about those little stories

[kaigou]

For the sake of clarity, I'm going to use the term 'folklore' to refer to all the little stories -- from the mythos of a culture, its anonymous but oft-repeated fairy tales up to its attributed greatest works/stories, to the minutiae of daily life and the advice elders give the next generation. (In essence, there is no reason for anyone to say, "my culture doesn't have that," because if you look at the list and the previous posts, you'll realize that although you may lack in one area, no one lacks in all areas, thus, everyone is raised with some type of folklore.)

The phrase I used before was "cultural currency," speaking in terms of external-culture authors "purchasing" a cultural bit of folklore -- but that's actually rooted in thoughts I was having on a macroeconomic, or macrocultural, scale. If you look at the exports of Japanese anime and manga, a significant number of them are moving along lines of cultural exportation (and the same goes for Korean manga), and an awful lot of the biggest of these exported products also incorporate significant distinctively-Japanese elements.

It's even in the most innocuous of moments in a story, like the Christmas-moment in Kimi ni Todoke where the protagonist's father tells her, "don't tell me what you want, tell Santa!" The next shot shows her hanging a paper tablet -- that looks an awful lot like a prayer tablet -- on a branch of the Christmas tree. To me, as someone who grew up with "writing a letter to Santa", this is both logical and at the same time clearly and strongly influenced by the protagonist's culture. It's the same idea... but not. That's part of cultural currency, where it can have an unexpectedly large impact -- unexpected, I say, because the one within the culture probably doesn't even think twice about it. (I'd never think to explain to anyone that "telling Santa" means "writing and mailing off a letter", but if you were raised writing your request and hanging it on the tree, you'd probably find "writing and mailing off a letter" to be both familiar and strangely unfamiliar at the same time.)

Anyway, the ground material of all stories is, I think, ultimately our fairy tales and myths -- even when these are wrapped up in the fancy dress of modernity. Even the notion of "urban fantasy" is really just taking the "once upon a time" facet and putting it into this-world, rearranging the features of those fairy tales and myths, but not enough to make them unrecognizable. It's when that urban or contemporary fantasy is exported that it merges with the overall cultural import-export exchange, and thus becomes fodder for other writers' and readers' imagination, elsewhere. Yes, possibly at times divorced from its original ground, but still... if there are loan-words, there can be loan-stories, too.

Behind all those thoughts, though, I was thinking this: that while it's pretty unrealistic to think that there's some overriding authority designating which stories are acceptable for import/export, the fact remains that when taken as a whole, this is how other-cultures create certain assumptions or expectations. This is why the average Swede I met, even perfect strangers, wanted to know if I grew up in a house with a pool and drove a BMW to school -- because their impression of the entire assortment of teenage protagonists in American movies and television invariably had kids who turned sixteen and immediately got a flashy new car to drive, and who went home at night to big houses. Yes, there are exceptions to that stereotypical Hollywood teenager, but those are exceptions, and exceptions don't impact the cultural stereotype, which is created on an amalgamation of the most common presentations. To see the deviations and exceptions requires the audience explore at a deeper level, and that's not always possible, feasible, or even of any real interest.

The upshot is: whether Japan realizes it or not (and it seems many companies do, when you think about the marketing used), its folklore is a major stream of its economy. You might even say entire industries in exportation are riding on the back of this exported folklore: the rage for wedding kimonos to hang on the wall, for chopsticks and teacups and rice bowls, for the notion of wabi-sabi decor, and even those stupid bedsheets with [chinese] characters that don't make any sense because the designer didn't expect anyone to actually be able to read it, silly. The market that exists for these things exists, in some part, I think, to the stories exported by that culture, which laid a groundwork.

This is far beyond simply anime and manga, mind you, though I'd say Spirited Away carries a huge chunk of the current story-export process, in terms of major Japanese folklore. Prior to that, though, there were samurai films and big robot movies and before that, stories and art and reports brought back by people who'd visited. If the first exported folklore was 'about' Japan, in the past fifty years it's become 'by' Japan, but otherwise it's not a major break in continuity.

I was thinking all this around the time I'd started looking for more Korean manhwa, because frankly, I wanted to see some other folklore. The presentation of Japanese folklore -- depending on source, of course -- sometimes starts to feel a little, erm, packaged. Every culture has its formulas, of course, and while I'm sure there are some who are constantly charmed by the quaintness of "everyone dresses traditionally and goes to the festival" -- just as I'm sure there are non-Americans who have a similar reaction to seeing/reading "everyone watches the Independence Day parade and then picnics during the fireworks" -- the fact that I'm seeing another culture's stereotypes doesn't change that all cliches do, eventually, bore me to tears. I have no more inclination to watch another Hollywood "poor girl gets makeover and wins rich boy" story than I do to watch another Japanese "let's all have a cafe for cultural day" story.

The problem, of course, is that I can't read hangul -- it's not like Japanese, where I can at least get a crude sense of things by parsing any kanji in the text -- so I'm limited to the output from scanlation teams. Fortunately, they seem to be as diverse as the manga teams, so there's a lot to choose from. Not as much as Japanese -- which dominates the scanlation field as much as the international manga/comic field, it seems -- but still, it's not like there's nothing.

