Folklore and Semiotics: An Introduction

Author(s): Janet L. Langlois

Source: Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 22, No. 2/3, Folklore and Semiotics (May - Dec., 1985),
pp. 77-83
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3814386
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Janet L. Langlois

Folklore and Semiotics: An Introduction

For skeptics, the phrase "folklore and semiotics" has an artificial ring
because it yokes folklore with one more methodology. For believers, the
phrase is redundant because folklore is semiosis. For the contributors to this
special issue, who participated in the 1983 International Summer Institute
for Semiotic and Strucutral Studies at Indiana University, the phrase is a
valid one for severalreasons.1First, they see folk patterning and sign making
as distinct cultural phenomena which have, however, overlapped in ways
"at once strange, irregular and implicit" as Clifford Geertz has said of all
human social behavior.2 Second, they recognize that folk studies and the
study of signs, although separate disciplines or methodologies, are as
intricately related as are their areasof study. And, third, they are committed
to the scholarly pursuit of understanding the connections and, so, of
understanding the meanings of peoples' lives.
Since the perceived relationships between folklore and semiotics depend
on definitions, "Which folklore?" and "Which semiotics?" become useful
questions in organizing this briefreview which focuses on literaryand, then,
ethnographic answers. Richard Bauman, in his 1982 Semiotica article
"Conceptions of Folklore in the Development of LiterarySemiotics," traces
verbal folklore's convergence with the study of linguistic signs that
developed from the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
(semiology). Bauman summarizes semioticians' use of folk materials in
expanding structurallinguistics to text analysis; he also outlines folklorists'
use of semiotic models in analyzing folk narrative structure and perfor-
mance.3
Saussure's conception of natural languages as abstract conventional
systems of signs (langue) actualized in specific speech events (parole) is a
core assumption underlying the analyses Bauman discusses and is implicit
in the five papers that follow. Roman Jakobson's 1960model of the speech
event, a charter for blending folk narrativeand semiotic studies for twenty-

77

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78 Janet L. Langlois

five years, reformulates the langue/parole relationship within a communi-

cation framework:

SPEECH EVENT = parole

context (referential F)
message (poetic F)
addresser ---------------------------------------- addressee
(emotive F) (conative F)

contact (phatic F)
code (metalingual F) = langue

Here, one speaker, the addresser, produces signs by sending a message to

another, the addressee, with reference to a shared context through a contact
governed by a code (langue), a mutually-understood rule or set of rules
coordinating the exchange. Each of the six elements in the transmission
process has an attendant function (F). Although all elements and their
functions work together, often in pairs, in any given speech event, one
element usually predominates, so that its function becomes the function of
the communication as a whole.4
Literary semioticians, following this model, have seen folk narrative, in
common with all narrative structures, as a complex message, a second-order
sign system, itself made up of natural language signs. They have seen
folklore, in contrast to literature, however, as communication dominated by
the langue aspects of language, that is, by normative rules that are
communal and traditional. Structural studies have focused, therefore, on the
code's significance in folktale, myth or riddle. Vladimir Propp, in his
Morphology of the Folktale, saw plot structure encoded in thirty-one
functions or actions (syntagms) regardless of individual tale variations. And
Claude Levi-Strauss, in his volumes on the Introduction to a Science of
Mythology, saw mythic structure as the mediation of binary opposites
through transformations (paradigms). Levi-Strauss saw these opposites as
part of cultural coding systems with social, cosmological, technological and
spatial dimensions (metalingual F). Assessing the influence of Propp's and
Levi-Strauss's structuralism on folk studies, Pierre and Elli Kongais Maranda
wrote in their introduction to The Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition,
"Thus, folklorists have at their disposal the equivalent of de Saussure's
langue to which actual informant performances, equivalent to parole, can
be referred." At this point, structural and semiotic studies are equivalent or
coterminous; their power lies in their commitment to discovering basic
structures generating narrative signs within cultures.5

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 AN INTRODUCTION
AND SEMIOTICS:
FOLKLORE 79

