Pourquoi tales are folk stories that explain why or how something came to be the way we know it today. Pourquoi is French for “why.” Folklorists adopted the term to describe etiological, or origin, stories from around the world. Many societies use pourquoi tales as a pedagogical tool in the education of children. In the United States, primary school teachers often use these stories to expose students to multicultural traditions and teach them how to appropriately ask and answer “why” questions.
Although their details vary from culture to culture, pourquoi tales have certain elements in common. The characters are often animals or features of the Earth that have human-like qualities. They interact with each other and with people outside the bounds of normal reality. As in most folktales, the characters are one-dimensional and easy to classify as heroes or villains. They always receive a just ending according to the cultural standards of the storyteller, with the hero victorious and the villain foiled. Their actions are meant to impart traditional wisdom through clearly discernible lessons. Attributes of the natural world are explained as the positive or negative consequences of the primary character’s decisions.
Pourquoi tales are distinguishable from myths. While myths are also etiological stories, they often involve deities and answer questions about how the world was formed or the meaning of life. Myths are associated with a culture’s religious beliefs. In contrast, pourquoi tales seek to answer more basic questions about what we observe in nature.
A popular Vietnamese story relating how tigers got their stripes is an example of the sort of questions that pourquoi tales address. The conceited and covetous tiger asked a farmer for some of his wisdom. Though the farmer was frightened, he tricked the tiger, convincing it to stand on its hind legs facing a tree and be bound by a rope while the farmer fetched his wisdom. The farmer made his escape, and the tiger was left to struggle for hours against the rope, which left permanent marks on his back in the form of black stripes.
The Vietnamese story also offers a way to understand how scholars distinguish between pourquoi tales and fables. While fables end with a specific moral statement, pourquoi tales imply lessons based on the fate of the characters. By contrasting the outcomes of the witless tiger and the wise farmer, this story subtly cautions against conceit, covetousness, and gullibility while encouraging ingenuity. But the storyteller ultimately allows the listener to make his or her own judgment.
Pourquoi tales are usually part of ancient oral traditions, passed down from generation to generation. Since the late nineteenth century, many of these stories have been collected and published by folklorists and anthropologists. These stories are often converted into children’s literature, which is where most people encounter them today. An early example of this genre is Rudyard Kipling’s (1865–1936) Just So Stories, published in 1902. Kipling was raised in England and India and may have received some inspiration for these stories from his travels. Most of the tales in Just So Stories explain why animals look and act the way they do, such as “How the Camel Got His Hump.”
There are at least two categories of pourquoi tales indigenous to North America. The first category is made up of stories from various Native American traditions. Popular stories in this category include “Rabbit and the Moon Man,” “How Chipmunk Got His Stripes,” “The Tale of Rabbit and Coyote,” and “Why Bat Flies Alone at Night.” The first story comes from the Mi’kmaq tribe of upper Maine and Canada. It describes what happens when Rabbit, a prolific hunter of the remote past, realized that his traps were being plundered every night. Rabbit snared the culprit, who turned out to be the moon man, and whose glow was nearly blinding. To put out the light, Rabbit threw balls of clay at the moon man. The moon man demanded to be set free, but Rabbit was terrified. They struck a bargain. Rabbit would chew through the snare if the moon man would never return to Earth. As a result of their encounter, the moon man has never been able to get rid of the dark spots of clay on his face, and Rabbit’s mannerisms are permanently skittish in memory of his fear.
The second category of American pourquoi tales comes from African Americans living in the southeastern United States. These stories were first documented in the 1880s by Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), who included them in several volumes of Uncle Remus tales, named for the purported storyteller. His books were criticized in the twentieth century as a theft of African American culture and for including demeaning portrayals of African American characters. But his work had an undeniable influence on American children’s literature. Scholar Julius Lester rewrote and published many of the Uncle Remus tales in the 1980s. The Uncle Remus tales featured animal characters, often given the honorific prefixes Brer (Brother) and Sister. The most famous of these was Brer Rabbit, whose experiences are often analogized to those of African American slaves.
Lester’s The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit includes such pourquois as “How Brer Fox and Brer Dog Became Enemies.” This story began with Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox talking about Sister Goose, who was doing laundry by the river. Brer Fox became hungry and went home. Brer Rabbit realized that Brer Fox planned to eat Sister Goose. He informed Sister Goose, who asked her friend Brer Dog to guard her home that night. Brer Rabbit told Sister Goose to roll up her laundry and hide it in her bed. When Brer Fox got into her bedroom, he grabbed the laundry, thinking it was Sister Goose. Brer Dog yelled at Brer Fox, who dropped the laundry and ran away. Through Brer Rabbit’s cunning, Sister Goose was saved. But to this day Brer Fox and Brer Dog do not get along.
Pourquoi tales such as these are commonly used in American primary schools. In addition to imparting wisdom by way of implicit moral instructions, these stories introduce global awareness, supplementing geography and culture lessons. Additionally, they teach children to think in terms of “why?” There is an extensive and expanding literature on the use of pourquois in the classroom. Most scholarly books and articles on the subject recommend that children invent their own pourquoi tales to develop creativity, performance, and critical thinking skills.
Nina M. Schreiner
See also Animal Tales; Brer Rabbit; How the Bat and Flying Squirrel Got Their Wings; No Tigers in Borneo, an Indonesian American Legend; Uncle Remus
Further Reading
Foster, Karen K., Deb Theiss, and Dawna Lisa Buchanan-Butterfield. 2008. “Pourquoi Tales on the Literacy Stage.” The Reading Teacher 61 (8): 663–667.
Hamilton, Martha, and Mitch Weiss. 1999. How and Why Stories: World Tales That Kids Can Read and Tell. Little Rock, AR: August House.
Harris, Joel Chandler. 2002. The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Kipling, Rudyard. 2015. Just So Stories: With Original Illustrations by Rudyard Kipling. Durham, UK: Aziloth Books.
Lester, Julius. 1987. The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit. New York: Dial.
Mayo, Margaret, and Louise Brierley. 1996. When the World Was Young: Creation and Pourquoi Tales. New York: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers.
Singh, Rina, and Debbie Lush. 2001. Moon Tales: Myths of the Moon from Around the World. London: Bloomsbury.