Estudos de Literatura Oral

Folklore, April, 2000 by Juliet Perkins

Estudos de Literatura Oral, No. 4. Edited by Isabel Cardigos and Dias Marques. Faro: Centro de Estudos Ataide Oliveira--Universidade do Algarve, 1998. 239 pp. Illus. $28.00 (surface mail) $30.00 (airmail). ISSN 0873 0547

Portugal, a country rich in folk traditions and oral literature, has until very recently remained somewhat isolated from international scholarship and under-represented in standard reference works, such as The Types of the Folktale. On the other hand, tempting as it must have been for Hispanists and Lusitanists to privilege Iberian material at the expense of adopting, for example, the Aarne-Thompson classification of folk tales for their own collections, such a decision did nothing to open up this material to a wider European and international context. Equally importantly, it did not allow comparative studies to take root and flourish.

Happily, such an inward focus, fomented perhaps by early twentieth-century nationalism and a certain competitive spirit between scholars of both countries, together with their political and cultural isolation during the long years of dictatorship, is now in the past. Symptomatic of the change in focus was the creation, in 1994 at the University of the Algarve at Faro, of the Centro de Estudos Ataide Oliveira, and the publication, in 1995, of the first journal in Portugal devoted exclusively to oral literature. Under the editorial eye of the Centre's Director and Assistant Director, Isabel Cardigos and Dias Marques, this annual journal, Estudos de Literatura Oral, has marked a real step forward in the integration of Portugal and its scholars into the internationalism of oral literature. The intention of the editors, set out in the first number, to make the journal a meeting place and a link for scholars, whatever their native language and area of study, is conveyed by the felicitous acronym, ELO ("elo" means "link"), an effective and welcome "mission statement" in itself. Apart from the quality and variety of the articles published so far, two editorial decisions have contributed to the journal's good reception: articles in languages other than Portuguese or English are accompanied by abstracts in both languages; and the full address of each contributor is given in the first footnote to the article concerned. These two measures facilitate easy communication between scholars of diverse nationalities and interests.

The current issue, no. 4, is comprised of eleven articles (in Catalan, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish) and eight reviews (in English, Portuguese, and Spanish). In "Espacios y Formas Rituales de lo Femenino en el Romancero Tradicional," Virtudes Atero and Nieves Vasquez draw on the corpus of romances from the province of Cadiz to examine the role of women in traditional ballads, from the perspective of their ritualised representation within the spatial contexts of both civilisation and the wilderness. The majority of women in the corpus are in a domestic setting, in charge of home and garden, leading enclosed lives with few excursions to the traditional feminine spaces of river and fountain, to wash clothes and draw water. The very small minority of wild women and mountain femmes fatales figuring in the ballads, and already the object of many studies, are examined by Atero and Vasquez as subverters of gender models, at times wielding weapons of the chase, at others carrying out typical feminine tasks of bed-making and cooking but only to devour the male rather than serve him.

The second of a two-part article by Patricia Oder de Baubeta, "Fairy Tale Motifs in Advertising" (Part One appeared in ELO, no. 3) is an enlightening and stimulating analysis that gives due credit to the creativity and imagination behind the use of such motifs. With plenty of illustrative material, she draws parallels between fairy tales and advertisements in general, showing how consumers can be manipulated by the techniques of fairy tales, which hold out the promise of happy endings and fulfilled dreams, even when the source material is parodied and subverted.

Two articles on child-centred oral literature, by Gloria Beatriz Chicote and Carmen Garcia Surrales respectively, allow useful links and comparisons to be made in this area of study. Chicote, drawing on a corpus of nursery rhymes gathered in the Province of Entre Rios, Argentina, looks at the determining factors of context and performance, taking into consideration the communicative functions of voice and gesture. Of special interest to her theme is the counting game "Los esqueletos," with its variety of hand and body movements imitating the skeleton's response to the clock striking the hours. Surrales draws on the traditional nursery rhymes from Cadiz, collected between 1978 and 1993, in which she distinguishes three main groups of song: traditional themes; reworking of the folklore of adults; and new themes and models deriving from the contemporary environment. She concludes, and it is to be hoped that her conclusion is still valid, that the children of Cadiz province have not yet succumbed to the lure of video games to provide their entertainment and world-view.