsro%A
viR;apdy=aplrkalx a frjsopA
& pk.kD;fufr
lalkj ds nq%[k ls nqf[kr iq#"kksa ds rhu gh foJke ds
dkj.k gS]a larku] L=h vkSj lk/kw laxfrA
For Men tired of the world, there are only three
havens of rest— wife, children and the company
Of holy men.
Here, the absence of a narrative voice (character) is one of the oft found
characteristic of fables, stories and knowledge structure found in Indian
subcontinent, which pushes us to seek the importance and situatedness of this
verse in the poet Kailash Vajpeyi’s historical condition and being. After doing
that, we have to read the lines again to see it in relation to our times and with that
of individual ‘I’ and beyond the self in the macrocosm of the “beingness” of the
human race. The literal inference of these lines is contradictory in nature as it
suggests the possibility of respite for a tired, troubled man lying in his wife and
children which are philosophically another form of maya, which ties ourselves
to the material reality while the company of holy men suggests moving away
from the material relations of the world and enter into a world of spiritual
philosophy. Simultaneously, the company of wife and children also suggests the
truthfulness towards those dependent on you and your human karma and holy
men might allude to just, rightful, wise fellow beings who are co-existing with
us in the world. Thus, a text’s understanding can be many, given the conscious,
subconscious or preconscious presuppositions of the interpreter and it need not
be ‘the understanding of the text.’

4.7 LET US SUM UP

In this Unit we have learnt about the various tools of post-structural reading and
the methodology of the New Hermeneutic examination of text while situating
the reader/interpreter as the central figure instead of the author, and reader as the
one who can decide her/his end of meanings while reading a text.
In post-structuralist application, we have attempted to create an understanding
of intertextuality and moved beyond the hierarchical reading of texts towards a
horizontal reading eliminating the primacy of central motive and have accepted
84
the break and re-emergence of practices and textual signs in diverse spatio- Port-structuralism and
the New Hermeneutic
temporal map of interpretations.
Later, we have moved towards the study of a more philosophical terrain of the
construction of the interpretative process and its pre-requisite elements through
the New-Hermeneutic. We have also come across the need of realizing the
importance, intent and world of the authors’ meaning and historicality while
accepting the leap and distance between our existential “I” and “reality” and its
relative world of meanings.
Through the New Hermeneutic we have come to the unbiased reading of text not
limiting it to a certain, specific idea either posed by the writer or pre-decided by
our presupposed notions and a more neutral attitude of interpreting the text and
cultures. While reading this, one can see how folkloristics has incorporated
structuralist reading of folklores and cultures but do not have a folkloristic
scholarship within the ambit of post-structural or New Hermeneutic methods
and references, rather these theories belong to the discipline of cultural and
philosophical study of society in an intertextual manner. There is an inherent
paradox in applying post-structural reading to the structure of the discipline of
folkloristics which challenges the unifying and universalizing practice of scientific,
objective methods of reading and refutes any kind of definitive model.

4.8 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS

Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard,
University of California Press, 1986.
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Fontana, 1977.
Bronner, Simone J. Folklore: The Basics. Routledge, 2017.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix, Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press,
1987.
Dharwadker, Vinay, editor. The Collected Essays of A.K Ramanujan. Oxford
University Press, 2006.
Friedman, Jeff. “Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment.” The Oral History
Review, vol. 41, no. 2, 2014, pp. 290–300. Taylor & Francis Online,
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1093/ohr/ohu034.
Harcourt, Bernard E. “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Poststructuralism?’”
Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series, working paper no. 156,
2007. Chicago Unbound The University of Chicago The Law School, https://
chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=
public_law_and_legal_theory
Hogan, Homer. “Hermeneutics and Folk Songs.” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, vol. 28, no. 2, Winter 1969, pp. 223-229. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/
stable/428571.
Hoffman, Katherine E. “Culture as text: hazards and possibilities of Geertz’s
literary/literacy metaphor.” The Journal of North African Studies, vol. 14, no. 3- 85
Structural & Post 4, Sep.-Dec. 2009, pp. 417-430. Taylor & Francis Online, www.tandfonline.com/
Structural Approaches
doi/abs/10.1080/13629380902924075.
Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue and Novel”. The Kristeva Reader, edited by
Toril Moi, Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 34-61.
Verma, Ishita, and Manna, Nirban. “De-Limiting Storytelling: A Post-structural
Approach to the Medieval Narrative of the Panchatantra.” International Journal
of English: Literature, Language & Skills, vol. 7, no. 2, July 2018, pp. 16-31.
IJELLS, www.ijells.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/July-2018.pdf#page=16.
Prasad, Anshuman. “The Contest over Meaning: Hermeneutics as an Interpretative
Methodology for Understanding Texts.” Organizational Research Methods, vol.
5, no. 1, Jan. 2002, pp. 12-33. SAGE journals, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/
1094428102051003.
Ramanujan, Attipate Krishnaswami. “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five examples
and three thoughts on Translation”. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a
Narrative Tradition in South Asia, edited by Paula Richman, University of
California Press, 1991, pp. 22-48.
Thiselton, Anthony C. “The New Hermeneutic.” New Testament: Essays on
Principles and Methods, edited by I. Howard Marshall, Paternoster Press, 1979,
pp. 308-333.
Tremlett, Paul-Francois. “(Post)structuralism.” The Oxford Handbook of the Study
of Religion, edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, Oxford University
Press, 2016, pp. 220-234.

