War Eagle

Background: Informant is a middle-aged woman living in Seattle, who went to Auburn University. She told me this story on the phone. 

Informant:  I don’t really get it, but there’s a story about the War Eagle at Auburn…the mascot is actually the tiger, but The War Eagle (they have a great Vet school there and also rehab bird of prey) flies at the start of every game. Starts at the top of the stadium and lands in the center of the field, with 90,000 (yes, really) fans yelling Waasaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, Eagle, Hey! It’s kinda cool actually.

Thoughts: It’s interesting to hear folklore from universities, especially because universities and schools can get so intense about their traditions. Even at USC, people think that the mascot is Tommy Trojan, but the real mascot is actually Traveler the Horse. It almost feels like another “in-the-know” piece of information that you have to be familiar with the school to know and not the commoner would know. It reminds me of the “Fight on!” Being so common and known among all USC students and alums, but to someone who isn’t familiar with USC as an institution, having someone scream “fight on!” At you would be jarring. 

The Devil is the Smurfs

Background: The informant was raised east of Los Angeles by a mother who was a practicing Jehovah’s Witness and was very active in the church. The informant was and is not religious herself, and her father was not a member of the church either. This was told to me in person.

Informant: I wasn’t allowed to watch the Smurfs as a child because my mom said they were demonic… but I don’t know if that’s folklore, that’s just my childhood.

Thoughts: I’d never heard of anything like this before, but I feel that anything that is viewed as demonic even though it isn’t specifically stated to be is very interesting to me. Looking into it, it also appears that this wasn’t just isolated to my informant and her mother. I found a book called Turmoil in the Toybox, written by Phil Phillips, who claims that many childhood books, shows, and toys have a satanic and demonic presence that are supposed to “program and influence the minds of our children towards the occult and witchcraft.” The show The Smurfs was included in this book, being branded as “undead corpses,” as they are “blue with black lips,” and the Lake Hamilton Bible Camp spreads the notion that children who have Smurf toys are more likely to be attacked by vampires. For more, there is a brief excerpt of the originally 90-minute long video interview between Phil Phillips, and Pastor Gary Greenwald included in this article:

Emmett, Neil. “‘Turmoil in the Toy Box’ Revisited.” Cartoon Brew, 23 Oct. 2013, https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/turmoil-in-the-toy-box-revisited-90147.html.

The Legend of Stone Money

Background: The informant was born in the Philippines to a Filipino mom and a white dad, and spent his childhood, from age 2 to 13, from 1966-1977. Yap is a small group of islands in Micronesia, of which he grew up on the main island of Yap. I was told of this legend over the phone. 

Informant: So, um.. when I grew up in Yap, the Yapese… they don’t have a written language. And so, when all, well indigenous peoples for lack of a better word, indigenous peoples without a written language have a history of oral tradition and in Yapese they were all referred to legends for the oral traditions. 

A very popular or well-known one is The Legend of Stone Money. So yap, as you may know, the island, is known as the island of stone money, and there are many anthropologists that have gone there and there was even a ted talk about the legend of stone money.

To give some background, stone money on the island of yap has monetary or currency value and the reason it comes up a lot with economists is that it’s a method of exchange but that you don’t actually… you can’t actually carry or give somebody stone money as they’re usually really large pieces. And, um, it’s very difficult to transport and so what it often then becomes is the ownership of the money changes hands, but the location doesn’t, if that makes any sense

Me: Yeah. And what classifies a stone as stone money? Is there a set size?

Informant: They can be huge… as large as 8-10 feet in diameter. They can be huge.

Me: Gotcha. How does one get it in the first place? Are there carvings or something?

Informant: Yeah, yeah. So stone money is actually limestone, of which there isn’t actually much found on Yap itself. Yap is a coral atoll, it’s not really volcanic, so somewhere inside the island there’s limestone as that’s what coral turns into. So the legend is, what the yapese decided many many years ago… they also have a history of sailing as well… but many many years ago the Yapese decided they wanted to go…. To sail to the moon. They wanted to go see the full moon. So, the full moon, as you might imagine, when it comes up on the horizon (you may have seen), imagine being on the beach in PayPay, and all you see perhaps in the distance are a couple islands, but all you see away from the beach is the sea and the horizon. When the moon comes up, it’s super spectacular, especially wen it’s low on the horizon. So imagine the moon coming up and 

The way that stone money came about is the Yapese decided they were going to go the full moon, they were going to sail to the full moon. People in Micronesia, particularly in the island of yap and the outer islands of yap are known to be incredible navigators

Small islands, Micronesia, and their primary mode of transportation is sailing from island to island using canoes. In the legend, Yapese men got together in their sailing canoes and decided to sail to the moon. Well the moon rises in the east, like the sun, and sets in the west, like the sun. They started off on their journey to the moon and as they followed it over the course of the night, because the moon was rising and setting, they were changing course along the way.

Where the moon set to them actually had them sail to the island of Palau. Palau is the closest large island to Yap. Completely different language, completely different culture, but the closest large island. The Yapese end up in Palau and the Palau are known for the “rock islands of Palau.” There are big, huge, walls of limestone that resemble the color of the moon. In order to return home and not be made fun of by the rest of the people, the men decided to quarry out disks that look like the moon. They’re not spheres, but they’re round since they see the moon as two-dimensional, but in order to carry them, because they were so heavy, they put holes in the center of disks so they could put a bamboo pole through the center and have two or more people carry them down. 

