Prediction time: This will be interesting, but flawed from narrow exposure

I'm going to make a prediction about this video I'm sharing before I watch it: it will have some fascinating insights, but it will be very, very limited in breadth and scope of knowledge of folklore making it profoundly flawed in its conclusions as a result. (This is a common failing among folklorists and anthropologists.)

I will reply later with a post-viewing commentary, but thought I'd share in advance.

OK, post-viewing, I partially nailed it. It is flawed in its conclusions, but not for the reasons I gave. Although it does seem that the presenter is unfamiliar with a lot of the creation mythology of a lot of peoples of Southeast Asia, this is to be expected and is not really a problem.

What is a problem is what I like to call the "Campbell Effect". He keeps going back to a "database of motifs and cultures" that he uses to support what he's pitching. The problem is that said database itself is deeply flawed because of scholarly bias. As a concrete example, the "bird scout" motif (think: the birds sent out by Noah to see if the Flood was over) is documented as an "obvious" variant of the "earth diver" motif … but this is really only because the biased western eyes of biased western scholars says that this is so and further because of the western compulsion to arrange things in orders and hierarchies which later constrain thought such that later analysis for far too long tries to hammer everything else into that model. (Like the deeply, fatally flawed "Hero's Journey" of Campbell which single-handedly set back folklore studies, mythology studies, and even just plain old writing for decades!)

It is the very existence of such a database, based on questionable assumptions about human migration (protip: we don't actually know how and when and how many times humans spread over the planet) and the questionable desire to shove square pegs into outside round holes, that makes me think there's a problem in the conclusions being presented.

My apologies for not replying sooner, I either didn't get a notification or I swiped it off by mistake because morning blurry eyes

Crecganford is very hit and miss. I like him, but not as much as Arith Herger largely for the reasons you stated. The problem with the Theosophy approach to world folklore is the problem they themselves identified in the beginning before they bullied forward...you need to actually be able to identify a beginning in the first place with a coherent progression thereafter. For the Theosophists, the debate consisted of either the Biblical narrative for their starting point or the Hindu narrative. They ultimately chose the latter, which created its own can of worms down the line for them as we all know.

Crecganford suffers from a slightly different problem of like nature. He tries to academize the narrative, which you pointed out accurately as a bigger can of worms. How do you point to a first...without actually being able to prove a first? We know the data is incomplete, so just stop being pretentious. That's my reaction to try-hard academics. Even well meaning ones like this.