"Banana Cannon" and Other Folk Traditions Between Human and Nonhuman Animals
Jay Mechling
File 2

If the folklorist wants to insist upon "creativity" and innovation (versus formula and convention) as a distinctive feature of the "aesthetic," then nonhuman animals still cannot be discounted. Animal play demonstrates plenty of creativity and innovation (Fagen 1981:449-471). My favorite example is Bateson's (1972b:276-277) description of a training session in which a porpoise learned "a context of contexts" in order to burst forth with creative, innovative behavior never before seen in the species.

If by "aesthetic" we mean more, if we mean that the communication is "stylized," then my natural question would be: what do you mean by "style" and "stylized"? I presume that this refers to a distinction between frames of communication, that "stylized" communication helps frame performance and other folklore events, and that these frames are distinct from everyday life (Bauman 1977:11). Again, however, notions of metacommunication, frames, and modes of communication work just as well for the communicative interactions of non-human animals as for human animals. A "playfight" between two dogs or between a dog and human involves, by Bateson's account, "stylized" communication.

In short, by all the criteria generally used by folklorists to decide if they are in the presence of communication worthy of being called "folklore," I see no persuasive reasons why non-human animals cannot be included in "the folk." It is only a fiat, by speciesism, that folklorists define folklore as a unique possession of human animals.

Assuming, then, that I have persuaded the reader to at least entertain the possibility that there is folklore (or even "protofolklore") between humans and their pets, I see some important implications in this conclusion for the study of folklore in exclusively human groups. I make no claim that these are new and original insights, simply that the case of folklore between human and nonhuman animals reminds us of some of the points that we ought to keep in mind and too easily forget when studying folklore among humans.

First, looking at the human/pet dyad helps the folklorist appreciate more the role of nonverbal communication in the whole communication system of a folk group. Communication systems between species, as in inter-specific play (Fagen 1981:445-447, 489-490), for example, help us see further that what is happening is not simply nonverbal communication but a "fitting together" of two different organisms into a system that is more than the sum of its parts. Bateson described late in his life the following scene:

It is an almost miraculous phenomenon to see the invention of play between members of contrasting mammalian species. I watched it happen between our two pets: a female keeshond puppy and a tame, female pre-adolescent gibbon. The gibbon would come down suddenly out of the rafters of the porch and lightly attack. The dog would react with her normal response to an unexpected tweak of the fur and would give chase; and the gibbon would run away. Not back into the rafters, which would be no fun, but along the floor and corridor into the bedroom. There the whole system was reversed. The bedroom had a ceiling instead of exposed rafters. There were no beams for the gibbon to catch on to, so further retreat was impossible. She would attack the dog and drive her out into the porch again. With that the gibbon got back into the rafters, and then would come down and start another attack, driving the game back into the bedroom. It was a game and they might repeat it six or eight times. Quite evidently both parties enjoyed it. It was the result of an experimental fitting together of the characteristics of one creature with the characteristics of the other; an evolution of a jigsaw puzzle of behavior. Obviously the learning that took place-the fitting together of the two animals' behavior to the evolving rules of the game-was rooted in the relationship between the two animals, not in something happening inside each animal (Bateson 1982:7).

A second implication of accepting the human/pet dyad as a folk group is that this view alerts us to some common fallacies committed in the study of human folklore. In the equality fallacy, for example, folklorists too often assume that the participants in a dyad or larger groups are equal in power and ability (competence). We tend to treat folk dyads as symmetrical when, in fact, many human folk relationships are asymmetrical (Bauman 1972). Ortner (1984) sees as one of the benefits of Marxist influence on anthropology in the 1980s increased attention to asymmetric relations, and folklorists ought to follow suit. In fact, the equality fallacy might be an artifact of masculine bias in folklore studies. Power relations often are invisible to those in power, so it may be that male folklorists tend to see symmetry where asymmetry actually reigns. Part of the feminist agenda in folklore studies is to make visible such invisible assumptions.

Similarly, folklorists often commit the voluntariness fallacy by assuming that the participants in a folk event are there by free choice. But if power is often asymmetrical, then there may be participants who are coerced into participating in the event. Sutton-Smith and Kelly-Byrne (1983) make this point about play, but we might extend the point to cover any folk interaction.

