Word coined in 1846 (to replace the term “popular antiquities”) by English scholar
William J.Thoms, who defined it as “the Lore of tke People…[comprising] the manners,
customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc. of the olden time.” To some
degree, the antiquarian tone and the openended enumerative format of Thoms’ concept of
folklore has remained, while at the same time the word has acquired several new
connotations and faces competition from such terms as “folklife,” “expressive culture,”
“traditional culture,” “verbal arts,” and “vernacular culture.” The greatest divergence in
the 20th century from the original concept of Thoms and his times concerning folklore
has been to remove the emphasis on the rural and the past in order to include now as well
the “lore” of the modern, the urban, and the technologically advanced times.
The English word “folklore” itself gained international currency having its
counterparts in such forms as Volkskunde in German and folkeminne in Norwegian. In
English, folklore inspired compounds like folktale, folksong, folklorist (one who studies
folklore), and folkloristics (the field of folklore study), as well as the negative term
fakelore. The British FolkLore Society, founded in 1878, and the American Folklore
Society, in 1888, both continue to this day. Still, there is considerable debate (especially
in the United States) about exactly what parts of culture the word “folklore” refers to, and
there is much disagreement on the wording of a suitable definition of the word. As a
result, the editors of the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (1949)
simply allowed each of twenty-one contributors to submit his or her own definition, and
all of these statements were published in lieu of an agreed-upon common definition. But,
as American folklorist Kenneth Goldstein suggested, “Despite variance of opinion, there
is a certain core of materials which all definitions recognize as belonging to folklore.”
The three common features of the numerous cultural elements (including proverbs,
tales, songs, dances, games, toys, foods, fences, and so forth) that are included in most
folklorists’ concepts of what comprises folklore are: (1) that these elements are
transmitted orally or by means of informal demonstration; (2) that these elements are
traditional in form and content; and (3) that these elements (as a result of their traditional
circulation) always exist in different versions, or “variants.” Secondarily, in a minimal
definition of folklore, most folk-traditional elements of culture are anonymous as to
origin, and they tend to become formularized in the ways that they are performed or
expressed. Similar concepts of folklore prevail in the wording of most definitions of the
word, including, for example, Jan Harold Brunvand’s definition, Robert A.Georges’
(“continuities and consistencies in human behavior…[expressed] during face-to-face
interaction” [1980]), and Barre Toelken’s (“tradition-based commmunicative units
informally exchanged in dynamic variation through space and time” [1979]). Another
viewpoint, however, is that of Elliott Oring, who wrote in 1986: “At this point, a
definition is not really necessary. The field is still being mapped and any hard and fast
definition is likely to prove partial, idiosyncratic, or inconsistent.” Beginning in the 1950s the European folklife movement (named after the Swedish
word folkliv) began to strongly influence American folklore studies, inspiring more
attention to customary and material traditions instead of primarily oral traditions. For
example, Richard M.Dorson had written in 1959: “‘Folklore’ usually suggests the oral
traditions channeled across the centuries through human mouths. In its flexible uses
folklore may refer to types of barns, bread molds, or quilts; to orally inherited tales,
songs, sayings, and beliefs; or to village festivals, household customs, and peasant rituals.
The common element in all these matters is tradition.” But in 1968, taking these ideas
further, Dorson admitted that “my own view of the subject matter of the folklorist has
shifted somewhat from the established genres to what might be called the unofficial
culture.”
In 1976, a major piece of national legislation supporting folklore study was enacted,
The American Folklife Preservation Act, which established in the Library of Congress
the American Folklife Center. The short definition of “American folklife” quoted in the
act was “traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups in the United
States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional…mainly learned orally, by
imitation, or in performance, and…generally maintained without benefit of formal
instruction or institutional direction.…”
In the 1960s, a strong behavioral, or performance- and communications-oriented,
movement influenced younger American folklorists, whose statements of their “new
perspectives” on the theory and practice of folklore research found expression (among
other places) in 1972 in a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore. Distilling the
essence of this approach in a concise phrase, Dan Ben-Amos proposed as a definition,
“…artistic communication in small groups.” The major influence of the behavioral
approach is a shift in focus from recording merely the items of folklore and their histories
to analyzing the processes and functions involved in the events in everyday life during
which folklore is performed. Echoing most of the varying approaches to folkloristics of
the past and present, the American Folklore Society itself, in a booklet published in 1984,
declared: “We now speak of folklore/folklife as song and story, speech and movement,
custom and belief, craft and ritual—expressive and instrumental activities of all kinds
learned and communicated directly or faceto-face in groups ranging from nations,
regions, and states through communities, neighborhoods, occupations, and families.”
Although the aspect of constant variation of folk materials and folk expressions is
something that is not always stated directly in their formal definitions, the scholars’
interest in different “versions” and “variants” is amply demonstrated in many of their
published studies. In a booklet written by folklife specialist Mary Hufford, titled
American Folklife: A Commonwealth of Cultures, published in 1991 by the American
Folklife Center, the importance of folklore variation—changes in both form and in
function—is emphasized in a paragraph that begins: “Traditions do not simply pass along
unchanged.”
In the 1980s, influenced by such movements as Marxism, feminism, postmodernism,
and cultural studies, American folkloristics made yet another change of direction, this
time toward what is often referred to as “the culture of politics” (or “the politics of
culture”). The introduction (published in 1993 in Western Folklore) to a 1992 American
Folklore Society symposium that reviewed the “new perspectives” of twenty years before
states simply that “folklore as a discipline is concerned with the study of traditional, vernacular, and local cultural productions.” The editors further suggest that folkloristics
examines “the ways in which traditionalizing (identifying aspects of the past as
significant in the present) [is] a dynamic cultural process.” But the editors also warn that
some people “…have challenged the authority of any nation, group, gender, or class to
represent the experience of an-Other.” Thus, these contemporary folklorists allude to the
political nature of current folklore study in the United States. No longer does it seem
politically correct to define folklore (even jokingly), as one American folklorist did in
1973, as”…what folklorists study,” since we must now be aware of who is studying
whose traditions, plus how, why, and for whose advantage the study is being conducted.
Jan Harold Brunvand
References
Briggs, Charles, and Amy Shuman, guest eds. 1993. Theorizing Folklore: Toward New
Perspectives on the Politics of Culture. Western Folklore (Special Issue) 52 (2–4):109–400.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1986. The Field of Folklore. In The Study of American Folklore. 3d ed. New
York: W.W. Norton, pp. 1–15.
Dorson, Richard M. 1959. A Foreword on Folklore. In American Folklore. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp. 1–6.
Dundes, Alan, ed. 1965. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 1–51.
Folklore [21 definitions]. 1949. In Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, ed.
Maria Leach and Jerome Fried. New York: Funk and Wagnalls.
Oring, Elliott. 1986. On the Concepts of Folklore. In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres. Logan:
Utah State University Press, pp. 1–22.
Paredes, Américo and Richard Bauman, eds. 1972. Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Austin:
University of Texas Press.