4.9 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

1) Briefly explain the six principles given by Deleuze and Guattari to better
illustrate the picture of the rhizomatic assemblage of ideas, practices, cultures,
literary and oral productions.
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
2) What does the death of the author or the absence of the author signify?
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................
3) Why and how does the New Hermeneutic call for the interpreter to first
strike the text dead?
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........................................................................................................................
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86
4) What do you understand by the term Hermeneutic circle? How can it be used Port-structuralism and
the New Hermeneutic
in parables of your cultural belonging?
........................................................................................................................
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........................................................................................................................
5) Write a brief note on intertextuality in the Panchatantra.
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6) Explicate the statement: Panchatantra resembles the structure of a rhizome.
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7) Apply the New Hermeneutic and post-structuralism in the folklores around
the character of Alha Udal.
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8) Describe how the New Hermeneutic is applied to the Bible.
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9) How have Deleuze and Guattari challenged the conventional mode of looking
at books?
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10) Try collecting multiple narrations of one story in your family which has
undergone historical shifts and check how you relate to them.
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87
Structural & Post
Structural Approaches UNIT 5 DECONSTRUCTION AND
POSTCOLONIALISM
Structure

5.0 Objectives
5.1 Introduction
5.1.1 What is Deconstruction?
5.1.2 What is post-colonialism?
5.2 Deconstruction and post-colonialism as approaches to Indian folklore
5.2.1 Deconstruction and Indian folklore
5.2.2 Post-colonialism and Indian folklore
5.3 Let us sum up
5.4 References and further readings
5.5 Check your progress

5.0 OBJECTIVES
After completing this unit, you will be able to
 theorize folklores through certain methodologies
 constructing the idea of folklore as well as how deconstruction and post-
colonialism can be discussed as important approaches to folklore
 gain basic ideas about subaltern studies
 constructing the idea of Indian Literature and folklores are essential elements
of Indian Literature
 gain basic ideas about Comparative Literature as a methodology of reading
and understanding folklore.

5.1 INTRODUCTION
5.1.1 What is Deconstruction?
French philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term ‘deconstruction’ in response
to ‘structuralism’ and ‘formalism’. Deconstruction is the way to create a dialogue
with the ‘other’, a social construction. Deconstruction is the way to
interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, intertextual methods of reading a text. It’s a
way to understand the relation of a text with its meaning. Deconstruction is a
strategy for close reading and understanding a text. The text is not static by its
meaning, but it generates meanings through production, through context. (Barthes
R.) In his book Of grammatology, Derrida introduced his major ideas about
Deconstruction. Derrida also grabs his ideas from the previous philosophers like
Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, and Claude Levi-Strauss. The word
‘Deconstruction’ comes from Heidegger’s concept of ‘Destruktion’. Derrida’s
concerns were to re-evaluate the western values, to evaluate texts as cultural
88
production. But Derrida strongly resisted that it’s not destruction, but it’s a way Deconstruction and
Postcolonialism
to find certain ways to crack the system through text. According to Derrida, writing
is a sign of a sign which differs from Saussure, as Saussure proposed ‘sign’ is
composed of two tools, one is ‘signifier’ and another is ‘signified’. ‘Signifier’ is
the form taken by ‘sign’ and ‘signified’ is that what it refers to. These two are
psychological things or concepts. Saussure focused on the phonological aspect
of ‘sign’ and described it as a phonocentric privilege, and Derrida focused on the
writing through which ‘sign’ produces meanings and represents the cultural
context. Saussure relates speech with writing, and Derrida opposed this idea.
Deconstruction is a way of reading a text with context to generate meaning.

