Folk Drama

Abstract

Abstract:This article provides an overview of how scholars in the discipline of folklore have approached the topic of folk drama over the past one hundred fifty years, arguing that, despite relative neglect in the field, folk drama is a valuable window into culture and should be taken more seriously. I begin with nineteenth century ideas about ritual drama that stem from Sir James Frazer. I then discuss the growing emphasis on context that emerged in the twentieth century, including overlaps between ideas about folk drama, performance, and theories of play more generally. I conclude by providing a brief overview of the relationship between play, drama, and politics, and suggest that contemporary digital realms, such as YouTube, offer a new ecology of folk drama that brings traditional questions about actors, context, play-frames, audience and transformation to the fore in new and interesting ways. Keywords: folk drama; folk plays; ritual drama; playIn the Introduction to his book Rethinking Folk Drama, Steve Tillis writes, "given the nearly universal impulse toward drama, it might well be that folk drama can teach us something not only about particular cultures, but about humanity at large" (Tillis 1999, p. 11). Tillis's provocative comment certainly suggests the potential for studies of folk drama to mount a challenge to the humanities, but while the impulse towards drama may well be universal, scholarly ideas about and approaches to folk drama are not. On the one hand the term "folk drama" is an etic term used by scholars in various disciplines to encompass different ideas and applied to a broad range of performance traditions. As an etic term, it easily imposes frameworks of interpretations that are not necessarily grounded in local understandings. When used in non-western contexts, for example, the term imposes western understandings of drama on traditions that may be more profitably understood as something else, such as worship, sacred retellings, or a visitation by deity, thus drawing disparate performance traditions into the same interpretive sphere. Additionally definitions and understandings of what actually constitutes folk drama have changed over time and this understanding is contingent upon a variety of factors that, themselves, have evolved. Folk drama therefore has been applied to a wide range of traditions that may or may not be related, making it difficult to define and universal conclusions unlikely. Yet on the other hand as a vernacular cultural performance intrinsically tied to immediate social, political, and cultural contexts, folk drama offers insights into and transformations of society unavailable in other expressive forms. Folk drama temporarily invokes an alternate world in order to speak about and comment on the real one in aesthetically heightened ways, providing participants with alternate means of viewing and understanding both society and themselves. In doing so folk drama does not merely comment on the world but rather, in its own small way, transforms it.This article provides an...

Suffering in Medical Contexts: Laughter, Humor, and the Medical Carnivalesque

“…As noted above, there is a robust and extensive body of humor among medical professionals that is well-documented in both scholarly and popular literature. Physicians who work in teaching hospitals may perform various kinds of verbal speech play, including jokes, puns, nicknames, slang, toasts, funny personal stories, and other routines; they may also engage in practical jokes and pranks, poke fun at co-workers and administrators, and parody work situations through song and dance routines on YouTube and other media (Gabbert 2018). This body of humor functions temporarily to transform dominant frameworks of interpretation that assign meanings of sadness, grief, and failure to patient pain, illness, and death, thus shifting the actual experience of work-related suffering by changing its meaning.…”