Magic in Popular Narratives

Front matter

Modernity in Question Studies in Philosophy and History of Ideas 15

Jan Kajfosz

Magic in Popular Narratives

Chapter Four Narrative Folklore as a Colloquial Text and Its

The Status of the Represented World of Folklore as the Gente Marker asów a eet

Categorization as a Tool for Ordering the World T — ————— AE

Building a Cosmos Through Judgment and the Situational LOGIE ...:. cette retenti

6 Contents

Foreword

The book in reader’s hands looks at manifestations of magical thinking in everyday lives of denizens of Cieszyn Silesia (Teschen Silesia, Tésin Silesia) in the premodern era. In the book, I recreate the magical dimension of routine and habitual ways of perceiving and thinking about reality, and therefore of the magical dimension of conceptualizing and ordering reality during the premodern era by means of works of narrative folklore collected by local folklorists between the 1950s and the 1980s of the twentieth century. The book, which was published by the University of Silesia in 2008, is an attempt to recreate the magical image of the world shared by the broadest social strata of Cieszyn Silesia. It is also an attempt at finding an answer to the question of the role that magical thinking played in social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann 1989) in the premodern era.

When presenting a book dedicated to the English-speaking reader, we should first explain why in an anthropological study looking at magical thinking as part of social construction of reality, we choose to refer to relatively obscure region of Cieszyn Silesia, one of Silesian provinces, which constituted part of Habsburg’s monarchy since 1918. The Duchy of Teschen territory mentioned in contemporary anthropological, sociological and linguistic literature in English is known most commonly as the borderland. Works dedicated to Cieszyn Silesia typically focus on the study of processes that shape collective identities and processes of linguistic change, and the study and demonstration of the influence of national borders on these processes (Hannan 1996). The previous Duchy of Teschen was divided between two states in 1920: Poland and Czechoslovakia. During the years of the border crossing the area (lasting, with one break, from 1938 to 1945), the Cieszyn Silesia used to be a multi-language and multi-ethnic territory, which was a common phenomenon across the regions of Eastern Europe at that time. The territory was dominated by the population, which identified with the Polish language aside populations that identified with German or Czech and a population that identified with two or more languages simultaneously. The Czechoslovakian Poles who inhabited the Czech part of the former Duchy of Teschen are one of the luckier ethnic minorities of Central-Eastern Europe that managed to survive the Second World War on its territory and the following mass displacements of entire populations. The Polish minority exists in the Czech part of the Cieszyn Silesia to this day, even if due to assimilation, its numbers have dwindled.

Ethnic conflicts in that territory, which from the end of the Second World War took on a character of a competition between the Polish and Czech ethnicity (after eliminating and relatively marginalizing the German language), are the reason for the wealth of folklore materials collected between the 50s and the 80s that is almost unmatched. The motive behind these long term and intense ethnographic field studies conducted by the Polish Cultural and Educational Association in Czechoslovakia (PZKO) was an attempt to collect proof for the ethnically Polish character of the municipalities which, at the time of being inducted into Czechoslovakia, were mostly inhabited by populations speaking in Silesian-Polish dialect and identified with the standard Polish language. Under the guise of the official friendship between the communist governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia an unofficial Czech-Polish kulturkampf continued. It focused, among other issues, on winning domination over the narrative regarding the linguistic and cultural past of the area. One of the main tools of that struggle over the image of the past wielded by the local Poles was folklore studies focused on recording and documenting oral folklore of different genres. Thanks to that effort, today, we have very precise samples of the local, historical folklore at our disposal, which are representative enough to use them for reconstructing with great detail local models of life-worlds. For a long time, in ethnographic discourses of Central-Eastern Europe, texts of the oral folklore have been looked at from the perspective of aesthetics or the question of collective identities, but they could be treated as a relevant source for reconstruction of the magical image of the world of the premodern era, regardless of the fact that similar texts across Europe and including metropolitan cultures, were collected at the turn of an epoch that we call postmodernism.