5.1.2 What is post-colonialism?

Post-Colonialism means the end of colonialism or indicates the era followed by
Colonialism. It is rather a period that indicates the world after the age of
Colonialism. It is a way to rethink, reshape and reclaim the history, culture, and
theories from the perspective of the people who were colonized or who were
dominated by the imperial power. Imperialism is a kind of machinery to run the
colonies by the empire. And there comes colonialism which indicates the culture,
literature, and lives of people are controlled and exploited by the empires. Post-
colonialism is something that means the end of colonialism and the era followed
by colonialism both. So, it’s a kind of complicated term with multiple dimensions.
Post-colonialism first appeared during the 1950s in the discipline of History. In
the 1970s the term came to be used in the field of Cultural Studies. When it came
to be used under the Culture Studies discipline it got larger meaning and larger
aspects. Because academicians from the discipline of cultural studies believe
that after World War II, colonialism is not ended. Because colony is not only a
geographical term but also a psychological term. There is political colonialism.
So, after the word came to be used under culture studies discipline, it has got
meaning that it is after colonialism, not the end of colonialism. So, Post-
Colonialism is rather a chronological term that means ‘after colonialism’ because
only one form of colonialism ended but still there are other forms of it.
Post-colonialism is a term that emerged from several ideas and thought processes.
In the 1950s, the term Commonwealth literature emerged. Again this is a political
term. Commonwealth means the countries come under the umbrella of the British
colonial past. But again, Commonwealth is an umbrella term that failed to address
the issues of the countries that come under it because there were two kinds of
colonization. One is White-Commonwealth or settler colonies, and another is
Non-White Commonwealth or non-settler colonies. In the case of settler colonies,
they invaded and settled, and in the non-settler colonies, they invaded and left
after the invasion. So, the experiences are not the same. Another example is the
British invaded India and Africa. They were once colonies. The term
commonwealth indicates the same colonial experience for this two. But this is a
partial historical fact because Africa and India know each other through business
ties, cultural ties, and trade ties since the 1st century. They know each other not
in terms of colonialism but also in terms of broader historical engagements. From
that one new term comes into the scenario that is called the New-Literatures.
This term is an alternative term to Commonwealth Literature. But this is also
distorting history. So, another new term came and that is called ‘Third World
Literatures’. It is also a political term or political category. It creates a problem 89
Structural & Post and certain questions like why the third world, and it is also based upon the
Structural Approaches
economic category. Then the term post-colonial came under process. The main
focus of the Commonwealth was to only think British as the colonizer. But in
post-colonial, the focus is not on who colonized but the experience of being
colonized. The focus shifts to victimized from victimizer. So, the Post-Colonial
is a much broader term. In post-colonialism, the data is not significant, but the
experiences, impacts, and consequences are very much important for the study
and analysis. So, post-colonialism is a kind of methodology and ideology. The
central idea of colonialism was Mother countries were the centers and the colonies
were the margins. And post-colonialism shifted the focus. From that point of
view, the field of Subaltern studies emerged. Because within the margins there
are new centers and new margins emerged. The concept of nation-states,
geopolitical locale emerged gradually and the subaltern critics deny the whole
colonial structure of historiography and they focused to make it the subaltern
historiography. The literature and culture of the folk, the tribes, and the indigenous
people came to the center of the academic discourse through post-colonialism
and subaltern studies. De-canonization, de-colonization, the transformation of
the center and margin comes with it. Post-colonial approaches are also strong
criticism against the Eurocentric view of knowledge, language, and culture and
also emerging voices to relocate, reshape the literary canon and literary cartography
from the perspective of the people who were once colonized.

