Yet folklorists reveal their own ethnocentric bias in their unquestioning acceptance of a border that is every bit as arbitrary and, hence, as cultural as those normally the focus of folklorists' attention. I mean the border between human and nonhuman animals.
Some folklorists were at the time, and probably still are now, greatly disturbed by Alan Dundes's minimalist definition of the folk as "any group whatsoever that shared at least one common factor" (Dundes 1965: 2; emphasis in original). Nearly twenty years later Elliott Oring pressed even further at the meaning of the folk to propose that a common, but neglected, folk group was the dyad, "a more or less enduring interaction between two individuals who primarily relate to one another as persons rather than as occupants of social statuses (1984:19). Oring argues persuasively, I believe, that we can find within folk dyads genuine dyadic traditions, those "behavioral and linguistic routines that are generated, endowed with significance, and maintained within the dyadic relationship" (Oring 1984:20). Oring uses many examples to demonstrate the ways people use their dyadic traditions to test whether they are 'sensitive to the same aspects of the immediate experience and whether they share a common orientation toward this experience," to "symbolize their intimacy," and to "activate" a sense of a shared past (1984:21; see also Bendix 1987).
In everything written by folklorists on larger folk groups and by Oring on dyads, the implication is that only human beings are members of these groups. I want to make problematic this assumption and ask whether there is a meaningful way to talk about "dyadic traditions"-that is, folklore--between human and nonhuman animals. If there is a meaningful way to talk about inter-specific folklore, then what are the implications of this discovery for our study of folklore in human groups?
Let us take the most obvious case of a dyad between a human and pet. On one level, we know that people have communicative routines with their pets. One class of these communicative routines is play--we play with our pets. We play "fetch" with our dogs, throwing balls, frisbees, and sticks for them to carry back tirelessly. But there are also more complex games we play with pets. I offer here some personal examples from my own experience with our male yellow Labrador Retriever, "Sunshine," but my examples will doubtless be familiar to many.
The game of fetch was truly interactive. I was not always in control of the game. Sometimes Sunshine would fetch the ball but stop on the way back to me some ten feet away. He would begin a slow retriever stalk, then drop the ball in front of him and assume the familiar canine "play bow"--forepaws extended flat on the ground, the body sloping upward toward his erect hindquarters, tail wagging. This is the canine invitation to play. In this case, however, we were already engaged in a game, so his message to me was that he, too, could exert some power and control in the game. Another game I would play with Sunshine was just as interactive as this game of fetch. We would play hide-and-seek, wherein I would run into a darkened bedroom, hide behind a door, and call him from another room. He would race into the darkened room, then stalk me, then enjoy with me his discovery.
Other games between pets and their humans fall into the category of training or "tricks." For example, Sunshine would sell his mother for a Milkbone biscuit or similar dog treat, so he and I would often play "guess which hand holds the treat." I loved the game because of the play and probably because of the power I was able to wield in the game (Tuan 1984). Sunshine loved the game for the treat, at least, and probably for the attentive interaction with me.
But I also played this game with my daughter when she was one
or two, placing a brightly colored bead behind my back, bringing
my two clenched fists back out in front of me, and inviting her to
guess which hand held the bead. Again, she and I loved this game
for the playful interaction. Developmental psychologists would say
that she also enjoyed the game for reasons having to do with the
discovery that things out of sight do return, and that I enjoyed
the game for the power I exercised over her. My point is that
neither an ideal observer nor I could make meaningful distinctions
between these two play scenes--the one involving me with Sunshine
and the one involving me with my daughter. If the game with my
daughter counts as folklore, that is, as a traditional interactive
routine, then so should the game with Sunshine.
Other dyadic traditions between humans and their pets abound
A Gary Larson cartoon tapped into one such tradition, the game in
which the human places a dog treat on the dog's snout or head,
requiring the dog to hold still until given permission to flip the
treat into the air and catch it in his mouth. I played this with
Sunshine, but I also invented another routine involving Ritz
crackers, a treat he and I both loved. I would place a Ritz
cracker partially in my mouth, and squat down to his level to let
him take it gently from my mouth. At times, however, I would tease
him, using my tongue to shift the cracker instantly into my mouth,
making him pause at the disappearance, and then making the Ritz
cracker reappear. After a few trials at this unique game of keep
away, I would let him take the cracker.
