Folklore: The Basics

Simon J. Bronner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317420972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Folklore: The Basics is an engaging guide to the practice and interpretation of folklore. Taking examples from around the world, it explores the role of folklore in expressing fundamental human needs, desires, and anxieties that often are often not revealed through other means. Providing a clear framework for approaching the study of folklore, it introduces the reader to methodologies for identifying, documenting, interpreting and applying key information about folklore and its relevance to modern life. From the Brothers Grimm to Internet Memes, it addresses such topics as:

• What is folklore?
• How do we study it?
• Why does folklore matter?
• How does folklore relate to elite culture?
• Is folklore changing in a digital age?

With case studies, suggestions for reading and a glossary of key terminology, Folklore: The Basics supports readers in becoming familiar with folkloric traditions and interpret cultural expression. It is an essential read for anyone approaching the study of folklore for the first time.

1
What Is Folklore, and Why Does It Matter?

Problem and Practice

On the cusp of a new century that promised to bring profound changes to the world, English folklorist Edwin Sidney Hartland in 1899 riveted the attention of his august Victorian audience with a provocative question: “What is Folklore and What is the Good of It?” (Hartland 1899). Folklore had become a popular subject in the land and consumers snapped up books on tales, speech, and songs with the term in the title. By the time that Hartland issued his tract, the term folklore, introduced into intellectual discourse by William John Thoms in 1846, had taken hold on several continents. Thoms later reminisced that his motivation was a fear that the past was quickly giving way to industrialism. He remembered that “the railroad mania was at its height, and the iron horse was trampling under foot all our ancient landmarks, and putting to flight all the relics of our early popular mythology” (Thoms 1876, 42).

Thoms hoped that folklore could integrate many genres that previously had been studied separately: “manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs.” The connecting theme through all of the material was tradition. Under Hartland’s watch, scholars calling themselves “folklorists” flourished, a learned society with celebrity writers had been organized devoted to folklore, and the first academic chair of the subject had been created in Helsinki, Finland. Folklorists, Hartland proclaimed, were engaged in the “science of tradition” (Thoms 1965; Hartland 1894–1896; 1968). Even as methods and theories changed drastically from the Victorians to digital natives who framed tradition arising out of technological interaction, the flag of tradition continued to be waved over the territory of folklore. Surveying folklore’s study at the mid-point of the twentieth century, eminent American folklorist Stith Thompson proclaimed “the idea of tradition is the touchstone for everything that is to be included in the term folklore” (1951, 11). That idea still held strong by the end of the century when Richard Bauman declared for a new generation of communications-centered folklorists that “there is no single idea more central to conceptions of folklore than tradition” (1992, 30).

Whereas most Victorians limited lore to semiliterate or isolated “folk,” most folklorists by the time the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend came out in 1949 agreed with Mamie Harmon that folklore “may crop up in any subject, any group or individual, any time, any place” (1949, 400; see also Dundes 1966a). Folklorists identified multiple existence and variation in the lore as a characteristic of a folk process, rather than its relegation to the remote past or place, as the Victorians were wont to do (De Caro 1976; Dundes and Pagter 1975). To underscore folklore as a type of communication that draws attention to itself, Dan Ben-Amos suggested during the iconoclastic 1960s removing temporal tradition altogether from definitions of folklore. In its place, he advocated for emphasizing imaginative expression emerging from social interaction in a definition of folklore as “artistic communication in small groups” (1972, 13). Yet in 1984 he reflected that “tradition has survived criticism and remained a symbol of and for folklore” (124).

The idea of tradition had evolved even among the Victorians. With reference to tradition, Hartland altered Thoms’s emphasis in folklore on literary antiquity to a social application of natural history that followed a hierarchy of progress in civilization. Tradition, as he later publicized it for his fellow folklorists in various guides, was a process of transmission characteristic of the level of “savagery” among unlettered, isolated groups which survives into civilization. In his words, “It is now well established that the most civilized races have all fought their way slowly upwards from a condition of savagery.”

