Eventi del
17 2018 12:30
Sala Riunioni 5.e4.sr04 - Via Roentgen 1
Folklore
Stelios Michalopoulos (Brown University)
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 preindustrial 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 non-extant characteristics of preindustrial 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 plow-using groups, and the intensity of rule-following norms in politically centralized group. Finally, we explore how cultural norms inferred via text analysis of oral traditions predict contemporary attitudes and beliefs.