Abstract

Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. This vast expressive body, studied by the corresponding discipline of folklore, has evaded the attention of economists. In this study we do four things that reveal the tremendous potential of this corpus for understanding comparative development, culture, and its transmission. First, we introduce a unique dataset of folklore that codes the presence of thousands of motifs for roughly 1,000 pre-industrial societies. Second, we use a dictionary-based approach to elicit the group-specific intensity of various traits related to its natural environment, institutional framework, and mode of subsistence. We establish that such measures are in accordance with the ethnographic record, suggesting the usefulness of folklore in quantifying currently nonextant characteristics of pre-industrial societies including the role of trade. Third, we use oral traditions to shed light on the historical cultural values of these ethnographic societies. Doing so allows us to test various influential hypotheses among anthropologists including the original affluent society, the culture of honor among pastoralists, the role of women in plough-using groups, and the intensity of rule-following norms in centralized societies. Finally, we explore how cultural norms inferred via text analysis of oral traditions predict contemporary attitudes and beliefs.

Melanie Xue is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Economics and Center for Economic History at Northwestern University.

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Reference

Melanie Xue (Northwestern University), “Folklore_CANCELED”, IAST General Seminar, Toulouse: IAST, March 30, 2018, 11:30–12:30, room MD103.