Narrative Culture Volume 3 | Issue 1 Article 6 5-1-2016 Ecotypes: Theory of the Lived and Narrated Experience Galit Hasan-Rokem Hebrew University of Jerusalem Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/narrative Recommended Citation Hasan-Rokem, Galit (2016) "Ecotypes: Theory of the Lived and Narrated Experience," Narrative Culture: Vol. 3 : Iss. 1 , Article 6. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/narrative/vol3/iss1/6 article Galit Hasan-Rokem Ecotypes Theory of the Lived and Narrated Experience An Innovative/Subversive Concept Among the theoretical concepts that have emerged as fruitful crossroads of folklore studies and neighboring disciplines, one of the most versatile and productive may be the concept of ecotype, although created in the twentieth century true to older practice of naming scientific terms and concepts in Greek or Latin, traditionally named “oikotype.” The classical Greek οἶκος (pronounced: oikos) denoted primarily a house, a dwelling, or a household. It thus encompassed the experience of space in combination with the most intimate social formations associated with a private dwelling. When Swedish folklorist and ethnologist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1878–1952)1 picked the term for describing a process of cultural adaptation of tradition, he was imputing into his terminology the subjectivity of the tradition bearers (also his term) whose close contact with their natural environment was a key paradigm for his analytical work. We cannot and do not want to gloss over von Sydow’s enthusiasm for Nazi ideology during World War II in “neutral” Sweden, that has been documented, laid bare, and castigated by Nils Arvid Bringéus. This deplorable fact may have been narrative culture, vol. 3, no. 1, spring 2016, pp. 110–137. copyright © 2016 wayne state university press, detroit, mi 48201-1309. 110 n Ecotypes n 111 connected with a heightened valuation of the physical territory and nature as the locus of the spirit of a particular folk identity transposed to a particular nation and/or race. It is, however, not visibly expressed in the essay in which the concept of ecotype is proposed: “On the Spread of Tradition” (Sydow),2 and was not really known among folklorists until its revealing in Bringéus’s book (178–86). Definition and Conceptualization In its most general and unspecified form the concept of ecotype denotes primarily a variation in an international type (usually a tale-type) specific to an area or a group. It is thus rooted in the typological approach that reigned in the geographical-historical (Finnish) school of folklore studies dominating the field from the second half of the nineteenth century until the early 1960s. In his article “Geography and Folk-Tale Oicotypes,” von Sydow elaborated the term with special reference to the study of folktales and integrated it into his study on the transmission and dynamics of tradition, calling for a study of folktales “as part of natural, living whole” (44). It is this aspect that has been viewed as his contestation of the methodology of the then-influential geographical-historical school. He later reformulated the concept a number of times.3 In a footnote von Sydow explicates the origin of the term in botany, referring to “an inherited form of adaptation to a specific environment, common to different individuals of a species” (“Geography and Folk-Tale Oicotypes” 243 n. II, 5). The biological metaphor of ecotype, which von Sydow creatively applied, refers to the ecological adaptation of a zoological, or rather botanical, species to a new environment to which it has been transported. For von Sydow’s model of the distribution of tradition the activity of “tradition bearers” (a term that he created and theorized as well), that is, human agents who actively narrate and less actively listen, was of major importance. The functional or rather functionalist theory he constructed was thus deeply interactional and socially contextualized. Whereas von Sydow himself focused on narrative folklore, linking it strongly with what Dov Noy (“Folklore”) has termed “cogitative folklore,” that is, beliefs, symbols, and rituals, his disciples, for instance, Albert Eskeröd applied the concept and the ensuing methods to ethnological projects such as studying the entire “life world”4 of fishing villages and to the concept of year cycle as embodied in harvest festivals. Eskeröd amplified the von Sydowian functional analysis with explicit application of Malinowski’s functionalist work. 112 n Galit Hasan-Rokem Von Sydow’s contestation of the dominant geographical-historical school’s principles aims at their “super organic” theory isolating the products of tradition from the human agents of the production of tradition.5 Thus the choice of his botanical metaphor seeks to replace the depersonalized metaphors suggested by the masters of the geographical-historical school, especially Kaarle Krohn, namely, that tradition spreads as a stream of water or as rings in water when a stone is thrown into it (Hafstein). Von Sydow’s research emphasized in general the relationship between tradition and its environment,6 especially its ecological environment in nature, and his work is replete with numerous examples of the function of trees, stones, rivers, and lakes in producing beliefs, narratives, and customs. Transposing the concept of ecotype from botany to folk traditions is formulated as follows: “The tradition in question will thus come to undergo a process of unification within its own area through the mutual control and reciprocal influence of its bearers, and altogether independent of corresponding traditions in other countries. It will therefore also receive a more or less distinct national character: an oicotype characteristic of its cultural area is formed” (Sydow, “On the Spread of Tradition” 16).7 Von Sydow thus clearly formulated the emergence of the ecotype as a process occurring in a specifically defined region, although as far as I know he did not set criteria for a size of such a region. However, he did distinguish between ecotypes of “lower”—more limited locality—and “higher” order, and suggested the term “ethnotype” (which did not gain popularity) for ecotypes common to large areas. In practice, Swedish emic divisions of regions and counties served as the terms of the discussion among von Sydow’s local followers. It may be helpful to briefly review the modus operandi that von Sydow confronted in the field of folklore research, especially Nordic folklore research, when he developed his particular theoretical and methodological brand. The prevailing analytical tools of the geographical-historical school as they were published in Kaarle Krohn’s articulation of his father Julius Krohn’s principles, and as applied by the younger Krohn’s student Antti Aarne, among others, were the laws of the transformation of tradition, and above all the concept of type. The method showed great affinity to the comparative methods