Abstract
In a 1986 essay, the folklorist Claire R. Farrer raised an important yet still largely unanswered question: “How are a culture’s perceptions of women and expectations of them expressed folkloristically”? (1986:xviii). Although many investigators have collected folklore by and about women (Fischer 1956, Hymes 1971, Sapir 1977, Dwyer 1978, Baldwin 1985, Mitchell 1985, Rowe 1986, Mark 1987, Chernala 1988, Gottleib 1989, Crain 1991) few have attempted to analyze systematically the ways in which cultural models of gender are expressed in and give meaning to such discourse (for an exception see Taggart 19901), or conversely, the role that linguistic forms play in the representation and communication of these models. Gender ideology is constructed in discourse both through what women and men do with language as well as through what speakers say about women and men. Thus, it is a central contention of this article that the study of linguistic form cannot be separated from a study of the cultural content conveyed within a particular genre.2 It is important, moreover, to identify a set of methodological techniques that can enable us to recover from folklore the cultural models that organize people’s understandings of the world and that can enable us to demonstrate how such cultural understandings guide the production of linguistic forms like folktales.
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Mathews, H.F. (2005). Uncovering Cultural Models of Gender from Accounts of Folktales. In: Quinn, N. (eds) Finding Culture in Talk. Culture, Mind and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05871-3_4
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