Author Archives: Sam Hassell

Proverb- Indonesia

“Ada udang di balik batu”

“There is shrimp behind stone.”

“There’s a motive behind every act.”

The informant stated that she most likely learned the above proverb from a friend in middle school. She would use the proverb specifically to “warn a friend” if she thought that someone else were “trying to use or exploit them.” According to the informant, this proverb is used very frequently in Indonesia, but she doesn’t understand “why this specific sentence is used”; for instance, she asked, “why is it a shrimp?”

While the proverb doesn’t seem to exclusively address evil or self-serving intentions, but rather makes the claim that all actions are performed by people with some purpose in mind, I agree with the informant that the proverb can be construed as cautionary; that is, as exhorting an individual to look beyond the behavior of another in order to see the cause, or potential causes, for that behavior. It could also be taken more generally, however, and not necessarily apply to human behavior, instructing us to look in all matters to what is deeper than mere appearance (the stone) so that we may find something even more true or profound (the shrimp). The imagery of a shrimp concealed behind a stone may be arbitrary, as the informant seems to believe, or it could perhaps be a juxtaposition of the small, less conspicuous nature of the shrimp with the large, easily-spotted nature of the stone; or that one provides sustenance and thus serves a practical end, while the other is very common and for the most part useless. Linking these two notions together, we might say that the proverb is also remarking that those who take the time and care to discover that which is not so easily found are rewarded for their efforts—an interpretation which, though broader, encompasses the informant’s understanding of the proverb as warning us against being naïve of other people’s motives. Two items of folklore of which I am aware that resemble this Indonesian proverb in imagery and/or meaning include: “Leave no stone unturned” and “Appearances can be deceiving.”

Annotation:

Atmosumarto, Sutanto. A Learner’s Comprehensive Dictionary of Indonesian. Yogyakarta, Indonesia: Cahaya Timur Offset, 2004. 622. Web <http://books.google.com/books?id=0PV0NSjCdFAC&pg=PP9&dq=a+comprehensive+dictionary+of+indonesia&hl=en&ei=s1G6Tb3jD4j6swOmv9DaDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=a%20comprehensive%20dictionary%20of%20indonesia&f=false.>

Joke/Blason Populaire- Singapore

“What do you call Indians in an orange boat?” Answer: “A papaya.”

The informant states that she learned this joke from a friend, when she was probably around 15 years old, while at dinner in an Indian restaurant in Singapore, where she was currently studying. She would tell it to friends when making jokes about Indian people, which she claims commonly occurs since there are “so many” Indians in Singapore. Her opinion of the joke was that “it’s funny and kind of true.”

The joke given above clearly relies for its humor not on an abstract property or stereotype of Indians but on a very basic, phenotypical attribute—their skin tone—which according to the joke, is so dark that they look like the dark seeds of a papaya fruit, which are enclosed by an orange layer (i.e. “the orange boat”). It also seems worth noting that the informant correlated the prevalence of such jokes about Indians with the large presence of that group in the region where the jokes were told. Similar to dead baby jokes, which seem to arise during periods where there is an extraordinary number of births and focus on infants, such as during so-called “baby booms,” the prominence of these sorts of Indian jokes, which seem somewhat mean-spirited like their dead-baby counterparts, may be a counter-reaction by another competing cultural sub-group, or perhaps the dominate culture itself, which feels threatened by the growing presence of the group that is mocked. This trend of portraying “the other” in a negative way, which has undoubtedly characterized the dynamics of the myriad groups of immigrants that have arrived to the “melting pot” of America as well (particularly during the peaks of immigration), thus carries over the frustrations—economic, cultural, or otherwise—of one group with another into the realm of that group’s folklore, which its members share with one another.

Folk Speech- Sicilian-American

“Face levata” (Sicilian dialect)

“Cleaned face”

“Putting on a straight face”

The above item was learned by the informant most likely from his grandparents, between the ages of 9 and 12, perhaps while they were talking to his parents in Sicilian dialect, and using the phrase to describe someone. According to the informant, this folk speech is used in “any circumstance” in which a person is hiding their true feelings, such as “withholding their criticism” or “hiding their disdain”; when they are, in other words, “putting a good face on, or pretending.” The informant considers this phrase a “useful and clever way to express an interaction between people,” particularly when others who are around cannot understand the meaning of the phrase because it is Sicilian.

To capture the meaning of this piece of Sicilian folk speech, I use the more familiar phrase “Putting on a straight face” since it seems the best rendering of the phrase with an American equivalent. However, as the latter seems most typically understood as the concealment of negative feelings with more of a neutral face or disposition so as to comport oneself as being “alright” when this is not really the case, this may not fully encapsulate the meaning of the original if, as the informant states, it may also describe a person who is doing even more—namely, “putting a good face on.” Accordingly, this possible additional meaning must be taken into account in considering the phrase, as it is unclear to what extent “clean” and “straight” express the same notion in their respective phrases. That being said, I agree with the informant that the item is “useful and clever” since it represents an easy and succinct way of conveying what may be a rather complex social dynamic.

Proverb- Thailand

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“Hen Chang Kee Yaa Kee Tam Chang”

“See an elephant shit. Don’t shit follow an elephant.”

