Folklore Concepts

Histories and Critiques

Dan Ben-Amos, Henry Glassie, Elliott Oring, Henry Glassie, Elliott Oring

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253052445
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

By defining folklore as artistic communication in small groups, Dan Ben-Amos led the discipline of Folklore in new directions. In Folklore Concepts, Henry Glassie and Elliott Oring have curated a selection of Ben-Amos's groundbreaking essays that explore folklore as a category in cultural communication and as a subject of scholarly research. Ben-Amos's work is well-known for sparking lively debate that often centers on why his definition intrinsically acknowledges tradition rather than expresses its connection forthright. Without tradition among people, there would be no art or communication, and tradition cannot accomplish anything on its own—only people can. Ben-Amos's focus on creative communication in communities is woven into the themes of the theoretical essays in this volume, through which he advocates for a better future for folklore scholarship. Folklore Concepts traces Ben-Amos's consistent efforts over the span of his career to review and critique the definitions, concepts, and practices of Folklore in order to build the field's intellectual history. In examining this history, Folklore Concepts answers foundational questions about what folklorists are doing, how they are doing it, and why.

1

THE IDEA OF FOLKLORE

An Essay

THE CONCEPT OF FOLKLORE EMERGED IN EUROPE IN the mid-nineteenth century. Originally, it connoted tradition, ancient customs, and surviving festivals, old ditties and dateless ballads, archaic myths, legends and fables, and timeless tales and proverbs. As these narratives rarely stood the tests of common sense and experience, folklore also implied irrationality: beliefs in ghosts and demons, fairies and goblins, sprites and spirits. It referred to credence given to omens, amulets, and talismans. From the perspectives of the urbane literati, who conceived the idea of folklore, these two attributes of traditionalism and irrationality could pertain only to peasant or primitive societies. Hence they attributed to folklore a third quality: rurality. The countryside and the open space of wilderness were the proper breeding grounds for folklore. Man’s close contact with nature in villages and hunting bands was considered the ultimate source of his myth and poetry. As an outgrowth of human experience with nature, folklore itself was thought to be a natural expression of man before city, commerce, civilization, and culture contaminated the purity of his life.

This triad of attributes—traditionalism, irrationality, and rurality—was to dominate the concept of folklore for many years to come; often, it still does. It provided standards for inclusion or exclusion of stories, songs, and sayings in terms of the domain of folklore proper. Those that possessed at least one of these qualities were christened folktales, folk songs, riddles, and folk sayings; those that had none were reprovingly rejected.

In their turn, these three terms of meaning generated additional attributes, which together constituted the sense of the concept of folklore in common use, in print and in speech. The cloak of tradition concealed the identity of those who authored folktales, ballads, and proverbs. Compounding matters, the transmission from generation to generation obscured their origin. Thus, by default and not by merit, anonymity became an earmark of folklore. Indigenous prose or poetry became part of folklore only after the memory of its creator had been erased. Then the seal of anonymity sanctioned tradition as genuine. It legitimized songs and tales as integral parts of the cultural heritage of society.

Yet the anonymity of folk narratives, rhymes, and riddles hardly solved the enigma of origin. The responsibility for authorship had to be assigned to some creator, divine or human. So in the absence of any individual who could justifiably and willingly claim paternity of myths and legends, the entire community was held accountable for them. After all, the existing evidence appeared to support such an allegation. Narrators and singers often attribute their tales and songs not to a single individual but to the collective tradition of the community. Even in the exceptional cases in which they indeed claimed authorship, scholarship succeeded in unveiling analogues in their own and other traditions. Such parallels cast doubt on any contention for originality and sustained the assertion of the communality of folklore.

