| Abstract: |
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. |