Jonathan Evans' paper is most clearly in the structuralist tradition

discussed above with its emphasis on coding in medieval texts of the dragon
slayer episode. Evans fuses an analysis of the texts' syntagmatic structure
(preparation, travel, combat, slaying and reward) with that of their
paradigmatic oppositions (hero/villain and human/monster) in order to
understand the heroic culture supporting and supported by the texts. His
unique contribution, however, is to insert an historical sense into a method
generally recognized as ahistoric. He builds a case for looking at textual
shifts as signs of cultural shifts. He sees a growing textual ambiguity
correlating with a growing cultural ambiguity.
Post-structuralist thinking within the field of folklore has manifested
itself in ethnography-of-speaking and performance studies that emphasize
the parole aspects of the folk process. Richard Bauman's Verbal Art as
Performance as well as Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking by
Bauman and Joel Sherzer, and Folklore: Performance and Communication,
edited by Dan Ben-Amosand KennethS. Goldstein, epitomize the refocusing
on the individual performance within a specific, immediate context.
Looking at each performanceas an entity in itself highlights other elements
and their functions within the speech event, most particularly the
addresser/addresseerelationship and the conative function of the audience-
directed communication. One of the consequences of redirecting attention
to the individual creativity of folk artists and to the art of "everyday"genres
and conversation is to blur the line theoretically separating verbal folk art
from literature proper.6
John McDowell's paper takes this process a step further. "The Poetic
Rites of Conversation" challenges literary semioticians who define only
literature by its poetic function, that is, by its focus on its own message.
McDowell also modifies research that assumes talk is "practical," without
considering what he calls the "frivolous"or "ritual"aspectsof conversation.
He shows how talking, through the strategic use of ritual speech for the
Kamsa Indians in Colombia and of proverbs for Americans, is also self-
referential. Poetic rites become signs of transitions within the flow of
dialogue.
Kwesi Yankah's paper challenges performance-centeredstudies them-
selves. Yankah states that, despite the theoretical commitment to both
addresser and addressee, most studies have analyzed only the addresser. He
offers a corrective to this "disequilibrium problem" by looking at the
audience's role in creating competent performances.(Here, "competence"is
equivalent to langue and "performance"to parole.) Yankah shows the risks
inherent in this joint venture by gauging the audience's response to
incompetence through an arrayof signals to the performer.Examples cover

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80 Janet L. Langlois

a range of African verbal genres with emphasis on that of the Akan peoples
of Ghana.
When Michael Herzfeld urges a move away from what he calls "verbo-
centrism," an overemphasis on linguistic signs, in his introduction to a 1983
special issue of Semiotica entitled Signs in the Field: Semiotic Perspectives
on Ethnography, different answers to the questions "Which folklore?" and
"Which semiotics?" begin to emerge. Herzfeld's comment indicates a
convergence of non-verbal folk patterns with semiotic models designed to
explore cultural symbol systems. Both the structuralist and performance-
centered approaches to folklore discussed above have branched out from the
semiotic analysis of verbal art alone, but in quite different ways. On the one
hand, structuralists have extended Jakobson's model by treating non-verbal
signs as significant language systems. As Terrence Hawkes writes in his
Structuralism and Semiotics, "precisely the great achievement of semiotics,"
and one way that it differs from structuralism proper, is its "effect of
'stretching' our concept of language to include non-verbal areas." Petr
Bogatyrev's early work on Moravian folk costume as sign, Levi-Strauss's on
masks, music, table manners and cuisine as cultural codes, and Victor
Turner's on Ndembu ceremonies as metaphors are well-known examples of
"stretched" language in the areas of folk custom, ritual and material
culture.7
Performance studies, on the other hand, situate verbal art within cultural
events as one more form of social action. Rather than textualize behavior as
structural studies do, performance studies activate speech. A variety of social
interaction models, then, parallel, complement and augment Jakobson's
model in interpreting verbal, customary and material folklife as signs in
action. Erving Goffman, for example, has criticized what he calls "the
traditional paradigm for talk" precisely because it disregards a great deal of
"all that relevantly goes on" in the activity of talking. Sociolinguistic
studies have explored the cultural significance of paralinguistic features of
conversation as well as that of body language, gesture, use of space and other
ritualized interaction. And Mikhail Bakhtin's classic study, Rabelais and his
World, though literary in intent, has offered a model that apprehends a
culture's expressive folklore as a unified system of signs.8
Both Kenneth Burke's and Victor Turner's dramatistic models for
symbolic action, influential in American and British symbolic anthropo-
logy, carry these rhetorical approaches to their logical conclusions in the
metaphor of theater.9 Beverly Stoeltje's paper on the semiotics of the rodeo
clown draws particularly on Burke's work for a framework of analysis. She
builds a case for seeing the clown as the agent who ultimately makes the
rodeo a dramatic representation of western cattle culture. She shows that,

