Folk Illusions

Children, Folklore, and Sciences of Perception

K. Brandon Barker, Claiborne Rice

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English

Indiana University Press
22 April 2019

Folklore, myths & legends; Age groups: children; Neurosciences; 3-D images & optical illusions

Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, ""stealing"" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell- these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed.

By: K. Brandon Barker, Claiborne Rice
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780253041098
ISBN 10: 0253041090
Pages: 264
Publication Date: 22 April 2019
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Unspecified

K. Brandon Barker is Lecturer in Folklore at Indiana University, Bloomington. Claiborne Rice is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Reviews for Folk Illusions: Children, Folklore, and Sciences of Perception

This book explores much deeper issues of psychology and even deeper neurology. Just when we thought we knew everything there is to know about our own bodies and their responses, we can have new and surprising experiences engendered by simple little tricks. This learned, encyclopedic, and well-referenced examination fully realizes the authors' aim of establishing these phenomena as a genre of folklore in its own right. --Janet E. Alton Folklore

Winner of Iona and Peter Opie Prize for Books on Children's Folklore 2020 (United States)
Winner of Iona and Peter Opie Prize for Books on Children’s Folklore 2020 (United States)