Monthly Archives: May 2019

Navratri

Nationality: Indian-American
Age: 18
Occupation: student
Residence: Austin, TX
Performance Date: March 14, 2019
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

Text: RB: Navratri is an Indian Festival, it’s like celebrated in India. It happens every November, and I think you know, it’s like whenever I wear those really fancy dresses and I’m like, “I’m gonna go dance.” I feel like you know that. But anyways it’s basically just a celebration of dancing and fasting, like a celebration of life. And it’s really good cause what you do is you go to this big dance hall or whatever, and there’s this music, it’s called Garba music. And you can search it up, it’s like very traditional music. And you just dance all night to it. And it’s like a celebration of life. Traditionally, it celebrates three goddesses in Hinduism. It’s like Durga, Lakshmi, and one other goddess. But, it just marks the start of a new season basically. The most famous thing about it is the dance style. So, Garba is a very famous dance style, it’s like folk dancing. But anyone can learn how to do it because it’s just repetitive steps in a circle over and over again. But that’s my favorite dance ever.

AT: Who taught it to you?

RB: My parents. My parents and my grandparents taught it to me. And sometimes they conform the dance style into competitions. People have like competitions with this style now, or people just do it for fun at like any event. It’s just a very big community thing in India. Especially if you’re, like, my type of Indian. Like, I’m Gujarati, which is like from the state Gujarat in India. And it’s originally from Gujarat. So if you see someone else from Gujarat you’re like, “Hey, Navratri, Garba…” It’s our thing. Oh, and my grandmother sewed my dress.

Context: RB is an Indian-American who lived in India during her pre-school years. She practices Jainism, one of the lesser-known religions of India. She frequently returns to India to visit relatives and continues to practice her faith and India’s festivals with other Indian-Americans in Texas. This interaction took place in a living room while we were both home for spring break.

Interpretation: Navratri is typically a nine day-long festival typically celebrated in honor of the divine feminine in India. Navratri is celebrated differently depending on where you are/are from in India, practices surrounding the festival existing in multiplicity and variation. RB mentioned that it was a time of fasting, while others who participate in Navratri see it as a time of feasting. While the pattern varies somewhat by region, generally the first third of the festival focuses on aspects of the goddess Durga, the second third on the goddess Lakshmi, and the final third on the goddess Sarasvati. RB mentioned the first two of these goddesses while failing to remember the third.

RB chose to share this festival with me due to the mere fact that it is her favorite. She holds it special because of the fact that it is specific to the region in India from which her family is from, and the fact that Garba dancing is a point of pride and community that her family and the people from Gujarat share.

For another interpretation of this festival, please see p. 2416-2419 of Stany Pinto’s “Communalisation of Tribals in South Gujarat” (Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 30, No. 39)

Mount Diablo

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: student
Residence: Walnut Creek, California
Performance Date: April 21, 2019
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Text: JC: The there’s a mountain near where I live called Mount Diablo, and there’s a story surrounding the mountain regarding how it got its name. Back in 1805, Spanish conquistadores were pursuing the Volvon tribe, or anybody who was resisting missionization. So the tribe entered a thicket, and they the spaniards cornered them. And the Spanish word for thicket is “monte.”

AT: Wait, what’s a thicket?

JC: A thicket is, I don’t know, trees and bushes and stuff, right?

AT: Ah, okay.

JC: And so the Spanish thought that they cornered the Volvon there, and that they were gonna capture them, but the tribe escaped in the middle of the night. So the story is that the spaniards named the it “monte del diablo,” or “thicket of the devil”, because of the native people escaping them. But then, the word “monte” got mistranslated by Americans into “mount diablo,” instead of thicket, because they did not know what “monte” meant. And so the name still lasts today. Even after that, people continued to make up stories about how the mountain got its name, because if you look at a picture of it, people are like, “Oh its peaks are devil horns,” or, “That’s where native people did Satanic rituals.” But none of that is true. And in the 1900s there were all of these newspaper articles speculating how the mountain got its name, but it’s really just because of that original event.

