Jamshid J. Tehrani – Reply to Lajoye, d'Huy and Le Quellec (2013)

Reply to:
Patrice Lajoye, Julien d'Huy and Jean-Loïc Le Quellec  (2013),
Comments on Jamshid J. Tehrani (2013).

Jamshid J. Tehrani*

 

 

*Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, U.K.

 

I thank the authors for taking an interest in my study and welcome the constructive spirit of their critique. While Lajoye, d’Huy and Le Quellec are broadly sympathetic to my approach, they raise a number of specific concerns which I would like to respond to here.

 

● In suggesting that I included Egbert’s 11^th century poem “uncritically” in the ATU 333 corpus, Lajoye et al. seem to have misunderstood my aims, or got them back-to-front. The point is that we don’t know which tales can be classified as ATU 333 and which ones can’t a-priori, since we can’t even be sure it even exists as a distinct international type. Establishing these facts was precisely what my analyses sought to do. And it would have been very odd to omit a story that some scholars believe to be the earliest surviving variant of ATU 333. (As it turns out, my results suggest that these scholars were probably right).

● While I certainly can’t claim to have referenced every work on ATU 333 and ATU 123 – two of the most discussed international types in the folklore literature – some of the gaps identified by Lajoye et al. are in fact cited in the study: Eberhard (1970) and Ikeda (1971) both appear in the list of references, while samples of the material collected by Delarue and Rumpf were included in the analyses.

● Lajoye et al. similarly suggest that there are gaps in the motifs used in the character data. I should point out that one of the motifs they say I ignore - “villain gives victim remains of the grandmother to eat” – is actually present (indeed, they reference that very character in the sentence immediately prior to the one in which they say it was missing). They also claim that the number of characters is important for the effectiveness of phylogenetic method. This is not necessarily true. It doesn’t help to keep adding characters and character states if they are uninformative about phylogenetic relationships, redundant, or add noise to the analysis. Quality is more important than quantity. In this case, most of the characters and character states they point to as missing either do not occur in the tales I used, or only occurred in a single variant, making them phylogenetically uninformative.

● This brings us to the most substantive criticism made by Lajoye et al., namely that there are many more variants of ATU 333 and ATU 123 that have not been translated into English. They focus on the rich body of material collected by French folklorists in particular, including a fascinating version of ATU 333 from the Velay and the Dauphiné. I am grateful to the authors for drawing my attention to these variants, which certainly deserve further investigation. I absolutely accept (as stated in the paper itself) that there is much more work to be done, both at a regional scale and globally. However, I think that the need for multi-lingualism must go further than European languages like English, French and German. As I say towards the end of my paper, there is surely a wealth of Chinese, Turkic, Mongolian, etc. variants that would illuminate the many questions that remain concerning the origins and diffusion of these stories. In the meantime of course, we work with the materials we have. No corpus is ever complete – even the collections mentioned by Lajoye et al. represent a tiny sample of all the versions of those tales that exist in those populations. So that raises the question of how much data are enough data? 58 versions of ATU 123/333 may only be a snapshot, but it is one that nevertheless reveals an image of the big picture, if not all the details and nuances. Similarly, one of the authors of the above critique considered 13 versions of Pygmalion (d’Huy 2013 Rock Art Research 30) and 44 versions of Polyphemus (d’Huy 2013 NMC, 1) to be sufficient to make inferences about their diffusion and original forms over extremely large geographical and temporal distances. So I suppose it is a question we can ponder together.

 

I believe that future progress in this field will depend on international collaboration, and on making our data and findings available to one another. From that point of view, I welcome the reanalyses of my data that Lajoye et al. report here. The results are interesting, and support the same major clusters as my phylogenetic analyses. A word of warning though – multidimensional scaling like PCOA does not employ an explicitly evolutionary model to account for the dissimilarities among taxa, so we must be careful not to over-interpret what these clusters mean from a phylogenetic point of view, or make inferences about ancestor-descendent relationships.

 

Once again I thank the authors for their feedback. I hope that this response has proved useful and look forward to discussions on our future research.

 

Jamie (Jamshid) Tehrani

 

Patrice Lajoye, Julien d'Huy and Jean-Loïc Le Quellec - Comments on Tehrani (2013)

Comment on:
Jamshid J. Tehrani (2013),
The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood,
PlosOne, November 13, 2013.

