What is Folklore?
Folklore is the traditional art, literature, knowledge,
and practice that is disseminated largely through oral communication
and behavioral example. Every group with a sense of its own
identity shares, as a central part of that identity, folk traditions–the
things that people traditionally believe (planting practices,
family traditions, and other elements of worldview), do
(dance, make music, sew clothing), know (how to build
an irrigation dam, how to nurse an ailment, how to prepare barbecue),
make (architecture, art, craft), and say (personal
experience stories, riddles, song lyrics). As these examples
indicate, in most instances there is no hard-and-fast separation
of these categories, whether in everyday life or in folklorists’
work.
The word "folklore" names an enormous and deeply
significant dimension of culture. Considering how large and
complex this subject is, it is no wonder that folklorists define
and describe folklore in so many different ways. Try asking
dance historians for a definition of "dance," for
instance, or anthropologists for a definition of "culture."
No one definition will suffice–nor should it.
In part, this is also because particular folklorists emphasize
particular parts or characteristics of the world of folklore
as a result of their own work, their own interests, or the particular
audience they’re trying to reach. And for folklorists,
as for the members of any group who share a strong interest,
disagreeing with one another is part of the work–and
the enjoyment–of the field, and is one of the best ways
to learn.
But to begin, below we have cited several folklorists’
definitions and descriptions of folklore, given in the order in which they were written and published. (One of them uses
the word "folklife" instead, which American folklorists,
following their European colleagues, have used more frequently
of late.) None of these definitions answers every question by
itself, and certainly none of them is the American Folklore
Society’s official definition (we don’t have one),
but each offers a good place to start. From time to time we’ll
add the views of other folklorists to this page.
One thing you’ll note about these definitions and descriptions
is that they challenge the notion of folklore as something that
is simply "old," "old-fashioned," "exotic,"
"rural," "peasant," "uneducated,"
"untrue," or "dying out." Though folklore
connects people to their past, it is a central part of life
in the present, and is at the heart of all cultures–including
our own–throughout the world.
For more information about folklore and about what folklorists
do, please see the other sections of this "About Folklore"
chapter, as well as the other chapters of this AFSNet web site.
And if you have further questions about folklore or folklorists’
work, we invite you to contact the university
folklore program or public folklore
organization closest to you, or the American
Folklore Society’s office.
Benjamin A. Botkin, 1938.
Folklore is a body of traditional belief, custom, and expression,
handed down largely by word of mouth and circulating chiefly
outside of commercial and academic means of communication
and instruction. Every group bound together by common interests
and purposes, whether educated or uneducated, rural or urban,
possesses a body of traditions which may be called its folklore.
Into these traditions enter many elements, individual, popular,
and even "literary," but all are absorbed and assimilated
through repetition and variation into a pattern which has
value and continuity for the group as a whole.
Dan Ben-Amos. Toward a Definition of Folklore
in Context, in Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman, eds.
Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Austin: University
of Texas Press for the American Folklore Society, 1972.
…folklore is artistic communication in small groups.
Jan Brunvand. The Study of American Folklore:
An Introduction, 2nd edition. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1978.
Folklore comprises the unrecorded traditions of a people;
it includes both the form and content of these traditions
and their style or technique of communication from person
to person.
Folklore is the traditional, unofficial, non-institutional
part of culture. It encompasses all knowledge, understandings,
values, attitudes, assumptions, feelings, and beliefs transmitted
in traditional forms by word of mouth or by customary examples.
Edward D. Ives. Joe Scott, the Woodsman-Songmaker.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.
No song, no performance, no act of creation can be properly
understood apart from the culture or subculture in which it
is found and of which it is a part; nor should any "work
of art" be looked on as a thing in itself apart from
the continuum of creation-consumption.
Barre Toelken. The Dynamics of Folklore.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
Tradition [means] not some static, immutable force
from the past, but those pre-existing culture-specific materials
and options that bear upon the performer more heavily than
do his or her own personal tastes and talents. We recognize
in the use of tradition that such matters as content
and style have been for the most part passed on but not invented
by the performer.
