Localization In Tokat Tales

Folk tales, which are transferred to a tongue from another, from a generation to another by their narrators in the framework of oral culture tradition; and meets personal and social functions such as having fun, passing time and educating are among the most researched folk narratives. In addition to text based research which were applied in the early stages of folk tale researches, new theories and methods which brings new perspectives have been developed since the first quarter of the twentieth century. The performance (execution) method, which enables more accurate evaluations to be reached in folk tale studies by taking the narrator and the context of text into account, has started to be implemented in Turkey especially after 2000s. Opinions have been put forward that folk tales are universal, based on features such as the fact that events develop around unknown persons at an unknown place and time, their being imaginative, and similar folk tales can be found in other nations in terms of subject matter, theme, and motifs. Yet, folk tales acquire a national character by being adorned by all kinds of local and national cultural elements of where they are narrated in the context of knowledge and experience of narrators. Story tellers localizes folk tales by permeating many elements such as beliefs, traditions, value judgments, eating habits, events related to daily life, geographical characteristics of the places etc. into folk tales.. The nature and extent of localization varies from narrator to narrator. The environment where the narration occurs plays an important role in the emergence of this difference and in the shaping of the folk tales. Studies about localization usually depend on narratives of the single source person. In this study the case of localization was examined in the framework of data obtained about the narrator and the context by considering the integrity of the area via analyzing folk tales collected from different source persons from various settlements far away or near each other in Tokat region where this survey conducted during various periods of 2011-2013. It has been identified that themes, subjects, events, phenomena, heroes and other beings and objects, which are regarded as universal, are kneaded with local cultural features.