Grand Theory in Folkloristics

Lee Haring

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780253024398
• eBook ISBN: 9780253024428
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

Essays arguing diverse positions on the concept of a grand theory in American folklore. Why is there no "Grand Theory" in the study of folklore? Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) advocated "grand theory, " which put the analysis of social phenomena on a new track in the broadest possible terms. Not all sociologists or folklorists accept those broad terms; some still adhere to the empirical level. Through a forum sponsored by the American Folklore Society, the diverse answers to the question of such a theory arrived at substantial agreement: American folklorists have produced little "grand theory." One speaker even found all the theory folklorists need in the history of philosophy. The two women in the forum (Noyes and Mills) spoke in defense of theory that is local, "apt, " suited to the audience, and "humble"; the men (Bauman and Fine) reached for something Parsons might have recognized. The essays in this collection, developed from the forum presentations, defend diverse positions, but they largely accept the longstanding concentration in American folkloristics on the quotidian and local.

Responses

Lee Haring

2America’s Antitheoretical Folkloristics

BEGETTING THIS COLLECTION of essays was an American Folklore Society forum in October 2005, which asked the question, “Why is there no ‘Grand Theory’ in folkloristics?” The origin of the phrase in sociology is explained in the essay by Gary Alan Fine. Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) inscribed “grand theory,” which he said “put the analysis of social phenomena on a new track in the broadest possible terms.” Not all sociologists, he knew, would accept those broad terms; some still adhered to the empirical level, as folklorists continue to do today (1937, viii–ix). In the AFS forum, the diverse answers arrived at substantial agreement: American folklorists have produced little “grand theory.” One speaker even found all the theory folklorists need in the history of philosophy. The two women (Noyes and Mills) spoke in defense of theory that is local, “apt,” suited to the audience, and “humble”; the men (Bauman and Fine) reached for something Parsons might have recognized. The essays in this collection, developed from the forum presentations, defend diverse positions, but they largely accept the longstanding concentration in American folkloristics on the quotidian and local. To fill out the picture, John W. Roberts has contributed an unblunted look at the history of American folkloristics, a fuller paper than the brief pieces I solicited from the forum participants. It was originally addressed to a conference in May 2006 at Ohio State University on “Negotiating the Boundaries of Folklore Theory and Practice.” For contrast, one other country provides a comparison to the American emphasis: James Dow, America’s leading interpreter and translator of folklore studies in Germany, contributes an essay to show the decline in the status of folklore there and the fragmentation of Volkskunde studies.

Concentrating on the United States, it is important to be true to the history of the field. Dorothy Noyes and John Roberts point to what American folklorists learned from Franz Boas and William Wells Newell, whose evolutionary assumption is dead today, though folklorists have neither considered nor rejected evolution’s newer refinements (Eccles 1989; Falk 2004). No longer are cultural productions seen as monuments to be studied in an archaeological spirit, although many of the folk regard them so. True to their historical moment, folklorists have turned away from the past. “Vernacular practices,” writes Roger D. Abrahams on this topic, “are our focus and our hope, not just the waifs and strays or the scattered remains of past societies” (2005, 148). But our historical position, says Dorothy Noyes, is that of the “provincial intellectual,” probing “the intimate other of modernity.” Characteristic of pragmatic, “can-do” America, our folkloristics is tirelessly inventive of method, without caring to ask what theory the methods are based on. In contrast to literary study, folkloristics has manifested neither a strong interest in theory nor a receptivity to foreign influences (de Man 1986, 5). Also staying close to the history of the field, Richard Bauman christens the common intellectual program the “philology of the vernacular.” As Roland Barthes led critics “from work to text,” Bauman, Dell Hymes, Erving Goffman, and M. M. Bakhtin have led folklorists from words to the social situation that elicits them. The broad redefinition of “text” in Bauman’s previous work to mean the whole of a communicative event in its actual occurrence has amounted to a call to weave theory and formal criticism into ethnography (Hutcheon 1988, 94–101). Bauman calls his philology of the vernacular a prevailing theory, though not the only one. It doesn’t prevail in all of the studies that properly belong to folklore. Take mythology, that most alienated branch of folklore study, which has the same philological ancestry and the same history of struggle between the literary and the anthropological. Mythological studies are thematic, moralistic, or historical, but seldom oriented to the vernacular.