To find the "pretty much amounts to nothing," you have to go looking for manhua -- the Chinese manga. To compare: on one site's database, you can't search for totals but you can search by summary, so I searched for all summaries containing the word "the". The database contains 5983 series scanlated: 369 of those are manhwa (Korean); 76 are manhua (Chinese), which leaves 5,538 Japanese series scanlated. Another site's database tracks Asian comics regardless of scanlation status; in that database, roughly 44,300 titles are Japanese, 900 are Korean, and 400 are Chinese.

The bottom line? If you have any interest in the export-import of Chinese folklore in tales/myths, you might want to try wuxia, because manhua-wise, it just isn't there. For an even more blunt version of the same, I search by the genre term "supernatural", which is effectively code for "cultural folklore" -- the demons, monsters, heros, and myths. Stories like Pahanjip or Bride of the Water God or Gegege no Kitaro or Nurarihyon no Mago or even the folklore you'd find embedded in retellings like Gekka no Kimi or Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

And... well, not much. 792 total: 709 manga, 75 manhwa, 8 manhua.

---

Somewhere in there, I segued into thinking about imperialism and the destruction of another culture's folklore by conquest or infiltration -- but then, as I kept digging for Chinese folklore-infused manhua, I started wondering whether it's possible to turn this imperialistic-style destruction on one's own culture.

And I started thinking, maybe that's why there's such a dearth of Chinese folklore exported, because the Cultural Revolution knocked the ground out from under a lot of the oral folklore. In the stories I've read by Chinese (modern) authors, there's a remarkable lack of folklore -- and what there is (by the broadest definition I'm using, here), is mostly related to, well... not to sound too bleak, but a lot of it seems to be related to basically "how not to end up with the authorities looking at you as a suspicious person." What kinds of music you shouldn't play (Western composers), which colleges are considered "better" for someone who wants to advance, the things you say and don't say if you want to keep getting along and not get in trouble.

Now, granted, some of the stories I've read -- like English -- are memoirs and/or fictional recitations of life in the middle of, or directly after the conclusion of, the cultural revolution. But other authors I've read were writing after Mao's death and more recent. Possibly one of the few jackpots of little-stories usually swirls around New Year's, but that's about it. Finding a whole genre of folklore-influenced, little-story-laden, fiction is... well, there certainly aren't any stories like Bride of the Water God that I can find (scanlated or not), and there sure as hell aren't any Gegege no Kitaros, either.

Which really sucks, because if we had an equal number of each of the types of Asian comics -- Japanese, Korean, Chinese -- with only a few exceptions, I would spend the majority of my time reading Korean and Chinese. But for Chinese, it's just not there.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not lumping Taiwan and PRC together -- I do know they're different -- but it seems as though the influence of the Cultural Revolution did stretch. That's my best guess, at least; after all, it stretched its hand down to cause unrest in Hong Kong, too, and that area was ostensibly an economic zone then-managed by Great Britain. (And I seem to recall hearing the tensions of the cultural revolution also made an appearance, here and there, in Kuala Lumpur, too. Hrmm.)

It only takes a generation to really undermine the cultural folklore, because these are predominantly stories passed from adult to child, whatever the relationship. So if the adults stop telling the stories for any reason -- especially if an entire nation of adults stop telling the stories -- there's no recreating that experience of subliminally absorbing the folklore. That experience is lost, and in a self-inflicted situation like the Cultural Revolution, it might be lost irreparably -- the same way so much is lost for continuing generations of Saami, for whom a wave of missionary outsider zeal did about the same thing, silencing nearly an entire generation of adults within a very short period of time. It's probably safe to say this is true of a huge number of conquered indigenous nations, but China is near unparalleled, I think, in that its change was self-inflicted. I mean, Russia attempted a break with the past, but it doesn't seem to have gone quite so far as Mao, in terms of almost literally uprooting major chunks of its folklore and tossing them out.

So the grandparents stop talking, the parents don't get the full extent of the folklore, and the next generation is raised with a new set of folklore. Yes, a new set, because we can never -- I think -- not have folklore. If we reach a vacuum or a chunk of outdated information, we fill it with something new or update the advice (though perhaps with the addendum of "back in my day..."). The result is that the next generation has a full plate of folklore, but it's a radically different folklore from the grandparents, and that, I think, can create a bizarre pseudo-cultural barrier right there, just as much as there's a subtle but definite cultural barrier between my Southern-ness and, say, a friend from Idaho.

It's not impassable, but it's something we don't always notice; we tend to assume we speak the same language and know the same history, so our culture is the same (because we're ignoring/unrealizing the interplay of 'regional' in there, along with 'gender' and 'race' and 'religion' folklore-influences, as well). But when it's in the same family, man, that's rough -- because family is supposed to be, for most people, the most common demoninator. If you don't have much in common with others, you at least know you've got shared history with your family -- but significant folklore-breaks like conquest, or something like the Cultural Revolution, can destroy that shared history, leaving you only with the illusion of shared folklore.

