Paper Short Abstract:

Since 1987, I was conducting fieldwork on rituals and magic in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. Their attitudes towards me and my research influenced their contribution. In the paper, I will talk about the speaker’s perception of the borders of magic in a conversation with an outsider.

Paper Abstract:

Since 1987, I was conducting fieldwork on the topics of rituals and magic in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. While interacting with my interlocutors, I was also paying attention to their attitudes towards me and my research that influenced their contributions. In the paper, I will talk about the types of these attitudes, the borders of magic in the perception of the speakers, and the effect of these borders on revealing magical knowledge to a person both understanding, and detached from, the village world. The remoteness of the folklorist allows speakers to forego some taboos (“You live far from here / you don’t have a cow anyways, so it is OK to tell you the healing spell against snake bites”; “don’t tell people here what I told you, but when you go home, there you can tell everything.”) The folklorist’s close knowledge of local traditions can help the speaker relax and share more information about their own tradition, though it can also make the speaker suspicious and shorten her story or cut the magical elements in it. The gender of the folklorist also plays a role since female speakers do not feel dominated by a female folklorist. A visit from a male folklorist is felt like a more official affair; in these cases, male speakers feel entitled to dominate the conversation as gender peers with the male scholar. The paper examines these and other aspects of the folklorist’s person that influence the conversation and the resulting oral texts.