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FOLKLOREAND SEMIOTICS:AN INTRODUCTION 81

through his humorous acts-verbal, gestural and action-oriented-inter-

spersed throughout the rodeo events but concentrated in the concluding
specialty act, the clown shapes the categories work/play, order/disorderin a
complex definition of power in west Texas.'0
Olivia Cadaval'spaper is also concernedwith power in a dramaticsetting,
the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. Cadaval invited
membersof the Washington, D.C. Latino community to become involved in
the Gallery exhibition celebrating festivity and ritual by creating a public
simulation of the Day of the Dead calendar customs as practiced in Latin
America. She finds that a dual semiotic structure emerged through the
public display of a remembered culture. The community performed the
media event of the Day of the Dead through the presentation of museum
objects, prayerand song and so createdan iconic referenceto a reconstructed
past. They also enacted their real lives in the Capitol, their sense of their
ethnicity, and so constructed an indexical sign of their own reality."
Cadaval'suse of the terms"index," "icon," and "symbol"shows reference
to the work of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, whose
name for the study of signs-semiotics-is most widespreadin this country.
Milton Singer, in his 1984Man's Glassy Essence:Explorations in Semiotic
Anthropology, argues that most ethnographic approaches to signs and
symbols are, in fact, directly or indirectly derived from Peirce. Singer urges
an explicit adaptation of Peircian semiotics to anthropological problems.
He sees Peirce's model of semiosis, a tripartite one that involves signs
infinitely interpretingeach other within cultural contexts, as a more flexible
vehicle for studying human groups than the Saussurian/Jakobson model.
Although a number of anthroplogists have found Peirce'sconcepts useful, it
remains for folklorists to explore the validity of this ethnographic ap-
proach.12
MargaretMead,afterattending a conferenceon kinesics and proxemics at
Indiana University in 1962, commented, "If we had a word for patterned
communication in all modalities, it would be useful." She chose the word
"semiotics." Some folklorists might have chosen the word "folklore." This
overlapping of terminology might confirm what this sortie through folk
studies and sign systems indicates: that the phrase "folklore and semiotics"
is not "yokedby violence together," but accuratelysummarizesat least three
decadesof joint scholarship. The phrase is "imperialistic" in the sense that
it incorporates structuralism, performance-centeredstudies, social inter-
action and symbolic anthropological methods within its boundaries. It
points to an underlying unity in these approaches toward folklore and
folklife as significant cultural systems;it becomes an overarching category

