Fieldwork in Folklore Studies

Guest Editor’s Introduction Chinese Folklore Studies: Toward Disciplinary Maturity

The historiography of Chinese folklore studies commonly traces the advent of the discipline to the Folksong Studies Movement (Geyaoxue yundong 歌谣学运动; (hereafter, FSM) of the May Fourth era (1910s to 1920s)1 (Chao 1942; 1943; Honko 1986; Hung 1985; Tuohy 1991). In his critical study of this movement, Wolfram Eberhard highlighted the underlying forces of nationalism and cultural awakening that re...

Folklore, Folklorism, and Synchronization: Preserved-Created Folklore in Israel

Hubble-bubble in Iranian Folklore

Hubble-bubble has been the most common device for smoking tobacco in Iran and its neighboring. It has a folkloric name in every region. Hubble-bubble consists of a glass pitcher or pottery at the bottom, a wooden body in the middle, a wooden or plastic tube attached to the body for puffing, and a censer at the top to put tobacco and charcoal. Puffing causes the charcoal to catch fire and the to...

Virtual Fieldwork

The morphological properties of genealogical and marriage alliance networks constitute a key to the understanding of matrimonial behavior and social norms, in particular where these norms have not been explicitly formalized. Their analysis, however, faces a major difficulty: the actual datasets which allow researchers to reconstruct kinship and alliance networks are generally subject to a marke...

The Scorpion in Muslim Folklore

In the dry zone between North Africa and South Asia scorpions have caught the imagination of nomads and sedentary people in various ways. First of all, venomous scorpions have long been considered as embodiments of evil, but also as protectors to counter the powers of other evil forces. This is reμected in beliefs, in pictorial representations of oriental art from early historic periods, and in...