Psychology and Folklore - by R. R. Marett - PDF ebook

Psychology and folklore.

Excerpt:

 I am not sure whether these addresses, essays, and reviews are worth the republishing; but I hope that they are. To attend to one's subject during the War was not easy. Yet the very confusion of the times made thinking necessary, if only in order that the mind might keep its beatings during the storm. For the same reason, one's thought tended to dwell on first principles. 

These are none too steadfast, to be sure, in such a new and complex science as anthropology. But to find them to be relatively stable, or at any rate to seek how they could be made so, proved comforting to me. 

In the hope, therefore, that others have also of late been examining foundations with similar results, I venture to appeal to their sympathetic attention. I apologize to any reader who is troubled by echoes of the spoken word in these pages. It is hard to turn a lecture into an article without taking half the life out of it; and so I have changed nothing, not even suppress- ing a few passages of an occasional character. Anyone with imagination can make the necessary allowances. 

The title is borrowed from the first paper but provides a fair notion of the general scope of the book. The prevailing interest is throughout psychology, and whatever is not folk-lore in the strict sense belongs at least to anthropology.

Folkore cannot restrict itself to a purely sociological, that is, exterior, view of its subject matter. Not only is its ultimate aim to illustrate and explain the workings of the human soul; but even at the present stage of its advance, it cannot dispense with psychological considerations. 

Thus the so-called ethnological method, from which so much is expected, is hound to employ a psychological criterion. 

This method proceeds stratigraphically, seeking to resolve a given complex of culture into a series of deposits left by successive waves of ethnic influence; former conditions being traced by the wreckage, the partially useless survivals, that they leave behind. But how is such partial uselessness to be proved if not by reference to the experience of the people concerned? Their life is not merely being fashioned by culture-contact from without but is all the while developing from within by the exercise of selection on what is offered.

Contents of the book:

I. Psychology and Folk-lore
II. War and Savagery.
III. Primitive Values.
IV. The Psychology of Culture-Contact
V. The Transvaluation of Culture
VI. The Interpretation of Survivals
VII. Origin and Validity in Religion
VIII. Magic or Religion? 
IX. The Primitive Medicine-Man
'X. Progress in Prehistoric Times
XI. Anthropology and University Education

Author: R. R. Marett

Publication date:1920

Publisher New York: Macmillan

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