Due to the fact that the folklorists living in the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia inhabited by the Polish minority - the so-called Zaolzie — focused on folklore narratives of the oldest generation of people living in the least urbanized areas, we may suspect that the materials they collected constitutes at least a partial representation of the premodern world, even if the storytellers themselves lived in an already modern, heavily industrialized, and urbanized country of the Eastern Block. The switch from premodern to modern world initiated by the industrial revolution did not happen simultaneously in all parts of Europe and did not encompass all social strata and all spheres of everyday life at the same time. Even if we were to connect the beginning of modernism with the industrial revolution, the change from the premodern to modern epoch had a form of a multi-dimensional evolution that, with varying speeds, took over different aspects of social practices. In the Cieszyn Silesia area, the premodern templates of culture held for the longest among the plebeian strata, mostly in respect to everyday life, and mostly those that did not require a lot of reflection, or verification. Cieszyn Silesia’s folklorists managed to collect an interesting material during times when the remains of magical thinking in its premodern form functioned at least among some of the members of the oldest generation of farmers and laborers as a natural way of spontaneous perception and interpretation of the world, while in other circles they have been already recognized as an element of ancestral tradition that is worth recording. Magical thinking as such has an obvious universal dimension (Sorensen 2007) that pertains to the modern and postmodern world, however, there are no more characters of the socially reproduced system of ordering of the world.

At this point, we must ask how it is possible for mutually exclusive paradigms that condition the perception and interpretation of the world to exist next to each other and do not lead to cognitive dissonances and conflicts. The answer could lie in the phenomenological theory of everyday knowledge proposed by Alfred Schütz (Schütz 1944). Everyday knowledge differs from scientific knowledge by not having the prerequisite of being consistent. It also does not have to eliminate contradictory views and attitudes. Not all its elements activate simultaneously, but rather interchangeably follow the changing circumstances, which repeatedly decide about the hierarchy of importance of the objects of our interest. On the plane of the everyday, the way of perceiving the world that fits one set of circumstances could be replaced by a different way in a different situation without the need for any revisions. The consistency of attitudes and beliefs does not constitute a necessity in this case, while interpretations, which within a reflexive overview would be mutually exclusive can, instead, complement one another within the sphere of spontaneously adopted worldviews. As an example, let us take a theater play, in which an actor playing the main protagonist is killed with a dagger and dies, while remaining alive to give another performance and, once again, "die" In the spontaneous experience of the audience member, one does not exclude the other and even within the framework of reflective view a similar contradiction does not have to be noticed and does not have to constitute an epistemological problem. Within the sphere of everyday life, the magical order of the world can exist besides the positivistic one, or any other order, as long as each of them finds use in specific circumstances. The magical order of cognition takes on the form of unobserved, tacit routine when new information corresponds with reference framework (or: background knowledge) to a point where there is no longer a need for a blunt legitimization.

In this book, we work with the notion of folklore as proposed by Peter G. Bogatyrev and Roman Jakobson (Jakobson and Bogatyrev 1980). As understood by these authors, the verbal folklore is a poetic text that exhibits a repeatable meaning structure that corresponds with aesthetic and cognitive habits (reference frameworks) of the members of the communication community understood as a more or less broad social environment. In that sense, folklore is a relative phenomenon, due to diversity of social environments and changeability of historical circumstances that are tied to patterns of fictionalization and perception, including evaluation and ordering of the world. In that sense, we could speak of historical folklore of a given territory, or a social environment and contemporary folklore, shaped by, among others, currently employed communication technologies.

As a source for reconstruction of the magical image of the world from the premodern epoch, we used only those texts of historical folklore that have been recorded on tape and after minimal editorial treatment published in magazines native to the researched area and placed in local press. We use narratives, which from the perspective of their “senders” take the form of memories about past, important events and not memories about how their ancestors interpreted the world. One problem related to use of these sources was the fact that we are dealing exclusively with narratives recorded by local folklorists, most often without any information about the social context or circumstances surrounding the recreation of those narratives. However, the relative lack of context for the used texts does not constitute any major, methodological problem, due to our stated goal, that is a reconstruction of premodern mechanisms of cognitive ordering of the world, which are independent from any concrete situation, because they operate both within the framework of spontaneous perception of phenomena and within the boundaries of their secondary interpretation and reflection.