AT: Well is it possible that even that could have been made up?

JC: Totally, because the thing is, there is no primary documentation of it, so most of the information has been orally transferred. The reason I know about it is cause it’s right by my house.

Context: JC is a 19 year old history major at the University of Southern California. A resident of Walnut Creek, California near San Francisco and an adamant history buff, JC is well versed in a lot of local legend surrounding his famous and historically colorful place of origin. The exchange above took place over coffee when I asked JC if he knew and slang from the Bay Area. He gave me legends instead.

Interpretation: I think that this legend is significant due to the fact that it not only engages with the situations regarding the name of a place, but also the translation of a words across three different languages. Firstly, the fuzzy origin of the name of the actual place shows how easily different influences such as topographical features (devil horns), convincing oral tradition (the thicket story), and possibly even predisposed racists views (satanic rituals) can have on the understanding and belief of a place and its history. Additionally, this is a local legend tied to this one specific mountain. So, I find it even more interesting that part of the legend holds this mountain and the confusion around it solely responsible for the supposed mistranslation of monte into mountain instead of thicket. In this way, the “name origin” nature of the folklore surrounding the mountain provided a nexus for other “language folklore” of a similar topic.

Also, I like how at the beginning of this exchange, JC presented his version of the legend as the sole story associated with Mount Diablo that held any validity, only later admitting that other stories surrounding the site existed. Even so, he quickly dismissed them as rubbish. Only when I asked for proof that he had as to why his version was the most valid did he admit that there was no way to actually know for sure due to the lack of evidence. This folkloric exchange therefore provided an example of the way that people treat the folklore that they receive, and though the medium exists in multiplicity and variation, this demonstrated how people tend to hold the version that they heard first as the absolute truth.

For another version of this legend, please see p. 457-470 of Bev Ortiz’s “Mount Diablo as Myth and Reality: An Indian History Convoluted.” American Indian Quarterly Vol. 13 (1989)

Russian Joke

Nationality: American
Age: 60
Occupation: Regional Sales Manager
Residence: Frisco, TX
Performance Date: April 17, 2019
Primary Language: English
Language: Russian

Text: So my grandfather told me this joke that there were two old Russian guys driving through the forest. And, the guy in the passenger seat told the driver, “Hey, you need to pull over.” And the driver’s like, “Well, we can’t pull over, we’re not, we’re not where we’re supposed to be yet.” The passenger goes, “Look,” he goes, “I need you to pull over.” The driver goes, “But we’re in the middle of nowhere.” The passenger goes, “Look, I have to go to the bathroom. You have to pull over.” So, the driver pulls over, the guy gets out of the car, and he heads into the woods. A few minutes later, the passenger comes back to the car, and his pants are soaking wet. The driver looks at him and says, “What’s a matter? You didn’t make it in time?” He answers, “Nah, the wind was blowing in the wrong direction.”

Context: AT is a child of Russian and Italian immigrants that grew up in Queens, New York. He would spend the summers in Maine surrounded by dense forest and vast natural landscapes, with is Russian grandparents who insisted that he learn Russian so that they could converse in their native language with their grandson. He has been a fluent speaker ever since then because of their teachings. His grandfather used to tell him this jokes as they were driving through the forests during the harsh main winters. I was told this joke over coffee one afternoon.

 Interpretation: Jokes area very popular form of folklore that can take on different forms in different societies.  The use of punch-lines in the telling of jokes can be largely recognized as an American behavior, for a lot of cultures don’t do punch-lines, rather they just tell funny stories. I expect that this is the case here, for when AT told me the joke for the first time, I didn’t really laugh because I thought the punchline was weak. I expected that perhaps the punch line was funnier in Russian, but now I expect that there is no punchline, only a funny story.

This joke still employs the cognitive switch technique that all jokes share. It sets up something in the beginning only to turn it on its head by the end. The entire story builds the idea that the passenger needs to use the bathroom, and that he will wet himself if the driver does not pull over and let him go into the woods to do his business. However, when the passenger finally gets his chance, he makes a mess anyways, cognitively switching the joke on its head.

