While large-scale comparative and historical analysis of folktales has largely disappeared from anthropological inquiry after the wane of diffusionism in the early 20th century, such approaches are experiencing a revival in the framework of cultural evolution. In that context, questions asked include to what extent narrative traditions are transmitted horizontally from generation to generation; influenced by practices of neighbors; and form larger packages with other expressions of culture, prominently language. Here, I explore to what extent 41 versions of a widespread story told by Indigenous Andean storytellers in the Quechuan languages show signs of having developed according to evolutionary phylogenetic mechanisms, bringing data from the underrepresented New World into the purview of the literature. The story of Juan Oso ("John the Bear"), which tells of the origins and adventures of a half-bear, half-human boy, has European roots, meaning that variation in the Central Andes only had several centuries to develop. Analyses show that the story varies in ways that can neither be explained fully by where it is told (and hence by possible "diffusion" of characteristics from region to region), nor by the Quechuan variety in which it is told ("co-evolution of language and culture"), nor, most importantly, by historical mechanisms of an evolutionary nature according to which the story might change. With reference to the ethnographic literature, I suggest that these results can be explained by the ways in which Andean storytellers recombine narrative material from stories to imbue them with new meaning that comments on local and regional social and political circumstances, and that a "rhizotic" model of development, in addition to or instead of the phylogenetic ones tested by cultural evolutionists, might be more adequate to understand how the individual versions of this story came to be told the way they are.
The early history of cultural anthropology is characterized by the succession of evolutionism in the 19 century and diffusionism in the 20. The former, now regarded as deeply problematic, would posit quasi-evolutionary stages in the development of human societies towards ever greater complexity and sophistication. The underlying assumptions of diffusionism are considered no less problematic, not least for portraying as passive recipients those people who are claimed to be at the receiving end of cultural diffusion.
Present anthropological practice has largely abandoned such diachronically oriented approaches and often also the endeavor of large-scale cross-cultural comparison, instead preferring more particularistic approaches that emphasize the active role of individuals in shaping and reshaping cultural traditions. When it comes to oral traditions (the topic of this contribution), attempts at comparative historical interpretation, especially when parallels in content form the basis for metanarratives of deep migration or contact histories that trace back thousands of years in prehistory, as posited e.g. by the "Kulturkreise" school of diffusionism, are viewed with particular skepticism.
Independently from this, however, in the field of cultural evolution, large-scale cross-cultural comparison is experiencing a revival. This is part of a broader surge of evolutionary phylogenetic models from biology into disciplines studying cultural behavior (cf. e.g., Currie, 2013 and Mesoudi, 2015 for review on this movement), including historical linguistics (e.g., Bowern, 2018), archaeology (e.g., Mendoza Straffon, 2016), the history of religion (e.g., Norenzayan et al., 2016), or the development of political complexity (e.g., Currie et al., 2010). Researchers working in the framework of cultural evolution have begun to apply methods originally developed to model biological evolution to oral traditions in an effort to trace the origins and development of folktales. Based on correlations with language phylogenies, cultural evolutionists have claimed to trace the origins of some folktales up to the Bronze age (Graça da Silva, Tehrani (2016)). Some studies also employ so-called ancestral state reconstruction to establish an "original" version of a narrative from which attested version are derived. In other words, cultural evolutionists are replicating core concerns of earlier comparative traditions in anthropology from the 20th century, and their studies resonate in particular with the historicist-diffusionist "historical-geographical" school of folktale analysis (to be reviewed in section 2).
In this contribution, I study versions of a well-known folktale from the Quechuan-speaking Andes in South America that tells of the history and adventures of a character named Juan Oso (or "John the Bear"). While having European origins, in the Americas the story has acquired distinct new elements that reference Indigenous mythology and belief systems and reflect life of Indigenous people under European rule. Anthropologists have recorded local variants of this tale at dozens of places in the Central Andes in which different Quechuan varieties are spoken.