Patrice Lajoye, Julien d'Huy* and Jean-Loïc Le Quellec**

 

*Centre d'Etudes des Mondes Africains, CNRS, UMR 8171.

**Centre d'Etudes des Mondes Africains, CNRS, UMR 8171 - Honorary Fellow, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies - University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

 

 

A few weeks ago, the magazine PlosOne has published an interesting article, "The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood ", by Jamshid J. Tehrani , University of Durham, on the study of folktale -type AT 333 – Le Petit chaperon rouge, The Glutton , Rotkäppchen - and AT 123 – Le Loup, la chèvre et ses chevreaux, The Wolf and the Kids. Indeed we have long sensed that both AT 333 and AT 123 have at least interfered or that one could derive from the other. The author had the good sense to apply methods borrowed from phylogenetics on these folktales. Good idea, because this is a way of approaching sources as neutral as possible, without preconceived ideas. By applying this method to both tale types, the author concluded that AT 333 and AT 123 are indeed two different types, and that African versions belong to AT 123, but that Far Eastern versions are a mixture of both.

We support this type of analysis: our readers were able to read an article by Julien d'Huy, based on a similar methodology, which was the first paper we published. But we need to emphasise that, regarding statistical analyses, it is required that the corpus be as broad and representative as possible. This is the weak point in Jamshid J. Tehrani's study.

 

First of all, he includes, uncritically, the Latin poem of Egbert of Liège (11th century), in the corpus of AT 333, while this is still debated¹.

But the most important criticism that we can emit concerns the weakness of the corpus itself. The entire study covers only 58 variants (Egbert included). And for a good reason:« Data for the study were drawn from 58 variants of ATU 333/123 available in English translation from 33 populations ».

Of course, we are not asking anyone to be a new Jeremiah Curtin or a new Georges Dumézil, but if there is one field in which the knowledge of languages other than English is required, it is folkloristics. Two major languages are to be taken into account: French and German. Thus, significant gaps are found in the bibliography of the author, who works on less than one tenth of the AT 333 versions mentioned by Stith Thompson, which was far from complete. We do not find, for example, Marianne Rumpf thesis on AT 333, defended in 1951 in Göttingen, published in 1989². An article by Gottfried Henssen and another one - this time on AT 123 – by Marie-Louise Tenèze are also missing³.

Most importantly, the indispensable descriptive catalog of the French folktales by Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Tenèze, yet reissued in a single volume in 2002, is even not mentionned⁴.

One might think that the last remark reveals our chauvinism but the Delarue-Tenèze corpus mentions 32 versions of AT 333 and 88 versions of AT 123 (not to mention the medieval versions from the Isopets and from French speaking territories overseas, yet also inventoried).

With only the French corpus, Jamshid J. Tehrani could have tripled his corpus. What about the other potential national corpora? The author mentions, for example, one Russian version of AT 123, from second hand and not localized (when you know the size of Russia, this is important). A simple overview of the collection of Alexander Afanasyev allows to discover two versions⁵, but Afanasyev's collection is not unique: there are many more! In the case of Portugal, the author mentions "Vasconcellos, L. (nd) "O Chapelinho Encarnado", without going further in search of his source, which is José Leite de Vasconcelos, Contos Populares e Lendas, published in 1963. However it has been shown that this version is directly demarcated from Perrault and Grimm⁶. And can we say, again, that this version is unique? Certainly not, as another one was published in 1984 by Zófimo Consiglieri Pedroso.

To return to the French case, the study of Paul Delarue is important because it allows precisely to nuance many aspects, particularly with regard to possible literary influences - which Jamshid J. Tehrani ignores. Regarding AT 333, Delarue mentions 20 versions which owe nothing to Perrault (all located in the basin of the Loire and north of the Alps, they are similar to Tyrolean and Italian versions), 12 mixed ones and 2 versions that owe everything to Perrault. He also notes that the Grimm version is the Perrault’s one, with an end taken from the German form... of AT 123!

