Suitably chastened ...

Last year was rather grimly preoccupying for me, and most of my available mental time and space was spent dealing with fallout of family loss. It was a pleasant relief over Christmas, therefore, to find that I was thinking again about folklore projects and topics. I found myself thinking about blog posts again, and was looking forward to reviving this rather neglected blog. I hadn't got round to it yet, obviously, but was reassured that the folkloristic engines seemed to be starting up again.

I was even more delighted today to get absolutely right kind of folkloric fillip. Seven previous posts here (not consecutive, of course) were treated this afternoon to the same spam comment advertising the services of a traditional healer. Thank you 'Fatema Davis' for this [email address removed, but otherwise as posted]:

'my partner and I have been trying for a baby for over two years now, We were going to a fertility clinic for about 5 months before somebody at baby center told us to contact this spell caster who is so powerful, We contacted him at this email; babaka.wolf@xxxxx.xxx or Facebook at priest.babaka , for him to help us, then we told him our problem, he told us that we will conceive once we follow his instructions ,but after two years of trying we were at a point where we were willing to try anything. And I'm glad we came to Priest Babaka, Because his pregnancy spell cast and herbal remedy help us, and I honestly believe him, and his gods really helped us as well, I am thankful for all he has done. contact him via email: babaka.wolf@xxxxx.xxx or Facebook at priest.babaka if you are trying to have a baby or want your lover back. he has powers to do it, he has done mine'



It's not quite as beautiful as the healers' cards I used to find around London, but I'm glad cyberspace is filling a gap in my folkloric vistas.

And with that, I'm back.

Bee stings as a treatment for rheumatism

I'm interested in rheumatism, having seen relatives suffer badly from it, so I was interested to stumble accidentally across the following observations made in New Zealand in the 1920s/'30s:

'Speaking to an Auckland bee-keeper, he said that before keeping bees he had had rheumatics badly for many years. When he started keeping bees he got stung by them a great deal, and this soon appeared to have cured his rheumatics. He had lost it entirely.'

The source is Crook Frightfulness, by 'a Victim' (Birmingham: J.G. Hammond, n.d.), p.63. The book is a rather strange little memoir by a former rent collector who became convinced that he was being pursued globally by villains employing ventriloquism (amongst other things) to menace him. The less frenzied tone of offhand remarks like this one - exactly the sort of folkloric item one picks up in casual conversation - suggests they are rather more reliably related than all of his stories of corner-of-the-mouth insults.

A quick online search now reveals that there is some scientific literature on the subject, pointing to proper investigation of folk remedies. (A very brief scan suggests the scientific jury is still out, at best, but that might also highlight the attractiveness of the treatment as a folk remedy).

Dorson, Hospital, and Folklore Lived

I've been thinking a lot lately about Richard M. Dorson (1916-1981). Dorson was one of the key American folklorists after the Second World War, responsible for cementing the reputation of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Anyone interested in the early development of folklore in Britain should read his book The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), and the two-volume anthology he edited to accompany it, Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).
Dorson fought, above all, to establish Folklore as an academic discipline. He saw a university basis for the discipline as the way to ensure the training of new generations of folklorists. He was fierce in attacking 'fakelore', a word he coined to summarise 'the pseudo-scholar creating folklore for the mass culture', as he once put it. There's lots to argue with, to dispute, and to disagree with, in his conclusions, as well as in the positions he advanced in defending them, but his writings still burn as a passionate and reasoned championing of a marginal discipline that should be valued.
I was delighted to find that a couple of ghost traditions had attached to him. One is very funny (his ghost appearing in a dream to Henry Glassie to give him some important advice), the other is a deeply touching account of Nancy C. McEntire seeing his apparition. The stories are in Elizabeth Tucker, Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 51-53.
He'd already been on my mind, though. He was a clever fieldworker, and able to turn his clarity of vision onto his own situation. In 1972 he was hospitalised with arteriosclerosis, and underwent by-pass surgery. On his recovery he wrote 'Heart Disease and Folklore', about the procedures he saw in the hospital, and the folk medicine preventing such heart conditions. (It's reprinted in Readings in American Folklore, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 124-137).
I thought about that article a lot during a recent stay in hospital. I did observe a little of the changed folklore of nursing, but mostly I just lay there. I don't remember anything of the accident that laid me out, so I've renewed respect for Dorson's attentiveness on the ward. When he came out of hospital, he investigated folkloric mechanisms for managing stress and maintaining 'emotional equilibrium'. I wasn't in hospital because of any heart condition, but I was delighted with the concluding hypothesis of Dorson's essay. It's been a bit of an effort writing this, but now that I'm out again I'm happy to embrace Dorson's hypothesis fully: 'folklore lived, not studied, is the surest preventive of heart disease'.