 

Funghi; Fun Guy

Nationality: American-Indian
Age: 19
Occupation: student
Residence: Rhode Island
Performance Date: April 14, 2019
Primary Language: English

Text: Question: What do you call a mushroom that likes to party?

Answer: A fun guy.

Context: SV is a freshman at the University of Southern California studying neuroscience. Befitting her scientific major, she remembers hearing this joke is biology class. This is one of her go-to jokes because, as she says, “I’m a sucker for puns, and that’s probably why I remember it.”

Interpretation:  Jokes are a very popular form of folklore, and can take on different forms in different societies. The use of punch-lines is a distinctly American behavior, and is employed in the joke above through the use of a pun. A pun is a joke exploiting different possible meanings of a word, or a joke that uses the fact that there are words that sound alike but have different meanings. There is still a cognitive switch going on, but puns resemble riddles in the way that they propose a solution to a seemingly impossible question and end up creating a magical transformation of meaning through the use of language.

In the example above, the participant is asked to link two seemingly unrelated things in order to derive an answer to the joke. However, the pun reveals that the answer was hiding in a play on words the entire time.

Blind Stallion

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: student
Residence: Dallas, TX
Performance Date: April 19, 2019
Primary Language: English

Text: So basically there was this cowboy, and when he was a little kid, he would go out onto the range with his father. And there was this wild herd of mustangs that was roaming at the time, and there was this one little foal. It was a black stallion foal, and he was like, “One day I’m going to get that horse, and I’m gonna ride that horse.” So he grows up and spends his adult life wandering the hills trying to find the same horse that he saw as child. He wants to capture it. So he finally finds the herd after like a year of wandering, and he starts following it around because he wants to figure out how to catch the stallion. He spent three days following the horse, and with each day, he figured out that the stallion what is the strongest horse, but it always stayed next to its mother. It stayed with the mother horse that the cowboy saw it with when he was little. So he’s like. “Okay, whatever, kind of weird.” But it keeps going. After the three days, he decides that the only way he’s going to catch this horse is if he shoots the mother horse. So that the stallion won’t follow her anymore. So he shoots the mother, which is obviously sad and awful, and horses start running away. But the black horse starts running in the opposite direction and acting wild and crazy and falls off of the edge of a cliff. And then that was when the cowboy realized that the horse was always blind, and that the only reason he was following the mother around is so he could get around. And when the cowboy shot the mother, the stallion couldn’t get around anymore, so he fell off a cliff.

Context: SH is a born and raised Texan studying psychology at USC. Her time in the south led her to be exposed to many different stories with western flairs while she was growing up. In regards to the tale above, she doesn’t remember who told her the story, but it has never left her mind due to the fact that, “It’s so fucking awful.” SH thinks its significance means, “To leave nature be because you don’t always know what is going on behind the scenes, and if you insert yourself into nature it might not go the way you wanted to because you just don’t know.” I was told this piece of folklore over lunch one afternoon.

Interpretation: Tales are recognized as fictional stories that are used as fun ways to entertain and teach lessons to one another. They can sometimes reflect values and teach important lessons on behavior and ethics, or they can simply be stories for stories sake. They are not supposed to be viewed as true and exist outside of the real world. They also like to use groups of threes in their plot structure, a definite tactic employed in the blind stallion. This tale seems to function completely as a way to teach lessons, for there is a lot to be learned from the horrible acts committed in the above story. I will note that the tale does remain entertaining despite the horrible ending, due solely to its shock value and ridiculous logic in how the main character goes about getting what it wants.

I think that SH was correct in that the blind stallion contains some commentary about nature and how people should leave it alone. I also think it has possible lessons rooted in the shying away from greed, impulsive action, and murder. This tale also contains the idea that SH brought up about things not always operating as they appear, and the ghastly consequences that can unfold when people convince themselves that they understand something that they really don’t.