5.2 DECONSTRUCTION AND POST-

COLONIALISM AS APPROACHES TO
INDIAN FOLKLORE
5.2.1 Deconstruction and Indian folklore
Deconstruction itself is a very post-colonial theory. It is one of the complex theories
with the multi-dimensional approach as Derrida once told that his all essays are
devoted to defining the definition of Deconstruction. So, when one has to use
deconstruction as a methodology to study Indian folklore, truly it will be a multi-
dimensional approach. Deconstruction is a process of unfolding the meaning of
a text and it’s a process of searching textuality. Deconstruction focuses on the
point that it is not only the written language that is important but also the language
of speech, culture, and history is important factors. Deconstruction is also a process
to investigate interdisciplinarity and intertextuality with a close view.
Deconstruction is also a process of breaking the conventional known binary
opposition and the centering of meaning. Derrida thought that “nothing outside
the text” (Derrida J.) . So, it is a very complex method to read and investigate
Indian Folk culture through Deconstruction. Mostly, folk cultures and folk texts
are constructed with memory, with myths and legends. Folk traditions are oral
traditions also. So, these texts and meanings and every part of these texts and
traditions have travelled from one region to different regions, from one generation
to another generation. There are continuous processes of changing and transactions
and point of cultural confluence also. Texts, memories, myths and legends are
deconstructed in the case of the folk texts and traditions and cultures, and this is
a continuous and subtle process, that needs critical approaches to understand the
folklores and folk cultures. The famous Indian poet, literary theorist A.K.
90
Ramanujan in the preface to his book, named Folktales from India: A Selection Deconstruction and
Postcolonialism
of Oral Tales from Twenty-two Languages, wrote:
Like a proverb, a story gains meaning in context; in the context of this book,
the meanings are made between us now. A folktale is a poetic text that carries
some of its cultural context within it; it is also a traveling metaphor that
finds a new meaning with each new telling. I have arranged the tales in cycles
as I would arrange a book of poems, so that they are in dialogue with each
other and together create a world through point and counterpoint. (Ramanujan
A. K.)
Indian folklore and folk texts are full of myths and legends. Myths and legends
are the key elements to claim history, the identity. So, investigating myths and
legends and the adaptation of several myths and legends are very important in
the case of folklores and folk cultures. Besides that, there are plenty of
intertextualities between the folk texts. Most of the folk texts are performative in
nature because it is oral traditions through which folk communities express their
cultures. So, in the folk songs, in the folk rituals, in the folk religion, in the folk
material culture, in the folk customs, in the folk medicine everywhere there are
multiple texts and multiple possibilities of reading and that is a fundamental
approach of deconstruction also. In the Santhali tradition, santhali people often
tell that speech is more beautiful than written things. In their Bintis (Santhali
Puranas, sung in Payar rhythm like Mangalkavya in Bengali) there are myths
that the Murmu pandits are reading old scriptures which were claimed to be the
contemporary of Sindhu Civilization. Using this myth in their Bintis the Santhali
people are claiming their history and the background of their civilization as well
as claiming the existence of scripts in their knowledge system. Through
their Bintis they are describing themselves as Harh (man with no religion). Bintis
are even different when those are closely investigated. Among the Bintis,
KaramBinti is everything about the festival of worshipping the crops. This form
of tradition is adopted and deconstructed in the modern text of Somai Kisku’s
santhali novel Namaaliye. The season of Namaal is very important to the santhali
community’s people of the Chotonagpur Plateau. The geographical location here
is very important to investigate the situation and the reason behind Namaal or
migration. Chotonagpur Plateau is geographically not an ideal land for agriculture.
So, from ancient times, there is a long tradition of seasonal migration during the
period of harvest. Famous Indian writer Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar also adopted
this theme of Namaal in his famous book The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories. So,
there are multiple adaptations of myths and legends and deconstructing the myths
and legends and using those in modern texts. Another example is Dashnai
Sereng. During the festival of Durgapuja in West Bengal, on the day
of Dashami (Dashera) the male performers of the santhali community play and
sing songs to remember Ravaana as their ancestor, and through this, they directly
claim their connection with the Ashura community. The dance they perform is
called BhuyangNach because they use a musical instrument made with the outer
surface of a Bottle Gourd vegetable and strings which is called Bhuyang
Enech. The songs are composed in sad notes. The same sad sentiment is echoed
through TusuGaan during Makar Parab but Sendra Sereng, the hunting songs
of Santhali community are also performed during the same parab which are
composed in very cheerful notes as these songs are the elements of showing
