Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at different attitudes towards the folklore tradition concerning the donkey. It analyses this narrative tradition through the prism of humans’ understanding of nature and their survival. It also explores the impact of the changing philosophy and literary stereotypes.

Paper long abstract:

While the horse was often extolled in literature, the donkey received somewhat less extravagant praise. It was characterised as stupid and stubborn. These stereotypes prevailed in fables and various animal tales, songs and other parts of the literary tradition, and often in everyday life as well. The principles of speciesism and anthropocentrism, which long held sway in science, are nowadays less frequent in modern research, which follows a non-speciesist and ecocentric philosophy. This is also reflected in current folkloristic and literary research. Some anthropologists have even concluded that instead of seeing the world from the perspective of one nature and many cultures, we now have to look from the perspective of many natures and one culture, and from the perspective of spiritual unity and bodily diversity.

The paper looks at different attitudes towards this through the prism of both humans' and animals' understanding of nature and survival. It also explores the impact of the changing philosophy and literary stereotypes. It compares various modern anthropological and folkloristic theories in this area within the Europe, and projects it particularly on Slovene folk narrative and folk song tradition.