Inspired by the classics of anthropology like James G. Frazer, Marcel Mauss, Edgar E. Evans-Pritchard and others, we refer to the concept of magic only to alleged dependencies and processes that, according to testimonies of witnesses, work independently from whether they are being registered by human consciousness. The object of our interest is the implicit, direct performativity of phenomena, different from performativity that is mediated by the human consciousness. In that sense, we have excluded from our field of interest any situations, in which the sign has an impact on the world in a verifiable way, because the observer does not differentiate it from the reality which it represents. We can study only that which is made available by the folklore material we work with. We are not primarily focused on rhetoric, speech acts, or reification, nor circumstances, in which that what people perceive as real becomes such in its consequences (Thomas and Thomas 1928), like in the case of divination (representing sign) becomes fulfilled, because people have identified it with a future state of affairs.

This book is an attempt to reconstruct the premodern, cognitive habitus that is employed in routine situations of everyday life and which in the light of intensifying domination of modernist templates of culture has gradually become noticeable, transformed into an object of reflection, gaining a status of something suspicious, doubtful, amazing, or even amusing, a status of an object of ethnographic interest. We are undertaking the reconstruction of patterns of seeing and interpreting the world used independently from a situation and relevance of phenomena that are of interest to a man. We are looking at patterns, which are the rule within the framework of a spontaneous perception, fictionalization, and reflective thinking.

Chapter One deals with defining the category of “colloquial.” It is an attempt at answering the question of what is the difference between colloquial and all the other texts. What is the relationship between a colloquial text and narrative folklore?

Chapter Two touches upon the question of categorization that constitutes the center of the argumentation in the book. I attempt to show that we could also employ the theory of categorization — within which the cognitive linguistic studies has been related to the lexical plane of language - as means of delineating broader units of language - whether it is an opinion (proposition), or narrative itself. A narrative could be understood as an ordering of fragments of the experienced reality through the plot in the process of transforming experienced contents into “chains” of events that are ordered by cause-and-effect relationships. Similar process based on selective forgetting, which in the field of semiotics is described as semiosis, could be considered an example of categorization, making the world available to a man, thanks to a relative simplification and immobilization of that very world. If we were to understand categorization in that way, we should consider the social memory as its unique form, along the representations of experienced reality in the form of common and colloquial narrative. A form of categorization understood as a process of ordering - simplification and solidifying — of reality is finally magical thinking that does not recognize coincidences itself. It is the primary thesis of this work.

The fact that the world represented in any narrative is never an exact reflection of the experienced world, but always its more or less successful representation, suggests a fundamental question about collectively determined, or solidified mechanisms of creating these very representations. The key code or system of operation, symptoms of which constitute the object of this book, is magic understood as action and cognitive system, along with an established interpretation of the world. It provides men with — often misleading - conviction that they can explain almost everything and fully control their present and future.

Chapter Three focuses on analyzing units of different levels of linguistic construction of the world, which are characterized by a shared correspondence. More specifically, we are talking about correspondence between images that accompany notions of natural language (connotations), routine propositions, and narratives. In that context we could speak of three planes of a linguistic system: stereotype as a repetitive and simplified image of reality on the level of word's connotation, routine judgment, and common narrative. A stereotype was shown here as an unquestionable condition for any kind of spontaneous cognition and communication, which is simultaneously a condition for and a result of categorization. Repetitive character of judgments, propositions, and texts constituting the effect of categorization as is nothing else than a symptom of a systemic character of language and culture, understood as a condition for the existence of the experienced cosmos, a sphere of cognitive comfort and safety.

Chapter Four looks at the relationship between the narrative and social memory. Its most important proposition is a thesis that social memory constitutes a specific form of categorization. Colloquial and common narratives about the past may function as the basic medium of socialization, social communication as a basic tool of realizing the social or environmental consensus and of identity building — all that due to collectively conditioned forgetting. It is based on employing relatively common systems of meaning, or systems of constructing sense. Conclusions in Chapter Four allow us to recognize that categorization is gradable. Although linguistic-cultural clues participate in the process of noticing "facts; they can always be verified, which means that their domination is limited — to a lesser, or greater extent — by sensually perceived reality. The less of direct contact with the sensual reality there is — since it is available to a varying degree (distant in time and space) - the more pronounced the domination of linguistic-cultural clues for recreating that reality.