The size of the stone money also has some valuation consideration—the bigger the piece of stone money, the more valuable it is. I don’t know exactly how that value is calculated, but in the photos, you will see that there are varying sizes of stone money. 

The story board art tradition is from Palau, and not Yapese, but it depicts the Palauan version of the Yapese story of stone money.

Thoughts: It’s so interesting to me that the oral tradition in Yapese culture is still so prevalent even today. While this legend was something told to the informant when he was a child, he never read any script of this legend, and even when retelling it there are parts that the informant needed to pause to remember, and as he was retelling this legend to me there were moments that triggered other memories related to the original legend. Doing a little bit of research on the stone money legend doesn’t prove to produce much similarities to the legend I was told, and instead paints the origins of stone money as coming from a need for money in a society. The other version of the legend I found detailed an explorer who, similar to the story I was told, found himself off course when exploring, and found himself on Palau as well and carved disks out of the limestone. The details and the premise of the latter legend and the one I was told are still quite different, and it’s interesting to me that there are som any different versions that all share the same result—the origin and use of stone money in Yapese culture. To read the other versions of this legend, you can find them here: 

Barach, Paul. “The Island of Yap and the Idea of Money.” Medium, Mission.org, 25 Aug. 2016, https://medium.com/the-mission/the-island-of-yap-and-the-idea-of-money-9f570421d854.

Adamovich, Kirill. “Stones as Means of Payment: The Story behind Island of Yap Money.” PaySpace Magazine, PaySpaceMagazine, 11 June 2020, https://payspacemagazine.com/economy/stones-as-means-of-payment-the-story-behind-island-of-yap-money/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Yap%20legend,therefore%2C%20they%20became%20valuable%20materials.

Black American Food Tradition: Eating Black Eyed Peas on New Year’s

Text:

KJ: “So, basically, on New Year’s Eve every year, my mom does it in my house, but it’s a very common Black tradition, you make black eyed peas. It’s food, so you can put whatever you want in it, but the traditional thing is to put a ham hock in it, which is classic, Black food for holidays in general. At least my mom starts making them either the day before New Year’s Eve, or on New Year’s Eve, so it can marinate all day. You eat them on New Year’s Day, and it’s supposed to be good luck.”

Context:

The informant is a 19-year-old Black American college student from Montclair, New Jersey. She said that this tradition is common among Black Americans. KJ said that this food holds cultural significance not only because it’s traditional, but also because enslaved Black people ate it. Since black eyed peas and ham hocks were seen as undesirable foods, enslaved people were able to cook with and build a food culture around them. She said that Black people now consider these eating this dish good luck because it nourished enslaved people enduring oppression and violence.

Analysis:

 In his essay about the globalization of and continued imperialist legacy within Indian cookbooks, Arjun Appadurai wrote that “Eating together, whether as a family, a caste, or a village, is a carefully conducted exercise in the reproduction of intimacy… Feasting is the great mark of social solidarity,” (Appadurai 10-11). As is the case for many ethnic and folk groups, food can be an important means by which Black people connect to each other and to their histories. Familiarity with certain foods or food traditions like eating black eyed peas on New Year’s Day can spark recognition and community between individuals of similar backgrounds. Moreover, the food acts as a kind of tangible link to this group’s heritage.

Black American food traditions are specifically important because they symbolize the ethnic group’s history both of brutalization and of resilience. Enslaved people’s ability to transform the most undervalued ingredients, like ham hocks, into delicious food and common culture, which enslavers sought to strip Black people of, is a source of pride and an emblem of ancestral strength for Black people today. Many groups partake in good luck rituals on New Year’s Day. I think that this food is considered good luck because it nourished enslaved people through the horrors of oppression, so people hope it can sustain them through any hardships of the upcoming year.

Appadurai, Arjun. “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 30, no. 1, 1988, pp. 3–24., https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500015024. 

Proverb: “Marry a rich man. They all look the same in the dark.”

Text:

SP: “Marry a rich man. They all look the same in the dark.”

Context:

The informant is my grandmother. She is an 83-year-old woman of Ashkenazi Jewish descent who was raised in New York City and currently lives in Fort Lee, New Jersey. SP said that her mother said this to her when she was a teenager or in her early twenties. She got married at 23. Her mother was sharp-tongued, outspoken, and funny. They had a very close relationship.

Analysis:

Proverbs tend to be didactic, often conveying their message through metaphor. In chapter eight of Elliot Oring’s ‘Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction,’ F. A. de Caro writes that, “Nonmetaphorical proverbs communicate through a direct statement of a presumed truth that supposedly applies to a situation, rather than by invoking a poetic image to which a situation is compared metaphorically” (de Caro 186). This proverb is blunt and probably hyperbolic, encouraging women to marry rich men because they’re ultimately the same. I think that this saying can be interpreted as cynical and sexist, neglecting women’s abilities to be self-sufficient and encouraging them to sacrifice their happiness for material wealth. It intends to dispel women of illusions about men and love. However, this proverb can also be read as subversive (especially considering that my grandmother heard it at a time when women occupied a lower social position than now), encouraging women to be cunning and look out for themselves and rejecting the idea that women should worship their husbands. It also is an example of how wisdom can be transferred from one generation of women to the next.

         Proverbs are almost always concise and easy to remember. This one is memorable because it’s so blunt and it conveys a jaded point of view, but also because it alludes to sex. Because female sexuality was so taboo at this time, so I imagine that such an allusion—even if it’s euphemistic—would be shocking.