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82 Janet L. Langlois

containing some of the most fruitful methodologies of the past and,

possibly, of the future as well.13

Wayne State University

Detroit, Michigan

NOTES

1. The Fourth International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural

Studies, May 30-June 24, 1983,was hosted by the ResearchCenterfor Language and
Semiotic Studies (Indiana University) in collaboration with the Toronto Semiotic
Circle. A number of colloquia/research panels, courses, and lectures in the Visiting
Scholars' Evening Lecture Series were presentedby folklorists and anthropologists.
2. Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of
Culture," in his The Interpretationof Cultures(New York:Basic Books, 1973),p. 10.
3. Richard Bauman, "Conceptions of Folklore in the Development of Literary
Semiotics," Semiotica 39:1-2 (1982): 1-20, esp. pp. 10-13.
4. Bauman, pp. 4-7; Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in
Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok(Cambridge,Mass.:M.I.T. Press, 1960),pp. 350-73;
A. J. Greimas and J. Courtes, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, tr.
by LarryCrist and Daniel Patte et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982),
passim.
5. Bauman, pp. 4-6; Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, tr. by L. Scott
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958); Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction
to a Science of Mythology: Vol. I, The Raw and the Cooked;Vol. II, From Honey to
Ashes; Vol. III, The Origin of Table Manners;Vol. IV, The Naked Man, tr. by John
and Doreen Weightman (New York:Harper and Row, 1969-1981);Pierre Maranda
and Elli Kbngis-Maranda, "Introduction" in their Structural Analysis of Oral
Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. xii.
6. Richard Bauman, VerbalArt as Performance(Rowley, Mass.:NewburyHouse,
1977); Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, Explorations in the Ethnography of
Speaking (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Dan Ben-Amos and
KennethS. Goldstein, eds., Folklore:Performanceand Communication (The Hague:
Mouton, 1975); Bauman, "Conceptions of Folklore in the Development of Literary
Semiotics," pp. 13, 15, 16.
7. Michael Herzfeld, "Signs in the Field: Prospects and Issues for Semiotic
Ethnography," Semiotica (Special Issue Signs in the Field: Semiotic Perspectiveson
Ethnography) 46:2-4 (1983):99-103; TerrenceHawkes, Structuralismand Semiotics
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. 125; Petr
Bogatyrev, The Functions of Folk Costume in Moravian Slovakia (The Hague:
Mouton, 1971, originally 1937); Bauman, "Conceptions of Folklore in the Develop-
ment of Literary Semiotics," pp. 6-8; Henry Glassie, "Structure and Function,
Folklore and the Artifact," Semiotica 7:4 (1973): 313-51; Levi-Strauss, see note 5;

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FOLKLOREAND SEMIOTICS:AN INTRODUCTION 83

Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1967). See also Janet L. Langlois, "The Belle Isle Bridge Incident:
Legend Dialectic and Semiotic System in the 1943 Detroit Race Riots," Journal of
American Folklore 96:380(April-June 1983):183-99 for analysis of legend structure,
geographic space, rumor transmission and riot action as semiotic systems. Langlois'
paper at ISISSS '83, " 'Like Thebes Through the Mouth of the Sphinx': The Urban
Text in Folklore," is a reworking of the above article.
8. Bauman, "Conceptionsof Folklore in the Development of LiterarySemiotics,"
pp. 8-10, 14; Erving Goffman, "Footing" in his Forms of Talk (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981),p. 130;for sociolinguistic literature,see, for
example, Dell Hymes, Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach
(The Conduct and Communication Series) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1974) and William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (The Conduct and
Communications Series) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972);
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, tr. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985).
9. Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1985); Victor Turner,
Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors:Symbolic Action in Human Society (Symbol, Myth
and Ritual Series) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974);Janet W. D. Dougherty
and James W. Fernandez,"Introduction" to Special Issue Symbolism and Cognition
of American Ethnologist 8:3 (August 1981):434.
10. See also ElizabethAtwood Lawrence, The Rodeo: An Anthropologist Looks at
the Wild and the Tame (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982)for another
semiotic reading.
11. See Victor Turner, ed., Celebration:Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washing-
ton, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982) for essays growing out of the
Renwick Gallery exhibit.
12. Hawkes, pp. 123; Milton Singer, Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in
Semiotic Anthropology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), traces
Peirce's influence through William James, G. H. Mead, Robert Redfield, W. L.
Warnerand CliffordGeertz,and seessemiotic anthropology as a way of incorporating
structural and symbolic anthropology, functionalism and empiricism.
13. Margaret Mead as quoted in Approaches to Semiotics, ed. by Thomas A.
Seboek et al (The Hague: Mouton, 1964); Umberto Eco, in A Theory of Semiotics
(Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 6-7, writes: "This project for
semiotics, to study the whole of culture, and thus to view an immense range of objects
and events as signs, may give the impression of an arrogant 'imperialism' on the part
of semioticians. When a discipline defines 'everything' as its proper object, and
thereforedeclares itself as concerned with the entire universe (and nothing else) it's
playing a risky game."

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