Story Lab: Storybook Research

In my last research post I wrote about finding an article by Bill Ellis, so I read that now and took notes; this is the single most useful article I've found for my Brer Rabbit project in general. It has so much good insight into folklore processes (at work in both fetishes and in storytelling), and it also gets at the cultural appropriation that makes working on the Brer Rabbit tradition so tricky: Disney (and others) took the rabbit, and the rabbit's foot got appropriated too!

Here are some notes I took on the article: it's given me so many good ideas and important themes to keep in mind.

Bill Ellis (2002). Why Is a Lucky Rabbit's Foot Lucky? Body Parts as Fetishes. Journal of Folklore Research, 39 (1), 51-84. Here it is online with OU Library proxy.

fetish from West African pidgin fetisso, from Portuguese feitico, where the term referred to veneration of saints' body parts

"the fetish is a physical object shaped to comprehend a spiritual or personal value that would be difficult to grasp otherwise"

"a narrative, like a fetish, may take on some characteristics of a living entity, providing a symbolic means for storytellers to approach and evenmodify the underlying social problem"

"fetish beliefs can be considered the material culture counterpart of a cognitive process that also leads to legend formation"

ELLIS DEFINES FETISH: "the fabrication, acquisition, and use of a material object invested with extraordinary spiritual forces, which thus becomes a metonym for an implied narrative and so a means of gaining control over complex social relationships"

he puts roots of the rabbit foot tradition "in the politically subversive tradition of African American conjure"

"the rabbit's foot can be interpreted as one of many traditions arising from the ambiguous social and political relationship between Black and White culture in the early twentieth century"

in early 20th century rabbit's foot had taken its place beside horseshoe, four-leafed clover and wishbone as iconic lucky charm

has testimony from Hyatt that even whites saw it as black tradition: rabbit must be "caught by a Negro after midnight in a Negro cemetery"

Puckett documented rabbit foot traditions in 1880s in New Orleans, certified for example as: "left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit killed in the full of the moon by a red-headed, cross-eyed nigger at 12 o'clock at night, riding a white mule"

he inventories other gravesite fetish beliefs and practices

he also discusses other animal body parts, esp. witch associations: "these animals are often considered to be a human in another form"

"we see the rabbit's foot as part of a broader agenda of Black folk magic: the use of power objects to help the bearer resist a status quo seen as ethnically bankrupt"

curious anecdote of a conjure bag in Uncle Tom's Cabin!

he has a lot on human body parts, commodification of rabbit's foot in early 20th century, with urbanization too (people couldn't go to rural graveyards to do the deed themselves)

Ellis argues "that the rabbit's foot is a metonymic echo of a ritual event in which an animal's body part is acquired as a substitute for a human body part, one that will invest its owner with enough charisma to challenge -- or maintain -- a disordered power structure"

on marketing: "if the charm is rooted primarily in African American folkmagic, its brisk consumption by Anglo Americans is a sign of its efficacy as a fetish."

intense: he contends it is a substitute lynching! "Perhaps Whites who appropriated and reinterpreted a Black fetish found a culturally accepted way of maintaining their hegemony. Certainly many Anglo borrowing from African Americans followed this pattern"

~ ~ ~

There is lots more I wanted to follow up on here, but I will just note for now that "graveyard rabbit" is definitely a thing: there is an Association of Graveyard Rabbits dedicated to documenting and preserving sacred grounds.