that were developed in Germany inspired by the theories of Jakob (and Wilhelm) Grimm, especially as they took form in the annotations to the folktales of the Grimm brothers themselves in the work of Johannes Bolte and Jiří Polívka. Ecotypes n 113 Without providing here a full discussion of the concept of type and the various epistemological rationales with which it was attributed, it is important to state that the concept of the ecotype served as a functional, indeed functionalist, corrective to the general theory of the type, as it had formerly been developed in the framework of the geographical-historical school. The research into ecotypes diverts, initially at least, the focus from the dominant diachronic interest of the traditional geographical-historical method to a more synchronic view. Rather than analyzing the changes occurring in types as an internal dynamics of development, the observation of ecotypes is based on a contextual, interactional, and functional view of the transmission and change in tradition. The emergence of the concept of ecotype occurred in the period when other alternative models of change in the theory of the geographical-historical school were introduced, such as Walter Anderson’s “Law of Self Correction” of the tale-type. The concept of ecotype contributed toward the disappearance of the concept of origin and of Urtypus, which became less and less applied in research in the second half of the twentieth century, after World War II.8 In his later article, “Folktale Studies and Philology—Some Points of View,” von Sydow distinguished the ecotype from “mutations,” the first caused by more conscious adaptation in specific situations: “oicotypification, which consists of a certain unification of variants within one and the same linguistic area on account of isolation from other areas. It may consist of the circumstance that one mutation has prevailed over the rest so as to become the oicotype of the tale within the area concerned” (213). The wider definition encompasses the nexus to area, language, and nation. Although historically largely conceived and employed within the framework of essentialist thinking about the type, the concept of ecotype may also be considered as a potential opening for a nonessentialist way of thinking about typology of culture, in which the types serve as abstractions derived from the concrete negotiations carried out in each performance situation, negotiations that construct the specific configuration. It may however be shown that the research concentrating on ecotypes has in many cases actually transformed the synchronic potential embodied in it into more particular and less comparative diachronies. The ecotype as an analytical tool addresses probably the most central issue raised in all theories of folk narrative research, namely, the dialectics between stability and change. Although not necessarily designed so by its creator, the concept of ecotype has largely been understood to presuppose the type as a normative 114 n Galit Hasan-Rokem configuration from which certain local or particular formations deviate. Its formulation tends to reflect a relationship between type and ecotype in which the type is primary and the ecotype secondary, derived from the type. The concept of ecotype has been discussed in correlation with geographical distribution, locale, and collective identity. The Reception of “Ecotype” The term oicotype was slowly integrated in later research that adopted into the geographical-historical method various modifications of some of its precepts. The international tale-type index (Aarne and Thompson; cf. 3rd rev. ed. Uther), the prime concentrated expression of the methodology of the Finnish geographical-historical school, has an asterisk marking some tale-type numbers, intended to single out the types that, according to the material classified by Thompson, are limited to certain areas only. The graphic representation of those “ecotypes” includes smaller and less bold lettering as well as occasional italics. In the first revision of the index many of them were included in a supplement titled “Tales Not Included,” usually those “appearing very rarely or in a single country.” The term “ecotype” is not mentioned by Thompson in his “Preface to the Second Revision” of the index (Aarne and Thompson 7). Loyal to the geographical-historical school, he discussed the concept briefly, with deep skepticism, in his major work The Folktale (Thompson, The Folktale 440–41). Toward the end of his career, Thompson seems to have reconciled himself with von Sydow’s innovation, in an article where he also clearly renounces the study of original types: “The group [of what S. T. calls hypothetical subtypes] may indeed constitute what von Sydow calls an ‘oikotype’” (Thompson, “Hypothetical Forms in Folktale Study” 370). The spread of folk narrative studies to regions and languages earlier unknown to internationally publishing folk narrative scholars has often revealed that a taletype that had been considered to be a locally defined ecotype may have variants in heretofore undocumented places. Thus AT 872*9 “Brother and Sister,” which according to the Aarne-Thompson index has documented variants in Norwegian and Catalan, was shown by Hasan El-Shamy to have an extensive and characteristic distribution in the Middle East. As a result of the comprehensive indexing of non-European, especially African, collective repertoires, enormous amounts of “new,” formerly internationally unobserved, tale-types have emerged. Lee Haring Ecotypes n 115 reported over four hundred formerly unknown tale-types in the index of printed Malagasy folktales, which he considered “oikotypes.” In proportion, the recognized international tale-types in the same repertoire number thirty-one. On the other hand, due to variations in theoretical points of departure and terminology and especially national research traditions, research into similar models of change has not always included the concept of ecotype.10 When the research paradigm of American folkloristics changed toward the end of the 1960s, and especially during the 1970s, toward contextualist ethnography (Paredes and Bauman), only a few scholars adopted the ecotype as an analytical tool. Linda Dégh characterized von Sydow’s criticism of the geographical-historical school as the move from folktale philology to folktale biology (Dégh 47–49). The Hungarian school of Gyula Ortutay, in which Dégh was educated, put special emphasis on the empirical ethnography of storytelling in context. Ortutay himself formulated the phenomenon as follows: “Displacements of a type lead to the rise of another, kindred type” (221), praising von Sydow’s contribution with some reservation: “Nor can we deny that, by the examination of oikotypes and the classification of various subtypes C. W. von Sydow and his school have likewise promoted the elucidation of the problem at issue [i.e., the study of affinities in the context of international types]” (ibid.), pointing