Craig got clear information about the appropriate (and inappropriate) where, when, and with whom of this folklore, and also about the how, the attitude behind the traditions. While a second interview was obviously necessary (and was made much more useful through Craig’s idea to bring a new person along to provide a fresh audience for the telling of complete stories), the jumbled and confusing trip to Walmart provided Craig with a foundation of understanding for what life in this folk group was really like. In any collecting situation, it’s important to set aside expectations and consider what folk culture you’re actually getting.
Analyzing Folklore
Once you’ve collected your folklore, you’re ready to do something with it. One of the best things about the field of folklore studies is that since folklorists are united by what they study, rather than by how they study it, folklorists get to use any and all methods and approaches that seem useful to them. We get to take useful tools from lots of different fields and put them to work for us in whatever way helps us understand our material better.
As we talked about in the previous chapter, folklorists look at folklore as a thing, and also as a process of transmission. We can ask, “What is it?” and also “How does it work?” and “How does it travel?” Jan Harold Brunvand, a folklorist perhaps most famous for his lifelong work with urban legends,11 put together a list of questions that folklorists commonly ask, and it’s a helpful summary.
Folklorists ask questions about:
• definition (what folklore is)
• classification (what the genres of folklore are and how to distinguish between them)
• source (who the “folk” are)
• origin (who originally composed or created folklore)
• transmission (how folklore is carried and how fast and how far)
• variation (how folklore changes and evolves, and for what reasons)
• structure (what the underlying form of folklore is and the relationship of form to content)
• function (what folklore communicates for its carriers and how it works within a group)
• purpose (what the performer intends to convey and the intended effect on the audience)
• meaning (what the folklore may symbolize or represent in a metaphorical way)
• use/application (what the study of folklore can do for other fields and in other areas)12
While folklorists examine all these questions, the most common form of study, especially in the sense of analyzing a particular interesting type of folklore that comes from a particular group, is a functional analysis. Answering the question “What does this folklore do for the people who share it?” is a popular academic pursuit for folklorists, especially since there are so many possible answers.
Another famous folklorist, William Bascom, once wrote an article called “The Four Functions of Folklore” in which he claimed that folklore can serve to entertain, to validate a culture’s customs and rituals, to teach lessons, and to exercise social control.13 Are these the only ways that folklore can function? Not remotely. In a broad sense these are certainly applicable to many kinds of folklore, but the smaller the group, the more nuanced the function. Sometimes the folklore of a very small group, such as a single family, serves a unique function that doesn’t even exist outside of that group.
I had a student once who grew up in a large family that shared one very small bathroom. Over the years, the family members had developed a whole lexicon of folk speech used to evaluate and compare each other’s relative needs to use the facilities—whose case was the most extreme and thus merited first usage, what new situations could override the previously determined order of usage, and so on. The terminology stemmed mainly from funny or embarrassing incidents in the family’s history (“This is a ‘Julie-in-Yellowstone’ situation here!”) and was comprehensible and useful only among family members within the family home. The student also felt that the folk speech, which on the surface could appear to be crudely pragmatic, reflected her parents’ and siblings’ enjoyment of even the downsides of a large family—their insider terminology made them feel closer, provided them with a humorous method to negotiate awkward situations, reinforced their sense of unity as a group, and reminded them of the importance of both equitable sharing and graceful concession in the face of greater need.
So the same piece of folklore can serve multiple functions at once. An urban legend can serve as a warning for a whole community or simply as a psychological release for an anxious individual. A political joke can allow an adult to test the leanings of a social gathering, or it can allow a young person to unofficially push against parental ideology. A folk song can serve as a literal commentary on current or historical events, or as a symbolic expression of complex emotion. A customary holiday game or sporting event can provide social release as well as reinforce a group’s identity.
You can probably see already that a research question about function would require a close examination of the folklore itself (the component parts of the custom as practiced, the words of the narrative in its most common variations, the form and feel of the handmade object, etc.), meaning that you’d better have done a great, detailed job documenting and transcribing the folklore you collected (or, if you’re getting your folklore from an archive, you’d better hope that whoever collected it did a great job for you).
And of course, such a research question will also require a consideration of the ways in which the folklore emerges from within the group (the common social and cultural contexts, the acceptable—and, sometimes more revealing, the unacceptable—audiences for the folklore, the ways different individuals alter the folklore and their reasons for doing so, etc.), meaning that you really want to have done a bang-up job noting the context and texture along with the text.
