African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 609
exotica that may help European students of culture trace the stages of growth of human
civilization.
History
The curiosity is also recognizable in that collecting zeal, whereby the scholar sought to
put together everything he could find of the oral traditions of a whole people within the
covers of one volume or a few. Henry Callaway’s Nursery Tales, Traditions, and
Histories of the Zulus (1868) comes to mind, as do those catch-all collections of Hausa
lore by scholars like Schon (1885), Rattray (1913, in two volumes) and Tremearne
(1913). Subtitled An Introduction to the Folklore and the Folk, Tremearne’s work, in
particular, gives some evidence of the way this curiosity converged with a certain
condescension, which enshrined the concept of the folk as a (mostly) rural people, judged
unsophisticated or uncouth simply because they did not have the wisdom that Western
education supposedly confers. Although Alan Dundes addressed this prejudice in a
classic essay over two decades ago (1977), it is one that had a very good run in
humanistic scholarship and may still be very much alive in certain circles.
In time, however, this career of peregrine collectivism gave way to a more realistic
concentration of interest—identified with the growth of social anthropology as a
discipline—in the ways of life of manageable or fairly well-integrated ethnic or linguistic
communities. The study of traditional texts as literature may not have recorded
significant gains thus far, but the narrowing of the scholar’s focus somehow guaranteed
that the foundations were slowly being laid for the due recognition of the aesthetic
sophistication of those texts. The perception of the literary character of these texts is
revealed as early, indeed, as the mid-nineteenth century, when Bleek observed that the
“literary activity” of the traditions “has been employed almostm in the same direction as
that which had been taken by our own earliest literature” (1864, xiii). Bleek may, as we
have noted, be considered no more than a bemused amateur. But in the work of scholars
like Marcel Griaule, we soon move from an interest in the cherished traditions of a people
like the Dogon, to a recognition of the idiosyncratic articulation of it by their most
distinguished savant, Ogotemmeli (1948). This singular figure of the traditional wit or
artist was clearly the last to gain its freedom, thanks largely to the old view of “tradition”
as a body of knowledge handed down from generation to generation in virtually
wordperfect form and its bearers as largely uncreative conduits. Still, in the work of a
scholar like William Bascom, there is clear evidence, in the coinage verbal art (1955), of
a gradual shift from an obsession with the functional value of the oral tradition, to an
acknowledgment of its artistic sophistication.
This recognition of the artistry of African traditional texts was facilitated by other
factors. As scholars trained their gaze on ways of life within manageable societies, it soon
made sense to explore the relationships between various traditional forms as components
of a coherent system. Griaule’s appreciation of the complexity of Dogon thought
certainly gained much from his study of their games (1938a) and masks (1938b). This
integrative insight was to reach considerable maturation in the search for traditional
aesthetic principles guiding the artistic life of a people, amply demonstrated by the work
of Robert Farris Thompson. To that extent, the meeting in 1965 of scholars of various