out especially von Sydow’s disciples’ work.11 An interesting theoretical juncture was created by Alan Dundes, who in addition to introducing von Sydow’s concept of ecotype to American and world folklorists in his influential anthology of articles, The Study of Folklore, also included ecotype as an analytical tool within his structural-comparative formulation of folklore theory (Dundes, “Structuralism and Folklore”). However, Dundes has suggested an alternative model for comparative analysis that in practice excludes the ecotype. His structural-typological method, based on the concept of “allomotifs,” liberates the analysis from the need to point at a center or a norm from which the ecotype deviates, but on the other hand it necessitates the construction of a structural system within which the allomotific changes occur (Dundes, “The Symbolic Equivalence of Allomotifs in the Rabbit Herd”; “The Symbolic Equivalence of Allomotifs: Towards a Method of Analyzing Folktales”). This analysis also recedes from the context back to a text-centered methodology. In a well-documented and cogently argued review article, Timothy Cochrane expressed his ambivalence for the concept of ecotype, similar to the ambivalence he traces in American research in general. As he points out, the prominent exception for the general disregard for the concept of ecotype even in American contextualist 116 n Galit Hasan-Rokem folkloristic research is Roger Abrahams’s systematic use of it, in the pathbreaking analysis of urban ethnic traditions in his Deep Down in the Jungle. Abrahams applied the concept to the highlighting of the specificity of Philadelphia’s African American expressive culture. His usage develops the term into an index of the characteristics of the group itself, unlike von Sydow who, while having formulated the adaptation process of the ecotype in terms of tradition elements acquiring “national character” (“On the Spread of Tradition” 16), seems not to have considered ecotypes as indexes for an essentialized “national character.” Innovation and Elaboration: Ecotype and Identity After Abrahams’s significant reworking of the ecotype, other innovations have followed suit. The major theoretical follow-up of the concept of ecotype was made by Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko, inspired by Scandinavian ethnologists who had studied the ecological aspects of tradition in the footsteps of the Swedish ethnologist and von Sydow’s disciple, Albert Eskeröd. In his magisterial article, “Four Forms of Adaptation of Tradition,” Honko introduced a significant systematization of the concept of ecotype within a wider system of processes of change in traditions. Like von Sydow, Honko characterized the ecotype as the result of a time-consuming process that follows more partial and temporary changes, including “adaptation to the morphology of the environment,” “adaptation to the morphology of the tradition,” and “functional adaptation.” In the first kind of adaptation, new traditions introduced into a system attach themselves to the “milieu dominants” of the new environment, such as irregular stones, cracks, caves, unusually big trees, springs and rivers that function strangely, and so on. In the second kind of adaptation the newly acquired tradition element attaches itself to a “tradition dominant” already existing in the tradition it has entered: if a narrative or a belief regarding an eternal wanderer is transmitted from some neighboring tradition to Finnish tradition, it might in the past have been transformed into the mythical figure of Väinamöinen, a “native” figure whose traditional characteristics overlap with the “newcomer’s.” In a later study, however, I found that the figure of the Wandering Jew, relatively new in Finnish folklore, after having gained some popularity, developed as a separate entity, potentially able to incorporate other such figures (Hasan-Rokem, “The Cobbler of Jerusalem in Finnish Folklore”). The power of “tradition dominants” is known from various traditions. Thus stories about clever judgments tend to Ecotypes n 117 focus on the figure of Harun al-Rashid when told in classical Arabic tradition as related to the Thousand and One Nights, and as King Solomon when told in Jewish tradition. Honko considers these two kinds of adaptation as the major ones. They occur according to him in the transitory period when the tradition element is newly introduced into its new environment, and they tend to have relatively stable and irreversible effects. The third kind of adaptation, “functional adaptation,” is the one in which Honko’s analysis departs in the most significant way from the traditional geographical-historical method and takes advantage of the theoretical achievements of neofunctionalist, contextual folkloristics, especially as elaborated by the Hungarian school as well as the American “New Folklorists” from the late 1960s onward (Paredes and Bauman). The functional adaptation occurs in the performative aspects of tradition, and it relates to the personality of the performer and what since has been termed the situational context (Kaivola-Bregenhøj 52). Finally, Honko defines the comprehensive and stable change that occurs in an “imported” tradition element and becomes characteristic of a certain area or group, as the ecotype, and describes it as distinguished by the following traits: (1) it is pervasive and thus is articulated in various mediums and genres, (2) its appearance is stable and frequent, (3) it is generative and productive, (4) it is highly adaptive to the environment, (5) it resists the contamination of foreign and irregular elements, (6) it is specific. Whereas Honko’s work did not actively reconfirm the essentialist conceptualization of an international type from which the ecotype deviates, he did not formulate an explicit criticism against it. The inherent relationship between the concept of ecotype and the conceptualization of collective identity, especially national identity, is witnessed by the fact that it has been frequently applied by scholars belonging to relatively small ethnic groups striving to construct a separate national identity. An early example is found in Irish folklorist Delargy’s poetic description of the emergence of Irish ecotypes: “The Irish power of absorption of foreign ethnical elements is to be observed also in the treatment of ethnical terms. From the Gaelic cauldron of rebirth they emerged Gaelic in tongue as well as in appearance, taking on Irish dress, names, and citizenship, at liberty to move freely in the company of the stock characters of Irish oral fiction. So thorough at times is the disguise that only the expert, familiar from long intercourse with his sources, can detect the stranger in the borrowed Gaelic frieze” (36). In a later study of the ecotypes of Irish folk tradition, Linda-May Ballard has presented her findings regarding an Irish ecotype meticulously applying the “corrected” version of the geographical-historical