In fact, communality has become a central attribute, rivaled only by tradition in the formulation of the concept of folklore. There was no room in folklore for private tales and poems. Any expression had to pass through the sieve of communal approval before it could be considered folklore. But the identification of the processes that would justify the attribution of communality to any story or song proved to be rather complex, even logically thorny. Were folktales and folk songs only in the communal domain, free to all to speak and sing? Or should these property rights have been limited to the moment of origin, thus rendering folk expressions a communal creation and solving, along the way, the question of authorship? Furthermore, how does the community foster its bond between people and their folklore, and exactly which of its aspects relate to the society at large: the themes, the language, the forms, or the particular tales, songs, and proverbs? These and other issues were the whetstones that sharpened debates that were crucial to the idea of folklore. From various viewpoints, the attribute of communality implied communal creation, recreation, or simply expression.

Communal creation involved some anachronistic reasoning: the tales, songs, and sayings that the community shared together were also created together. Such an explanation might have solved the problem of authorship, but inferring origins from results might be valid only biologically and not logically. In the cultural and social spheres, the mode of existence could not necessarily attest to the genesis of forms. Historical processes such as diffusion of themes, dissemination of ideas, and imitation of manners do affect the state and nature of folklore. Consequently, collective knowledge of tales and songs could not be an unequivocal indicator of creation. The notion of communal recreation countered this dilemma. It prolonged the moment of origin over historical periods and conceived of the formation of songs, for example, not in a single exhilarating burst of poetic creativity but through repetitive recitations of singers on communal occasions. Each improvised and embellished the text yet conformed to the communal aesthetic and ethical standards. Such an interpretation of the communality of folklore also allowed the viewing of folk prose and poetry as expressions of social fears and wishes, ideals and values. Folklore reflected the collective experience of society and was the mirror of itself that the community constantly faced.

Paradoxically, intertwined with the attribute of communality is the idea that folklore is universal. While folk songs and tales might be forged within a particular community and express its unique experience, they also transcend the boundaries that language and space impose, and emerge in diverse groups and remote countries, still maintaining sameness to a large extent. The attribute of universality appeared to be both formal and thematic. All peoples distinguish poetry from prose, pithy sayings from epic poems; all construct narratives, fictional or historical, stringing events in sequences; and all can combine music and movement with words and sing and dance to their heart’s content. These are inherent abilities of humanity.

In that sense, folklore withstood the test that language failed. While modern discoveries about animals clearly demonstrate that some master the rudiments of language communication (whales sing), so far, neither monkeys nor rats have been caught telling legends to their infants. But the universality of folklore was not confined to the formal basis alone. The themes, the metaphors, and the subjects of stories, songs, and sayings of peoples who lived in countries remote from each other, and who spoke completely unrelated languages, exhibited a high degree of similarity that history could not explain. Migrations and contacts in war and peace could not account for the common features that the tales and poems of native Australians, Africans, and Americans shared. All include stories of gods, of creation, and of destruction; all tell about marvelous events, beings, and places; and all dwell on the supernatural, the extraordinary, the absolute, and the incongruous. Their metaphors relate to nature, beliefs, and societies, and their songs celebrate victories and lament failures in the struggle for survival. Often, similarities among folklores are even more striking, as the same narrative episodes and verbal or visual images appear in the expressions of unrelated peoples.

The dual attributes of universality and communality were locked together and created an apparent paradox in the idea of folklore, merging the general and the particular into a single concept. Evidence supported both. The themes and forms of folklore appeared to be universal, yet no other expression was so imbued with regional, local, and cultural references, meanings, and symbols. There were two ways to resolve this contradiction. First, universality and communality could be viewed not as contradictory but as complementary attributes. The relations that govern folklore are universal; the references to culture and history are specific. The principles of distinctiveness in form and in theme—the unusual, the incongruous, and conversely, the absolutely harmonious—are universal, but the languages, the social and historical experiences, the religious systems, and the moral values that make up the substance of the folklore of respective societies are communal. Second, these two attributes could be historically related, one preceding the other. If folklore was communal at first, later, its properties achieved universality by historical processes, such as diffusion of themes and population contacts through migration, trade, or warfare. Such an assumption would imply a single source, or place and time of origin, from which folklore features were universally diffused. But if folklore were universal first, then its basic characteristic forms and themes should have been formulated prior to any historical and evolutionary developments. In that case, folklore embodies the original homogeneity of the culture of man before diversity struck, following the Tower of Babel. Consequently, folklore also possesses the attribute of primariness, an attribute that made the impact of folklore on modern thought and art so powerful.

