• DOI:10.1086/201428
• Corpus ID: 144105176

The Migration of Folktales: Four Channels to the Americas [and Comments and Reply]

@article{Utley1974TheMO,
  title={The Migration of Folktales: Four Channels to the Americas [and Comments and Reply]},
  author={Francis Lee Utley and Robert Austerlitz and Richard W. Bauman and Ralph Bolton and Earl Wendel Count and Alan Dundes and Vincent O. Erickson and Malcolm F. Farmer and John L. Fischer and Āke Hultkrantz and David H. Kelley and Philip M. Peek and Graeme Lloyd Pretty and Carol K. Rachlin and J. H. Tepper},
  journal={Current Anthropology},
  year={1974},
  volume={15},
  pages={5 - 27}
}

• F. L. Utley, R. Austerlitz, +12 authors J. Tepper
• Published 1 March 1974
• Geology
• Current Anthropology

This paper attempts to draw together some of the evidences of borrowing in folktales from the Old World to the New. It abstracts in four channels, from Europe across the North Atlantic, from Africa across the South Atlantic, from Northeast Asia via the Bering Strait, and from Southeast Asia across the South Pacific. Considering both pre- and post-Columbian borrowing, it calls on both physical and cultural anthropology as witnesses to the route and relates this testimony to the recorded folktales in the Western Hemisphere, many of which still show signs of stratified borrowing as well as indigenous creativity. The theoretical frame, like the data, is pluralistic rather than monolithic or megalithic. The conclusions are not meant to be final, but merely conducive to a better perspective of the world picture and preliminary to more systematic work with new and old data and new theory.