research procedure. Based on 118 n Galit Hasan-Rokem traditional quantitative methods and maps, her conclusion actually highlights the need to adjust the study of ecotypes to new analytical, interpretative, and theoretical approaches in order to maintain the relevance of the concept of ecotype for present and future folklore research. Likewise the basis of the frequent usage of the concept of ecotype in the research of scholars of Jewish folklore in Israel may reflect their conscious involvement with shaping a new national identity of Israelis while at the same time almost paradoxically raising the consciousness of particular ethnicities based on one hand on the diversity of countries, languages, and cultures from which they have emigrated, and on the other the traditions of the local and indigenous inhabitants of their country (Hasan-Rokem, “The Birth of Scholarship”). In the context of the process of nation building in modern Israel, folklorists have used the term ecotype to suggest several different bases of identity formation for Jewish folklore in Israel, based on the claim of Jewish ecotypes that have been common to Jews in various environments as a minority among different peoples. In the tradition of folk narrative research practiced in the context of Jewish studies,12 the doyen of Israeli folklore studies, Dov Noy has constructed a historical-narrative Jewish identity, based on the research of the succession of written and oral texts in his analysis of the tale type AT 670, “The Animal Languages.” As a result of his analysis, Noy proposed a set of three rules that determine and regulate the ecotypal transformation of international tale-types in Jewish tradition. Critical reading of the rules reveals that at least the first of them, namely, that the changes occur at the beginning and the end whereas the middle of the plot remains rather close to the international type, needs not necessarily be seen as culturally specific and occurs in the adaptation of folk narrative types to most cultures, due to performance-technical reasons that privilege familiarization at the beginning of a storytelling act (Hasan-Rokem, “Aurora Borealis”). The two other additional ecotypification rules of international tale-types entering into Jewish tradition according to Noy, namely, association with biblical verses or other canonical texts, and word play—often multilingual—may well reflect the specific character of Jewish folk literature, which traditionally already from antiquity bears the stamp of heightened interaction between oral and literary traditions (Hasan-Rokem, “Negotiating Canons”). Noy’s contribution lies also in the combination of the typological and the structural methods, and according to his study the definition of the ecotype requires a stable alteration of a structural element, whereas the alteration of a descriptive, content, or style element will not suffice in order to Ecotypes n 119 make an ecotype. As a disciple of Stith Thompson, who supervised his 1955 dissertation on the types of Talmudic-Midrashic tales at the Folklore Department of Indiana University, Noy’s work naturally and strongly leans on the conjecture of an international “standard” tale-type from which the culturally specific deviates. Heda Jason, who started her studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem after Noy’s return from Indiana, but then went to complete her dissertation at Indiana University, has dedicated much of her work to the elaboration on the expression of a common Middle Eastern identity, also in ecotypal formations. Whereas her internationally acknowledged research initially addressed mainly the formalist and morphological methods associated primarily with Vladimir Propp (Jason, The Russian Criticism of the “Finnish School” in Folktale Scholarship; Jason and Segal), actually much more of her work has been devoted to the designation of types and ecotypes to Israeli and Middle Eastern tale repertoires, barely associating with her morphological research models.13 This may, however, remind us of the fact that Propp himself saw his folktale morphology as an especially exact description of stages in the geographical-historical evolvement. Eli Yassif has discussed the emergence of modern Israeli ecotypes as transformations of traditional Jewish ones in historical contexts, and pointed at a great variation in the level or intensity of these processes of re-ecotypification.14 Yassif’s analysis clearly transposes the ecotypal process from the synchronic to a historical continuum, constructing a Jewish narrative tradition—in his case even a Hebrew narrative tradition—following the abovementioned methodological model of Noy’s work. With regard to the Israeli development of the ecotype, his analysis reveals gradual, uneven, and partial processes of identity formation of modern Israelis in relationship to the traditional Jewish identity. This finding is further reinforced by Tamar Alexander’s work concerning ecotypes where the emphasis is on a particular ethnical identity within the larger Israeli context, expressed in the Judeo-Espagnol (Ladino) of Sephardic Jews, as well as a local element, Jerusalem (“A Sephardic Version of a Blood Libel Story in Jerusalem”; The Heart Is a Mirror 223–38). Alexander has further developed the concept of ecotype in another fieldwork-based research, adapting the concept of ecotype to an even smaller group than an ethnic group within the nation, namely a family, focusing on the detailed analysis of particular performances and discourses and thus touching upon Honko’s “functional adaptation” (Alexander, “Literary Tradition, Family Self Image, and Ethnic Identity”; The Heart Is a Mirror 239–56). Her work shows the versatility of the ecotype’s analytical perspectives that may be enlisted for nation building but also for a pragmatic 120 n Galit Hasan-Rokem deconstruction of the national framework by highlighting the specificity of forms of expression, ecotypes, of smaller-than-nation groupings. The variation shown in the application of the concept of ecotype for the construction of identities exemplifies the indeterminacy of the initial definition of the concept itself and its boundaries, and in particular the lack of a definition of the size of the area or the group that may produce an ecotype. Thus the interpretative potential of the concept lends itself to various hermeneutic models on the one hand and discourages the usage for purely classificatory purposes such as the Aarne-Thompson Index and its parallels on the other.15 Ecotypes in the Contact Zone and the Poetics of Long Duration The interpretive potentials that the ecotype has been shown to enable may be taken further out of the group to discuss relationships across groups. I have in the past reviewed the ecotype concept (“Ökotyp”) and situated it in the history of folklore scholarship (“Aurora Borealis”). In addition, I have applied it to illuminate the dialogic interface between classes, genders, subcultures, ethnic