‘Objectivity is impossible because I am there’ (pp. 56) Young
writes of the social sciences’ problem with maintaining a balance between
objectivity and subjectivity, and uses this framework to examine how folklore telling
operates, or, rather ‘should’ operate. She says pure objectivity is not what
folklore should aspire to, as the teller’s situation, location, biases and
feelings are entrenched in the retelling of a tale. ‘Descriptions … are always
situated’ (pp. 56) Phenomenology as a method of social study, has attempted to shift
the focus of folklore centrally, towards subjectivity, rather than on objectivity.
Pure subjectivity on the other hand, suggests the notion that
all accounts of experiences become speculative, and all sense-making becomes so
also. ‘Subjectivity is impossible because others are there too’ (pp. 56). A difficult
balance between the two ends of the spectrum; an ‘intersubjectivity’ which
makes important neither self nor objects but other subjects, is the ideal of
phenomenology in folklore. The assumption is that intersubjectivity is ‘an
effect of mutual attention between two still self-contained subjects’ to
recognise one another (pp. 69).
Young uses gestures to illustrate her point. Gestures are the
kinaesthetic apprenticeship of the body to a culture. Gestures carry with them
many meanings, specific to social orders, ethnic groups etc. They ‘allude to
the gesturer’s thought’, they present themselves as the ‘object of attention’,
and they ‘delineate the object to which they allude’ (pp. 56, 57). Gestures are
evidence of how one’s thinking is.
In an objective world, things are real but the person perceiving
them has almost been ‘de-realized’ (pp.57). Their awareness of the world does
not affect it. However, when placing this person into the world (subjectivity),
they can only see one side of the objects they view; can never fully apprehend
the world as it is. ‘Perspective is introduced by the fact of [one’s]
embodiment’ (pp. 57). The whole world becomes an entity insofar as it is
conceptualized by the person, and the subjectivity of any other bodies becomes
extinguished. The balance comes in recognising that an other can be a constitutive
consciousness of its own right. This is where the gesture comes into play,
disclosing the other’s intentionality. ‘I perceive both object and action in
the gesture itself, both what the thing is and what the gesturer has in mind
about it. The object is colonized by the action; the action issues in its
object. These gestures reveal not only consciousness as corporeity, the movement
of the body in the world’ (pp. 63).
Objectivity gives the illusion that a truth is given, which
can be appealing for folklorists. On the other hand, subjectivity frees
folklorists to openly state their own perceptions of the world. In between
these two, ‘The appeal of intercorporeity is the recognition that I belong to
objects and others before I belong to myself’ (pp.80). Folkoristics is
especially amenable to phenomenological approaches because of its angle of
entry into culture using [especially ritualized and habitual] embodied
behaviour and performance (pp. 81)
‘The tension between communicating meaning gesturally and
embodying meaning gesturally captures in miniature the tension in folklore
between treating performances as artifacts that performers design for audiences
and treating performances as embodied acts to which performers are given over
undesignedly and for which they cannot be held altogether responsible.’ (pp 64)
Reference: Young, K. (2011). Gestures, Intercorporeity, and the Fate of Phenomenology in Folklore. Journal of American Folklore, 124(492), pp.55-87.