santhali pride and their relationship with Jangal and Jamin (land) and reclaiming 91
Structural & Post their identity in the discourse of Itihasa (the Indian history). So, there is
Structural Approaches
multiplicity and multiple dialogues between the binaries without any centrism.
Nowadays, these songs are modernized and famous santhali singers like Kalpana
Hansda made the studio version of these traditional songs like Dashnai Sereng,
Sendra Sereng (hunting songs). So, there is always deconstruction of structure
and formation along with multiplicity and intertextuality. So everything is
considered as text. In the case of India, literature, folk culture, oral traditions,
history, science all things were not isolated from each other. Our two major texts
of claiming history are the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which are even
complex with thousands of retellings. A.K. Ramanujan in his famous essay “Three
Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation”
discussed how the retellings are modified with the local myths and legends.
A. K. Ramanujan in the introduction of his book Folktales from India: A Selection
of Oral Tales from Twenty-two Languages writes that:
The languages and regions in India have, therefore, a large stock of shared
folk materials. Collections can be made of proverbs, riddles, and tales common
to widely separated and distant regions of the subcontinent. Yet these shared
items may carry different meanings in different regions and uses. For instance,
the proverb ‘It’s dark under the lamp’ has been collected in Kannada and in
Kashmiri, at two ends of the Indian subcontinent. In Kannada, it means
(among other things) that a virtuous man, like a lighted lamp, may have
dark, shadow places, hidden vices. In Kashmiri, I’m told, ‘It’s dark under the
lamp’ has a political meaning (among others): that a beneficent king may
have evil henchmen. The kind of variation in meaning is characteristics of
cultural forms. The signifiers, whether they are images or characters or
episodes, or even so-called structures and archetypes, may be the same in
different periods and regions, but the signification goes or changing. You
cannot predict meanings from forms, for the meaning of a sign is culturally
and contextually assigned. A sign requires an assignment.
So, there are multiple perspectives of meaning and deconstruction of forms and
myths and retelling and recreations with adaptations. In the case of folk medicines,
one can find the existence of healers and the medicines come directly from the
healers. The task of the persons who are traditional healers are almost the same
in every community but the term which is used for them in a particular community
comes from the language and knowledge system of that community. In Lepcha,
they are called Boongthing, in Assamese, they are called Ojha, in Mizo, they are
called Zawlnei, in Arabic, they are called Hekim, and in Bengali, they are
called Baidya. All of these different names have come from different social
constructions, different language systems, and different geographical locations.
By locating these diversities, Derrida proposed to deconstruct the system.
Folksongs nowadays are adapted by popular artists, and they modernize the
versions. The Coke Studio adaptation of Lalan Fakir’s songs, composing original
Nepali folk songs like DhikiKuti, modernizing songs of Dashain Tiharparab of
Nepal like Tin Dang Tin Dhang Madal Bajyo by famous artist Navneet Aditya
Waiba, adapting Nepali myths and legends by the famous singer Bipul Chettri,
adopting Assamese myths and legends by the famous singer Nilotpal Borah, all
of these are forms of deconstruction the form, the myths, the legends. Indian
92 theatre is also a field of adapting the folklores and the myth and the legends.
Whether it’s Girish Karnad’s Taledanda, or Adya Rangacharya’s Kelu Deconstruction and
Postcolonialism
Janmejaya, or the Jatraa, Kirtan tradition of West Bengal, or the Ankia Nat
tradition of Assam, theatre and ‘desi’ performance always adopted folk songs,
folklores, folk texts, and folk myths and legends.
In folk cultures, there are folk religions of the communities and the clans. Most
of them worship hills, rivers, jungles, or trees as their God. Like Kanchenjunga
is worshiped by the Lepcha people, Banyan trees, the elephants are worshipped
by the Kurmali people. Donyi-Polo is an indigenous religion of the Tani-
speaking people (Mishing, Adi, and other communities) of Arunachal Pradesh.
They believed that their ancestor was Abotani (Tani Community). The legend
of Abotani is even very interesting. It is called that Abotani went to the place of
Tatar-Taji for a marriage ceremony. There his deer (Dumpo) and dog (Kipung)
shared a packet of rotten soya seed. Later they reached DigoAne (the keeper of
the land) from where he got the knowledge of cultivating rice. The important fact
is that Tani-speaking people considered Abotani as the first harvester of rice from
their community. In the myth of the Abotani, the existence of rotten soya bean is
presented and that is a traditional food of the people of North-east India, especially
to the people of Assam. That folk food material is called Axone. Besides this,
Donyi-Polo is a religion that comes in resistance to the Christianization of
the Mishing and Adi community of the Arunachal Pradesh. So, everywhere,
whether it is folk religion, or it is folk medicine, or it is folk food habit, there are
multiple texts, multiple binaries, multiple knowledge, language system, and
resistance from the margins along with the deconstruction of forms and myths in
a very complex way.

