Synopsis
An international ensemble of folklore scholars looks at some varied ways in which national and ethnic groups have traditionally and creatively used imagined states of existence -- some idealizations, some demonizations -- in the construction of identities for themselves and for others. Drawing on oral traditions, especially as represented in traditional ballads, broadsides, and tale collections, they consider fertile landscapes of the mind where utopias overflow with bliss and abundance, stereotyped national and ethnic caricatures define the lives of "others," nostalgia glorifies home and occupation, and idealized and mythological animals serve as cultural icons and guideposts to harmonious social life.
Italian Canadian Luisa Del Giudice looks at the rich Italian traditions of the gastronomic utopia called Il Paese di Cuccagna, the Land of Cockaigne, "a mythic land of plenty where rivers run with 'milk and honey' (wine, beer, coffee, or rum), food falls like manna from heaven, work is banished, and no one ever grows old." From New Delhi, Sadhana Naithani examines the "prefaced space" that as India, colonial British authors imagined and passed on to readers in formulaic prefaces to collections of Indian folklore. Reimund Kvideland, of Norway, and Gerald Porter, an English scholar teaching in Finland, show how nineteenth-century Norwegian and English railway navvies (itinerant laborers) idealized their low-status occupations in song. In a second essay, Gerald Porter demonstrates through broadside ballad texts the role of caricatures of the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish in constructing "Englishness." Turks were among the "others" Germans demonized, as Tom Cheesman, who teaches in Wales, explains, in his paper on historical representations of them in German street ballads. Cozette Griffin-Kremer of France paints a sweeping picture of the landscape of the mind written and popular traditions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales built around bovine bodies, the human-cow partnership, and the mysteries of domestication, and finds there conceptions of transcendence of the human condition. Finally, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, a scholar who is now president of Latvia, explains the images of longing for idealized childhood homes married women, exiled by a patrilocal culture, expressed in Latvian folksong.