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Motif, Type and Genre: A Manual for Compilation of Indices & A Bibliography of Indices and Indexing. By Heda Jason. FF Communications No. 273. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2000. Pp. 279. Preface, acknowledgments, appendix, bibliographies, abbreviations, references, list of titles and subtitles. As its subtitle may suggest, the present work aims both to serve as an instructional manual for the folklorist undertaking the preparation of an index of types or motifs, and also to provide a multi-faceted bibliography that such a scholar might find helpful. Since the author herself has several tale-type indices to her credit, her guidance for the novice arises from her experience not only as a consumer of reference works but also as a creator of them. The historic-geographic school, she says, initiated the indexing of tales and motifs (over 300 of which have now appeared) but never produced a guide to their making, and since indices remain important tools for scholarly research and student training, they should be prepared in a way that makes them truly useful. The principal purpose of an index is to facilitate comparative studies, helping scholars to locate comparanda, if there are any. An index describes phenomena, answering "what" questions rather than "how" or "why" questions, the latter being rather the task of the investigator. The proper job of an index, then, is simply to list comparable units for practical use. It may also classify them, but need not. Jason's manual cum bibliography is divided into six parts. The first (A) describes concepts, the next two (B-C) deal with methods, the fourth (D) exemplifies the author's approach, the fifth (E) is a lexicon of narrative genres, and the last (F) is a series of bibliographies. In the first part (Concepts) the author discusses and defines such notions as motif, tale type, episode, genre, literary and oral transmission, repertoire, and culture area. She distinguishes between indices of folk-narrative material and possible indices of popular fiction such as crime novels. In the following part (Praxis) Jason offers very practical advice on the making of an index, including what an index should contain, how to determine whether the material is appropriate to an index at all, what should be in the introduction, which language to write it in (she recommends English), how to describe motifs and types properly, what sorts of bibliographies to include, and what sigla to employ. Part C (Auxiliary Registers) treats the subject of sorting out different kinds of information into useful mini-indices within the index. These include a list of the source texts, a subject index, a list of proper names, information on the narrators, and indices of matters that may be of interest to researchers such as regions, religions, historical periods, and languages. In the fourth part (Sample Analyses) she illustrates her method, printing three variants of the same type, describing the texts, and analyzing them in terms of genre and in relation to other tale types. The following part (Appendix) is an idiosyncratic discussion of ethnopoetic genres, after which the book proper concludes with two bibliographies, one a list of (mostly) published indices and the other a list of scholarly works having to do with motifs, types, genre, indexing, classification, and related topics. William Hansen |