Also in France, according to Marie-Louise Tenèze, 9 versions of AT 123 have been influenced by Grimm, while 4 others derive from an “image d'Épinal”. And even without that, one should take into account the rich tradition of medieval Isopets, which certainly derived from Aesop's fables - and were popularized in Europe.

The situation is even worse for the mentions of AT 333/123 tales in Asiatic sources: eighteen Korean versions were cited by In Huak Choi in 1979, seventy-three Japanese versions were summarised in 1971 by Hiruko Ikeda, and 241 Chinese version were analysed by Wolfram Eberhard in 1970! So there is justifiable doubt as to whether or not Tehrani’s sample is really as “representative” of the geographic distribution of these tales as he says.

 

The extension of the AT333 and AT123 corpus also allows some nuance about Jamshid J. Tehrani work, who mentions the location of the action as a discriminant criterion between the two tale types: in one, AT 333, the action happens outside, at the grandmother’s house, while in the other, AT 123, the action happens inside, at the goat and kids’ home. However, there are four French versions of AT 333 (22, 24, 25 and 28 from the Delarue and Tenèze corpus) in which the action takes place at the girl's home. These versions are all located in the Velay and the Dauphiné, where they probably form a particular local tradition. The mother is eaten by the wolf in her house, and the girl discovers the tragedy when she returns home. What can we think about these versions? Are they contaminated by AT123, or do they represent an unrecognized, older state of AT 333?

Conversely, one of the two Russian versions of AT 123 shows a homeless goat, ready to whelp. It passes through a forest and finds there a hut similar to Baba Yaga’s hut, and occupies it. But that is not her own home. These are all nuances that do not appear in the work of Jamshid J. Tehrani.

Many other gaps and lacunae appear in the analysis grid of the author. Thus, he lists a "Villain offers grandmother's flesh to the victim" motif, but he forgets "Villain offers grandmother's blood to the victim." Similarly he's got "Guardian Gives remains of child to the villain to eat" but he doesn't take into account "Villain Gives remains of grandmother to the child to eat."

The author's unfamiliarity with folkloristics appears clearly in the motif he defines as "Victim flees through the woods, and uses the help of the river, mountain, etc. to obstruct the villain's pursuit "... whereas it is the well known "Magic flight" motif (Stith Thompson's D670).

 

Among the problems associated with Tehrani’s characterisation of the motifs, we note that the No. 21 is: "The victim and villain take separate routes": [0] missing [1] take the path of needles and pins [2] the villain takes the shortcut. But as far as [1] is concerned, the choice can be between needles and pins, stones and thorns, stones and pins, road and fields, or simply between two different paths. The list given for the species of the villain (No. 7: [0] fox [1] ogre [2] wolf [3] tiger/leopard [4] lion [5] bush beast [6] hyena [7] bear [8] alligator [9] crow) is far from being complete, as he can also be a man, a werewolf or the Devil. And several other motifs could be added, like “Villain comes to victim’s house”, “Victim tries to hide”, “Villain enters into victim's house”, “Victim wanders through the path while villain runs”, etc. This is important as the method followed by the author is more effective when the number of characters is important.

Some of the statistical tools used by Jamshid J. Tehrani themselves are also questionable. Thus, when using NeigbhorNet, he forgets to mention that the versions may only appear at the network edge, which prevents to see some more subtle links. Sometimes, NeighborNet also cannot place such a given version in an intermediate position between many others around it ; that can biase its position⁷.

In the autor’s database we replaced “-” by “?”, we transformed the base in Jaccard (taking into account the similarities and not the differences) and we launched a « principal coordinates analysis » (PCoA, transformation exponent : c = 2) with Past 3.0 (Hammer et al. 2001). PCoA is a well-know method that tries to find the main axes through a matrix. It starts with the matrix and assigns for each item a location in a low-dimensional (here two) Euclidian space. Then it calculates many eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Coordinate1 and Coordinate 2, which are the first and second principal coordinates, accounts for as much of the variability in the data as possible (here, proportion of explained variance: C1 : 30,629% ; C2 : 13,396% of the data). Indian, and not European, versions seem placed at the center (fig. 1).

 

 

When we placed in Easting and Northing the variable that explains the most distintive features (30.62%), we also obtained a similar result where the European versions are no longer in the middle (fig.2).