And then along comes the generation of great-grandchildren, who'd really like to recapture that lost folklore, but their grandparents are aging (and never really heard much of it at all, anyway) -- and the great-grandparents, the last mouths of that folklore who were raised in it themselves -- are gone. What little is captured is only an echo, and prone to questions of 'accuracy'. As if folklore was ever meant to be accurate! But worse, to me as a storyteller, is that such recapturing destroys the regional: if you can't recreate what people did on X holiday, then you borrow from someone over there who tracked down that folklore.

Eventually, the absence of extensive folklore means everyone's borrowing from others to create complete sets of folklore, and the regionalism is destroyed. Doubly so if we're getting into the realm of cultural anthropologists, some of whom I've read debating over whether this story or that story is "true" or whether it's a personal variation or a regional anomaly. The rich fabric of myriad folklore little stories is gone, replaced by a thinly-spread recreation.

What's worse is that so many of us (as evidenced by the replies to previous posts on this topic) see "folklore" as nothing more or less than "old stuff" or "stuff old people say" or even "superstitions that no one really believes". We ignore the wealth of new folklore we're developing -- from when/how it's okay to open a door for a lady, to proper cellphone etiquette (with "being suspended" replacing "seven years of bad luck", I suppose) -- and thus whether we're within a colonial, conquered, or self-inflicted cultural gap, we'll say, "we have no folklore, now" and discount the fact that folklore is never static, but always evolving.

I'm going to stop here because I've got other stuff to do, but I'll tell you where these thoughts led me, and we can hash it out in comments: the end-point of these thoughts is that perhaps the process of immigration and acculturation led the majority of Americans, over the past two-point-five centuries, to believe they must discard other-place folklore and adopt the new-place folklore... but as we consider folklore "old stuff" and discount newly-incorporated stories as folklore, perhaps our massive immigrant nation set aside what we'd left behind (either right away or as a process of acculturation), but dismissed all we were picking up to replace what we'd left behind or set aside.

The result: the majority population/privileged culture of the US -- white people -- don't realize there really is a white culture, and that this has nuances that off-set it from American culture, and that under that, there is most definitely a white folklore, as much as there are regional and familial folklores.

Maybe this might be one way to look at folklore, as a framework to get a better grasp (and come to a better awareness of) this 'white culture' that those on the inside have so much trouble seeing. Maybe if we see it as a collective of little stories -- old and modern -- then we can come up with a way to take ownership and pride, rather than appropriating other cultures as though this could fill some kind of perceived (but nonexistent, I say) 'gap' in our own folklore, or worse, declaring there is no such thing as 'white culture' at all, and declaring national culture to be indivisible and equal with racial (or even regional) culture. There is a thing as white culture, but with the issues of acculturation, immigration, imperialism, colonialism, and -- bluntly -- indenture and slavery -- the general 'white culture' has grown accustomed to seeing itself as the pure default, instead of understanding itself to be distinct, and valuable as something distinct.

Maybe I'm too optimistic in this, but I wonder if this major aspect of US racial/regional demographic (white people) were to see itself not as the "default baseline" but as "yet another racial sub-group with identifiable, if sometimes shared or overlapping, folklore", whether this might be a step in the right direction. That instead of saying, "you [immigrant, minority] need to acculturate to us [who are the measurable standard as default]", knowing each has culture/folklore might gradually move people towards seeing their cross-folklore positions as the meeting of two different minds, rather than as inferior who must ditch the superfluous as part of acculturating to the superior's [lesser, default] folklore.

Hmmm. Dunno. Just a thought, really. Okay, a bunch of them.

Comments

[hollyberries]

Re: Chinese folklore & the Cultural Revolution, because that's the only thing I can talk about with personal experience - one thing that always shocks me is that when I go looking for the little stories, or when I ask, most people are dismissive. They simply don't care. There are some from my parents' generation who've wholly rejected them, because they were, to quote 'poisonous and engendering imperialism'. And it's hard to believe that, because cultural submission and folklore are surely completely different things.

The result is that I hear a tonne about the same myths, over and over again, or history taken as folklore, because there's very little else to tell.

[kaigou]

The result is that I hear a tonne about the same myths, over and over again, or history taken as folklore, because there's very little else to tell.

That's exactly what I meant about the recreation process -- it's how you get such unending sameness in any colonialised or conquered cultures. When I went looking, as a kid, for Cherokee stories or Chickasaw stories after learning about the Trail of Tears in my grade-school class, it was like there were only four stories/myths for both nations, and repeated over and over. For that matter, the same myth would often be represented as Cherokee in one book, Chickasaw in another, and even Choctaw in a third, and even my child-brain could see that this couldn't be entirely accurate. Even then I knew that language couldn't be the only differentiation between the three, so why would the stories be exactly the same (and so few of them)?

I know far better now the process by which a vast collection of folklore was reduced to this barest minimum... but the worst part, I think, is that the message this sameness inadvertently creates is that there's no real difference, no real reason, no real value to be gained by digging any deeper, as if the overall culture can be reduced to just these few stories, and thus there's nothing to be gained from looking harder. That's a really sad (and erasing) message created, seems to me.

[dogemperor]

Speaking as one of those folks who has ancestry in an indigenous culture that lost a lot of its traditions via conquest and trying to keep from being deported forcibly to Oklahoma (ironically enough, in my case, Cherokee) pretty much my family essentially had *one* story left (about my ancestors who managed to escape the Trail of Tears and essentially hid out as "black Irish" for the next 100 years or so). That, and we'd hit Cherokee, NC just about every year being told the "family story".