groups, and religious groups in Palestine in Late Antiquity—especially between Jews and Romans, and Jews and Christians—as it emerges from rabbinic literature (Web of Life; Tales of the Neighborhood). The tale describing Rabban Yohanan ben-Zakkai’s acquiring from Roman emperor Vespasian the concession for establishing an academy of Jewish learning in the coastal refuge town of Yavneh after the destruction of Jerusalem,16 is often considered as the foundation legend of Rabbinic culture. Meanwhile, it is shown to be a Jewish ecotype of tale-type ATU 922,17 known as “The Emperor and the Abbott.” The ecotypal formation of this tale can be shown to have roots in the Hebrew Bible, fragmentarily in the appearance of both Joseph and Moses in the court of Pharaoh but with a fully-fledged plot structure in the book of Esther, with Mordechai cast as the “abbot,” a term rendered hopelessly anachronistic by the fact that the book of Esther, indeed the entire Hebrew Bible, preceded any abbot by many centuries (Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life 171–89). Noy called the Jewish ecotype “The Jewish Minister in a Gentile King’s Court,”18 and it usually stages—like in Esther—a Jewish and a non-Jewish minister or counselor where the second one tries to oust the first and is defeated by the cleverness of the first, and in some cases it may be hinted that the Jew was assisted by divine help. The Jewish ecotype may involve the peril of the entire local Jewish minority community unless their representative Ecotypes n 121 succeeds. The ecotype with its strong ethnic minority marking persists through the ages in multiple oral versions,19 as well as in numerous literary versions.20 But more importantly I think, I have tried to show the analytical and hermeneutic value of the ecotype exactly in the kind of analysis that transcends rather than upholds specific identities, be they related to nation, ethnic group, or any other collective formation. I have investigated the emergence of ecotypes in what Marie Louise Pratt has theorized as contact zones (Imperial Eyes; “Arts of the Contact Zone”), and found them to be especially productive areas of creation and recreation of this ecotypical formations of traditional culture. In parallel I have found the ecotype a powerful tool to address historical texts whose creators’ identity is difficult to nail down. Implementing folk narrative analysis based on ecotypes, I believe that I have been able to prove that a text parodying some of the elements of the life story of Jesus Christ, generally called Toledot Yeshu, “The history of Jesus” (but according to the heterogeneous character of the materials also bearing many other titles) that has traditionally been attributed to Jewish authors, actually belongs exactly to a contact zone (Hasan-Rokem, “Polymorphic Helena”). The analysis constituted on the concept of ecotype demonstrates the dominant affinity of this text to apocryphal Christian texts that have been ejected from the canon of the Church and the churches for being considered heretical, such as the apocryphal Acts of Peter and the apocryphal Acts of Paul (Schneemelcher), in addition reading the text with its many affinities to various noncanonical life stories of Jesus that appear in various folk narrative environments—such as “peasant bibles” (Lammel and Nagy). The specific contact zone that I have pointed at are heterodox Christian and Jewish and probably also Muslim groups in the eastern part of the Mediterranean toward the end of the first millennium CE. This contact zone included people who were volatile in their religious adherence and perhaps in other aspects of their identity. They may have lived in mixed families, or contemplated moving from one identity group to another. It is in those borderlands of identity where the longing is sometimes actualized in a partial or total act of conversion that the curious mixture of these narrative fantasies may have emerged and lived its restless life of agonized and inconsequent narrative plots, theological color, and characterization of dramatis personae. It is there, among seekers, hesitators, and transgressors of boundaries that the detailed knowledge of the others’ myths and images, such as is displayed in the text called “The History of Jesus” if conceptualized as Jewish, flourished (Lasker and Stroumsa; Stroumsa). Naturally, for the suggested literary and folk literary 122 n Galit Hasan-Rokem process to have taken place, porosity cannot be attributed only to the Jewish side of the boundary and thus the fluidity characterizing the apocryphal Christian texts that were suggested as an important interface with the various versions of the “Tale of Jesus” literature, provide a reference to possible textual and social milieus of literary interaction.21 Thus, although von Sydow himself was quite oblivious of the sociopolitical context of the ecotypes and especially the power relations in which they are embedded, the ecotype may still be useful for thinking of a text such as this one in the Jewish-Christian-Muslim “contact zone,” rather than belonging to any particular group. It may further be fruitful to think that the contact zone and the ecotypes that are produced in it do not always mark an interface between recognized groupings but possibly cut through some of the groups that are usually thought of as intact. Probably the most amusing instance of working with the ecotype on historical materials involved the discovery of what I believe are Sirens in an exegetical text of the Late Antique Rabbis in Roman and Byzantine Palestine addressing a text from the biblical book of Leviticus and the more or less proven hypothesis that it was in this period and this area that the transformation of Sirens from half birds to half fish took place; a pretty unusual enterprise to have been preserved in the cultural institutions and canons of the Rabbis, but exactly the kind of border transgressing cultural process for which the ecotype is a phenomenal tool to uncover.22 This intuition was reinforced by the likewise surprising appearance of Odysseus with a Siren on a floor mosaic in the city of Bet She’an in the Jordan valley. The major point of this project lay in the fact that whereas the Homeric Sirens, like all their sisters in classical traditions both literary and pictorial were half birds, those of the Rabbis and the mosaic were half fish, and preceded the earliest European half fish Sirens by a couple of hundred years. So I asked myself: why would this transformation have happened in this area out of all places? I suggested that one possible solution to this question lies in the closeness of the sites of worship of the syncretistic Dea Syria, Syrian Goddess—the goddess of the dead and of resurrection, about whom Lucian of Samosata (ca. 125–180 ce) (apparently) wrote a detailed essay, and among whose diverse manifestations Atargatis/Derceto the fish goddess is one.23 In a possibly even earlier source, Diodorus Siculus (ca. 60–30 bce?), the following half fish goddess is introduced: “Now there is in Syria a city known as Ascalon, and not far from it a deep lake [sic] full of fish. On its shore is a precinct of a famous goddess whom the Syrians call Derceto; and this goddess has the head of a woman but all the rest is that of a fish (358–59).”24 Ecotypes n 123 The long duration of this goddess’s worship in the region as described in scholarship,25 and the emphasis on her local character (Khirbet at-Tannur in the Jordan valley, Ashqelon) makes her into the kind of “tradition dominant” that affects the ecotypification of folk traditions and draws like a magnet other traditional materials that adapt it to varied and new contexts, “changing with changes of conditions, adapted to the circumstances and needs of the community” (Lucian of Samosata and Garstang 19).26 Transforming the winged Sirens into swimming ones in the Jordan valley and its environs could thus be viewed as a process of ecotypification as it has been defined in folklore studies. In the investigation of another narrative tradition, namely, the Wandering Jew in European folklore, the ecotype has shown itself as particularly adequate. The concept of tradition with special reference to the Wandering Jew—and perhaps even Jews in general—addresses tradition’s characteristic propensity to transform and to change, both in its movement from one place to another and in its being transmitted from generation to generation.27 Whereas the theme of the Wandering Jew tends to repeatedly defy a comprehensive chronological review or a definition within a specific cultural context, it eminently emphasizes how cultural creativity occurs across identity boundaries rather than within them.28 This is how this theme literally invites the application of the ecotype that refers to the cultural configurations shaped by adaptation to new conditions, new environments, and new ecosystems, both physically and symbolically speaking. The concept of ecotype together with a critically informed notion of tradition may thus enable us to uncouple tradition from its frequent linkage to specific identities and to deal with traditions not necessarily as emerging within groups but rather in interactions and interchanges between groups. Such a move may liberate folklore studies from some of its more stifling ethnocentric perspectives. The concept of ecotype almost “naturally” correlates with the figure of the Wandering Jew, a figure shaped by and within the interaction of various fields of human creativity, such as literature, the arts, religion, and perhaps above all, folklore.29 The past study of the theme of the Wandering Jew has tended to emphasize the Christian identity of its authors and transmitters.30 However, this tradition has moved between authorships, subjectivities, and agencies, and between Christian and Jewish narrators, painters, and printers who have coproduced European culture in many of its aspects for over a thousand years, being a prime expression of the dialogical emergence of culture between groups, in this case between Jews and Christians (Hasan-Rokem, “The Wandering Jew—A Jewish Perspective”; “Homo 124 n Galit Hasan-Rokem viator et narrans”; “Ex Oriente Fluxus”). Thus the adaptation of the figure of the Wandering Jew to various milieus, climates, periods, and social formations is not only a concrete example of the folkloristic pattern and process of ecotypization but also a metaphorical and symbolical embodiment of the phenomenon itself— the figure is an exemplary ecotype, constantly moving, changing, adapting. The persistent and multifaceted hermeneutic function of the figure of the Wandering Jew in European culture can thus at least partly be understood through its correspondence with the ecotype that has been identified by scholarship as a central phenomenon in the transmission and distribution of folklore and popular culture. In its ecoptypical function the legendary Wandering Jew figure not only portrays a superbly adapting individual who readily learns the languages of all places and effortlessly crosses state boundaries and even combat fronts,31 but the narrative itself also adapts to locality, so that in Switzerland he leaves traces in the snow (Rochholz 110, 306, 489); in Finland he may wear the shape of an almost familiar but uncanny forest spirit, the fire fox (Hasan-Rokem, “The Cobbler of Jerusalem”); and in southern Sweden he raises whirlwinds (Klintberg). The adaptations may occur exactly to create the impression that traditions, circulating between groups, may be identified as “our,” belonging to “us” who share a spot on earth, usually also a language and other markers of identity, in a dialectical tension with the itinerant protagonist of the legend. As Honko has shown, the ecotypical adaptation process encompasses in addition to an adaptation to a natural environment also an adaptation to the cultural system, its genres and dominant motifs and figures and especially a functional adaptation to the specific needs and conditions in the new milieus. In the case of the Wandering Jew, punished by Jesus to never rest for not letting Him rest on the wall of his house, the ambiguity of the Jew turned a pious Christian, or the pious Christian revealed as a Crypto-Jew will haunt the further cultural transformations of the figure of the Wandering Jew and energize both its rich associative power and its fatal sociopolitical force from early modernity to modernity (Hasan-Rokem, “Contemporary Perspectives”; Hasan-Rokem, “Der Ewige”). Thus the Wandering Jew is not only the embodiment of the ecotype, he also embodies the uncanny—the Unheimlich—that which is hidden and intimately known, and literally not at home anywhere, to paraphrase one of the great articulators of modernity, Sigmund Freud. Ecotypes n 125 Connecting Disciplines: Folklore and History It has been shown that the relevance of the concept of ecotype has survived when it is reinterpreted in new theoretical and ideological frameworks, sometimes even “against the grain” of its original context of articulation. The potential of interdisciplinary perspectives of the concept has been fulfilled for instance in the trailblazing and prolific work of scholar of Talmudic culture Daniel Boyarin, who has adopted ecotype as a particularly useful tool for his analysis of the textual contacts between Rabbis and Church Fathers in the eastern Mediterranean region and Mesopotamia (Boyarin 49–63). Critically discussing the monumental project of Louis Ginzberg who envisioned Rabbinic literature as the folk literature of ancient Jews (Ginzberg), Boyarin draws the broad contours of the ideological, theological, and philosophical context of Ginzberg’s project and identifies Ginzberg’s ideological roots in Romanticism. He interprets Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews as an attempt to prove that Jews are a “people among peoples,” since they have folk literature as other peoples do. Boyarin’s criticism