Culturally held beliefs that are constituent parts of the larger worldview of a culture.
(Worldview refers to the total manner in which the members of a culture see the nature of
the universe and their place in it.) The term was coined in 1972 by Alan Dundes and has
not been widely used by other folklorists.
Dundes proposed the term because he thought that worldview was such a broad
concept that students of culture needed a way to refer to smaller “units” of it. He also
hoped that “folk ideas” would replace the misuse of the term “myth” (which, to
folklorists and anthropologists, means a type of narrative) to refer to the grand,
controlling ideas of a culture (as in the “myth of the frontier”), a usage adopted by
literary critics and others. The term “folk ideas” was not meant to refer to a specific genre
of folklore but rather to concepts that might be embedded in various kinds of folklore or
even in other, nonfolkloric cultural expressions, including literature and the mass media.
Dundes suggested that folk ideas included such “cultural axioms” as the American
notion of unlimited good (there is no limit on the amount of something that can be
produced or obtained) and the American belief that all persons have equal opportunity.
The idea of unlimited good might be expressed, for example, in the folk expression,
“There’s plenty more where that came from.” A culture may have contradictory folk
ideas.
Folk ideas are related to folk stereotypes (such as those about ethnic groups), but
Dundes saw the former as less consciously conceived than the latter.
Frank de Caro
References
De Caro, Frank. 1992. New Orleans, Folk Ideas, and the Lore of Place. Louisiana Folklore
Miscellany 7:68–80.
Dundes, Alan. 1972. Folk Ideas as Units of Worldview. In Toward New Perspectives in Folklore,
ed. Americo Paredes and Richard Bauman. Austin: University of Texas Press and the American
Folklore Society, pp. 93–103.