Field Project: Burial Customs and Shape Shifter Legends Introduction In this course, we have read many folktales describing vampires and werewolves, but we haven’t thought about how, exactly, these stories end up in our hands. Historians, folklorists, and anthropologists are all researchers that set out to find and record such stories by going into the “field”—that is, the physical and cultural spaces where this information exists. Folktales can be written in a forgotten manuscript, passed down as a story as part of the cultural history of a group, or physically represented as an artifact. To better understand where folktales about vampires and werewolves come from, you will be going into the field to conduct your own research. Assignment To complete your own field project, you will do ONE of the following: 1) Visit a cemetery local to the city in which you are taking this class and record any customs you notice involving remembrance, superstition, and treatment of the dead. Answer the following questions in your field report: o o o Approximately how old do you think the cemetery is? (Hint: what are the earliest dates you can find inscribed on the headstones?) What kinds of symbols and objects do you notice? (Religious symbols, objects left on graves or within the cemetery, etc.) If there are other visitors to the cemetery, what are they doing? Summarize your findings and write a conclusion that links your observations about how your local community uses to cemetery and interacts with the dead to the Slavic concept of the vampire. Why do you think cemeteries—and the dead they contain— become the backdrop for folktales about the undead? What does this say about how humans perceive death? 2) Research whether or not local beliefs about shapeshifters or werewolf-like creatures exist in your community. This can be done entirely in the library, but ideally you should go out and ask some long-time locals what kind of shape-shifter stories they know. Answer the following questions in your field report: o What is the earliest mention you can find of “werewolves” in your community? o Do you find that the legend changes when people from other cultural backgrounds settle in? If so, why? o What kinds of people are likely to become “werewolves”? What kinds of people believe in “werewolves”? Summarize your findings and write a conclusion that links how your local community’s beliefs in werewolves or shape-shifters are similar to those found in Slavic folklore. Do you think this belief was directly influenced by Slavic culture? Why might such a belief exist in a completely different cultural context? Your field report must be a minimum of 350 words. 
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