Hartland implied in his tract that the “considerable amount of knowledge of a certain kind [traditional]” even if “savage” or unscientific, was nonetheless profound, although he stopped short of calling it artistic as Ben-Amos had. The knowledge was “traditional” in its association with oral and customary communication. In Hartland’s view, the folk who passed it on were presumably on the lower rungs of the social ladder. “Civilized” people at the top, he argued, might be quick to dismiss this knowledge, but Hartland urged his audience to study it so as to learn about their cultural progress.

The Modern Discovery of Folklore in Analog and Digital Culture

The modern present or process-oriented conception of tradition in folklore as it developed in the twentieth century owes more to another British folklorist’s social-psychological emphasis on the “folk” (Jacobs, J. 1893; see also Fine, G. 1987b). In an often-cited essay simply entitled “The Folk,” sociologically oriented folklorist Joseph Jacobs blasted Hartland’s laddered natural-history ladder model and assumption of illiteracy as the hallmark of folklore. He asserted several principles that added the individual to group, and space to time, as crucial factors in analyzing the significance of folklore in culture. He viewed the diffusion of folklore, and its suggestion of a multiplicity of cultures, as negating the assumptions of a singular hierarchy of civilization. His points were: (1) folklore is continuously being updated and invented, and therefore folklore involves innovation, and consequently individual initiative; (2) folk is not a level of society, but a group sharing tradition that could be of any stratum; and (3) tradition is not a body of knowledge among the illiterate, but a process understood by following spatial and psychological patterns.

Folklore in Jacobs’ perspective became contemporaneous, spread by technology such as telephones and books as well as by word of mouth. Linked to individual needs and social conditions, folklore lost the racial taint applied by the survivalists. Tradition, he implied, was chosen as well as followed. It was created anew as well as inherited from yore. Calling for the study of the lore of the present, Jacobs announced, “We ought to learn valuable hints as to the spread of folk-lore by studying the Folk of today” (Jacobs, J. 1893, 237; emphasis added). Hartland was willing to concede the point in establishing folklore study as a science rather than antiquarian pursuit. He broke with his fellow Victorians, who, he said, view “its subjects only in the remains of a distant epoch, preserved less perfectly in Europe, more perfectly in Africa” (Hartland 1885, 120). Capitalizing tradition to separate it as a body of knowledge in contrast to the customary manifestations of plural “traditions,” Hartland presaged future scholarly thought by pronouncing, “I contend that Tradition is always being created anew, and that traditions of modern origin wherever found are as much within our province as ancient ones” (1885, 120). Hartland and Jacobs could agree that the significance of folklore, the “good” of it, was its manifestation of the processes of tradition that shed light on how culture worked and how humans conducted their lives.

In late nineteenth-century America, similar definitional debates ensued, and as in Britain, they often referenced the dramatic changes brought by mass industrialization and immigration. The underlying issue driving the concern for folklore as a vernacular product was the effect of rapid social and material changes perceived by the white Protestant elite on national traditions and values. Folklore was not the only location for this question. As abstract art taking inspiration from primitivism took hold in the early twentieth century in response to modernization, art critics raised the issue of a tradition of art. As new forms of writing—realistic and popular—spread, literary circles took up the matter of vernacular or “local color” tradition in literary production. But arguably tradition was most discernible in the persistent quality of folklore and the groups it represented. In the first issue of the publication of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast, Phillips Barry and Fannie Hardy Eckstorm were among the few folklorists to directly face the matter in their title “What Is Tradition?” They were acutely aware of changes in popular musical tastes and the rise of the urban recording industry. They well understood the preservation instinct in saving the songs of tradition they called folksongs, even as they recognized “that ballad making is still going on” (1930, 2).

