Folk and Myth Breaks Harvard Mold

The summer before her freshman year, Sarah H. Arshad ’09 received a Harvard College handbook listing all the concentrations along with explanations of what they were about.

“I remember glancing through it and I kind of laughed like, ‘Oh folk and myth that sounds so funny and that was that,’” Arshad said recently.

When she came to campus, she jokingly told her roommate that she was considering majoring in Folklore and Mythology, and then decided she should actually check it out.

Today, Arshad is a Folk and Myth concentrator, with a focus on medicine in medieval Spain, who is planning to apply to medical school.

A BRIDGE AND A WINDOW

When Arshad first visited Warren House, home to Folk and Myth, she was struck by how friendly and helpful the faculty and administrators were.

“Everybody’s who’s involved with it wants to be there,” said Stephen A. Mitchell, a professor of Scandinavian and folklore and the previous chair of the Folk and Myth committee.

The faculty on the steering committee specialize in areas ranging from Germanic, Slavic, Greek, and Celtic languages and literature to archaeology, religion, and art and architecture.

“Even though we all come with our intellectual kit bags packed differently, everyone has a clear idea about where we overlap, which is a real interest in tradition and manifestations of expressive culture,” Mitchell said.

But the cobbling together of professors from departments across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is seen as a benefit rather than a cost.

“It has many windows. It’s a discipline in of itself but it also stands at the crossroads of many other disciplines,” said Maria Tatar, a professor of Germanic languages and literature and the current Folk and Myth chair. Mitchell agreed, using a less traditional analogy.

“Folklore is sometimes referred to as the bastard child that English begot on anthropology,” Mitchell said. “I wear it as a badge of honor. What they’re really trying to say is that we bridge the social sciences and humanities.”

Both said that an undergraduate degree in Folk and Myth could be a launching pad into any profession, be it business, law, medicine, or film—the first female president of a major film company was a graduate of Harvard’s program.

“So many professions rely on the power of a compelling story to make sense out of where we are and where we’re going,” Tatar said.

WITCHES AND BREAK DANCERS

Even though she didn’t see how her interests could fit into Folk and Myth, Arshad decided to stay with it and declared her concentration.

“I told the head professor, who is now my adviser, what I was interested in and she said, ‘You can definitely do that within Folk and Myth,’” Arshad said.

A large part of the coursework is a “special field”, which can be from any department as long as it can be justified why taking those classes will help in writing the senior thesis.

“We’re interdisciplinary on the one hand and we’re also global on the other so you can see why each student who comes to us has to really be able to create an area of specialization within the program,” Tatar said.

The thesis is seen as the cornerstone of the concentration, Mitchell said, and it connects the special field back to the methodology of folklore and mythology.

“Since it’s such a broad field and so interdisciplinary the only way it makes sense to structure the concentration is to allow students to put together a set of courses that create a cohesive academic unit,” Tatar said. “There’s so much to draw on really that we’ve found that students feel they’ve got an embarrassment of riches more than anything else.”

The concentrators, currently seven seniors and eight juniors, actually end up taking only a few classes together including the introductory course Culture and Belief 16, taught by Mitchell.

“It’s like what Rob Lue does in Life Sci 1a—a ridiculously overheated review and romp through the major genres,” said Mitchell, who added that he had never actually attended an introductory life sciences lecture.

The students must also all take a sophomore tutorial. In Arshad’s case, her main assignment was an ethnography of a group.

“I ended up doing one of the Harvard break dancing group on campus,” Arshad said. “It was probably the best paper I’ve written in my life.”

Another popular class taught by Mitchell is entitled “Witchcraft and Charm Magic.”

“There is now an Idiot’s Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft,” Mitchell said. “That’s how you know it’s come of age in pop culture.”

MYTHIC EXPANSION

The Folk and Myth committee offers three different options for secondary fields—Literature and Performance, Mythology, and Folklore.

One of Tatar’s priorities as chair is to strengthen the Mythology secondary field, which is currently lacking an introductory-type class.

“A lot of the freshman who showed up to our open house had all been mythology addicts—they had read Greek, Egyptian, Norse myths and just wanted more of that and in some cases they didn’t get it in high school,” Tatar said. “It was really the stories of their childhood and they were fascinated by them.”

Tatar is considering developing either a Greek and Roman mythology class or a world mythology class to supplement the current offerings.

“We don’t really have a course in Greek and Roman mythology, especially for freshman who read those stories as children,” Tatar said.

The world mythology class would be a broader year-long survey taught on a rotating basis by a set of colleagues specializing in myths from different parts of the world.

Its introduction would be an appropriate one for this imaginative community.

“Our students are a mirror image of our faculty,” Mitchell said. “They basically study everything all around the map.

—Staff writer Alissa M. D’Gama can be reached at adgama@fas.harvard.edu.