Craig’s folklore collection experience is a good illustration of this. If we want to consider the function of Craig’s roommates’ Walmart traditions, it’s clear that the text alone won’t cut it. If we looked only at the content of the story about Rob riding a tricycle into a stack of microwaves, we might assume that the function of that folklore—whether the custom of behaving that way or the story that is told in remembrance—is to promote an appearance of toughness, destructiveness, or recklessness. If we add in Craig’s understanding of the context and texture, however—that the group was conscientious of shoppers’ experiences—then we have a more nuanced representation of their values. If we consider that the stated target of their antics was typically the employees, not the customers, then we can perhaps read an anticorporation message into the tradition, rather than a generally antisocial one. We begin to understand something about the culture of these young men in particular, and perhaps the culture of young men in a rural community in general; we learn about the push and pull between impressing one’s friends and respecting authorities, and the ways these particular friends express and reinforce their values for each other in their choices of what to remember in story, what to laugh at and what to cringe at, and what activities to engage in at certain times in certain places. A consideration of the text, context, and texture—of the thing itself as well as the behavior that surrounds it—is required for a complete understanding of the folklore.
You may be wondering at this point why on earth anyone would bother to study academically Craig’s friends’ juvenile Walmart traditions. In the face of more obviously “important” folklore (the collections of the Brothers Grimm, world mythology, native peoples’ customs), the antics of some teenagers in a small town seem unimpressive as a form of cultural expression. Well, while we certainly do not want to turn away from studying “important”-seeming folklore, we need to consider the reality of the situation. It would be great if young men in small towns sat around telling each other creation myths, but most don’t. If we want to understand the culture of young rural men, we need to look at the folk culture they actually have, not the culture we think they should have. The folklore we choose to study depends largely on the group of peo
ple we’re interested in understanding.
So What?
Before we wrap up this chapter, I want to clarify why folklorists bother to do these things (or, perhaps more significant, why universities would pay folklorists to do these things). Well, one, because it’s fun. We shouldn’t ignore that fact, though it probably has more to do with individual scholars’ choices to study folklore than it does with why a university would value the study of folklore.
The significance of folklore studies as an academic field comes back to the idea that folklore exists as a form of cultural expression without the anchor of institutional culture. Think of it this way: if everyone everywhere slowly came to the conclusion that the works of Charles Dickens were no longer relevant to our society—that the average person had nothing to gain from reading them—would literature students suddenly stop reading them? No. Because the works of Charles Dickens are a part of the official canon, the institutionally recognized collection of what has been determined to be relevant to education.
Here’s another example: the law. Perhaps we realize that a particular law is no longer relevant to our society. Well, we can’t just decide to start doing it differently—we’d get thrown in jail! As discussed earlier, laws are a part of our formal culture; they require institutional administration in order to be changed, and it takes an awfully long time to change them. Legal changes can be slow to catch up with cultural changes.
Folklore, on the other hand, isn’t institutionally determined. That urban legend no longer speaks to something we care about? Gone. That custom no longer meets the needs of that family? Done—never happens again. While we may record the legend or a description of the custom in an archive so that we remember it was once relevant, there’s no formal organization still making us tell the legend or practice the custom. Unlike reading the past works of a famous author or obeying an outdated law, the moment folklore is no longer relevant, we simply stop using it.
What this means, of course (and this is the really important part, so make sure you write it down), is that if folklore is currently circulating, it must be important. It certainly may not seem important on the surface—as we know, folklore is often perceived to be trivial—but no one is making that folklore stick around. If it were completely superfluous, totally irrelevant to everyone’s lives, it would simply disappear.
So, if we want to understand people, and how people in communities and societies and other groups function and behave and interact (and the longevity of such fields as anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and marketing suggests we do), then folklore is possibly the single best barometer we have for understanding what is important to a group of people. Sure, we can try to understand a culture by looking at what it teaches through formal education, but students generally learn the stuff they’re taught in school because they have to—they’re getting tested on it. If we look at the stuff that people in any given group—students, parents, Seventh-Day Adventists, orthodontists, the Irish, whoever—don’t have to collectively know but all know anyway, then we’re on our way to really understanding them. And that’s pretty cool.
Want to Know More?
Bruce Jackson and Edward D. Ives, eds., The World Observed: Reflections on the Fieldwork Process (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
Sixteen different scholars (not all strictly folklorists) share their fieldwork experiences in this book, highlighting issues such as ethics, advocacy, identity, and the very human experience of cultural research.
Edward D. Ives, The Tape-recorded Interview: A Manual for Fieldworkers in Folklore and Oral History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995).