In our case, we not only had the whole "invasion and death march to Oklahoma" thing but a lot of folks of Cherokee descent actively passed themselves off as "black Dutch" or "black Irish" or "Travellers" in order to prevent being deported--and this meant in a lot of cases they actively abandoned culture or never had the chance to learn it. (In my own family, this was additionally compounded by the fact my mother joined a Bible-based cult (which condemned literally everything not part of white, Southern, "religious right" culture as being overtly Satanic) and attempted to recruit most of the family afterward.)

My grandpa kept the "family story" (which eventually was vindicated by my sister as not being a familial urban legend), pretty much my uncles (now both deceased, along with my mother) and the younger folks in my generation on down have been essentially "recapturing" things--in our case, it's been a case that we've been doing a lot of relearning about one of the cultures we came from and where the family has *tried* to maintain some ties to. (In this case, I was lucky to find copies of James Mooney's writings of Cherokee folklore--which even at that point when he recorded it (at the insistence of tribal elders) in the 1880s was diminished, but a lot of stuff had fortunately been written down in what amounted to grimoires in the Sikwayi syllabary so there WAS still some older stuff to go by. A *lot* of that stuff has since been lost as people assimilated.)

That said--the only reason I knew where to FIND a lot of it is because my family *did* keep some minimal connections to the "old country" and I managed to grow up at a time where there was a renaissance in interest in First Nations folklore in general; my mother's generation on up still had very much a stigma about admitting one was of First Nations descent (no matter that she and one of her brothers, and my grandfather, darn near looked like they just stepped off the Qualla Boundary and even I've had people comment on how I look obviously of some First Nations descent despite the fact I'm pale as hell). And a lot of it is lost for good, and my generation is pretty much integrating things into a larger narrative.

Surprisingly, some of the old traditions did survive--mostly mundane stuff, like women being more of the boss of the house and stuff on herbal remedies and such. Not so much the supernatural folklore, though, unless you talked to the oldest members of the household (and even this was coloured by a lot of Scots-Irish Appalachian folklore--which ITSELF has been influenced by Cherokee folklore, and Scots-Irish folklore, and African-American folklore). And what was left of that...I had to sneak around and ask on that without my mom knowing because she'd go apeshit (this is one reason I am deeply pissed off at dominionists; a lot of family traditions in our case got lost or only learned from grandparents and great-grandparents thanks to my mom going into full-out "God Warrior" mode, and even some stuff we did follow we had to keep hid from my mom till she recently passed).

[kaigou]

I interviewed an old friend for my thesis (on nonprofit fundraising and native nations) and when we were talking about family history, he made my jaw drop with this bombshell-fact of which I'd had no idea: that most of the tribal members had to walk, sure, but his family were actually quite wealthy. They didn't walk the Trail of Tears; they rented a steamboat to take them up the Mississippi. I must've laughed myself silly for about five minutes, for the way he said it, in this kinda quirk-of-the-lips bet-you-didn't-expect-that dry delivery. Buried under his jokes, though, there was a lot of sadness, because his grandmother had married a very religious white man, and decided that she'd become white... and the family history -- outside the little bits here and there -- were not just forgotten but actively rooted out and squashed. Only in her last years, as a widow, did she apparently relent and start to open up about her childhood and her memories of her parents and grandparents. Even now, my friend's sister has been trying to learn Choctaw, but it's a language no one else in the family (other than late grandmother) ever spoke, so... it's hard going, to recapture that.

And it doesn't help when I said something about learning multiple languages as a child being a route to more easily learning languages as an adult, and my friend just casually mentioned his first language was actually Japanese -- because the state had taken him away from his parents (he was a child during the forced urbanization movement) and put him with a foster family that was Japanese. My only guess is that the idiotic state CPS person probably assumed, hey, black hair and tannish skin, they all look alike, right? He didn't return to his own family until he was four or five, and by that point... I'm sure you can guess the damage done, in terms of folklore and culture, among many other things.

Honestly, though, if I could back in time and remove any single influence from the development of this country, it would be the missionary movement. It's also the one thing I absolutely patently ever refuse to see as positive are missionaries of any stripes, because I've seen too well just how much damage those fanatics can really do to a culture's integrity. It's sickening to me that anyone thinks that could ever be okay.

Meant to add: the honest folk I've known of Southern stock (or just younger and less tense about it) are more likely to admit freely that being Southern means having some part Scots, some part Native, and some part Black. Period, end of sentence: because the mountains were inhospitable enough to outsiders that anyone seeking a safe place to hide would be welcome. That may sound contradictory, but hey, that's part of the wierdness of the entire mountain regions of the South, and not just KY/TN. Most of my ex's family, and CP's ex's family, and plenty of parts of my own family, are of, shall we say, 'dubious' origin, with just enough genetic markers to make you realize that an awful lot of Native neighbors probably slipped into hiding amongst their white neighbors. Not just to avoid the Trail, but all the waves of native-aimed destruction that came after it. A lot of intermarrying is gonna happen, with stuff like that going on.