of the project is based on this premise, adopting updated post-Romantic theoretical models from folklore research, primarily the concept of ecotype, to address questions of the transmission of traditions from one place to another or from one group to another. The multiple ways in which the ecotype has been shown to enrich the understanding of the changes and variations occurring in those products of human culture that we, like von Sydow, call tradition or traditions, highlight the way in which the ecotype addresses cultural creativity transmitted over long periods of time and distributed over wide geographical areas. Originating in the work of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the concept of the long durée was theorized and explicated by their student Fernand Braudel and brought to its fruition in the French Annales School. Braudel emphasized the need to privilege in the study of history the study of lingering institutions and structures instead of events, balancing an unbounded approach to time and space with a deep sense of history, producing a serious study of everyday culture and popular creativity (25–54). This is where the concept of ecotype enters readily. As a body of knowledge and creativity that is transmitted primarily by the spoken word and behavioral example, much of folklore belongs to the domain of tacit and embodied information, especially open to adaptation to new conditions and environments. It thus stands to reason that ecotype is one of the most productive concepts to arise from twentieth-century folklorists’ investigation of the processes and mechanisms of tradition and change in performance. 126 n Galit Hasan-Rokem An interesting and significant contribution to the vitality and relevance of the concept of the ecotype has been the cogently argued adoption and adaptation of ecotype by historian David Hopkin, to create a bridge as he suggests between cultural history and social history. Hopkin’s essay is the first to follow the introduction of the editors in a volume honoring the cultural historian Peter Burke. Although I am not entirely sure why Hopkin has chosen a title that associates with Jonathan Swift’s rather rampant satire A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1729), the initial position of the essay in the volume marks Hopkin’s rank among his colleagues as well as the importance and, relative to other essays in the volume, its general and theoretical ramifications. The methodological proposition focusing on the ecotype as the best possible tool to elicit the voices of the otherwise unheard parts of past populations is, however, not the least apologetic as the adjective “modest” in the title may lead us to believe. In addition to the work of folklorists Abrahams, Dundes, and Honko mentioned above, Hopkin’s work is informed by the studies of Finnish ethnologist Matti Sarmela, and the Lund School of Swedish ethnologists Orvar Löfgren and Jonas Frykman, who in the footsteps of Eskeröd (also mentioned above) conducted research in various rural and urban communities in their countries and elsewhere in Europe, harnessing the ecotype as a major analytical tool that they also developed into ever more dynamic and versatile modes (Hopkin, “The Ecotype” 35–40).32 Hopkin’s understanding of the ecotype is fundamentally rooted in Burke’s teaching as quoted by the editors of the volume in which the essay was published: “cultural historians might usually define themselves not in terms of a particular area or field such as art, literature and music, but rather of a distinctive concern for values and symbols, wherever they are to be found, in the everyday life of ordinary people as well as in special performances for elite” (quoted in Calaresu, Rubiés, and Vivo 2).33 From the wide repertoire suggested by Burke, Hopkin tends to favor the more everyday life situations than festive or religious ceremonies, however clearly distinguishing himself from the kind of cultural history that focuses on one individual as a microhistorical exemplar or metonymy.34 His method correlates ecotypes of narratives and behavior, material culture and performance, in modes familiar to most contemporary folklorists (“The Ecotype” 43), while also counting on maps (42–46), a method nowadays more trusted by ethnologists, although very popular in the past among the geographical-historical scholars (e.g., Rooth and Cox; Rooth; Ballard). Focusing on the ATU type 450 “Little Brother, Little Sister,” Hopkin traces Ecotypes n 127 the local French ecotypes from a collection of 950 tales that have been collected in the area of Nièvres in central France in the nineteenth century, which is his period of expertise (“The Ecotype” 50–51), concluding that: “the cultural ecotype is not just a reflection of a socio-economic reality; the fairy-tale lets us listen into actual decision making process in which peasant narrators and their audiences grappled with the structuring forces in their lives, but also expressed their ability to manipulate or resist those forces” (52). Hopkin emphasizes the value of historical study employing ecotypes for the history of mobility on one hand and the extraordinary capacity to link the micro- and macrolevels of historical investigation. Having wholeheartedly embraced the ecotype, Hopkin, in his wonderful book Voices of the People in Nineteenth Century France, excels in applying multiple folkloristic methods, in addition to the ecotype, such as genre analysis, eliciting performance from textual recordings and correlating the tactics of narrating and riddling to political and socioeconomical activities and changes. Hopkin makes a strong case for folklore, and may teach even some folklorists to listen to the materials and methods of our discipline as a superb way to know, to make known, and to create knowledge. The work that the ecotype does as a bridge between history and folklore, folklore and history, as suggested by Hopkin learning history from folklore on one hand and my work on attempting to learn on folklore in history on the other hand, may point at further productive interdisciplinary potentials of this outstandingly inspiring concept in folklore studies and beyond. Galit Hasan-Rokem has served as Max and Margarethe Grunwald Professor of Folklore and Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and continues as visiting professor and researcher at major institutions in Europe and the United States. She studies folk literary, ethnographic, and intercultural aspects of late antique Rabbinic literature; theory of folklore; the proverb genre; Jewish motifs in European folklore; and Israeli folklore. Recent publications include: Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (2000), and Tales of the Neighborhood: Jewish Narrative Dialogues in Late Antiquity (2003); Companion to Folklore (2012) with Regina F. Bendix; and Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews: Ancient Jewish Folk Literature Reconsidered (2014) with Ithamar Gruenwald. 