I know, I know—who even owns a tape-recorder anymore? But despite the old technology, this short book does a good job of highlighting some of the social issues of collecting folklore. Ignore the outdated technical stuff and focus on the situational issues that Ives addresses.
Michael Owen Jones and Robert Georges, People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).
This book has interdisciplinary applications but is written by folklorists and speaks to folklorists well. Much more than objective data gathering, fieldwork is presented as an interpersonal experiment in communication, compromise, and reflection. The importance of the relationship between folklorist and informant is highlighted here.
Paddy Bowman and Lynne Hamer, Through the Schoolhouse Door: Folklore, Community, Curriculum (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2011).
If you think you’re interested in public folklore and want to know more, this book is a good starting point. While it’s mainly focused on education and ways to incorporate folklore into the classroom, it touches on a number of themes, including the history of public folklore, various applied folklore projects, and the perspectives of community members as well as students and teachers.
Notes
1. It can be helpful, before moving on to this second chapter, to revisit what it is you previously thought folklore was before you picked up this book. It can be hard to overcome preconceived understandings of a common word like folklore, and comparing what you previously thought to what you know now can be a good way to avoid falling back into earlier misconceptions. And anyway, rather than finding out you were wrong, it’s possible that you may find out you were right, or at least partially right. More important, with the basic rules of folklore identification under your belt, you’ll know why you were right or wrong in your previous understanding of folklore. Return to text.
2. Well, we hope they don’t. Return to text.
3. The analogy to crime starts to gets a tad worrisome here. Return to text.
4. This is just as cool as being a criminal profiler, I promise. Return to text.
5. Of course, they also felt that the glorious beacons of the past had been corrupted by all those darned peasants, so for a long time there were a lot of entertaining efforts to re-create the original, more impressive forms of things. Return to text.
6. Don’t get hung up on the idea of “performance” as meaning purposefully staged or anything. We’re talking about folk performance, which is just the moments in our normal lives when we switch from daily conversation to telling a story or joke or to participating in a custom. Return to text.
7. Alan Dundes is a famous Freudian folklorist; you should read his “Into the Endzone for a Touchdown: A Psychoanalytic Consideration of American Football,” Western Folklore 37 (1978): 75–83. He’s also the same guy who gave us our current definition of folk group. Return to text.
8. This word isn’t used here in the FBI, ratting-out-the-mob sense; it simply refers to the person you’re interviewing. Return to text.
9. People like Anya’s grandfather, people who are known to be ready with a story, joke, or song, are known as “active bearers” of tradition. Many more people are “passive bearers,” people who know the stories, customs, and songs but who don’t regularly offer them up or perform them for others. You can collect folklore from both types of tradition bearers, but it’s always easier to draw out a passive bearer’s knowledge if it’s someone you know well. This is a pragmatic thing to keep in mind if you’re asked to do a collection project for class. Return to text.
10. We haven’t talked in depth about different genres yet, but take my word for it that these are in there. Return to text.
11. And his appearances on Letterman. Return to text.
12. Jan Harold Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 1998), 25. Return to text.
13. William Bascom, “The Four Functions of Folklore,” Journal of American Folklore 67, no. 266 (1954): 333–49. Return to text.
Chapter 3
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Types of Folklore
Here’s what this chapter won’t do: this chapter isn’t here to give you numerous examples of folklore in the sense of giving you stories to read, customs to try, beliefs to learn about, or anything lik
e that. You can go Google that stuff if you’re interested in it, or hit the library and find an interesting collection of folklore to peruse. What this chapter is here to do is tell you about some of the main types of folklore that folklorists have studied and give you one or two cool examples of how each one has been approached or analyzed. Sound boring? It’s not.
As I’ve said in earlier chapters, folklorists study a variety of genres, or types, of folklore. After reading this section, you should be able to identify many of the most common ones and to understand how they’re different from each other. What distinguishes a legend from a myth? A calendar custom from a rite of passage? You’ll find out!
You’ll also discover how the differences in genres can affect the way the folklore functions in society. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of ways to approach each and every genre of folklore, but after reading this section, you’ll have at least a few analytical tools in your folklorist tool belt right off the bat. If nothing else, you’ll come away with some solid examples of what a close examination of different types of folklore can reveal.
While there are more genres of folklore than can possibly be listed in one place, one easy way to divide them initially is into these four basic categories:
things we say (like jokes, songs, folktales, myths, and legends)
Folklore Rules Page 5