Not saying everything was pleasant, but I guess if the choice is to be eradicated by the government, versus marrying into (and assimilating with) neighbors who accept you, then maybe for many people it was better to have the choice, to be able to say you gave up your history for the sake of peace or intermarriage with respected neighbors, rather than to have no choice at all and lose your history anyway.

But again, if the people you marry into don't carry with them a sense of their 'own' group-culture, then the end result is still a major loss of folklore and the replacements lack the same depth. Maybe equal breadth, but nowhere near the same depth.

[dogemperor]

As strange as it sounds, I've run into the same thing in a different cultural context (in my own case, the scraps of Cherokee and Irish Appalachian culture our family had (and my generations's desire to learn about them) versus my mother who had joined a "Jesus Camp"-esque cult (and hence felt they were Satanic and "polluting"), was from a generation that still had a stigma on it, who didn't like most of my relations...and was the family matriarch).

Pretty much what my family had left for a long time was the "family story" about how one of my ancestors escaped from the Trail of Tears (which a lot of THAT had been lost; my sister eventually vindicated this and found not only the whole story but what clan we'd technically be part of) and, well, trips my family made to Cherokee, NC in a desperate attempt to keep SOME sort of cultural pride going (it wasn't so bad starting in the late 80s-early 90s, but before that it was like a lot of reservations in that they'd have people in Plains regalia doing pics and "Genuine Indian" stuff made in Hong Kong and a lot of tourist-trap stuff that wasn't part of the real culture).

[kaigou]

One thing I loved about Georgia's school system -- and this was back in the 70s, mind you! -- was that the state history included very frank discussions of the wrongs done to the Civilized Nations and the damage done by the Trail of Tears. For years I felt a little odd that when people did mention the Trail, that I seemed to be the only person (thanks to Georgia) who was aware that white spouses were also forced to go along on the Trail, having effectively "become" Native in the eyes of the government -- which meant that the impression that it was just "force the Indians to up and leave" was so very, very wrong. Much more like "split the entire culture of Georgia down the middle and destroy the remainder for grief of what's been lost." There wasn't a family or region unaffected, and even those white families left behind (like my mother's father's family) retained grieving records of the friends, neighbors, and even relatives who'd been lost or killed during that time and afterwards, because it's not like the govt stopped there.

On the other hand -- I say with my cynical hat on -- there is nothing that gets a Scots-American fired up quite so fast as injustice perpetrated by the govt -- anger at such is practically bred into us and force-fed to us from birth, due to the way many of us came to this country -- so it's also possible that many Southerners, especially Appalachians, see anger for the Trail of Tears and adjunct events as just more fodder for railing against government tyranny in fine familial tradition.

before that it was like a lot of reservations in that they'd have people in Plains regalia doing pics and "Genuine Indian" stuff made in Hong Kong and a lot of tourist-trap stuff that wasn't part of the real culture

This is the part that made me think of Georgia's state education, because I distinctly remember being tested on what kinds of houses members of the Civilized Tribes lived in, and they sure as hell weren't teepees! The result was that I always looked with no small amount of disgust on classmates who dressed as Indians for Halloween (or worse, Disney representations of Indians), or whatever other mass-produced generic-Indian version I ran across. Georgia had already burned it into my brain that "those" (mass-produced, Hollywood & Disney) indians were, well, whatever they were, but "real" indians were nothing like that. (Okay, so it took me a little longer to find out there were different types of "real" indians, but at least I never fell for the indian headdress deer-shift dress hoopla.)

(Hrm, speaking of which, congratulations on finally getting a chance to enjoy your dancing shoes. Long overdue, I say, and I hope your shoes are very shiny and you did a whole lotta fancy high kicks in celebration of the rest of your life in true freedom. If not, I did some dancing for you, all the same.)

'Modern' folklore

[(Anonymous)]

This has reminded me of a book of Canadian folklore I read as a child which scared me silly by ending with a selection of urban legends.

While leaving me with a somewhat strange idea of the general scariness/horror level of folklore, it certainly ensured that I've never thought that folklore only consisted of *old* stories.

Kat

[kaigou]

...from overhead, they could hear a skritch, skritch, skritch from something scratching the roof of the car...

OH YEAH.

Man, urban legend ghost stories always got me just as badly as legend-ghost stories, and possibly moreso because the urban kinds of stories had things I knew where present in everyday life: cars, microwaves, old swimming pools. Potential for scariness everywhere!

Which just means that I think the kind of exposure you get to stories, as a kid, also influences your perception of 'folklore' -- like if grandparents tell you something (ie old wives' tales) versus what your peers tell you (urban legends). Seeing how most of my cousins were older, and they would sometimes repeat the same stuff my grandparents said, I guess I put grandparent-stories in the same category as peer-stories (in terms of immediate-ness), so I grew up with a sense that just because something was old didn't mean it wasn't still true.

Then again, the more a kid reads, too, the more the kid's breadth of folklore will stretch... which is yet another reason I think exposure to international fairy tales and myths is of immeasurable worth. It really helps a person grow up with a sense of cultural values, both in themselves and in seeing the value in others. A subtle way to learn respect, maybe? ...while having the wits scared out of you, in some cases. Heh.