5.2.2 Post-colonialism and Indian folklore

With Post-colonialism, the starting of shifting of margins and the centres
throughout the world has begun. Post-colonialism is the way to investigate the
experience of being colonized. So, within and from the colony, a post-colonial
thought process emerged. The study of folk culture and folk tradition itself is a
discipline that emerged in the period of post-colonialism. The methodologies of
Subaltern studies are also different approaches to study folklore. The subaltern
critics have denied the main course of Historiography which was Eurocentric by
its nature. In India the enlightenment, western education came with the British
colonizers during the first half of the 19th century. Western education came to
India to teach the people of the colony for an administrative reason and
simultaneously the process of learning the colony was started. So, everything
came through western education got the western shape and imposed upon Indians.
The notion of history has also come with the colonizers. But India had and has a
different notion of history and that can be called Itihasa (Mukherjee). Because
there was no historical framework to construct our literary history, but history
and literature were never separated in the case of Indian cultures. Our pieces of
literature flourished through folk cultures, folk traditions, and oral traditions and
performances. Indian folklore of the post-colonial era mainly aims to decolonize
Indian literature and culture. It is also resistant to the colonial knowledge system.
Folk traditions and cultures of post-colonial India are also a political tool to
reconstruct the Indian history and culture by shifting its focus from Eurocentric
viewpoints to indigenous viewpoints. The Santhali legend of Birsha Munda,
Sidhu-Kanhu, Full-Jhano, is reconstructed and the adaptation of folk cultures in 93
Structural & Post film and music is trying to reclaim cultural engagements. G. N. Devy told that
Structural Approaches
during the period of colonization, one thing happened that is called cultural
amnesia. So, we need to focus on the Tribal or Folk, or Adivasi Literatures because
those are constructed by memory and performed by memory: “It might be said
that tribal artists work more on the basis of their racial and sensory memory than
on the basis of a cultivated imagination” (Devy). The multilingual linguistic
situations and folklores from different linguistic communities construct the unified
wholeness of India along with celebrating pluralities. In the post-colonial period,
there are many processes and multiple steps were taken during the first decade of
independence to construct the idea of Indianness and the idea of Indian Literature
as a resistance to the eurocentrism and mainstream canon of literature. G.N. Devy,
Kapil Kapoor, Harish Trivedi, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Sujit Mukherjee, Sisir
Kumar Das, K. Satchidanandan, Ayyappa Paniker, A. K Ramanujan and the other
gigantic figures of Indian Literature spent their whole life theorizing about Indian
Literature. Sisir Kumar Das wrote three volumes of A History of Indian
Literature to construct the literary history of India in a very Indian way, while G.
N. Devy wrote “Of Many Heroes”: An Indian Essay in Literary Historiography to
construct the literary history of India as well as to construct the idea of Indian
Literature. G. N. Devy in the long introduction of his book Painted Words: An
Anthology of Tribal Literature writes:
A vast number of Indian languages have yet remained only spoken, with the
result that literary compositions in these languages are not considered
‘literature’. They are a feast for the folklorist, anthropologist and linguist,
but to literary critic they generally mean nothing. Similarly, several nomadic
Indian communities are broken up and spread over long distances but survive
as communities because they are bound by their oral epics. The wealth and
variety of these works is so enormous that one discovers their neglect with a
sense of pure shame. (Devy)
Krishna Kripalini once told that Indian literature is nothing but some ‘memorable
utterances’, because the major part of Indian literature exists through memory,
exists through orality, exists through community performances. The post-colonial
approach of India in the field of literature is to build the idea of ‘Indian Literature’
which cannot be possible without the inclusion of the literature of the communities,
the literature of the folks, and the literature of the indigenous people. In Translation
as Growth, Uday Narayan Singh argues that Indian literature is not only vertical
but also horizontal in nature. It is not always the reception of European literature
but also the reception between the ‘Bhasha literatures.’ Here ‘bhasha’ means the
Indian languages. The post-colonial approach is also about ‘disciplining Indian
Literature’. Sahitya Akademi, National Book Trust, National Translation Mission,
Doordarshan, all of these agencies’ key agenda was to re-construct the Indianness
after the independence. Sahitya Akademi’s publications of Lepcha Folkore and
Folksongs, Mizo Songs and Folktales, Tales and Tunes Tripura Hills (an anthology
of Kokborok folk songs and tales), Bharthari(A Chhattisgarhi Folk Epic), Dehwali
Sahitya, Garhwali Lokgeet, Garo Literature, Listen My Flowerbur: Missing
Folksongs, Gamit Dantkathao and so on, all of these publications are the initiative
to promote the plurality of ‘Indian Literature’. The catalogue of Sahitya Akademi
truly reflects its mission:
In order to document and preserve the rich tradition of oral literature in the
94 tribal languages, Sahitya Akademi has established the Tribal Literature and
 Oral Tradition Project. Under this project a series of bilingual literary texts is Deconstruction and