The mythology of all nations not only tells about but is the dawn of humanity. It incarnates the commonality, in all communities and voices, of the primordial expression of man. In its fundamental forms, folklore emerged before human diversity developed, and thus it embodies the most rudimentary forms of verbal and visual symbols. The primariness of folklore had historical and evolutionary aspects. Historically, folklore allegedly dated back to time immemorial, and hence, at its original stage, preceded any known recorded history. When man hunted and gathered his food, or even when he began to farm the land and to herd his cattle, but had not as yet quite mastered writing, he was already narrating tales and singing songs. The folklore of the world, it was hence assumed, abounds with symbols, themes, and metaphors that pertain to the beginning of human civilization, and could shed light on the dark corners of history that no other document could illuminate. The forms of folklore were regarded as the cores at the heart of artistic forms. They were the primitive, crude expressions out of which the literary, visual, and musical cultural heritage of the peoples of the world has emerged. Folklore comprised the symbolic forms at the base of the complex expressions of literate societies.

Naturally, folklore in its primary stage could not be accessible to modern man and would have been completely lost had it not been for the attempt to recapture tales and songs as they existed in nonliterate societies—that is, as they were told and sung orally, without recourse to any written devices to aid in the memorization and transmission of texts. No one claims that the current prose and poetry of peasants and nonliterate culture reflect human expression in its archaic, primordial form. Repeated recitations, loss of memorization, creative improvisation, and more general historical processes of cultural contacts amid technical evolution contributed to alterations in both the particular themes and the general tenor of folklore. However, in spite of the recognition of such historical factors, a basic assumption in folklore is that those stories, songs, and sayings continued to exist in the same way their ancient predecessors did—that is, in oral performance—and that they were transmitted from generation to generation only orally, as they were before the advance of literacy. Hence the oral nature of folklore became one of its crucial attributes, the touchstone of authenticity and originality. As long as stories, songs, and proverbs conformed with the principle of oral circulation and transmission, they qualified as “pure” folklore, but when, alas, somewhere along the line they came in contact with written texts, they were branded contaminated. No longer could they represent the primary expression of man.

The attributes of traditionalism, irrationality, and rurality; anonymity, communality, and universality; primacy and oral circulation became consolidated in the idea of folklore. They cluster, implying one another, and suggesting the existence of intrinsic relations between them. The occurrence of one quality in a song or tale often implies most of the others. A peasant song, for example, was considered as having long-standing tradition in the community. The possibility that it might be a recent composition, or borrowed from some external source such as an urban center, would have denied the song its folkloric nature and contradicted the basic assumptions held about it. Being rural, other attributes similarly follow: The author is anonymous, and the song belongs to the cultural heritage of the entire community. Most likely, as poetry, it would express deep-seated emotions or uncontrolled desires, which in turn project universal primary human qualities, unaffected by civilization. Thus, combined in a hypothetical song, these attributes convey the meaning of the concept of folklore.

Consequently, these attributes, which are only descriptive and interpretive terms at best, acquired a normative status, setting the standards and boundaries for the substance of folklore proper. They become defining terms, bound by an a priori notion of what folklore should have been but only occasionally was, transforming the desired into necessary conditions and injecting interpretations into alleged observations. They became terms of value with which to state the worth of songs and sayings and to rate their import in the light of ideals only implicitly understood.