[dogemperor]

Indeed, indeed...and I think that even urban legends and stuff can be a bit of local folklore, sometimes stuff that reaches into the larger mainstream.

In my area (Louisville, KY) we had the legend of the Waverly Hill Sanitorium (which was a former TB sanitarium that also was used as a state nursing home before it was shut down) and how it was absolutely haunted as all get out. (I've been there--I can agree there's something that is *not* good juju there) The stories are rather elaborate--that it was used to house insane people when it was a state nursing home, during the TB sanitarium days that they had a "body chute", etc.

Till very recently (I'd say, oh, the past ten to fifteen years or so) this was a very word-of-mouth thing talked about in the area. I think the first time it got any sort of real publicity was when a local megachurch threatened to tear the thing down and build a 900 foot Jesus on it (!) (yes, we do have local issues with our local God Warriors (tm) trying to attack local dark folklore areas, as you'll see) and a group of people worked to buy up the property to preserve the "haunted sanitarium" as a historic landmark.

Of course, now they do tours of the thing and it's now nationally famous as "one of the most haunted areas in North America"--but it was from a lot of local folklore.

Same goes for a long-abandoned railroad trestle somewhat "nearish" where I am now (the Pope Lick Road rail trestle)--lots of urban legends told (when I was growing up) about "goat-men" and supposed Satanic rituals (this was admittedly during the era of "Satanic Panic") and occasional cases of kids getting hurt or even killed trying to see the "goat-man" or the "devil worshippers". Basically it was our own local version of a "Mothman" type legend.

Again, we had local "God Warriors" actively trying to buy out the area to destroy the source of the local dark legend (in this case, the very Bible-based cult my mom was a member of)--again, the community stepped in and saved the local landmark, and now the area of the railroad trestle is protected as part of a future "greenbelt" of parks to be established around Louisville. And yes, the legend did spread outside of Louisville, thanks to a low-budget film and later retellings of the legend online; it's also a spot for "haunted tours" locally (under safe supervision, of course).

[troisroyaumes]

This is going off on a tangent, but a manhua series that might fall under what you're looking for is Ravages of Time, which is a massive retelling of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with Sima Yi as protagonist.

I wonder if your supernatural manhwa counts might not be an underestimate because I've found that the folklore-based stories tend to not get scanlated as often, probably because the words are harder to translate. (By the way, Dokebi Bride might be up your alley if you haven't come across it already.) Also, you can't discount the fact that a lot of the current manhwa scene is dominated by webcomics at the moment. I think these are slowly starting to find their way into scanlations. If you don't mind looking at an untranslated series, Miho's Story is about the gumiho (for some reason, gumiho have been popular this year) and is beautifully drawn to boot.

ETA: Also, I can't comment on the Cultural Revolution and its effects, but I think you're right about the reasons for white U.S.ians being unaware of living in a white culture.

[kaigou]

Ravages of Time -- already about halfway through! It's slow going, though, because it's a lot of history jampacked in there, and history I didn't grow up on, so shortcuts tend to trip me up and I have to rethink who-is-who. Dokebi Bride is right up there with Seirei no Moribito in terms of a nearly textbook-academic portrayal of shamanism, which is really quite rare (and since shamanism in Asian pop culture is CP's focus, I tend to be on the lookout now, to pass along good titles to him for reference). I just wish the author of Dokebi Bride would hurry up and get back to writing it, because it's been on hiatus for almost two years now, sob. I don't mind untranslated as long as it's Chinese, which I can muddle through slowly but a helluva lot better than I would ever manage with Korean. Though I have considered finding anyone on my flist who's bribeable by any means necessary and knows Korean, so I can read the rest of Ban Hon Sa. It's complete, but only scanlated halfway, and appears to have been dropped.

*checks link* oh, man, it's gorgeous... and it's in Korean. *cries* I swear, sometimes it pisses me off that my university was limited to so few languages, compared to where CP is currently going, which offers Korean and Vietnamese along with Mandarin and Japanese (and uncountable others, as well). Okay, so looks like yet another goes on the list of "must figure out how to bribe a Korean speaker into translating for me" -- I'd do everything else! Scan, clean, edit, typeset, if it'd get me a chance to read these other stories!

about the reasons for white U.S.ians being unaware of living in a white culture.

I think it's an intricate topic and one that deserves a whole host of posts, really, but I have this feeling I'm onto something in terms of the way immigrants tend to discount/dismiss old-world stories as something that belongs to "over there" (little stories also being significantly anchored in sense-of-place, a point I haven't really emphasized) -- but in the American process, there weren't really any "here" stories to adapt in place of the old. Instead, it was only newly-developed (in terms of things like technology and customs) that took the place of things like superstitions or holidays or whatnot.