Postcolonialism
being published. So far the volumes in Bhilli, Dehwali, Garhwali, Varli,
Kunkna, Mizo, Garo etc. have been published and other volumes in Khasi,
Bodo, Santhali etc. will shortly be published.
So, all of these initiatives have happened during the post-colonial era. Indian
Literature is plural, and the idea of it cannot be constructed without the inclusion
of the ‘bhasha’ literatures. Indian literature is interwoven and it is multiple sets
of ideas and multiple sets of literature dependent on the geopolitical location and
the location of the cultural context. Indian Literature is the amalgamation of
written texts and multiple retelling and traveling of the texts. The emergence of
Dalit literature and Adivasi literature as literary categories also evolved during
the post-colonial era and these categories are the part of constructing the idea of
Indian literature. Dalit, Adivasi and Tribal literatures are constructed by the folk
texts and folk traditions many of the cases because these are the literatures of the
folk. The emergence of Adivasi literature as a literary category, truly carries the
spirit of folk texts and folklores. The imagination of Jal, Jangal and Jamin and
the claim for the own lands, all of these are constructed with the folklores and
with the help of myths and legends. The status of AdiVasinda, which means the
oldest community of the land, is claimed through the help of folklore and folk
culture, and these chronicle their resistance against the constant marginalization
of indigenous communities. A. K. Ramanujan argues that every folktale is just
one telling, and there are endless retellings. The written version of a folktale is
not static, but when it comes to the reader and retold by the reader, that is the
afterlife of that text. (Ramanujan A. K.)
Indian folktales, as well as Indian Literature, exists with the help of translation.
This multilingual situation does not allow one to read and practice Indian folk
traditions and Indian literature because it is not possible for any individual to
have access to all Indian languages. So, translation is the bridge of Indian literature,
it the bridge between many points of Indian folktales and Indian
literature. Anubad as a practice is presented in India with a variety of names
from the ancient era, sometimes through retellings, sometimes through
performances, sometimes through the localization of a text. But the academic
involvement with Translation Studies is very much new as a post-colonial
approach which emerged with the emergence of many radical disciplines as well
as the emergence of ‘Comparative Literature’. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren
in their book Theory of Literature give multiple definitions of comparative
literature. One of these definitions is:
In practice, the term “comparative” literature has covered and still covers
rather distinct fields of study and groups of problems. It may mean, first, the
study of oral literature, especially of folk-tale themes and their migration; of
how and when they have entered “higher,” “artistic” literature. This type of
problem can be relegated to folklore, an important branch of learning which
is only in part occupied with artistic facts, since it studies the total civilization
of a “folk,” its costumes and customs, superstitions and tools as well as its
arts. We must, however, endorse the view that the study of oral literature is
an integral part of literary scholarship, for it cannot be divorced from the
study of written works, and there has been and still is a continuous interaction
between oral and written literature.
95
Structural & Post Comparative literature is a distinct field of study and rather a method to read and
Structural Approaches
practice literature. But, in the post-colonial era, the emergence of Indian literature
as a new literary canon is also a reason for the emergence of a new discipline and
that is called ‘Comparative Indian Literature’. Indian literature is truly comparative
in its nature. There are multiple dialogues between the margins and the
mainstream, between the sound and the silence, between the written and the oral
traditions, between westernization and Indianization. India had its style of
historiography (study of literary history), genrology (study of genre), reception,
influence, translation theory, intertextuality, thematological (study of themes)
studies. The great scholars like Kapil Kapoor, G. N. Devy, K. Satchidanandan,
Sisir Kumar Das, Amiya Dev, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Buddhadev Bose, and other
theoretician’s efforts are combined over time to propose the discipline named
‘Comparative Indian Literature. Amiya Dev argues that our journey is not from
Comparative literature to Comparative Indian literature, but it is rather from
Comparative Indian literature to Comparative literature. And the study of folk
culture, folk tales cannot be done properly without the help of comparative
literature as a methodology too. The representation of margin in the mainstream,
bridging the gap between literary production and non-literariness, the study of
translation, retelling and traveling of the folk texts, historicizing Indian folk texts,
intertextuality of the folk texts, the constant literary transactions between
the bhashas, the performative nature of the folk texts, the presence of knowledge
system inside the texts, all of these can be adequately addressed with the help of
comparative literature too. And the post-colonial approach to Indian folklores
and folktales is also about addressing the folk texts inside the disciplinary approach
of Indian Literature and Comparative Indian Literature: “Literatures in India are
interwoven with the literary, cultural and historical elements received from other
literary systems” (Pramanick).