A man lives in a world that appears to him as tested by others, including his ancestors, relatives, and friends who are persons authority figures. Therefore, an individual is also forced to rely on narratives by anonymous witnesses and information passed on by multiple intermediaries. A constructive (world-shaping) dimension of language and culture is the least visible, although present, within the sphere of directly experienced reality. It is more noticeable within the sphere of authentic experiences recreated in a narrative by a witness, and even more so within a sphere of an alleged experience of unknown individuals and their recreated narratives that have gone through a collective "filter" of sender-receiver chain of participants.

Chapter Five constitutes a practical development of the thesis formulated in Chapter Two about the life-world having a multi-layered, complicated, heterogenic and sometimes internally contradictory character. The conclusion of Chapter Five takes on the form of a warning against creation of too systematic and generalized models of life-worlds, excluding “cracks” and “crevices,” paradoxes and inconsequentialities present within them. The bulk of materials that have been analyzed in this chapter are folklore and ethnographic materials collected in Cieszyn Silesia territory.

Chapter Six presents magic as a cognitive and action/empirical paradigm that influences the processes of categorization that take place within its boundaries. As the core of the reader’s introduction into the questions of magical thinking we have used works by Mircea Eliade and Aron Y. Gurevich, whose works are not primarily connected to the theory of magic, and such classics as James G. Frazer, Marcel Mauss, Bronistaw Malinowski, and others.

Chapter Seven is an example of practical use of texts of narrative folklore, understood by its senders as memory narratives, as a source of knowledge about figures of their life-world. On the basis of the analysis of similar texts of historical folklore from Cieszyn Silesia, I analyze the elements and sediments (relics) of magical thinking as a socially conditioned tool for perception and understanding of the world. The analysis of texts is preceded by a short discussion of the area from which the source material comes from, and methodological rules for interpretation of particular texts. Particularities of Cieszyn Silesia has no direct impact on arguments presented in the book, if we were to assume that the object of our deliberations is a phenomenon that, at least in the context of Central-Eastern Europe, transgresses ethnic and linguistic boundaries. The value of the chosen area lies in the wealth of materials collected by folklorists who researched it and systematically provided a rich, original, and representative cache of materials for anyone interested. To illustrate the virility of analyzed strategies used for ordering the world, I have also used texts of narrative folklore gathered during fairly recent ethnographic studies.

Conclusion, which is a summary of the research, confirms the thesis that magical thinking is not only a system of meanings that defines routine (habitual) directions of categorizations that guide the sphere of the everyday life, but could be also considered as an example of the very tendency to create cosmos understood as a sphere of predictability, easily understood sense and relative safety. We should mention in that context that a similar tendency does not pertain to an individual functioning within a premodern culture alone. It pertains, to a greater or lesser extent, to a man as such.

I have a pleasant obligation to thank Karol Daniel Kadlubiec and Jerzy Bartminski for advice and inspiration, and critical commentary on the draft versions. I would also like to thank my book's reviewers, Piotr Kowalski, who has since passed away, Michał Buchowski, Wojciech Burszta and Frantisek Vrhel. Words of gratitude are also to Lukas Horak for all the help and to my other friends, critical readers of the Polish version of the book, especially my friends from the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Silesia.

Chapter One Narrative Folklore as a Colloquial Text and Its Cognitive Dimension

If we were to assume that colloquial narratives, which will be the subject of the following analyses due to the elements of magic they contain, constitute a case of a folklore text, we should define that term at the very beginning. I understand the term "folklore" as a particular case of a colloquial text that cannot be sufficiently defined by establishing its object or subject, but rather through means of its operating. In other words, folklore is difficult to define because of its object, or its thematic range, since those can change with time. Folklores text can refer to any sphere of reality and to whatever fragment of that reality — it can pertain to past events (narratives about “how it used to be in the olden days"), contemporary, and future (prophecies regarding the "end of the world"); it can refer to the personal sphere (family sagas), and public one (hoaxes, conspiracy theories, which can become politically weaponized as part of a campaign); magic and demonology, and science and related sensational technologies,’ or quasisciences (ufology, parapsychology).

