VHDG. The words of that debate made readers wonder because they saw that everyone had a point. But if we did not rely only on the text which only examined story types, the incident would not have been so "far from reality". The debate fell into silence and passed, but the theoretical and practical issues that needed a truly scientific and thorough answer to that noisy event were still open. If there was a theoretical perspective on folklore as something that exists, perhaps the debate would be more convincing to readers. Many researchers have begun to see that: While Thompson and those who are absorbed in lookup tables are only interested in folklore materials that exist in texts of literary value and that they are products of the past, other researchers believe that folklore still exists in the lives, activities, thoughts, and cultural behaviors of mankind. According to Tran Thi An, that reality requires a new research method.
That is the basis for the birth of the folklore research method from the performance perspective, placing narrative discourse in the context of the relationships between speakers and listeners, a research method that was popular in the United States in the second half of the 20th century and is being applied worldwide today [2, p.99].
Researching type and motif based on text is still a research direction with advantages and many advantages, accepted and developed by many researchers. However, outside the text there are still many things that contain the potential and foundation of a true folklore work. Compared to reading a text and modeling the words into formulas, studying folk literature works in actual performance still awaits many interesting things. On that side, there is both the source, the way and process of expression, and the reception and interpretation of folk literature works in the flowing life of current people. In the living context,
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Folklore exists as a matter of course, as a simple expression of human cultural life.
In general, the approach to VHDG folk tales through the textual perspective has had certain achievements but also revealed some shortcomings. Specifically:
1. The relationship between written VHDG works and real life has a certain difference. Many works, through the process of being turned into documents, over time, no longer have the power to "take root" in the life of a certain community. The unfamiliarity of the community with works considered to be their cultural capital becomes common in real life. The role of textualizing oral works is often misunderstood, elevated to the main, even the only, object of debate. Written documents cannot replace oral information but only have the effect of having a temporary position in certain circumstances. Because in the end, the vitality of VHDG works "still depends on words in communication" [104, p.411].
2. In fact, folklore is not only the past, nor is it only what lies still on the pages of books in the library, but it is also what still exists in today's life; still echoing amidst the noise of modern media are lullabies, songs, and stories told at night... The endless flow of folklore life from the past to the present is sometimes silent, sometimes noisy, but never stops. Therefore, it seems that the research direction of stories through documents is showing its powerlessness before many bustling and vibrant elements of reality surrounding texts that only have neat, silent words.
3. Current research theories mostly focus on a recorded moment of that flow (such as lookup tables based on texts, textual research with reference to cultural materials) and “seem to be retreating into the background and playing a secondary role” [3, p.99]. Many works and theses continue to expand and deepen in the direction of type and motif, but certainly, folklore requires much more from researchers. That is also the basis for another approach to folklore: folklore as a process.
1.2. Folklore research in context – new trends in the West.
1.2.1. Shifts in the definition of folklore
In science, the research methodology will determine the research object and if there is a new method and approach to the research object, it will contribute to creating something new, new and leading to creativity. Since the 1960s, folklore research in the United States has begun to change in approach. The first point marking the change is the redefinition of the nature of folklore . This change can be seen through the following aspects:
First of all, overcoming the way of thinking that has been ingrained in many generations of researchers, considering folklore as belonging to culture or literature, American folklorists have sought to prove that folklore and language have a close relationship. The next step, they seek to prove that folklore studies are different from linguistics in the argument: the language that folklore uses is the language of artistic communication , that is, the system of words and other related fields such as identity, values, origins, aspirations, ... of a group of people using it. Therefore, language in VHDG is the language of life, associated with
Folklore has an advantage over other social sciences and humanities in the discourse of everyday life; while language is still considered an abstract system of signs or a cultural category, folklore has the ability to fill the gap of language in communication. Dell Hymes has reinforced this way of thinking with the notion:
Linguistics has the capacity to construct normative models for texts and study them from a syntactic perspective, but studying texts as discourses requires working methods and insights that only a field like folklore can provide [105, p.707].
Thus, with the view that folklore is a discourse in life , scientists have expanded the boundaries of the linguistic element in folklore to have a basis for determining the focus point. However, Dan Ben-Amos believes that defining folklore is a difficult task and requires a lot of effort. Because it belongs to both the field of art (unlimited creativity) and the field of culture (limited) and the definitions often fall into describing folklore as a static, tangible state. To overcome that, he proposes to understand folklore as a communication event :
Storytelling is also the story itself; therefore, the storyteller, the story he tells, and the listener of the story are all related to each other as components of a continuum, which is the communicative event" [105, p.218].
The recognition of this concept will have the effect of changing the concept of genre division because the scope of folklore is expanded beyond language. It is not a projection or reflection of reality but is considered as a field of interaction. And he also has a new concept of folklore with a simple saying
simple but contains a change of approach: “folklore is artistic communication in small groups”. That is, a small group of people, face to face, in the same situation.