Taking up a desideratum expressed in the literature on Andean folklore in connection with the Juan Oso story (Weber, 1987), I aim to shed light on variation in how the tale is told. In spite of a wide range of sources being available, such a comparative treatment is so far lacking.
I study aspects of the story from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Doing so, I tie this case to a (hopefully) more generally relevant exploration of the question to what extent variation in how the story is told reflects processes and patterns commonly invoked in quantitatively oriented literature in the cultural evolution framework: these include the question whether certain motifs are typical for certain regions of the Central Andes (spatial structure which would usually be attributed to "diffusion" in the relevant literature); whether the versions of the story recorded in different localities are related to the different Quechuan varieties in which they are told (under a scenario of "co-evolution" of language and culture); and whether they reflect transmission under conditions that are characteristic of evolutionary systems (and hence showcase evidence for evolutionary mechanisms in culture itself). I employ methods of data analysis that are similar to those used in relevant studies on the development of folktales in a cultural evolution framework, including measures of spatial autocorrelation, correlations with linguistic distance, and metrics of phylogenetic signal, and apply these to a coded dataset that reflects regional variation in the Juan Oso stories as recorded at different places of the Central Andes. The Juan Oso story as told in the Central Andes has several characteristics that make it well-suited as a case study: first, while having European origins, the story has acquired distinctively Andean characteristics, and thus contributes to remedying an emphasis on Eurasia, or even Europe more narrowly, in the available sources for large-scale studies. Second, claims for remote origins of folktales made in the literature are typically based on mapping stories onto dated language phylogenies. The Juan Oso story can open up more direct perspectives on the question what magnitude of variation we may expect in folkloric material after a certain amount of time has passed: assuming that a uniform version of the story was brought to the Americas from the Iberian peninsula, all variation observed in the Central Andean versions has had a maximal time horizon of approximately 500 years to develop.
In section two, I provide more background on the application of quantitative and phylogenetic analysis to cultural data, especially to folktales and mythological material. In section three, I give more information on the Juan Oso story and its characteristics, paying particular attention to variation in the plot of the story across the Central Andes. I then analyze the dataset, which, as I discuss in section four, I have prepared in a way that is parallel to the way tales are broken up into constituent motifs in the so-called "historical-geographical method" of folktale analysis and the cultural evolution approaches that continue its tradition. In section five, I show that, while there are some regionally salient characteristics in the way the tale is told in the Central Andes, overall there is no strong geographical variation to how the tale was recorded (no evidence for "diffusion"); there is no appreciable evidence that the structure of the tale co-varies with the structure of the Quechuan varieties in which it has been told (no evidence for "language-culture coevolution"); and with possible local exceptions, overall, there is no clear phylogenetic signal in the dataset that would indicate that the story was passed down from storyteller to storyteller through time and evolved as certain plot elements were transmitted in that process while others were lost (no evidence for "cultural evolution" in a broad sense).
In section six, I then articulate the results with ethnographic perspectives on Andean traditions of storytelling that, like elsewhere, rely on the creative agency of storytellers to imbue traditional material with new meaning in and for the particular local, regional and national contexts in which stories are told, but in particularly Andean ways. I suggest that these traditions are relevant in several regards that relate to the methodological and conceptual assumptions of quantitative analysis of folktalkes as practiced in the cultural evolution framework: first, if recorded versions of the story to a significant extent reflect storyteller's ad hoc engagement with narratological material in a creative practice in which motifs are altered, inversed and recombined, individual recorded versions give the potentially misleading impression that they reflect "the story" as told in a particular locality whereas they may be better viewed as one product of a larger creative practice among other, equally valid ones. Second, that storytellers engage with motifs of tales, and in some cases even recombine entire tales to provide reflections on events in the community as well as regional social, political, and economic conditions under which people live, provides a perspective on the development of stories and their adaptiveness that is not commonly reckoned with in studies of narrative traditions in the cultural evolution framework. Third, evolutionary phylogenetic reconstruction requires the specification of underlying models for how stories, and variation between them, are generated; however, to my knowledge, these models do not capture these particular ways stories are crafted in places like the Central Andes.