Following Jacobs, Barry and Eckstorm significantly distinguished two kinds of tradition: in time and in space. They wrote:

A song may have come down through the ages, like “Hind Horn” [Roud Folksong No. 28] or “Johnny Scot” [Roud Folksong No. 63], traditional in the sense that many generations of singers have sung it. Or, it may be, like “Willie the Weeper” [Roud Folksong No. 977], or “Fair Florella” [Roud Folksong No. 500], merely widely distributed, so that one who sings it may expect to find an indefinite number of persons, over a large territory who know it. Such is tradition in space. Both types of songs are equally traditional; both are species of folk-song. For, despite all that has been argued to demonstrate the contrary, it is tradition that makes the folk-song a distinct genre, both as to text and music.

(1930, 2)

Still, the problem of how tradition fit into technological or mass culture remained along with the additional question of whether “authentic” traditions in modernity needed the qualifier of “folk.” American folklorist MacEdward Leach addressed these issues when he observed:

America is rapidly developing a new cultural stratum—alas for folk story and song. This is mass culture, a product of a society ordered and regimented by a technology working through mass media, such as radio, television and graphic advertising; and master-minded by hucksters selling goods, ideas, social behavior, religions—hard and soft commodities.

(1966, 395)

The situation was hardly America’s alone, as references spread to the influence of mass media on the rise of mass culture throughout the globe by century’s end.

The concept of tradition in the twentieth century was revised to include creativity, individuality, and emergence into the “folk process.” In the modern sense of folkloristics, especially, individuals choose and adapt traditions rather than merely following them, as the Victorians imagined (see Bronner 1998; Dorson 1978b; Dundes 1966a). Traditions in this modern view are indeed invented and contested, but still presumed as a kind of shared knowledge and action to be a basic need of life. Traditions are strategically selected and performed for the purpose of changing modes of persuasion and identity.

Equating tradition with submission, however, cultural critic Raymond Williams claimed “tradition” to be a loaded keyword of society that was frequently manipulated to keep the establishment in power. In the midst of modernization, he reflected, tradition became associated with respect for the establishment and duty to follow precedent. In his view, tradition stood in the way of “virtually any innovation” (Williams, R. 1983, 318–20). In the reformulation of tradition advanced by folklorists, the term became intertwined with creativity or “expressive culture.” It often was presented as the profound intellectual property of disempowered groups hanging on to tradition as a form of resistance to official authority or to bolster claims to political recognition and advocacy for social change (Bronner 1992b; Limón 1983; Norkunas 2004; Silverman 1983).

In the reformulation of tradition characterized by acceptance of a present accelerating into the future, the standard of persistence through generations no longer held fast. The spread of jokes in short-lasting “cycles,” carried through loosely connected “networks,” “conduits,” and “communities” was one oft-cited example of a “new” or “emergent” tradition (Dégh 1997; Dégh and Vázsonyi 1975; Dundes 1987a; Fine, G. 1979b; 1980; 1983). Indeed, the late twentieth-century folkloristic attention to jokes as a pervasive modern narrative genre was itself a sign of expansion of the concept of tradition, because formerly, according to folklorist Elliott Oring, jokes, a prominent example of a performative “living tradition” used by people in all walks of modern life, “were considered neither to reflect the spirit of the ancient folk-nation nor to indicate the survival of primitive belief and thought” (1986, 9–10). Other newly scrutinized genres in this “living tradition” mode were legends, personal experience stories, youth slang, gestures, and song parodies.

With the explosion of the Internet representing “digital” communication, the question of tradition’s role in culture again surfaced. After all, texting a joke to an unseen recipient is a far cry from gesturing and making eye contact with huddled buddies in the usual familiar place (Bronner 2012c). One commonality of both cyberspace and natural space is being “free” and “open” in the sense of being unrestricted. Both invite involvement on common ground and participants form social guidelines to organize themselves. From the perspective of the user, the Internet opens access and is an open medium. Users recognize a fundamental difference between sites identified as “official” or corporate, usually controlling its content and broadcasting information to a passive viewing audience, and those that allow posting, “live” chat, and free exchange among users. For many users, the latter constitutes the folk universe of cyberspace in contrast to a corporate realm. The folk realm is not located in a socioeconomic sector or a particular nation as much as it represents a participatory process that some posters refer repeatedly to as the democratic or open Web.

