Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend (review) Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend (review) Stiofán Ó Cadhla Journal of American Folklore, Volume 122, Number 483, Winter 2009, pp. 117-118 (Review) Published by American Folklore Society DOI: For additional information about this article [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] https://doi.org/10.1353/jaf.0.0070 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256992 https://doi.org/10.1353/jaf.0.0070 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256992 portant for the individuals who pass them on in informal performance venues and also for the community that unselfconsciously sponsors them (pp. 18–9). The study does not only focus on narrative. As the Mennonites and Amish are famous for their conscientious objection to war, there is a chapter on protest songs. Glass paint- ings of flowers, birds, and butterflies with moral statements are a common genre of folk art in the culture, and Beck provides an examination of this kind of cultural production. Almost every Mennonite home has a family record book, and genealogy is a vigorous form of historical mem- ory practiced within the community, including the maintenance of detailed birth, marriage, and death records. The Relief Sale Festival is a folk festival, not a fair, organized by the Mennonites and for the Mennonites. Beyond these genres, this is, most importantly, a book of countless tales. It shows how individual stories can be re- told in differing versions with various under- standings and interpretations, and it also ex- plores humorous narratives. In sum, Beck’s MennoFolk is an interesting introduction to the Mennonite folk culture through stories and other traditions. The lan- guage used in the book is plain and clear, and the concepts conveyed are easy to grasp. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the generous inclu- sion of photographs and illustrations in the book has definitely aided my understanding of the Mennonites’ uniqueness as a people. Finally, this study is recommended to all who want to gain a general knowledge of Mennonite religious and folk traditions from an insider’s perspective. Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend. By Gillian Bennett. (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. Pp. x + 313, preface, key texts, references, after- word, index.) Stiofán Ó Cadhla University College Cork, Ireland When we consider the 1960s, our attention can- not help but be drawn to urban and contempo- rary legends. This decade has taken on the con- notations of revolution, rock and roll, sex, hippies, and feminism, all jostling in the final and fateful confrontation of tradition and mo- dernity. Here, fairies and monsters are replaced by aliens and hook-handed killers, and myth and folktale are replaced by news and history—but legend continues to partake of both. This is, per- haps, legend’s central problematic. In her mar- velously accessible but scholarly style, Gillian Bennett goes straight to the heart of this prob- lematic, “the cultural clash of discordant catego- ries and concepts” (p. xv). She reminds us that one of the key facts about the legend is that it is difficult to define. Legends are marked by their longevity, geographical spread, style, the multi- plicity of audio and visual media through which they are disseminated, and the recurrence of specific details or motifs. Avoiding the carto- graphic pedantry (that is, the historical-geo- graphical or Finnish method) of definition and delimitation, Bennett points out that legend is not a scientific term and, as such, it has no real referent. Legend can be superstition, relic, delu- sion, and curiosity, or it can be cool, new, sexy, urban, and teenaged. In the unfolding reassess- ments of the discipline, legend has been decon- structed or at least “declassified”—the distinc- tion between reality and legend is no longer considered to be clear-cut. Contemporary leg- end, itself an orphan of the 1960s, has in many ways become an exemplar of the contemporary life of the discipline. Bennett’s Bodies, therefore, is about folklore as much as it is about contemporary legend. In her encyclopedic detail and analysis, Bennett draws attention away from the supposed nov- elty of the genre to broader generalizations about the discipline. Following Paul Klee’s ap- proach to painting, Bennett takes “a line for a walk,” exploring thematically the evolving shape and form of six particular legend case studies from their early variants to their con- temporary inflections (p. xv). Here the shape- shifting element of story is exemplified. Story is information, entertainment, strategy, news, gossip, rumor, warning, lesson, joke, photocopy, graffiti, fallacy, or political commentary—in short, a palimpsest of life. As a popular poetics of interpretation, legends may be better under- stood within contemporary discursive para- digms or contexts. They are a kind of social, Book Reviews 117 118 Journal of American Folklore 122 (2009) psychological, and cultural diary full of scrib- bles, and yet they cannot be reduced to the encoded fears of society. Defying national and generic boundaries in literature, journalism, theater, television, or the Internet, legends appear both homeless and uni- versal, old and modern, urban and rural. AT 939A, “The Murdered Son” (or “The Killing of the Prodigal Son,” as Bennett prefers to call it), has a life of four centuries. The Bosom Serpent complex can be traced back to twelfth-century Ireland; indeed, the idea of reptiles infesting the body was orthodox medicine. Ancient Greek and Roman literature and European medieval monk- ish culture are saturated with similar themes. One could be tempted to see the tale-type or motif indices themselves as inventories of uni- versal themes, veritable handbooks of humanity, rather than exclusively folkloric checklists. One might ask, if urban legends remained seamlessly hidden in the streams of discourse for so long, are there other unlisted, sleeping genres? Bennett includes examples drawn from China, India, Ireland, and Greece as well as from biblical or apocryphal narratives. The protagonist of legend may be Rock Hudson, and the storyteller may be Jackie Collins. Legends do not end hap- pily ever after but in death or madness. Current contamination themes echo earlier epidemics of typhoid, cholera, plague, syphilis, and leprosy. What if AIDS Mary is just a newer version of Typhoid Mary? How does the researcher avoid jaded or jaundiced reductionist analysis that ap- pears to debunk folklore, legend, or the gullibil- ity of humanity? According to Bennett, the sto- ries themselves “are enough,” and folklorists should consider documenting the presentation and use of legends as more than a trivial pursuit (p. 307). Bennett’s interpretations here are as diverse as the symbolic, cultural, and psychological meanings implicit in the genre. The approaches to contemporary legend cobbled together in this book confront the ideas that legends are false or trivial stories; are told to discredit certain com- panies; are derived from private fear, anxiety, or distrust; are cautionary tales; are a psychocul- tural response; are a vernacular etiology; are symbolic or metaphorical truths; are a reflection of gendered psychology; are serious and danger- ous; and are a projection of a desolate view of the human condition. The preferred approaches to legend study used in the book involve sam- pling the cultural complex that involves the leg- end or including all related material associated with the particular case study, highlighting a specific example with local behavioral and cul- tural norms, or viewing legend as a sociopolitical language where the pathology or symptomatol- ogy of the body mirrors the sociological or eth- nographic analysis of the social body. Legend might create mainstream opinion, but it also fol- lows it. For example, AIDS legends might absolve heterosexuals from culpability in the spread of the disease, or stories of street urchin syringe aggressors may relocate danger beyond the en- virons of the home. Bennett’s analysis is more revealing and intriguing for its careful consider- ation of vernacular gender perceptions that shape and create the imaginative undercurrents in the ocean of stories that she presents. The legend is an emotionally powerful and challenging genre. Gillian Bennett’s innovative and questioning exploration of this topic re- minds us that folklore studies sometimes has a tendency to trivialize reality as mere urban leg- end. Folklore studies was long a romantic hob- byhorse, and today it must insist on its right to explore the social and cultural fallout caused by the quarrying of “mere folklore” from the most grotesque nadir of human behavior. Leg- end tends to echo life, and life echoes legend as well; as a result, a common rejoinder to ac- counts of legends should be, perhaps, that they are not in fact legend, but truth. Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-Type Index. By Hasan M. El-Shamy. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xxviii + 1255, bibli- ography, register of tale types, list of changed tale-type numbers, register of motifs, index of authors and sources, register of countries, tale- type subject index, addendum.) David Elton Gay Indiana University As Hasan El-Shamy notes, the classification scheme of Aarne and Thompson’s tale-type index “is seldom adequate for identifying folk