Revivalism. Encyclopedia Of American Folklore

A term used by folklorists to describe the conscious use of folklore to express or
represent ideas about identity and/or art. The term has been used most frequently to
describe practitioners of folk music particularly during the 1960s (Rosenberg 1993), and
storytellers, starting in the 1970s (Sobol 1992). “Revivalism” is sometimes used by
folklorists as a straightforward descriptive term to describe certain kinds of social
movements, but it has more frequently carried with it meanings of judgment about
authenticity. It is one of those terms, like “fakelore” (Dorson 1969), “folklorism” (Bendix
1988), “folksay” (Hirsch 1987), and “folkery” (Dean-Smith 1968) that has the potential
to draw attention to often overlooked reflexive dimensions of thinking—be they
academic, intellectual, or casual—about folklore.
An early appearance of the term “revival” in connection with folklore came in the
writings of English folksong collector Cecil Sharp, who in 1907 called for a revival of
English folk music. Following his lead, the English Folk Dance and Song Society became
the center of the social movement called the first British folksong revival—although the
strong interest in the ballad during the 18th century has also been characterized in
retrospect as a revival—and this led indirectly to later-20thcentury folksong revivals in
Britain and elsewhere. Sharp, however, was using the term metaphorically (its oldest
sense) to describe the refurbishment of a repertoire or genre, as when we speak of the
revival of a Shakespeare play or some other historical work of art. “Revival” has also
been used as a metaphor for the awakening of religious spirit since at least the time of
Cotton Mather; during the 1970s to 1980s, folklorists have grown more interested in
religious revivalism as a social phenomenon with folkloric aspects. This area of inquiry
has, however, been considered by folklorists to be essentially different from that of
secular revivalism and is generally treated as an aspect of the folk-organized religion
continuum.
By the 1960s, when folklore emerged as a professionalized discipline, folklorists
tended to read the term “revival” literally rather than metaphorically and, having shifted
their focus outward from cultural products to include cultural producers and contexts,
tended to see the term as referring to the resuscitation of “living” traditions in these new
terms. Consequently, they used it to describe the uses of insiders’ cultural products by
outsiders, individuals from “other” cultural contexts. This perspective coincided with the
apogee of the commercial folk-music boom of the 1960s. “Revivalism” thus became a
pejorative or judgmental term for folklorists, referring to the contextually inauthentic or
spurious, used, characteristically, to describe situations in which individuals or groups
perform texts, enact customs, or create objects that are based on traditions from outside
their own personal historical and/or cultural experience.
Revival—whether referred to literally or metaphorically—has been problematic to
folklorists for another reason. While folklorists have typically defined their materials as
emerging from a matrk of “unselfconscious” cultural production or enactment, any
attempt to revive such materials implies some degree of self-consciousness. Those most
interested in the revival of folklore tend to have, like Sharp, conscious (and articulated)
political, artistic, or cultural agendas that extend far beyond the original contexts of
production. Ironically, then, given their pejorative use of the term, folklorists have been
among the principal folklore revivalists.
When folklorists analyze situations in which differing degrees of awareness about
such matters are manifest, they tend to create categories of classification that differentiate
on the basis of awareness and agendas. Ellen Stekert, writing in 1966 about the urban
folksong movement, spoke of four groups: “traditional singers,” “imitators” (she later
altered this to “emulators”), “utilizers,” and “new aesthetic” singers. For Stekert,
traditional singers are those who “have learned their songs and their style of presentation
from oral tradition as they grew up” (Stekert 1993:96). Joe Wilson and Lee Udall, in their
1982 book addressing folk-festival organizers and managers, present a somewhat similar,
though more detailed, set of categories. They first separate performers into two
categories: Those “reared in the culture from which the performed materials are drawn”
are distinguished from those “who adopt elements of style and materials from cultures
into which they were not reared.” This allows them to split what is in essence Stekert’s
first category three ways: “traditional folk performer,” “aware traditional performer,” and
“evolved traditional performer” (Wilson and Udall 1982:20–23). These subdivisions
allow for the idea that traditional performers might lose the unselfconscious quality in
their performance; they also split the second, nonreared, category into subdivisions that
resemble Stekert’s last three.
This is good as far as it goes in that it admits the possibility of
nonunselfconsciousness, but what is usually left unsaid is that there is often collaboration
among the reared and the nonreared with a revivalist or revitalizationist goal in mind.
Examples abound within the domain of music: Since the 1960s, for example, the growth
of old-time fiddle music associations in North America has been characterized by the
participation of individuals who grew up hearing and performing fiddle music together
with those who did not. They share a perception of this music culture as being threatened
by outside forces, and they collaborate to protect and promote the tradition. Similarly, the
late-20th-century storytelling revival brings together those who learned Jack tales from
their family and friends and those who first encountered such Märchen through the
Grimm brothers or Walt Disney. In a more general way, collaboration between insiders
and outsiders occurs whenever folklorists conduct research into a tradition. Today
folklorists recognize the intellectual necessity and ethical imperative for dialogue with
their informants in the process of research and publication. As scholars become “aware”
and “evolved” in their attitudes about the traditions they study, so, too, do die tradition
bearers. Consequendy, the possibility of revivalism always exists whenever anyone
identifies something as folklore.
Neil V.Rosenberg
References
Bendix, Regina. 1988. Folklorism: The Challenge of a Concept. International Folklore Review 6:5–
14.
Dean-Smith, Margaret. 1968. The Pre-Disposition to Folkery. Folklore 79:161–175.
Dorson, Richard M. 1969. Fakelore. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 65:56–64. Reprinted in American
Folklore and the Historian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1971 pp. 3–14.
Hirsch, Jerrold. 1987. Folklore in the Making: B.A.Botkin. Journal of American Folklore 100:3–
38.
Rosenberg, Neil V. 1993. Transforming Tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Sobol, Joseph D. 1992. Innervision and Innertext: Oral and Interpretive Modes of Storytelling
Performance. Oral Tradition 7:66–86.
Stekert, Ellen J. 1993. Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folksong Movement: 1930–1966. In
Transforming Tradition, ed. Neil V.Rosenberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 84–106.
Wilson, Joe, and Lee Udall. 1982. Folk Festivals. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

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