From the perspective of the recipient and the community that nurtures folklore, Roman Jakobson asserted: "The existence of a folklore product only truly begins when it is accepted by a certain community, only what this community accepts exists in it" [105, p.29]. According to the author, for a folklore work to exist and develop in the cultural life of a community, it must be accepted (remembered or known by many people) and approved (accepted and frequently retold). Therefore, when studying folklore, do not forget a basic concept: preventive criticism of the community (that is, stories that the community does not accept have no practical value, or are imported, or are historically eliminated). In addition, starting from language, he conceived the nature of folklore (a specific genre or work) as the relationship between "langue" (language) and "palore" (words, speech).
Like the “langue”, the folklore work is outside the individual and has only a potentiality. It is simply a collection of certain norms and impulses, an outline of a living tradition that the performer enlivens with the embellishments of personal creativity, just as the owners of the “palore” do with the “langue” [105, p.33].
The task of contemporary folklore is to examine the artistic system that creates folklore works in a certain community - a village, a district, an ethnic group. Sharing the same point of view with Jakobson, V. Propp is interested in the field of performing folklore works in the community. He believes that the performer
The performer is not a re-presenter of his own work, but he is not a re-presenter of someone else's work either. He does not repeat word for word what he has heard before, but adds to the work changes that he himself has created: "The performer's personality, his own preferences, his outlook on life, his capacity, his creative talent play a significant role (although not decisive)" [134, pp. 282-283]. This shows that the re-creation at the level of artistic speech in the process of telling or performing a folklore work is an important characteristic of its nature. If we study folklore without ignoring this nature, the work risks going astray.
Second, the shift in the study of folklore was due to the influence of cultural anthropology. Through the works of Bronislaw Malinowski and William Bascom, the concepts of “situational context” and “cultural context” were brought into focus and applied to a reconsideration of the definition of folklore. Context, which had been considered essential to understanding a text , was now seen as both the specific situations in which a text was composed or performed to attract the attention of its audience and the larger cultural systems of which the text was a part. These notions of context and its importance in understanding texts required a new level of analysis and shifted the attention of folklore researchers from function to meaning, from explanation to interpretation. Many researchers have also pointed out that separating the ancient stories (by textualization) from their native place, time and society that gave birth to those works will certainly create qualitative changes. “Social context, cultural attitudes, rhetorical situations, and individual abilities are variables that create distinct differences in the structure, text and texture of the linguistic product, …” [105, p.211].
In applying cultural anthropology, folklorists in the ethnography of speaking direction have re-analyzed the definition of folklore by reviewing the elements that make up a folklore repertoire. According to Dan Ben-Amos, in an article on fairy tales, "the purpose of the ethnographic method is to describe the full potential of storytelling and its realization in a given society" [104, p.342]. Accordingly, the study of fairy tales includes 03 elements: story teller , performance and context . In which, performance is considered an artistic method of information in which the teller openly assumes the role of a communicator with the listener. Meanwhile, Alan Dundes believes that in the past, the definition of folklore genre was just a way of classification, but now any folklore genre can be defined from 03 elements: texture : the language part, including the dominant abstract structure, which is often untranslatable; text : a variant or a single telling; and context : the specific circumstances in which an item (work) is actually used [105, p.508]. Different from the type of context recording as a footnote of the collection and textualization of documents, Alan Dundes believes that recording the context is necessary for each genre, but recording the address, time, name, and age of each provider is not recording the context, but such data is just the beginning.
Third, one of the influential sciences that contributed to the shift in folklore research is the theory of behavioral psychology in folklore. In an article on the psychological approach in folklore research [163, pp.670-678], Hasan El-Shamy argued that behavior is understood as the conditioned response of the human body to a certain external impact, which is completely observable and recorded. Direct observation is the most important accepted certification.
in behavioral psychology. Therefore, when applied to folklore research, attending and directly observing a storytelling session and recording the reactions of the narrator and the audience will help the researcher understand the psychological changes and the meanings of the reactions from both the narrator and the audience. Hasan El-Shamy calls on folklorists to pay priority attention to the folkloric reactions themselves (the act of telling, the act of creating belief, the act of singing, the act of using a proverb, or the act of dancing) and the related socio-cultural factors before continuing to study the folklore repertoire itself (folktales, beliefs, folk songs, proverbs or dancing). To this end, he introduced a concept called “folklore behaviour,” which notes the direct connection between behavioral factors such as motives , contexts (cues), responses , and reprimands in the performance of a community’s folk tradition. By applying these principles, research has established observable or quantifiable relationships between the stability and continued development of any folklore repertoire or its disintegration or disappearance.
With the view that folklore is a process, the study of folktales is basically based on the achievements of linguistics, cultural anthropology and behavioral psychology. Through these foundations, folklore works have been examined with different perspectives and orientations. Specifically as follows:
1. Starting from the need to redefine folklore, researchers have found that the nature of folklore is closer to language than literature. From a pragmatic perspective, folklore is considered a discourse; a story told is a narrative discourse. If considered a discourse, storytelling must be placed in a communicative event, an artistic communication in a small group. Folklore is essentially an outline of tradition, an “impulse” and