In the process of research and interpretation, desired goals could often turn into a priori assumptions and serve as the initial premises rather than the final results. This, in fact, had often happened with qualities attributed to stories, songs, and sayings, which became the basic premises on which research was designed and theory constructed. Naturally, there have been sufficient examples that supported these contentions. Stories have circulated orally, existing in the traditions of rural communities for many years; their authors, if there were any, were long forgotten, and their analogues recovered in distant lands. But even if there were texts that measured up to all the criteria of folklore, these standards should not have been the defining terms for the substance of folklore.

The penalty for transferring norms into premises and ideal goals into a priori conditions is a limited range for research and theory. Past folklore scholarship paid its dues twice over. The diversity and richness that folklore is was confined by the constraints that the notions about it imposed. The study of traditions in villages flourished, but the equivalent manifestations in cities went unnoticed. Anonymous tales and songs were avidly recorded, stored, and dissected, but equally entertaining songs and stories whose authors were alive and known were ignored as irrelevant. Other attributes became frames for interpretation. The relationship between expressions and the community was, and is, a major paradigm for analysis. The implicit irrationality of ideas found in tales and metaphors has been the only basis for their explanation and has opened the gate to a host of psychological interpretations. Significant as they are, these notions blocked the way for alternate modes of explanation, directions of research, and construction of theories. They predefined and identified the substance and the problems of study, silencing the expressions and the people themselves. In recent years, the clouds of a priori premises began to disperse. Still, with a sense of innovation and intellectual rebellion, Hermann Bausinger (1961/1990) expounded on folk culture in a technical world, and American folklorists gathered to discuss The Urban Experience and Folk Tradition (Paredes and Stekert 1971). Even more recently, Alan Dundes and Carl R. Pagter (1975) published a collection of written materials as urban folklore, and with a similar sense of innovation, Richard M. Dorson (1978) convened a conference on the subject of modern folklore. But these are recent developments, when scholarly traditions yielded to the demands of reality. Throughout the formative years of folklore study, and in many years that followed, the attributes of the idea of folklore dictated the conception of its substance and the limits of its research. They became unchallenged premises and assumptions that were taken for granted.

Regardless of the validity of these attributes, they contributed to the popularity of the idea of folklore. At the same time, however, these very qualities impeded the transformation of folklore from an idea into a field of scholarship. These attributes burdened folklore research with unproved assumptions, untested beliefs, and a projection of popular attitudes toward the substance that makes up the subjects of folklore inquiry. In order to progress with research in the field of folklore, it is necessary to unload the attributes of the past and to observe folklore freshly as it exists in social reality, as some have already done. Within this context, folklore is a culturally unique mode of communication, and its distinctiveness is formal, thematic, and performative. There is a correlation between these three levels of expression, by which the speakers of folklore set it apart from any other communication in society.

As a distinct mode of communication, folklore exists in any society; it is the sole property of neither peasants nor primitives. No doubt folklore could be traditional, but it is not so by definition; it could be anonymous, but it is not essentially so. Any of the qualities that were, and still are, attributed to folklore might be inherent in some forms, in some cultures, and anytime that they are, it is up to the folklorists to demonstrate it anew.

Bibliography

Bausinger, Hermann. 1961. Volkskultur in der technischen Welt. Stuttgart: W. Rohlhammer.

———. 1990. Folk Culture in a World of Technology. Translated by Elke Dettmer. Folklore Studies in Translation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Dorson, Richard M., ed. 1978. Folklore in the Modern World. World Anthropology. The Hague: Mouton.

Dundes, Alan, and Carl R. Pagter. 1975. Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Publications of the American Folklore Society Memoir Series, vol. 62. Austin: American Folklore Society.

Paredes, Américo, and Ellen J. Stekert, eds. 1971. The Urban Experience and the Folk Tradition. American Folklore Society Bibliographical and Special Series, vol. 22. Austin: University of Texas Press.

2

THE ENCOUNTER WITH NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE EMERGENCE OF FOLKLORE

APERIOD OF THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS separates the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus and the coinage of the term folklore in 1846 (Merton 1846; see Bo...