Folklore as an expression of tradition is wrapped up in the Internet because in “messaging,” “connecting” and “linking,” if not talking to one another, people incorporate the symbolic and projective functions that folklore distinctively provides. And when people email or post, they often invoke, and evoke, folklore as a cultural frame of reference for creatively relating experience, particularly in narration and image that respond to ambiguity and anxiety. The basis of the claim for the Internet taking on folkloric qualities is the medium’s interactive, instrumental quality that differentiates it from television and radio for which people are divided between broadcasters and listeners or viewers. Internet users are captivated by its capability to simultaneously send and receive, produce and consume, write and read; they are “prosumers” (Tabbi 1997; Zukin 2004: 227–52). Precedent can be found in vernacular uses of photography, photocopying, and faxing, which invited manipulation of images and text to create a play frame in which humor, pathos, and memory were shared among members of a social network, often from an anonymous source that signified commentaries that folklorists call “metafolklore” on values and attitudes about the very technology and institutional contexts that made the images and text possible (Dundes 2007; Dundes and Pagter 1975; Fineman 2004; Mechling 2004; 2005; Preston 1994; Roemer 1994). Many of these broadside-type sheets, surreptitiously produced in circulated from photocopy rooms, found their way to bulletin boards and office walls.

The visual practice of Web posting differs from the vernacular use of photography, photocopying, and faxing because it is more widely available, of course, but further, it also could be personalized at the same time. Youth has also influenced the growing compactness of the Internet, which can be utilized on the run, and in private away from home and the watchful eye of authority. Youth are thought to particularly engage the Internet because they have more to say, and fantasize or worry about, and they derive gratification from widening their circles of contacts into definable networked cliques. It enables the transition out of the home, giving them physical mobility and social connection often associated with cultural passage into adulthood. The openness of youthful endeavor is indicated by the number of electronic responses to tell others what one is doing. This linkage of action to age is yet another way that the Internet mediates, and alters, tradition, for conspicuous on the web are efforts to virtualize rituals of change, joy, and grief, such as virtual wedding chapels, church services, and cemeteries (Goethals 2003; Hutchings 2007). The folk Web has not replaced in reality rites of passage, but it often elaborates upon them in virtual photo sites, and arguably has transformed the album-keeping (related, too, to autograph-album writing) and photocopying of humor into digital culture. As the folk Web is embraced by all ages, beginning even before children can read, it becomes part of ritual routine, including creation of electronic family albums, virtual cafes, and support groups composed by parents, niche sites for ethnic-religious networking, matchmaking and chat rooms assuaging loneliness for singles, and memory-making by older adults in scrapbook and memorial sites. The old pastoral model of folklore with wisdom of yore “handed down” by a golden ager may lead people to think that digital culture displaces tradition in this mode, but digital culture can be conceived as fostering a “handing up” by young wired wizards with mythic imagination and social ebullience.

A distinction that arose in the twenty-first century is between analog and digital culture. Digital comes from the Latin digitus for finger, suggesting discrete counting, and converting real-world information into binary numeric form. Analog contains a reference to the Greek logos philosophizing meaning that comes from the related senses of the word as “word” (or “say”) and “reason.” Analog culture, often attributed to the touch-oriented world of tradition, especially in pre-modern society, is one whose meaning comes from sensory aspects of perception (Stewart and Bennett 1991: 28–32; Bronner 1986b). In this view, storytelling in analog culture is an event defined not just by a text but by a physical setting and the perceptions between tellers and audience (Georges 1969; Oring 2008). Digital narrative, as indicated by its symbolic equivalence with seeing something “going viral,” is often described in terms of spread, immediacy, placelessness, and ubiquity (Wasik 2009). Digital culture, rather than being relational, is analytical because users link, arrange, and reconstitute informational elements; folkloric action that is analytical depends on repetition and alteration of images as users simultaneously send and receive (Blank 2012; Buccitelli 2012; Howard 2008; Page and Thomas 2011; Peck 2015).

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