Folklore and Oral Tradition

The Forager Oral Tradition and the Evolution of Prolonged Juvenility

The foraging niche is characterized by the exploitation of nutrient-rich resources using complex extraction techniques that take a long time to acquire. This costly period of development is supported by intensive parental investment. Although human life history theory tends to characterize this investment in terms of food and care, ethnographic research on foraging skill transmission suggests t...

Narrative Tradition In Early Greek Oral Poetry And Vase-Painting

Archaic Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BC exhibits visual narrative phenomena that are very similar to the verbal narrative patterns of traditional, orally composed poetry: in the poetry these are the familiar formulaic phrases and themes analyzed by Milman Parry and the ensuing train of oral theorists; in the art they take the form of repetitious iconography and recurrent composit...

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

Folklore and Medicine

Your education heretofore has been focused on the horizon which opens for the first time to-day, to fit you to receive training as entered apprentices of the mystery and art of clinical medicine and surgery. From now on you will come into contact with the raw material of our craft, the sick and suffering who seek relief within the walls of this hospital. It will be your duty and inestimable pri...

Sleep paralysis and folklore

Sleep paralysis is a relatively new term to describe what for hundreds of years many believed to be a visitation by a malevolent creature which attacked its victims as they slept. The first clinical description of sleep paralysis was published in 1664 in a Dutch physician's case histories, where it was referred to as, 'Incubus or the Night-Mare [sic]'. In 1977, it was discovered more than 100 p...