A Companion to Folklore

Regina F. Bendix, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Regina F. Bendix, Galit Hasan-Rokem

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118863145, 9781405194990
• eBook ISBN: 9781444354386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Companion to Folklore contains an original and comprehensive set of essays from international experts in the field of folklore studies. This state-of-the-art collection uniquely displays the vitality of folklore research across the globe. The Companion covers four main areas: the first section engages with the practices and theoretical approaches developed to understand the phenomena of folklore; the second discusses the distinctive shapes that folklore studies have taken in different locations in time and space; the third examines the interaction of folklore with various media, as well as folklore's commoditization. In the final section on practice, essays offer insights into how folklorists work, what they do, and ways in which they have institutionalized their field.

Throughout, contributors investigate the interplay of folklore and folkloristics in both academic and political arenas; they evaluate key issues in the folk life of communities from around the world, including China, post-communist Russia, post-colonial India, South America, Israel and Japan. The result is a unique reflection and understanding of the profoundly different research histories and current perspectives on international research in the field.

PART I

CONCEPTS AND PHENOMENA

INTRODUCTION TO PART I
Concepts and Phenomena

Regina F. Bendix andGalit Hasan-Rokem

In our initial chapters we would like to introduce folklore as it is dialectically and hermeneutically processed by its practitioners as well as by those who study it. As revealed by the frequent appearance in our writing of the twin expression “folklore and folkloristics,” much of folklore studies is invested in the negotiation of the field’s epistemology between the production of folklore in communities and the definition of it as a distinct field of academic research. This peculiar interrelationship also accounts for much of the sociological reality which is perhaps unique for this field, i.e. the intense communication between the creators of folklore, on the various levels of its production, and its scientific researchers.

Investigating the social base of folklore is thus the logical point of departure of our exposition. Class, gender, age, occupation; local, linguistic, ethnic or national identity – all these are defining features of the phenomena of folklore. However, only occupation receives separate treatment among the chapters here presented, whereas the presence of the others is interlaced in the other phenomena discussed, especially in the first chapter of this section.

Tradition has always been a major term in the definition of folklore (except for pronouncedly present-oriented definitions). Tradition is of course defined relative to the culture from which the particular definition grows. What is common, however, to all definitions known is their dialogic and dialectical relationship to modernity, to which it most often serves as a foil. Post-modern thought may present some alternative configurations in which tradition becomes intertwined in the contemporary world, due to both inherent theoretical development, but perhaps even more so due to the emphatic mobility of our time where societies earlier conceptualized as traditional become in various modes suffused with characteristics of modernity (technologies, social modes of behavior, etc.). On the other hand, many societies that have been conceptualized as modern are hosts to populations stemming from less modernized contexts.

One of the first and major areas of folklore collection and study was narrative, later termed verbal art so as to include the full span of oral expressive culture. During the initial phase of building the discipline, collecting and sorting the materials in a variety of archival modalities was a major preoccupation, linked not least to the nation building enterprise with which folklore studies was implicitly or explicitly involved. Once sizable amounts of particularly narrative and related materials (such as songs, riddles, proverbs, etc.) had been collected and published, attention increasingly turned to theoretical concerns about classification, origin, and distribution, while communities and individuals engaged in narration and transmission were largely ignored. The topics chosen to address phenomena in the realm of verbal art in the present volume represent approaches that amplified this early fascination with the materials’ existence and spread in folklore scholarship with new theoretical interests. These also reflect a new engagement with modes of producing folklore and, eventually, with actors. With poetics, orality/textuality, and performance, we direct attention to concepts that allow for the tracing of theoretical transformations which also had profound methodological consequences.

The relevance of the concept of poetics may initially be rooted in the early focus on texts and consequently in the theoretical engagement with textual disciplines, mainly literary scholarship. However, with the emergence of semiotics and its borrowing of theoretical models from verbal expressive modes, poetics has become available for the study of folklore in all its manifestations. Through the lens of poetics, genre emerges as a diagnostic, organizing, and interpretive principle, and new ways of considering issues of subjectivity, ethnicity, and universality become discernible.

Fieldwork within oral societies enabled scholars to experience narrative within settings not taking recourse to literacy and attendant canons of evaluation. Communicating such experience within the realm of folklore scholarship brought into focus orality’s creative universe, and allowed for the recognition of an emic aesthetics in counterdistinction to the analytic or etic perspective brought into the field by researchers. Scholars were challenged to evaluate and subsequently modify their own textualization practices analogously to later moves in anthropological ethnographies reflecting on “writing culture.” Performance, in turn, augmented such field experience with trajectories emanating from linguistics and rhetoric. Aided by ever more precise and mobile recording devices, scholars were able to study aspects of folkloric performance in finely grained detail, and could confirm the sophisticated behavioral repertoire and practiced skill constitutive of every instance of folklore production.

Thinking together symbol, myth and ritual is a statement on the interrelatedness of expressive media in folklore. The connection of cognitive, narrative and performative categories underlines the circulation of aesthetic as well as existential and social norms in genres that strongly emphasize the collective manifestations of folklore, often in socially privileged and revered contexts. This triad brings into the discussion established theoretical and terminological traditions that have long held sway in folklore studies and in neighboring disciplines, emphasizing the phenomenology of all three across divides of register and cultural value.

Similarly, religion as conceptualized in folkloristics today, has left behind a division into faith versus superstition and affords a holistic view of the span of devotional practices actors engage in within established or institutionalized global religions, within the multitude of religious groupings deriving their legitimacy from localized authorities and texts, as well as within syncretistic expressions of belief. Here, as in the realm of narrative, participant observation has opened theoretically challenging vistas; in religion and its corollaries, this pertains particularly to embodied experiences of the numinous.