This game reminds me of one collected by one of my undergraduate folklore students while she was studying a group of married student couples living on campus and the ways they attempted to create folk traditions as a way of making friends. The focus of that study was a playful "birthday party" given by one young couple for their dog, Winston. These were young, childless couples, but the host couple treated the party just as if it were for a child. They sent invitations, arranged for decorations (such as party hats for everyone, including Winston), presents, cake, party games, and so on. The focus of that study, of course, was how a group of humans uses a pet as symbolic material for creating a folk group culture, and how an intimate couple might use a pet as a surrogate child, building rich dyadic traditions around that pet (Perin, 1981.)
In the course of interviewing these couples, my student stumbled across a game of "Banana Cannon" that one of the males had invented to play with his dog, Shana:
Play is only one genre in a longer list of interactive routines we find in human/pet folk dyads. People sometimes have "pet names" or nicknames for their pets, using the AKC (American Kennel Club) names and nicknames in different contexts to indicate to the pet pleasure or anger, just as parents might address their children differently according to the context Humans and their pets sometimes develop traditional gestures, rituals (such as those around meals or walks), teases, taunts, and so on. I could multiply the examples, but I believe this much is obvious: people play with their mammalian pets, often creating elaborate and complex interactive routines.1
Now, can we make any meaningful distinction between these interactive routines and those folklorists would agree to call "folklore"? It is instructive to recall that frame analysis, appropriated by Bauman (1977) and other folklorists from Erving Goffman (1974) to establish the performance paradigm for the study of folklore, began with Bateson's (1972c) landmark essay, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy." Bateson's own testimony is that the idea of metacommunicative frames came to him on a visit to San Francisco's Fleishhacker Zoo in 1952, as he watched two monkeys playfight. Bateson noticed how the animals used nonverbal cues to establish a metacommunicative frame: "This is play," that governed the "interpretation of communication" within the frame. The metamessage enabled the animal players to distinguish between mood signs and "messages which simulate mood signs," as in dogs' growling during a playfight. Moreover, observes Bateson, metamessages themselves carry important messages about the relationship between the framing participants, relationships having to do with hierarchy, affection, and so on (Mechling 1983).
All of these elements-the role of nonverbal behavior in creating and sustaining frames, the ways in which frames signal mood, and the ways in which frames signal relationships-are as true for human social behavior as they are for play between animals and between animal pets and their human companions. Indeed, one of Oring's most important insights is that some dyads are such high-context folk groups that nonverbal communication comes to play a more important role than verbal language in the routines of the dyad. Nonverbal and paralinguistic features of teasing in a dyad, for example, make all the difference between playful and cruel interactions.
In short, then, I see no way to distinguish meaningfully between the play in human folk dyads and the play in human/pet dyads. But the skeptical folklorist might object: "Yes, you have demonstrated that humans and pets have interactive routines, including complex play, but these cannot be folklore because the pets do not have a reflective consciousness toward the routines and the relationship. The animals learn the routines by normal laws of operant conditioning and do so for the reinforcement that is sometimes a Milkbone but at other times simply affection and approval. Like most pet owners, Jay, you are attributing too much intentional consciousness to your dog."
My reply is to point out, initially, that folklorists are always projecting intentionality onto the participants of an interactive routine the observer chooses to call "folklore." The folklorist never has privileged access to the consciousness and intentions of the participants. Bauman (972) issued an early warning to folklorists to beware the common assumption that folklore requires "shared identity." Bauman shows that "folklore performance does not require that the lore be the collective representation of the participants, pertaining and belonging equally to all of them. It may be so, but it may also be differentially distributed, differentially performed, differentially perceived, and differentially understood" (1972:38).
