ABSTRACT
Combining anthropological and folkloristic approaches creates a powerful, holistic lens through which to view a storytelling tradition. A major contribution made by anthropology to the study of folklore is a recognition of the mutually reinforcing metaphors of belief as understood from other media in the same cultural community. A major contribution of folklore to anthropology, in turn, is an insistence on performance context, which is the best way to get at the range of specifics within individual and group repertoires. Both disciplines have been converging in our generation of scholarship toward paying full attention, at last, to the individual as the place where tradition has its life. Both, however, still struggle with tenacious scholarly legacies that prompt the search for core beliefs and basic forms that are thought somehow to float free of context.
