ABSTRACT
Folklorists have always been concerned with the most vital expressions of culture: folktales and myths, riddles and proverbs, festivals and rituals. Though folklore is made up of the most patently meaningful statements of community and culture, folklorists have contributed little to an understanding of how meaning and significance is achieved. The vitality of expressive man is, thus further deadened by folklorists, fixing the transient and transitional out of a need for the objective scholar to describe and compare through the medium of the written word and the printed page. The growing popular as well as scholarly interest in the patterned and symbolic dimensions of expressive culture dramatizes the need for a critical methodology which will both enable to describe the patterns of behavior characteristic of the recurrent scenes within one culture and to carry out some sort of comparison of such systems cross-culturally.