 

 

 

This does not mean of course that the method used by the author is to be rejected: quite the contrary. But it must be applied with caution and only after establishing and criticizing a corpus as complete as possible.

 

Patrice Lajoye, Julien d'Huy, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec

 

 

 

Alexander Afanasyev, Народные русские сказки, Moscow, Nauka, 3 volumes, 1984-1985.

Jacques Berlioz, « La Petite robe rouge », in Jacques Berlioz, Claude Brémond et Catherine Velay- Vallantin, Formes médiévales du conte merveilleux, 1989, Paris, Stock.

In-Hak, Choi, A Type Index of Korean Folktales, 1979, Seoul, Myong Ji University Publications, xii-353 p.

Paul Delarue, « Les contes de Perrault et la tradition populaire », Bulletin folklorique d'Île-de-France, 1951.

Paul Delarue et Marie-Louise Tenèze, Le Conte populaire français. Catalogue raisonné des versions de France, 2002, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose.

Wolfram Eberhard, Studies in Taiwanese Folktales, 1970, Taipei, Asian Folklore and Social Life Monographs, 193 p.

O. Hammer, D. A. T. Harper and P. D. Ryan, PAST: Paleontological statistics software package for education and data analysis, Palaeontologia Electronica, 2001, 4(1), 9 p.  http://palaeo-electronica.org/2001_1/past/issue1_01.htm

Gottfried Henssen, « Deutsche Schreckmärchen und ihre europäischen Anverwandten », Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 51, 1953, p. 84-97.

Paul Heggarty, Warren Maguire and April McMahon, « Splits or waves? Trees or webs? How divergence measures and network analysis can unravel language histories », Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2010, 365, p. 3829-3843.

Hiroko Ikeda, A Type and Motif Index of Japanese Folk-Literature, 1971, Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (Folklore Fellows Communications (vol. 209), 375 p.

Zófimo Consiglieri Pedroso, Contos Popolares Portugeses. Revista e aumentada, “Outras Obras”, 1984, Lisboa, Vega [1ª ed.: 1910] (297-301)

Marianne Rumpf, Rotkäppchen, eine vergleichende Märchenuntersuchung, (1951) 1989, Peter Lang.

Marie-Louise Tenèze, « Aperçu sur les contes d'animaux les plus fréquemment attestés dans le répertoire français », IV International Congress for Folk Narrative Research in Athens (1964), Lectures and Reports, Athènes, 1965, p. 569-575.

José Leite de Vasconcelos, Contos Populares e Lendas, coordenação de A. S. Soromenho e P. C. Soromenho, I, 1963, Coimbra, Acta Universitatis Conimbrigensis.

Francisco Vaz da Silva, «Capuchinho vermelho em Portugal.», Estudos de Literatura Oral 1, 1995, p. 38-58.

 

 

 

1Delarue, 1951, p. 227 ; Berlioz, 1989.

 

2Rumpf, (1951) 1989.

 

3Tenèze, 1965.

 

4Delarue et Tenèze, 2002.

 

5Af 53/23a ; Af 53/ 23b.

 

6Vaz da Silva, 1995.

 

7Heggarty and al., 2010.

 

(Review) Jean-Loïc Le Quellec - Jung et les archétypes. Un mythe contemporain

Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, Jung et les archétypes. Un mythe contemporain, 2013, éditions Sciences Humaines, Auxerre (France)

 

Nous sommes quelques-uns ici, participant à Nouvelle Mythologie Comparée, à ne pas admettre la notion d'archétypes, qui nous semble non-démontrée. J'ai pu mettre en évidence que le mythe de l'homme cosmique, par exemple, n'en est pas un : il est d'origine indo-européenne et s'est répandu par la suite en Asie, jusqu'à atteindre des régions parfois fort éloignées. De même, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec a accompli le même travail sur l'ouroboros, travail qui a par ailleurs intégré le présent ouvrage sous la forme d'un chapitre particulier.

Si cette notion a été particulièrement mise en avant par des mythologues comme Joseph Campbell ou Mircea Eliade, son principal promoteur -souvent considéré comme son inventeur – est Carl Gustav Jung. Autant dire qu'une étude sur ce personnage, axée sur les archétypes, s'avère nécessaire.