For example... it's not uncommon for Americans to treat most holidays as though they're all invented by Hallmark, as most of our holidays actually were, and some pretty recently -- Mother's Day, Father's Day, President's Day, Thanksgiving, Veteran's Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and seeing how Valentine's Day only reached its apex of popularity in the Victorian era, one could say that's a somewhat modern/ized holiday, as well. The oldest Fourth of July parade dates from 1785, but the idea didn't really catch on as a regular thing elsewhere until the early 1800s or so. If holidays are a major source of cultural conveyance, it says something that the remaining holidays are judeo-christian -- Easter, Christmas -- and that may be why we may discount our holidays as not "old enough" to have any major cache of continuity. (That's why, I think, Americans adopt other-culture holidays so readily, like St. Patrick's Day and Cinco de Mayo.) The lack of cache means we act as though those holidays "don't really matter," not realizing that these holidays can be (relatively) new, even corporately-created, and yet they've still become a huge facet of "being American", with regional elements that can color how we participate in each.

Anyway, I can't even say that new colonials (pre-US) really 'adapted' the existing Native folklore, since most of our history is a bloody record of doing our best to eradicate indigenous culture and folklore. Although we still have a folklore (that's mostly cobbled together from a variety of sources/times/places), I think this cobbling history tends to create the impression that there isn't really a "true" American folklore/culture, that it's some kind of big gap (outside of the most general patriotic nationalistic kind of folklore/mythos) -- and when you add in the racial tensions and histories, you get even more of a hot mess of assumed 'gap' of culture/folklore.

Perhaps it's also that of the people who came to America who chose to come here -- or came here with little to no intention of going back (even if some did, still, they didn't arrive with plans to return) -- that the process of 'coming here' means 'leaving things behind' and that includes 'identity via folklore' ... whereas those who came unwillingly, as slaves or to work off debt/crimes*, or those who came with intention of eventually going home (as many Chinese men had intentions of doing so) would hold onto what they had of other-culture folklore. Partly perhaps to facilitate returning to it easier (having never truly cast it away) and also in defiance of those who'd say that being in America meant they had to give up everything: the little stories along with their dignity, integrity, even their names and religion and language. What we shake off willingly, we lose a lot faster (obviously) than what we cling to as part of our identity.

Hrm. This is probably also the reason that much of my family/regional folklore retains such strong British overtones in stories, customs, even architecture and phrases -- because the majority of Scots who ended up in Appalachia did not do so willingly. They were fleeing a country that would shoot them on sight for being Scottish, so the goal was to find somewhere they could hide, be safe, and then have the freedom to be themselves (which included their Scots identity) -- the goal was not to cast off the old, but to find a way to safeguard it. Even if that did mean living in the most inhospitable, unfriendly areas of the Eastern seaboard where you can't grow a damn thing other than pigs, and to consider notions like insulation and indoor plumbing to be newfangled notions resisted until the mid-70s. Not that I have anything against that part of my family, mind you, just that I do like to wear shoes. And have a washing machine. And decorate my house with something other than last year's newspapers for wallpaper. Fffffttt.

* The whole work-off-crime thing is actually a running joke for me, after living in New England. I had a coworker once who, for whatever we were talking about, found it necessary to inform me that her family came over on the second Mayflower. (I had no idea there was more than one, but apparently there was, and apparently it's a hotly contested thing to prove which one you came over on, like anyone outside the descendants really gives a flying rat's ass.) Not to be outdone, and thinking the woman was a twit anyway (and a pretentious one, at that), I informed her just as seriously that my family came over with Oglethorpe on his first trip. Ah! Respect blossomed! We were fast friends!

I never had the heart to tell her who Oglethorpe really was, or what exactly it said about my family that we were first in line on that first trip of his. (Incidentally, that article appears to be somewhat revisionist, because every history I've ever read or been told, including family history, says the exact opposite.)

[troisroyaumes]

Oh yay, I'm always glad to find someone else reading Ravages of Time. I'm also about halfway through (thanks to being really, really behind on reading the translations) but I've probably ended up rereading the first ten volumes about three or four times to try to keep all the characters straight. I was compiling a character guide for a while, if that's of any help.

I was actually planning on translating Miho's Story anyway; just need to get around to it on top of the million other projects I have plans for. >>; In any case, I'm very amenable to bribes. ^^

[kaigou]

A character guide... OMFG YOU ARE A GOD. TOTALLY. *clutch doc tightly* It almost makes sense, now!

Well, I probably couldn't build you anything from over a distance, but if you need a more efficient pantry or closet, I could probably design it for you. Aaaaaaand that's probably pretty wierd as bribery, okay, okay. Sigh.

[dogemperor]

I'd even go so far to say that there isn't just a white folklore and white culture (that most folks don't see as a "folklore") but probably multiple "white folklores"--I know the folklore in, say, the Northeast or Northwest US isn't the same as in the Southeast US (and particularly the rural Southeast and Appalachia).

I'd even bet a lot of the "cultural pissing wars" ARE in part due to the fact we have multiple "white folklores" (a big one being among rural Southeast folks, probably extending into part of the Midwest). Just my own two pence, though.

And no, folks don't tend to think of living in a distinct "white culture" (if anything, I do see an awareness of a Southern white culture as distinct from the majority white culture (seen as a "northern" culture), but not in the US in general.)

(I'll also admit that, compared to the rest of the US, KY/TN is...weird :D)

[kaigou]

there isn't just a white folklore and white culture (that most folks don't see as a "folklore") but probably multiple "white folklores"--I know the folklore in, say, the Northeast or Northwest US isn't the same as in the Southeast US (and particularly the rural Southeast and Appalachia).