Folklore fails to be identified by means of establishing its subject, or its carrier.’ The category of the folks, which delineated the range of folklore within the romantic paradigm (Krawczyk-Wasilewska 1986: 10), is no longer valid today,

1 In this context, is sufficient to mention popular conspiracy theories concerning e.g. CIA archives and laboratories storing UFOs or even the remains of extraterrestrial crewmembers of those ships that supposedly crashed in the United States of America. These are theories employed - and effectively sustained in the public circulation - by the film and TV productions (The X Files series by C. Carter, Independence Day by R. Emmerich, etc.) According to other common narratives, CIA laboratories were supposed to be a breeding ground for the AIDS virus created as a biological weapon (Czubala 1993: 85). If we were to assume that popular TV production are extensions of common knowledge and popular fantasies, we might as well mention "laboratory zombies" or the dead reanimated to a half-life, either through a Frankensteinian transplantology or using trioxin, a gas supposedly created for military use (The Return of the Living Dead by D. O'Bannon), or a whole host of other chemicals invented in those laboratories (Re-Animator by S. Gordon and others).

2 “We should once and for all reject the rural sociological discriminant as secondary within the general, theoretical defining of folklore" (Kowalski 1990: 111).

especially since the most vibrant genres of the narrative folklore today — urban legends and conspiracy theories - do not recognize any social boundaries that would mark the range of their transmissions (Janecek 2006: 324). To varying degrees, each man is a carrier of folklore, within the pre-modern, modern, and the post-modern culture. Each man is a carrier of folklore in a sense of being a carrier of commonly shared communication and cognitive habits, stereotypes (simplified concepts of reality), simplifying judgments (for example, sayings and proverbs), or narratives.

Defining folklore by means ofits "genres" seems to be falling short as well. First, its genres might be undergoing transformations and second, only a number of folklore genres display an objective character in the sense of its carriers being able to recognize it. As shown by J. Kryzanowski in his polemic with S. Thompson, the same narrative can be considered a fairy tale, or a folk tale, if its carrier approaches its represented world as questionable, or openly fictional, or treats the account of “objective” reality as true, authentic, and casting no shadow of a doubt. In the narrative of the second type, a folklorist can, at best, recognize the genre of folklore, but certainly not its carrier. (Krzyzanowski 1980a: 237-238) Narrative, which in the mind of its sender of consumer, reveals the truth, is not folklore for him. Whenever we encounter realistic fiction (Kadłubiec 1999: 63— 69) or an instance where the information is passed from “mouth to mouth,’ (or "from a mouth to the media and from the media to a mouth,’ or “interface to interface,’ etc.) during the transmission is considered objective in a sense that the text is of "faith" character — we are dealing with an unconscious folklore text that is capable of taking a form of different genres and not exclusively in the era of convergent media.

We do not consider a narrative that, in our assessment, represents a true, or plausible, state of affairs, as well as a true, or plausible sequence of events as folklore. Let us repeat, genres of folklore that are characterized by a realistic fiction are invisible for the carrier of said folklore. J. H. Brunvand (as cited by P. Janecek) highlights the fact that we are aware of our own folklore as vaguely as we are of the grammatical rules of our native language (Janecek 2006: 324). A man, when forgetting about the language and its rules (and the culture and its rules), points his attention to the "facts" and not the form, in which they present themselves to him or her. Following Gadamer, we could call this phenomenon a selfconcealment of language (Gadamer 1993: 146-154). "Self-discovery of language" is nothing other than a linguistic realism, also referred to as the myth of the museum, where ones attention is being pointed to "objective phenomena" with simultaneous disregard of the issue of social construction of these phenomena. In other words, man assigns word-labels to phenomena not realizing that they are dependent from language, culture, and social needs (Weisgerber 197 1a: 33- 39, see Kajfosz 2001: 12-14).

