African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 297
interpretation. Consequently, the position of structuralist researchers, who tend to classify
myths as patterns of imaginative concepts, cannot be of much relevance. Because of the
dominating use of oral traditions, folktales, and myths as historical source materials, the
anthropological school of symbolism of the 1970s did not gain an important position in
German folkloristic studies either.
In critical analysis of African folktales, the studies of Thomas Geider (1990) on the
Pokomo in Kenya and Sabine Steinbrich (1997) on the Lyela in Burkina Faso are
presently the most substantial and comprehensive in German language. Geider, a linguist,
places particular emphasis on problems of translation, aspects of linguistic analysis, and
an extended and welldocumented corpus of case studies. In Geider’s discussions about
various approaches of methodology, it is clear that he favors a view of folklore as a kind
of ethnographic method, much like those employed by Michael Jackson, Thomas
Beidelman, and Ruth Finnegan. For Steinbrich, a central goal of her analysis was to
investigate the relations and borderlines of imagination and reality in folktales. She
questions how far the folktales can be considered as a reflection of the real patterns of
life, and thus authentic sources for the ethnohistorical reconstruction of a given culture.
She refers to the epistemological problems involved and rightly advocates a thorough
awareness of all cognitive aspects in anthropological fieldwork.
References
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