Folklore
Stelios Michalopoulos, Melanie Meng Xue
Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. This vast expressive body, studied by the corresponding discipline of folklore, has evaded the attention of economists. In this study we do four things that reveal the tremendous potential of this corpus for understanding comparative development and culture. First, we introduce and describe a unique catalogue of folklore that codes the presence of thousands of motifs for roughly 1,000 pre-industrial societies. Second, we use a dictionary-based approach to elicit group-specific measures of various traits related to the natural environment, institutional framework, and mode of subsistence. We establish that these proxies are in accordance with the ethnographic record, and illustrate how to use a group's oral tradition to quantify non-extant characteristics of preindustrial societies. Third, we use folklore to uncover the historical cultural values of a group. Doing so allows us to test various influential conjectures among social scientists including the original affluent society, the culture of honor among pastoralists, the role of family in extended kinship systems and the intensity of trade and rule-following norms in politically centralized group. Finally, we explore how cultural norms inferred via text analysis of oral traditions predict contemporary attitudes and beliefs
Year of publication: |
January 2019
|
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Authors: | Michalopoulos, Stelios |
Other Persons: | Xue, Melanie Meng (contributor) |
Institutions: | National Bureau of Economic Research (contributor) |
Publisher: |
2019: Cambridge, Mass : National Bureau of Economic Research |
Subject: | Wirtschaftsgeschichte | Economic history | Kulturwissenschaft | Cultural studies | Ethnologie | Ethnology | Kulturelle Identität | Cultural identity | Kultursoziologie | Cultural sociology |
Saved in:
freely available
Extent: | 1 Online-Ressource illustrations (black and white) |
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Series: | NBER working paper series ; no. w25430 |
Type of publication: | Book / Working Paper |
Language: | English |
Notes: | System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files Mode of access: World Wide Web Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers |
Other identifiers: | 10.3386/w25430 [DOI] |
Source: | ECONIS - Online Catalogue of the ZBW |
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012479386
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