The genres of folklore could be compared to letters in a newspaper: an ordinary reader, despite reading, does not notice particular letters. His eyes glide over the paragraphs and he points his attention to “facts” that he or she finds interesting. However, metaphorically understood, folklorist is an editor, who is required to limit his interest in “facts” and his fascination in the represented world and focus his attention on particular genres of narratives understood as “letters.” They distinguish themselves through their particular style and composition that project on the presented "facts? The style — next to credibility of the sender and context of the message - constitutes one of the most important rhetorical tools. They shape the modality of every message that, along with our common knowledge, decide whether a given message is perceived as true, plausible, implausible or fictional.

The cognitive distance created by redirecting one's focus from the content of a message to its form is referred to in phenomenology as phenomenological reduction. In this case it consists of taking the "facts; which are fascinating in a way they draw attention of men (cf. Sokol 2002: 90, Vankova 2007: 29) out of the equation. Like an editor who is in awe of (and, in this case, blinded by) the content of the text and might miss a typo, a folklorist might sometimes fail to recognize sensational information as a folklore text. What is more, before recognizing the genre of that information, folklorists themselves might participate in its transmission (Janecek 2006: 323). It might be a proof of the fact that a pre-theoretical attitude toward phenomena (understood as assuming spontaneous positions) is always something primal, while critical questioning of ones own experience - something derivative.

I have mentioned before that a single, clear criterion that allows one to define the phenomenon of folklore, and therefore distinguish between a folklore text from the rest of the texts is a way in which folklore functions. The question about the contents of texts is not key to assigning their genres. The key question is whether - and to what degree - these contents correspond to perspectives, convictions, and strategies common among members of a particular linguistic-cultural community (or among the members of a particular environment), in which a given text appears. The basic criterion of establishing a text's belonging to folklore is reduced to a question to what extent the contents of said text are anchored in the consciousness of the members of a particular community and to what extent they are shared and recreated? In this case, we can safely refer to the work of Bogatyrev and Jakobson Folklore as a Special Form of Creation. According to the authors, a text can be recognized as a folklore text exclusively if it was “adopted by a given community” (Jakobson and Bogatyrev 1980: 5) and constitutes its part; a text that the community has accepted. While focusing their attention exclusively on the aesthetic dimension of the folklore text, Bogatyrev and Jakobson omitted its cognitive aspect. However, the folklore creation process they have identified is simultaneously a world creation process - it constitutes an expression of social construction of life-world (Lebenswelt).

Anchoring of a text in a consciousness may be defined as its more or less precise reproduction or "repetition" of specific forms or structures of meaning (Bartmiński 2012, cf. Kowalski 1990: 119, Krawczyk-Wasilewska 1986: 65-66)? which translates to its conventional and relatively systematic character in the sense of its orientation toward the sphere of langue. Texts, themes or meaning structures that replicate in that manner shape the collective background knowledge, or a system of assumptions, or a sphere of knowledge that is considered obvious and conditions the understanding of all other texts and understanding of the world as such. That is why the key indicator - or definiendum — of folklore is its fidelity toward defined patterns of text (Niebrzegowska-Bartminska 2007: 43-105, Sulima 1976: 11-12), which are rarely objectivized and noticed by the carriers of folklore. S. Niebrzegowska-Bartminska explains the term pattern as conceptual text scheme, toward which both the broadcaster in the process of telling of the text, as well as the listener during his lip-memory reception are ‘oriented? Its a scheme that becomes a norm for communicating users of language — broadcasters and consumers — and serves as a pointer, orienting both sides of the social communication (Niebrzegowska-Bartminska 2007: 104).

According to Niebrzegowska-Bartminska, vividness of those themes is:

in direct proportion to the level of stabilization of a text in the process of social transmission (that is, in the process of its ‘folklorization? Only texts with strong patterns - defined as clichéd or stereotypical — have a chance of surviving in the social memory and social circulation (Niebrzegowska-Bartminska 2007: 105, Sulima 1980: 98-99, 113, 122).