I'd say yes and no -- the distinctions of NW or SE or SW or whatever are regional, but that doesn't mean there isn't a core set of shared beliefs/stories/ways that we might be able to identify as cohesively 'white'. Thing is, with the advent of television and movies (and especially given that both push a white-culture much more heavily than any other), those regional differences are slowly disappearing. Some areas, like rural or strongly-identified urban areas (like New York City), might be hold-outs, but for the most part, it seems as though we're homogenizing.

Which makes it even more ironic, to realize we're losing our regional distinctions while people continue to claim that there's no "white culture" or "white folklore" -- well, what exactly is doing all the homogenizing, then? Our potato salad recipes?

[dogemperor]

Oh, I definitely agree there's homogenisation going on--you have to go pretty deep into Appalachia anymore to hear the stories about how some of the folks there are supposedly descendents of Bonnie Prince Charlie's army (there's a bit of Appalachian folklore that after Bonnie Prince Charlie was routed that his army--and some say Charlie himself--escaped to Appalachia and hid out in the woods before the area was officially "opened up" to white settlement), and stuff is blending in quite a bit--hell, I remember not TERRIBLY long ago that NASCAR was below the Mason-Dixon and hockey was above it and never the twain shall meet (not even in states like KY where they couldn't make up their damn mind in the Civil War).

And yeah, that's why I specifically mentioned *rural* (and it's much stronger with older folks, at that)--a lot of the "distinctives" go out the door once you get into cities. (Or, one could argue, go into other "white cultures" too--there IS still a rather distinct "horseowner culture" that tends to show up in Lexington but not so much in Louisville. Then again, Lexington is where all the horse-farms are, and "horse culture" there is more white upper-class culture, so YMMV).

[kaigou]

you have to go pretty deep into Appalachia anymore to hear the stories about how some of the folks there are supposedly descendents of Bonnie Prince Charlie's army

...or just head to North Georgia, as well, or any other place where the descendants have scattered -- since I grew up on those stories, too. (Well, I grew up on the amused retelling of the rumors of such stories, while the retellings of how Those Damned Campbells* cheated, lied, stole and double-crossed the MacGregors out of everything And We Will Never Forgive Them was taken very, very, seriously... because who cares about some pretender when you've got a centuries-old blood feud to get on with?)

Horse-owning culture, heh. Family legend has it that my paternal grandfather's family raised horses, but I don't think they were racehorses, per se. Then again, it's not like it ever looked like there was much else to do in Jonesborough, or maybe I have that impression only because the only relatives I ever met in & around Jonesborough were as creaky as floorboards and older than the dirt under the foundation stones for the porches. I mean, honestly, I swear some of them were alive when Jesus was in kneepants.

( * And then I had a Campbell roommate, to whom I never repeated the family whispers because, well, how backwards to suspect someone simply because of their name! Just having the name doesn't make one a thief... until the day she moved out of the apartment, and stole half my CD collection and some of my clothes. ON THE OTHER HAND... and then to add insult to injury, I had to eat crow with Gramma for thinking I could play fair with a Campbell and not get burned for it. Le sigh.)

[maire]

You had a Campbell roommate and there were issues with family over the fact? I had a Campbell friend once, and I still remember my grandfather teasing me about it.

[maire]

"I wonder if this major aspect of US racial/regional demographic (white people) were to see itself not as the "default baseline" but as "yet another racial sub-group with identifiable, if sometimes shared or overlapping, folklore", whether this might be a step in the right direction. "

That's what I've been thinking for the last decade or so in relation to New Zealand. It started as a knee-jerk reaction of disliking the automatic assumption that Pakeha (New Zealanders of European descent) have a basically English culture and can be identified with the English rulers of the country in the colonial period. I hated this, because my ancestors were mostly Scots, who came here at least partly as a result of the Highland clearances. Being blamed for the actions of people who discriminated against my ancestors didn't make me very happy.

From there, I moved on to thinking that part of the problem with race issues is the idea that the majority is a majority. If we all viewed ourselves as smaller groups within one whole, advantaged and disadvantaged in different ways, we might be better at not discriminating against other small groups. And we might also be better at valuing the cultures of other small groups.

I know that some groups have it a lot easier than others, but I do feel there's a lot to gain from breaking down the assumption that 'white' equals a monolithic English-based majority culture.

(Of course, I say this, but I've also been known to scoff at the suggestion that Australia has good support for ethnic diversity because of measures its taken to support its Greek and Italian populations. So maybe I'm as bad as any of them. I'm trying to improve.)

[kaigou]

I know that some groups have it a lot easier than others, but I do feel there's a lot to gain from breaking down the assumption that 'white' equals a monolithic English-based majority culture.

If nothing else, it might be a path to teaching those in the formerly assumed-monolithic culture that they (we) have no right to assume the default status -- that an absence of culture requires we ask, "what culture?" instead of saying, "ah, it must be white!" The general presumption of culture on the part of most (US, at least, and possibly elsewhere, dunno) whites is that there isn't really a white culture at all, and that seems to be the root of a lot of the cross-cultural issues, too, thanks to that complete blindness to the power -- the existence, even! -- of that majority culture.