“Just because you see an elephant shit doesn’t mean you have to shit as well.”

The informant states that he learned this proverb from his grandmother while very young, maybe 6 years old, at home. He would use it “to teach little kids that you don’t have to follow your friends” and to teach in general that someone should think that “something is good or bad on their own,” without worrying about “whether somebody else is doing it.” This proverb, according to the informant, is usually “meant for bad action,” and means that “before you follow somebody you should think whether what they are doing is good or bad.” The proverb is a “good” one because it allows someone, especially a kid, to “visualize or understand the abstract thought easier.”

This Thai proverb seems to me to be quite similar to the proverbial question “Would you jump off a bridge if all your friends were doing it?” which most Americans are familiar with and were probably told in childhood by an authority figure such as a parent or schoolteacher to undermine the worth of conformity (as with the behavior of one’s peers; i.e. peer pressure) for its own sake. As it is often assumed that Eastern cultures are more collectivistic than the individualistic West, I find this proverb interesting in that conformity with the actions of others is spoken of just as, if not more, harshly than the American equivalent I have provided. Both use uncommon and extreme examples to make their point, though it is only in the Thai version that we find the repeated vulgarity “shit” which is likely to seize one’s attention, especially if the proverb were directed toward a child.

Interesting as well is the proverb’s use of “elephant” and the specific Thai word meaning “shit” which, according to the informant, are both remnants of older Thai culture—the word for “shit” no longer used often, if at all, and the elephant as a symbol of a less industrialized Thai past. Whereas one would likely see nothing particularly antiquated in the image of a person jumping off a bridge (most likely because the bridges one envisions are works of very modern and sophisticated architecture) that is furnished in the alternative version, the image rendered by this Thai proverb is distinctively old, and perhaps on that account, more provocative and likely to get its point across. Moreover, insofar as it also serves as an ode to, or memory of, the past cultural life of Thailand it is very much a piece of folklore, as that term was originally understood.

Prank: Hospital Pagings

In his third year of medical school, the informant, a medical doctor for nearly 50 years now, states that he learned the prank of calling the hospital operator to page (back when paging on the loudspeaker was the primary way to reach doctors, since there were no beepers or cell phones) made-up doctors, whose names were taken from a medical term (this could be “the name of a body substance, enzyme, secretion, or whatever”) or the name of a medical syndrome, which may or may not have been actually named after a real doctor who identified it. Three examples of doctors—supposedly, attending physicians—whom medical students might have paged in the hospital, given by the informant, include: “Dr. Billy Ruben” (after bilirubin, a product of bodily processes and bile pigment), “Dr. Kleinfelter” (from Kleinfelter Syndrome, and the doctor of the same name who first described it), and “Dr. Marfan” (again, from Marfan Syndrome, and the doctor who first described the ailment). In the page, these prank doctors “would be given a real place to call to, like ‘4 South’ .”

The informant claims this prank was “like a tradition” played and passed down by many of the older, 4th year, medical students to the 3rd medical students who were in the first year of their “clinical clerkship” (clinical exposure to patients), and less frequently by interns who were in their first year out of medical school. The prank would be played most often on weekend nights at the hospital when the medical students (or interns) were on call, since the pranksters “didn’t want the attending staff or faculty,” who were less likely to be present in the hospital at those times, “to hear the pages.” These pranks would thus really only be played when most of the people in the hospital were “people who really didn’t understand what was going on like weekend visitors, non-medical personnel, and perhaps nurses” though the informant states that the latter group “might know” that the pages were pranks. Finally, the informant stated that he thought these pranks “were very funny at that time like the other medical students.”

In my opinion, the most interesting aspect of this prank is that its effect does not at all depend on, nor would it necessarily be enhanced by, a moment of realization for those upon whom it is played. Presumably, if nobody in the hospital from the operator who is doing the actual paging to the casual weekend visitor or janitor ever understands that the “doctors” who are being paged actually don’t exist (or at least not as attending doctors of that specific hospital), the full effect of the prank seems to remain intact. Here, the division that is represented, as in many if not all pranks, is between those who have the prerequisite knowledge, which here is the medical knowledge possessed by the prank’s perpetrators, the medical students (the insiders), to understand that what is going on is actually a prank, and those who lack such knowledge (the outsiders) and accordingly are not aware that anything other than the normal business of the hospital is taking place.

This specific prank, however, seems to set itself apart in that those who understand the prank seem not to care whether, nor even wish, “the others” find-out that they have been duped. In this case, there doesn’t need to be any moment when the pranksters inform their targets that they have been pranked; rather, the satisfaction primarily consists in the fact that the medical students are more knowledgeable, at least in medical matters, than those who lack the same background (which may even be nurses, as the informant relates) and are able to delight in the expression of this specific kind of superiority (a superiority of knowledge) which is embodied in the prank, and more specifically, in nobody ever realizing that they are being pranked. These hospital pagings thus constitute a very specific form of prank, “codding,” where the prank serves the purpose of enforcing exclusivity and special knowledge in a community, which here is the hospital, and everybody inside of it at the time of the prank.