Jean-Loïc Le Quellec commence par interroger la notion d'archétype elle-même, par en chercher la définition exacte – laquelle s'avère particulièrement fluctuante d'un auteur à l'autre, y compris chez Jung lui-même. Il remonte à l'Antiquité grecque, où le terme apparaît déjà, notamment chez Platon, qui en fut le premier vrai théoricien – un théoricien singulièrement absent de l'oeuvre de Jung. Malgré le fait qu'elle ne soit pas le moins du monde démontrée, cette notion est malgré tout rapidement devenue comme une sorte de credo (chapitre 5), qu'il n'est justement plus nécessaire de démontrer. Pourtant, très tôt des voix se sont élevées, notamment chez les ethnologues, mais aussi dans d'autres branches des sciences : ainsi l'éthologue Konrad Lorenz, pourtant invoqué parfois par les jungiens, a dès 1950 montré que « sa théorie de l' 'archétype' se révèle à l'expérience inexacte ».

Malgré ces réserves, jamais Jung ni ses continuateurs ne se remettront en cause, au contraire, le psychanalyste continuera sans cesse à creuser dans cette voie, invoquant de nouveaux archétypes, tentant une expédition « ethnologique » au Kenya dont la description fait plus penser à Tartarin de Tarascon chassant le lion plutôt qu'à une vraie expédition scientifique. Mais il y a pire : il apparaît au fil des pages que Jung a sciemment déformé certaines informations qu'il a mises à son profit. Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, à ce sujet, est prudent, s'étant attaqué d'abord à l'œuvre avant d'essayer de comprendre l'auteur, le mot « mensonge » n'apparaît clairement sous sa plume qu'à la page 177. Car mensonges il y a. Notamment lorsque Jung raconte, à plusieurs reprises durant sa carrière, le rêve qui lui aurait permis d'élaborer sa théorie des archétypes : un rêve qui n'apparaît jamais de la même manière d'une version à l'autre. C'est alors qu'il faut s'intéresser à la personnalité de Jung elle-même, essayer de comprendre pourquoi et comment a-t-il pu soutenir coûte que coûte cette théorie. Si Jean-Loïc Le Quellec s'adresse finalement peu aux années de jeunesse de Jung, à sa relation avec Freud – et on peut parfois le regretter, car il y a peut-être là une clé de compréhension de son antisémitisme –, il montre cependant que ses positions sur l'inconscient collectif et les archétypes l'ont amené à avoir un comportement pour le moins ambigu lors de la monté du nazisme. Jung semble avoir vécu Hitler et les nazis comme une résurgence d'un « archétype de Wotan », archétype construit sur rien de scientifique, mais au contraire élaboré en tordant les connaissance d'alors sur la mythologie germanique de façon pour le moins surprenante, voire irrationnelle. Si Jung s'est par la suite défendu de toute connivence avec le nazisme, il n'en reste pas moins que l'épisode est intéressant pour montrer, une fois encore, la nullité de la théorie des archétypes.

On pourra regretter alors quelques petites erreurs qui émaillent le livre de Jean-Loïc Le Quellec. Dès la première page, il n'est pas question du centenaire de la mort de Jung, mais de son cinquantenaire. P. 182, il fait de Camille Flammarion un proche de la Société théosophique (la théosophie, autre fléau de la mythologie comparée) : ça n'est pas du tout certain, même si cela est écrit partout. Selon Vsevolod Soloviev, qui fut membre de la société, Flammarion ne serait venu qu'une seule fois chez Mme Blavatsky et en serait reparti sans éprouver le moindre intérêt.

Autre erreur, plus importante : p. 232 et 327, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec inverse la deuxième et et la troisième fonction dumézilienne. Ce n'est pas la troisième fonction qui est liée à la guerre, mais la deuxième.

Mais ce ne sont-là que broutilles, tant à côté de cela l'ouvrage est salutaire. Il vient en effet à point, après les critiques de Campbell par divers ethnologues et anthropologues (Northup, Cosentino, Crespi, Dundes, etc.), puis d'Eliade notamment par Dubuisson : il était temps de remonter à l'une des sources de ces errances, Jung lui-même, dont le travail concernant les mythes n'avait finalement rien de scientifique.

 

Patrice Lajoye