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Paper short abstract

This paper presents strategies for reading folk narrative collections as more-than-human ethnographies. Focusing on Scotland and northern England, it interrogates the relational cultural lives of supernatural beings and their challenge to reductive nature-culture binaries.

Paper long abstract

Folklorists have long had an interest in beings beyond the human, but that are, crucially, entangled with human communities and local environments. Within folk narratives and their performative worlds, ‘supernatural’ beings are not only connected to human communities and their environments, but are also shown to have complex social lives. This paper explores folklore collections from the British Isles to elucidate how the socionatural lives of supernatural beings are documented, described, and connected to the everyday lives of humans. Focusing on Robert Kirk’s 'The Secret Commonwealth' (1691) from Scotland and Michael Aislabie Denham’s ‘tracts’ (1846-59) from northern England, it will examine the narrative strategies that collectors employ in presenting local folk narratives and customs that amount to what we might conceptualise as ethnographies of the supernatural nonhuman. Through this ethnographic lens, we can understand folk narrative collections as bioculturally diverse texts that help us rethink hitherto reductive notions of supernatural beings as mere reflections of nature, instead emphasising their relationality. At the same time, they illuminate how nonhumans are to be understood on a vernacular level, resisting scientistic categorisations that further separate human and nonhuman into culture and nature. In this way, this paper contests the notion that all western communities – especially so-called ‘modernising’ and ‘modern’ – view and engage with the world in nature-culture binaries. By reconfiguring ideas of supernatural beings in this way, we are better able to dissolve such binaries, emphasising relational entanglements and thinking more deeply about the naturecultures of supernatural beings.