Recall that Goffman's Frame Analysis (1974) dwells inordinately upon the construction of fraudulent frames, out of Goffman's confidence that if we could understand how "con artists" construct and sustain belief in deceptive frames, then we would understand how folks construct everyday frames. Bauman and Goffman's points add up to this: the participants in a perfectly obvious folklore event might have dramatically different motives and understandings of the event and still interact "successfully," that is, in a way satisfying both to the participants and to the folklorist observing the event. There may be nothing in the event itself to clue the folklorist into these differences. I want to extend this point to say that, just as the folklorist needs to be wary of imputing motives and understandings to human participants in a folk routine, so the folklorist need not impute motives and meanings to the non-human participants in a routine that on its surface looks like folklore.
Moreover, there is no a priori reason to assume that animals have no consciousness. Philosopher Tom Regan, who has constructed the most elaborately-argued case so far for the rights of animals, presents five tenets for attributing awareness to animals:
In no way is it necessary or even adequate, Regan argues, to use language as a test for the presence of consciousness. Regan then proceeds to use these five tenets to defend the view that mammalian animals, at least, have beliefs and desires.2The animal rights debate is a complex one, and I want to resist the temptation to go much further down this path. But it is important to note, for our purposes, that respectable ethnologists and philosophers make a strong case for animal consciousness and intelligence (Walker 1983; Griffin 1984). It may even be that folklorists have something to contribute to the debate over animal rights.
Let me take stock of the argument so far by comparing human/pet routines with the qualities or elements Oring (1986) lists in his attempt to locate the meaning of "folklore." For better or worse, folklorists agree to no single definition of "folklore," yet Oring detects in all the definitions and, more importantly, in the actual practice of folklorists some common elements that amount to an "orientation" rather than a restrictive definition. Folklorists, writes Oring (1986:17-18, emphasis in original),
But because many folklorists do insist upon the presence of the aesthetic element in folklore (e.g., Ben-Amos's [1971:13] definition of folklore as "Artistic communication in small groups"), and because most humanists would insist that artistic creation distinguishes humans from animals, it might be worthwhile to inquire briefly if there is any sense in which we can call a human/pet routine "artistic."
*Western Folklore 48 October. 1989): 3 12-323. This essay is
dedicated to the memory of Sunshine-of-Love (b. 24 June 1976. d.
16 April 1986). my collaborator for most of this research. This
essay is an expanded version of a paper presented at the annual
meeting of the .American Folklore Society in Baltimore, MD.
October 22-26.1986. The title of this essay purposely echoes that
of Donald F. Rov's "Banana Time" (1959-60).
1. There is a large literature on the interrelationships between people and pet animals. See, for example, rogle (1981), Beck and Katcher (1983), and Anderson. Hart. and Hart (1984). Much of the research reported in these volumes comes out of research centers attached to prestigious schools of Veterinary Medicine, such as the Center for Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, the Center to Study Human-Animal Relationships and Environments at the University of Minnesota, and the Human-Animal Program at the University of California, Davis. The Delta Society is a professional organization devoted to the study of the interactions of people. animals, and the environment. The Delta Society's Journal, which began publication in 1984, has evolved into a more elaborate journal, Anthrozoos. Shell (1986) offers a provocative thesis on the meanings and functions of the institution, "pethood," arguing that pethood permits humans to experience safe, idealized versions of kin and kind that conceal the incest and cannibalism those experiences represent.
2. interestingly, Regan's argument relies in part upon comparing animals with humans who lack some element of full human capacity. Even though infants and severely mentally disabled people may not enjoy the capacity of moral actors, we still consider them human, acknowledge that they have heliefs and desires, and treat them as "moral patients" entitled to our respect for their rights. Regan's point is that some animals show greater intelligence and more competent language use than do infants or the learning disabled. I would add that we folklorists have no problem including as among "the folk" those individuals who may not have oral language (Rutherford: 1983) or who may have limited intelligence. How can we exclude from "the folk" those animals that show greater capacity than these humans? file two home