Work, another activity that has patterned human life most profoundly aside from religious devotion, stands out in its elementary, economic necessity. In the twenty-first century, leisure might appear to absorb creative energies even more, yet work encompasses the span from the routinized to invention, and is a domain within which human capacity for improvisation and traditionalization manifest in tandem. Work produces value in tangible ways and is thus deeply connected to another major field of folkloristic research, material culture.

Much as archives housed collected items of verbal art, museums were the home of collected material items amassed in a manner reminiscent of the accumulation of material goods through work. As sites of display and categorization, museums were the realm within which material culture studies were, for a long time, situated. Attention to processes of crafting and shaping on the one hand and the world of consumption on the other oriented folklorists to new ways of engaging with materiality intellectually while also leading to reflection of exhibitionary practice in museums.

CHAPTER 1

THE SOCIAL BASE OF FOLKLORE

Dorothy Noyes

When the English antiquarian William Thoms coined the word “Folk-Lore” in 1846, he proposed it as a “good Saxon compound” to delineate the field then known as “popular antiquities, or popular literature” (Thoms 1999 [1846]: 11). Most readers have noticed the nationalism implicit in this substitution of words derived from Latin. Less attention has been given to the fact of the compound. To be sure, it mimics Germanic word-formation. But it also suggests a tighter semantic cluster than the previous English phrases might have implied. The hyphen between “folk” and “lore” anticipates key questions for the discipline. What commonsense relationships exist between bodies of knowledge and groups of people? What relationship should scholars posit between cultural forms and social structures?

Do such linkages dissolve over time? Cultural expressions persist and move independently of their creators: stories and songs are heard and retold; craft knowledge is passed on in apprenticeships; proverbs are remembered and invoked in new settings. Literacy and other systems of recording facilitate the detachability of forms from contexts. Today the circulation of both people and cultural goods is so rapid and multidirectional that the very idea of a folk organically connected to a set of customs and expressions seems like a nostalgic fantasy. To be sure, the fantasy has enormous currency. Politicians, both national and local, project it upon the territories they propose to govern. Innumerable industries reproduce it through tourist attractions, restaurants and packaged foods, music, books, clothes and home décor. And an academic discipline exists that seeks to examine the compound term both empirically and theoretically.

Folklorists have always been conscious of their own role in creating the category of folklore. Although “folks” have been objectified in a variety of institutions and representations (including the nation-state as a political entity), such publications as the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen confer the further dignity of academic objectivity upon the Germans as a people, legends as a kind of thing in the world, and German legends as a distinct corpus (1816–1818). Nationalist, populist, revolutionary, and colonialist scholars around the world have continued to produce cultural objects in the hope of modeling social futures.

The futures occasionally come back to haunt them. In the 1960s, German scholars querying their responsibility for the Nazi myth of the Aryan Volk engaged in a thorough critique of the disciplinary past; they laid out a reflexive approach to the afterlife of those concepts in the present (Bendix, this volume). Young folklorists in the United States, seeing the prevailing comparative method as Eurocentric and irrelevant to current civil rights struggles, set out more bluntly to slay the old fathers and reformulate the field on new scientific foundations. To this end, they posited a different kind of relationship between folk and lore. Dan Ben-Amos provocatively redefined folklore as “artistic communication in small groups”: tradition and variation were no longer considered essential (1972: 13). In the same forum, published in book form as Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, Richard Bauman proposed a new approach to what he termed the “social base” of folklore.

The old European textual scholarship, Bauman explained, took for granted the location of folklore “among peasants and primitives.” Postwar American work was instead explicitly concerned with social groups, defined not by their place in the hierarchy but by their communal identity. In this approach the deeper layer of nation-state ideology had been operationalized in functionalist social theory. Bauman argued for a third way. Folklore lives in a “social matrix” (1972: 35) of actors seeking to accomplish their ends not as components of a system but as individuals in competition and conflict. People were connected to folklore not through the abstract linkage of group to tradition but through empirically traceable instances of performance. To be sure, folklore often thematized communal identity, but rather than expressing a pre-existent identity among insiders, it more often constructed one, aggressively or humorously, at social boundaries. Communication of differential identity to outsiders nonetheless required a code held in common. Generated in ongoing social interaction, shared forms rather than shared identity were the sine qua non of folklore. Scholarship needed therefore to investigate the “social base” of particular forms empirically, case by case.

Bauman does not define this new phrase, used at that time to refer to the class, ethnic, and occupational makeup of political parties and social movements. The word “base” has, to be sure, an objectivist and perhaps Marxist tinge (cf. Williams 1973). It implies the dependence of cultural forms on societal structures, in contrast to later theorists such as Michel Foucault who treated discourse as constitutive of society itself. This debate would become fruitful for folklorists. For Bauman’s immediate purposes, however, the primary value of the phrase “social base” lay in allowing researchers to seek a “direct and empirical” connection between folk and lore (1972: 33).

In this overview, I follow Bauman in tracing the interlocking development of three dominant approaches. Each of them situates the social base of folklore at the nether pole of one of the core binary oppositions of Western modernity: old and new, particular and universal, fluid and fixed. The first takes folklore to be the cultural forms proper to the deepest stratum of social life, flattened and superseded by the historical, hierarchical, or institutional overlay of modernity. The second views folklore holistically as the expressive bonds of community, which assert or maintain its differential being against external pressures. The third turns from stratum and bonds to performance, finding the social base of folklore in the contingencies of a situation it seeks to transform. That very contingency, however, has destabilized the institutional base of the field of folkloristics: is there truly an isolable object to just...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: CONCEPTS AND PHENOMENA
• PART II: LOCATION
• PART III: REFLECTION
• PART IV: PRACTICE
• INDEX