Nor, as Bauman notes, is philology the only line of descent for American folklorists of today. Studies of folklife and material culture, also named folklore, trace their descent from William Morris, John Ruskin, anthropologists like Robert Plant Armstrong (Glassie 1999; Vlach 1993; Armstrong 1971), and historians like Lawrence W. Levine (Levine 1977; Joyner 1984). Another line leads to “public folklore”—the presentation of traditional arts to new audiences—which has grown out of festival production, museology, and involvement with broadcast media (Baron and Spitzer 1992). Then there is folk music, which finds its line of descent not only in Johann Gottfried von Herder and Francis James Child, but also in musicology (Evans 1982; Palmer 1981). If mythology, material culture, arts administration, and folk music are all taught in American university departments (surely departments are as local as can be), can any Grand Theory connect them? The absence of a self-conscious theoretical tradition, says Gary Alan Fine, makes it hard for folklorists to build models that transcend the local. Or is that desire what John W. Roberts calls “a frenzied attempt to claim scientific rigor”?

What theory authorizes American folklorists to focus on vernacular practices? What principles do we unwittingly follow in documenting and commenting on folklore? What principles underlie the rules of folkloristic competence (Gardner 1987, 189)? What about a non-Grand Theory? Margaret Mills advocates evaluating theory and interpretation through the eyes of members of the group being studied. How well will they appreciate the interpretation? Might her “low” theory be just the transcending model Gary Alan Fine calls for? Properly theorized, it would reach high (Abrahams 2005). Interpretation by performers and audiences, called “oral literary criticism” (Narayan 1995), touches the same topics as literary theorists do. To pose these questions leads inevitably back to defining the object of our investigation, as John Roberts asserts, and as Michel de Certeau says about history (Revel and Hunt 1995, 441). The definition game, which never ends among us (Ben-Amos 1971; Dundes 1966; Georges and Jones 1995, 231–32), sprang up during the discussion of these papers, as spontaneously as touch football. Discussants were reminded that folklore studies are racked by uncertainties and conflicts, as are many other disciplines (Richter 1994).

There is no Grand Theory in American folkloristics, I believe, because we are uncomfortable with the rhetoric of Grand Theory, because we refuse its authoritarian stance, and because we have gravitated towards the lower strata of societies. In rhetoric, Parsons’s Grand Theory style was consistently abstract. His critic C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), no less a Weberian than Parsons, once ridiculed the style by reducing four and five of Parsons’s paragraphs to one each of his own, in the reductive spirit of postwar polemics against gobbledygook (Flesch 1946 and 1949). As Gary Alan Fine points out, folklorists could be comfortable with Mills’s urging toward “historical and structural contexts” necessary “to describe and explain human conduct and society plainly” (1970, 42). Already in Mills’s time, Herbert Halpert was recommending that folklorists “offer us information in context about the area and the informants” (1958, 99). Melville Jacobs, another contemporary, was faulting folklorists for ignoring their own intellectual context, for failing “to learn from the advances in method and theory which were occurring in related fields of inquiry” (1959, 196). Mills could have known from his master Veblen that it’s perfectly possible to write abstractly about power relations. Folklorists today could know that from Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and (the grandest exemplar) Michel Foucault, if they read them.

But American folklorists practice a different rhetoric, a continual movement between theory and method, which for us is the essence of thoughtful investigation, and which leads towards Dorothy Noyes’s “humble” theory. Folklorists agree with certain literary critics: if theory is “an attempt to guide practice from a position above or outside it [and] an attempt to reform practice” by means of a general rationality (Fish 1989, 319; Knapp and Michaels 1985), the effort is futile and misdirected. The present generation of American folklorists takes instead the example of Dell Hymes, who (in Dorothy Noyes’s phrase) stays close to the ground, while also always formulating “a theory of the special case” (Hymes 1971, 51). Out of the special cases he treats, Hymes repeatedly sets forth extensive programs, but his generalizations promote ethnographic method, not sustained theory. His most theoretical statement advocates method: “to start from community definitions of situation, activity, purpose, genre, and to discover validly the ways in which communicative means are organized in terms of them” (1975, 350).