128 n Galit Hasan-Rokem n notes 1. “Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1878–1952) . . . was without doubt one of the single most important scholars when it came to introducing the discipline in Sweden. Due to political tactics, rivalry between universities, and private sponsoring in favor of another candidate, von Sydow was not appointed professor of folkloristics, nor was an academic chair in this field ever established. Towards the end of his professional life, however, von Sydow was granted a personal professorship in Nordic and Comparative Folk Culture Research. He was the founder of the Folk Life Archive in Lund and one of the instigators of the Irish Folklore Archive in Dublin.” Ulf Palmenfelt, “Carl Wilhelm von Sydow som folklorist, by Nils-Arvid Bringéus, 2006. Uppsala: Kungliga Gustav Adolfs Akademien för Svensk Folkkultur,” Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, review posted on May 6, 2008. <https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/jfrr/article/ view/2574/2450>. 2. See also Sydow, “Geography and Folk-Tale Oicotypes.” 3. E.g., Sydow, “Folktale Studies and Philology.” 4. The insertion of the Husserlian-Blumbergian concept is mine, however conveniently and adequately contemporary. 5. The term “super organic” is Alan Dundes’s characterization of Axel Olrik’s “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative.” 6. In ways that may lead us to think of the concept of habitus as theorized by Bourdieu. 7. I have retained the variant spellings of the term in each source quoted. In the preface to the collected essays of von Sydow, the editor, Laurits Bødker, comments on the variation between ecotype and oicotype in von Sydow’s own writings (Sydow, Selected Papers 9). 8. See von Sydow’s critique of the study of origin (“Folktale Studies and Philology” 207). 9. AT numbers refer to the second edition of the index, see Aarne and Thompson, Types of the Folk-Tale. 10. E.g., the systematic and comprehensive study report “De la variabilité du sens et du sens de la variabilité,” based on African materials (Calame-Griaule et al.). 11. Gyula Ortutay mentions Jan Ö. Swahn’s The Tale of Cupid and Psyche, and The Cinderella Cycle by Anna B. Rooth and Marian R. Cox, in this context. 12. See especially Louis Ginzberg’s article “Jewish Folklore: East and West.” 13. See Jason’s works, “Types of Jewish Oral Tales,” Types of Oral Tales in Israel, and her Ecotypes 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. n 129 completion of the work of prematurely deceased Sarah Sorour Soroudi (Jason and Soroudi). While Yassif’s The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning addresses the medieval versions of the Jewish oikotype (279–82), “The Man Who Never Swore an Oath: From Jewish to Israeli Oikotype,” as the title says, addresses the modern Israeli versions. E.g., Kovács using however only the term “subtype”; cf. Thompson’s “Hypothetical Forms in Folktale Study” (370). The historical and literary analyses and treatments of this narrative are too many to list, but they include authors like Gedaliah Alon, Jacob Neusner, Daniel Boyarin, and others. ATU numbers refer to the last revision of the index by Uther. The number AT 922*C was designated by him and Heda Jason (see Jason, Types of Oral Tales in Israel 51–52; Soroudi 148–49). E.g., Jason, Types of Oral Tales in Israel 51–52; Soroudi 148–49; Ben-Amos, Folktales of the Jews, in which the tale is numbered 34; in IFA (Israeli Folktale Archives, the University of Haifa) tale no. 3870, 335–37, notes pp. 338–56, followed by IFA 6870 that includes the threat on the entire community. At the present stage of digitalization, the Israeli Folktale Archives (IFA) database refers to about sixty items. I have discussed one such literary rendering in the novel Jud Süss by Lion Feuchtwanger (Hasan-Rokem, “Imagining the Wandering Jew in Modernity”). “Christianity interprets itself in these writings as a vivid subculture” (my emphasis) (Czachesz 95). See also Christine M. Thomas, suggesting folkloristic models of communication as an adequate method for studying the Acts of Peter and its likes (16). For the full account of this research, see Hasan-Rokem, “Leviticus Rabbah 16:1.” See on the fish symbolism: Glueck, “A Newly Discovered Nabataean Temple” 368, 374, 376; see also his Deities and Dolphins 315 ff., especially 381–83, 391–92; Lindner and Zangenberg include a long list of sources (147). See Millar on the locations of the Atargatis worship (242–47, 282). Franz Cumont mentions this aspect of the goddess only fleetingly in the article “Dea Syria.” Glueck (Deities and Dolphins 382–83) refers to ancient Mesopotamian roots of the tradition, as well as a parallel from Caesarea Maritima; see also Lucian and Lightfoot 254–55 (text); 352–56 (commentary); 65–72 (on fish symbolism). See also Gera 70–72. 130 n Galit Hasan-Rokem 25. E.g., Glueck, “A Newly Discovered Nabataean Temple of Atargatis and Hadad at Khirbet Et-Tannur, Transjordania”; Glueck, Deities and Dolphins; Lucian, Oden, and Attridge; Drijvers 76–121; Lucian and Lightfoot. 26. See also the process of interpretive crystallization of themes described by Glueck: “Like a magnet pulling isolated particles into the field of its attraction. . . . Separate pieces began to fit into a meaningful pattern, solving the puzzle etc.” (Deities and Dolphins 320). Glueck also mentions a “stone frieze in relief, depicting what has been described as a Nereid mounted on a Sea Centaur” (331) from Petra, and from Baalbek (339), both of which are among the motifs of the Leontis mosaic, as well as other similar combinations from close areas, e.g., Nahal Hever; cf. ichtyocentaur (332). The temple of Khirbet Tannur has been reexcavated by Judith McKenzie and her teams, who have published numerous reports (McKenzie, Gibson, and Reyes; McKenzie) with new interpretations that seem to favor fish, not dolphins, as the theme, unlike Glueck. McKenzie has also published extensively on Alexandria. 27. For an exemplary analytical overview of the concept of tradition, see Noyes. See also Ben-Amos’s article “The Seven Strands of Tradition” and my discussion of the Wandering Jew with special reference to the concept of tradition (“Contemporary Perspectives on Tradition”). 28. “‘Nomad thought’ does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference” (Massumi, xii). 29. The most comprehensive historical overview of the Wandering Jew materials is still George K. Anderson’s. 30. See for instance the subtitle of Alan Dundes’s and my edited volume, The Wandering Jew: Interpretations of a Christian Legend. 31. On the remarkable gift of languages, see the xenoglossy of popular prophets in northern Germany that have been suggested as parallel figures to the Wandering Jew (Beyer 67). These prophets are also suggested as models for the Wandering Jew by P. V. Brady. 32. Hopkin also refers to the folklore scholar Jonathan Roper’s work. 33. 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