5.3 LET US SUM UP

From our overall discussion in this Unit, it can be assumed that the study of
Indian folklore requires a multidimensional approach. To practice folklore, it
cannot be isolated from the knowledge of the folklife. There are constant dialogues
between the folk texts. Deconstruction and post-colonialism are two major
approaches and along with comparative literary methodology they can be adequate
to study and practice folklore especially in the case of India, where there are
multiple dimensions of a text and interaction between the ‘Bhasha’ literatures.
Folklores contain not only the knowledge system of the folk but also the knowledge
system of the language of that particular community to whom these belong. The
PLSI (Peoples’ Linguistic Survey of India), Bhasha Research and Publication
Centre, The Adivasi Academy, Sahitya Akademi, National Book Trust, Central
Institute of Indian Languages, all of these organizations and publication houses
are promoting the practice of folk culture because these folk texts are becoming
the denominator of Indian literature.
Deconstruction, itself as a post-colonial approach can be applied along with other
post-colonial approaches in the case of Indian Folklores because all of these are
connected and the very emergence of the study of Indian Folklore is based upon
these points of departures. Indian folklore, in a broader category, is representing
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Indian literature with its multiple features and aspects. So, it is very important to Deconstruction and
Postcolonialism
study and practice Indian folklore with the help of certain methodologies for
better understanding.

5.4 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS

Ao, Temsula. These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone. Zubaan, 2006.
Barthes R. From work to text, textual strategies: Perspectives in poststructuralist
criticism. Methuen Publishing, 1979.
Bassnett, Susan. Translation Studies. Routledge, 2013.
Dai, Mamang. Legends of Pensam. Penguin UK, 2006.
Derrida J. Of grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, John
Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Derrida, Jacques. “Racism’s Last Word.” “Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited
by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah, University of Chicago
Press, 1986.
Devy, Ganesh Narayandas. “Of Many Heroes”: An Indian Essay in Literary
Historiography. Orient Longman, 1998.
—. After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism. Orient
Longman, 1992.
—. Painted Words: An Anthology of Tribal Literature. Penguin Books India,
2002.
Hansda, Sowvendra Shekhar. The Adivasi Will Not Dance Stories. Speaking Tiger
Publishing Private Limited, 2011.
Jacob, Malsawmi. Zorami: A Redemption Song. Primalogue Publishing Media
Private Limited, 2015.
Mukherjee, Sujit. “The Itihasa of Our Literary History.” Towards a Literary
History of India, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1975, pp. 16-25.
Pramanick, Mrinmoy. “Mapping many Indias through the gamut of diverse literary
systems.” The Telegraph, 6 Feb. 2020, www.telegraphindia.com/culture/books/
book-review-positions-essays-on-indian-literature-by-k-satchidanandan/cid/
1742950.
Ramakrishnan, E. V. Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity.
Orient Blackswan, 2017.
Ramanujan, Attipate Krishnaswami. Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral
Tales from Twenty-two Languages. Pantheon Books, 1991.
Ramanujan, Attipate Krishnaswami. “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five examples
and three thoughts on Translation”. Many Ramayanas:The Diversity of a Narrative
Tradition in South Asia, edited by Paula Richman, University of California Press,
1991, pp. 22-48.
Sahitya Akademi. “Catalogue.” Sahitya Akademi, n.d. 97
Structural & Post Satchidanandan, Koyamparambath. Positions: Essays on Indian Literature.
Structural Approaches
Niyogi Books, 2019.
Singh, Udaya Narayana. Translation as Growth: Towards a Theory of Language
Development. Pearson Education India, 2010.
Thapar, Romila. Indian Tales. Puffin Books, 1991.
Trivedi, Harish, et al. The Nation Across the World: Postcolonial Literary
Representations. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Weisstein, Ulrich. Comparative Literture and Literary Theory: Survey and
Introduction. Indiana University Press, 1974.
Wellek, Rene, and Warren Austin. Theory of Literature. Harcourt, Brace & World,
1956.

5.5 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

1) How can deconstruction and post-colonialism be important approaches for
studying folklore in the Indian Context?
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2) What do you understand by the term ‘deconstruction’ as coined by Derrida?
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3) Write a note on the multiple dimensions of the term ‘post-colonialism.’
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4) Indian folklore of the post-colonial era mainly aims to decolonize Indian
literature and culture. Elaborate.
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5) Enunciate the significance of the emergence of Dalit and Adivasi folk literature
as literary categories.
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6) How can you justify that Indian folklore is representative of Indian literature? Deconstruction and
Postcolonialism
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7) Describe the approaches of Indian folklores in the post-colonial era.
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8) How can you justify Krishna Kripalini’s comment about Indian literature as
‘memorable utterances’ from the discussion of Indian folklore?
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9) “Like a proverb, a story gains meaning in context.” Explain.
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10) The study of folk culture, folk tales cannot be done properly without the help
of comparative literature as a methodology. Justify.
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