The anti-authoritarian stance of American folklorists today is one moment in the sequence of modes of thinking about the folk and their lore. Folkloristic production happens in history, where “the existence of a determinate [set of behaviors classified together] always reflects a certain possibility of experience in the moment of social development in question” (Jameson 1988, 9). At the beginning, eight years before Thoms wrote his note to the Athenaeum coining the word folklore, the Chartist movement had arisen as a working-class protest against industrialism; Thomas Carlyle soon roared his anti-industrialist response, Chartism (1840). William Cobbett was already pleading on behalf of the poor. Thoms’s neologism moved to contain the populace ideologically, by ascribing their customs and manners to “the olden time.” Just then the studies that came to be known as “English” were arising out of a desire to depoliticize the working class by imparting middle-class ideology in terms of universal values (Eagleton 1983, 25). Thoms’s “Folk-lore” was the “counter-distinction to the developing and enveloping capitalist modernity” around him (Limón 1998). Coloring the folk and their lore as politically irrelevant, Thoms’s voice was no solitary one, but it is the one prophetic voice that folklorists hark back to. In Thoms’s England, as in John Roberts’s United States, the spirit of nationalism advanced conceptions of folklore. In the 1970s, when Hymes, Goffman, and William Labov began turning folklore in the direction of descriptive ethnography, a new nationalism and xenophobia pervaded the nation and On the Road sounded its paean of praise to the vernacular. There was no “unified theory of expressive behavior” then; there was no “comprehensive, current work on folklore theory” (Burns 1977, 133). There was, however, a movement to democratize the notion of creativity, to recognize that even the powerless carried out aesthetic production as their expression of power. So Hymes defined folkloristics as “the study of communicative behavior with an esthetic, expressive, or stylistic dimension” (1974, 133).

From that definition came the attention to performance (Bauman 1977), but also a fatal political role and a fatal theoretical flaw. Politically, folklore has a role to play in maintaining the power structures existing in American society. Theoretically, if performance can be distinguished from non-performance when one person takes on responsibility before a knowing audience, then “folklore” has been not marked off; it has been dissolved. If all speech is to be approached as having an esthetic, expressive, or stylistic dimension (Hymes 1972, 50), then there is no substance to “folklore”; there is instead merely a dimension to be discerned. Isn’t that discernment the very making of folkloristics? Isn’t that how vernacular architecture, costume, the weaving of rugs, and pottery attain the status of folklore (Glassie 1999)? Any attempt now to frame, out of the practices and methods of American folklorists, a Grand Theory of folklore meets this obstacle: the entity has dissolved. The expression called folkloric ought to be definable by relation to other kinds of production, in order to give ourselves an object of knowledge (Ducrot and Todorov 1972, 107). But it has become impossible to separate folklore from other human activities, except as a product of one moment in that sequence of modes of thinking. “Folklore” is a historically-bounded term with a beginning and (now) an end. It has already been relinquished in some American universities; why not turn “folklore” over to traditional artists and their presenter-producers, who are developing “methods to interpret their traditions before audiences outside of customary performance contexts” (Baron 1999, 195)?

This view arises not through despair at defining the field or getting it more recognition in universities, but rather through trying to discover the nature of creativity. There are two kinds: “the use of an old sentence in a new setting . . . the use of a new sentence in an old setting” (Hymes 1972, 49). If folklorists today want to learn from advances in method and theory in related fields of inquiry (following Melville Jacobs’s advice), they could turn for instance to a field like cognitive science. Cognitive linguists propose that all human thinking is metaphorical at base. Metaphor as we see it in a proverb, being a product of human invention, is an elaboration out of universal mental equipment carried by everyone (Lakoff and Turner 1989, 174–79). Cognitive linguists propose to offer convincing, cross- cultural, experimental evidence for the fundamentally metaphorical nature of thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). If they convince folklorists of this conception of “human nature,” then what requires study in culture comprises a great deal more human behavior than the mere artistic communication of small groups (Ben-Amos 1971, 13). The separation of “folklore” from anthropology, literature, music, and art comes to an end, to be reconstructed on a new basis of knowledge of cognition. Or folklorists may simply continue to ignore the contributions psychology might make to their field, as they have rejected psychoanalytic interpretation.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the contributors and to the editors of the Journal of Folklore Research for their efforts in assembling these articles.

References

Abrahams, Roger D. 2005. Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Armstrong, Robert Plant. 1971. The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Baron, Robert. 1999. “Theorizing Public Folklore Practice: Documentation, Genres of Representation, and Everyday Competencies.” Journal of Folklore Research 36 (2–3): 185–201.

Baron, Robert, and Nicholas R. Spitzer. 1992. Public Folklore. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

Bauman, Richard. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.

Ben-Amos, Dan. 1971. “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context.” Journal of American Folklore 84 (331): 3–15.

Burns, Thomas A. 1977. “Folkloristics: A Conception of Theory.” Western Folklore 36 (2): 109–34.

Carlyle, Thomas. 1840. Chartism. London: James Fraser.

Ducrot, Oswald, and Tzvetan Todorov. 1972. Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Dundes, Alan. 1966. “The American Concept of Folklore.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 3: 226–49.

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Evans, David. 1982. Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Falk, Dean. 2004. Braindance: New Discoveries About Human Origins and Brain Evolution. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Fish, Stanley. 1989. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press.

Flesch, Rudolf. 1946. The Art of Plain Talk. New York: Harper & Row.

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Halpert, Her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• The Provocation
• Responses
• Comments
• Afterwords
• Index