Dynamic recognizes, on the other hand, that in the
processing of these contents and styles in performance, the
artist’s own unique talents of inventiveness within
the tradition are highly valued and are expected to operate
strongly. Time and space dimensions remind us that the resulting
variations may spread geographically with great rapidity (as
jokes do) as well as down through time (good luck beliefs).
Folklore is made up of informal expressions passed around
long enough to have become recurrent in form and context,
but changeable in performance.
…modern American folklorists do not limit their attention
to the rural, quaint, or "backward" elements of
the culture. Rather, they will study and discuss any expressive
phenomena–urban or rural–that seem to act like
other previously recognized folk traditions. This has led
to the development of a field of inquiry with few formal boundaries,
one with lots of feel but little definition, one both engaging
and frustrating.
William A. Wilson. The Deeper Necessity: Folklore
and the Humanities. Journal of American Folklore 101:400,
1988.
Surely no other discipline is more concerned with linking
us to the cultural heritage from the past than is folklore;
no other discipline is more concerned with revealing the interrelationships
of different cultural expressions than is folklore; and no
other discipline is so concerned …with discovering
what it is to be human. It is this attempt to discover the
basis of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human
existence, that puts folklore study at the very center of
humanistic study.
Henry Glassie. The Spirit of Folk Art.
New York: Abrams, 1989.
"Folklore," though coined as recently as 1846,
is the old word, the parental concept to the adjective "folk." Customarily
folklorists refer to the host of published definitions, add
their own, and then get on with their work, leaving the impression
that definitions of folklore are as numberless as insects.
But all the definitions bring into dynamic association the
ideas of individual creativity and collective order.
Folklore is traditional. Its center holds. Changes are slow
and steady. Folklore is variable. The tradition remains wholly
within the control of its practitioners. It is theirs to
remember, change, or forget. Answering the needs of the collective
for continuity and of the individual for active participation,
folklore…is that which is at once traditional and variable.
Mary Hufford. American Folklife: A Commonwealth
of Cultures. Washington: American Folklife Center, Library
of Congress, 1991.
What is folklife? Like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter,
folklife is often hidden in full view, lodged in the various
ways we have of discovering and expressing who we are and how
we fit into the world. Folklife is reflected in the names
we
bear from birth, invoking affinities with saints, ancestors,
or cultural heroes. Folklife is the secret languages of
children,
the codenames of CB operators, and the working slang of watermen
and doctors. It is the shaping of everyday experiences in
stories
swapped around kitchen tables or parables told from pulpits.
It is the African American rhythms embedded in gospel hymns,
bluegrass music, and hip hop, and the Lakota flutist rendering
anew his people’s ancient courtship songs.
Folklife is the sung parodies of the "Battle Hymn of the
Republic" and the variety of ways there are to skin a muskrat,
preserve string beans, or join two pieces of wood. Folklife
is the society welcoming new members at bris and christening,
and keeping the dead incorporated on All Saints Day. It is the
marking of the Jewish New Year at Rosh Hashanah and the Persian
New Year at Noruz. It is the evolution of vaqueros into
buckaroos, and the riderless horse, its stirrups backward, in
the funeral processions of high military commanders.
Folklife is the thundering of foxhunters across the rolling
Rappahannock countryside and the listening of hilltoppers to
hounds crying fox in the Tennessee mountains. It is the twirling
of lariats at western rodeos, and the spinning of double-dutch
jumpropes in West Philadelphia. It is scattered across the landscape
in Finnish saunas and Italian vineyards; engraved in the split-rail
boundaries of Appalachian "hollers" and the stone
fences around Catskill "cloves"; scrawled on urban
streetscapes by graffiti artists; and projected onto skylines
by the tapering steeples of churches, mosques, and temples.
Folklife is community life and values, artfully expressed in
myriad forms and interactions. Universal, diverse, and enduring,
it enriches the nation and makes us a commonwealth of cultures.