Together, the equality and voluntariness fallacies amount to a romantic fallacy, the tendency of folklorists to idealize folk groups and to consider folklore as more humanly satisfying and meaningful expressions of culture than the more alienated forms of social life. But just as the play frame can "mask" cruel, sadistic, masochistic, and similarly unpleasant human motives and behaviors (Sutton-Smith and Kelly-Byrne 1983), so some participants can use other folklore frames to mask real intentions. This possibility calls into question to functional fallacy, that is, the folklorist's common assumption that folklore serves useful social and psychological functions. Bateson's interest in pathological communication systems should remind us that folk cultures can be quite dysfunctional. Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1967) took Bateson's ideas to create a field called the "pragmatics" of human communication. They offer a close reading of Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to demonstrate how a dyad can create a rich, shared folk culture that threatens to destroy both characters.

The third implication I see in entertaining seriously the folklore of human/pet dyads is that we can press even harder on the definition of a "folk group" to explore some new possibilities. Let us see how far we can push the definition of folklore. For instance, the argument I have made so far relies exclusively upon examples of mammalian pets. What happens if we press further down the Great Chain of Being to inquire into pets of lower phyla? Plenty of people keep birds as pets and insist that birds are every bit as responsive as mammalian pets. Wilson (1987) recounts the story of Grace Olive Wiley, the herpetologist at the Museum of the Minnesota Academy of Sciences, who was the first to breed rattlesnakes in captivity. Wiley describes at length the folk traditions she evolved with her rattlesnakes. Zoologists have confessed to me pet relationships with amphibia and insects.

The further down the phyla we move in this inquiry, the more the folk dyad looks like a human/thing dyad. Surely humans cannot have a folk relationship with an inanimate object. But consider the "interactive" routines a child might have with a stuffed animal or other favorite toy. Adults often establish rich "interactive" routines with automobiles and other machines, talking to them, begging them to operate, giving them pet names, observing formulaic rituals with them, and so on (Hackett and Lutzenhiser 1985).

Of course, I have had to put "interactive" within quotation marks in the foregoing references to "interactive routines" because folklorists are unlikely to agree that things interact with us. But the reality of this social scene is located in more than just the mind of the human. Back to Bateson's point, we are observing a system that includes the human and the object, and the human is "interpreting" the behavior of the object just as much as a human "interprets" the behavior of another sentient being in an interactive routine. I am reminded here of the Twilight Zone episode about a diner fortune-telling machine and the system its users create in interacting with its random "yes" or "no" response to questions they pose about their future. The modern version of this fiction is the random answer computer therapist program that clients are unable to distinguish from interaction (through computer terminal) with a living therapist.

Finally, pushing our thought experiment to its extreme limit, let us consider traditional, "interactive" routines a human might have with imaginary others or even alone. Sutton-Smith (1979:239; 1986) talks about the rich play lives children have with imaginary playmates, and Caughey (1984) shows us a range of richly symbolic, expressive, and "interactive" relationships people can have with "imaginary others," such as media figures, sports figures, daytime serial characters, and so on. Solitary play offers no special problem. Any reasonable person (including the folklorist) would recognize that a game of solitaire counts as a game," as framed play, and Roy (1959-60) invented his own solitary game at the drill press before he recognized the other games, notably "banana time," in his now-classic study of play in the workplace.

So, what has happened to our notion of "folklore" as a result of this inquiry into folklore between people and pets, between people and things, and between people and imaginary others? Certainly I hope we can set aside some cultural assumptions about the boundaries between human and non-human animals and entertain a larger domain for folklore. Beyond that, I believe thinking about these possibilities helps us understand better what we mean by the elements of folklore (such as the problematic "aesthetic") and cautions us against committing the equality, voluntariness, romantic, and functional fallacies. Most importantly, I intend this exercise to draw attention to an epistemological error that Bateson thought was bad for our science and bad for our lives. Bateson warned us to give up conceptions of the autonomous, intentional self and to begin to think entirely in terms of systems. "The whole self-corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, 'thinks' and 'acts' and 'decides,'" he wrote in thinking about alcoholism and other addictions, "is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the 'self' or 'consciousness'... (1972:319). Whatever else it is, folklore is a feature of systems, and we ought not let our human hubris make us forgetful of this fact.

University of California
Davis, California

References Cited

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