Folklore Rules

by Lynne S. McNeill

  When we talk about customary celebrations, we can divide them into two main types: calendar customs and rites of passage. These two forms of custom are distinguished mainly by the way they relate to time.14

  Calendar customs are cyclical, they happen over and over again, following a regular pattern within the year or the seasons. That can mean a custom happens every year (Hanukkah, Valentine’s Day, Flag Day), every quarter (solstice and equinox), every month (date night, book club), or even every week (Pancake Sundays, your classmate’s weekly folk song gathering). Rites of passage, in contrast, happen linearly, over the course of a lifetime (like baby showers, getting a driver’s license, buying a drink at twenty-one, marriage, divorce, remarriage, retirement, and death). We can envision the temporal difference like this, with the calendar customs on the left and rites of passage on the right:

  Fig. 3.1

  Along with the difference in temporal movement, there’s an equitable difference in function. Calendar customs serve to remind us of the consistencies in life, while rites of passage highlight the transitions. Both of these types of custom can be purely cultural (meaning that the subject of celebration is a human invention: the Fourth of July or being able to drive at sixteen), or they can follow a physical or biological reality (meaning that the event would happen even if people didn’t celebrate it: solstices and equinoxes, or the onset of puberty). They can often appear in institutional forms that are celebrated in folk ways (a family’s Fourth of July BBQ tradition while observing the city’s fireworks display overhead), or in entirely folk forms (small-scale things like Pancake Sunday or first-day-of-school celebrations, things that may not be celebrated outside of that group at all).

  Rites of passage are especially interesting because throughout time, a consistent pattern has emerged in the way that groups of people acknowledge these transitions in life. Whether they’re a biological reality or we’ve just made them up, the turning points in human beings’ lives often bring about a sudden change in social status or a shift in responsibilities. As many teenagers have thoughtfully observed, there’s really very little difference between someone at fifteen years 364 days and someone at sixteen. And yet, legally and socially, that single day makes a world of difference. There’s a whole new realm of life to engage in, and a whole new set of responsibilities that come along with it. This is where rites of passage come into play—the celebration can help transition birthday boys or girls by providing them with a physical enactment of their otherwise conceptual or abstract status change.15

  Rites of passage typically fall into three stages. The first is where the subject of the celebration is separated out from the rest of the crowd and identified as unique. We can see this stage in everything from a birthday boy or girl being made to wear a funny hat to an initiate into a secret society being asked to wear ceremonial dress or abstain from normal activities. The second stage is defined by its in betweenness (folklorists like to use the word liminality, as “liminal” means “in between,” and as it sounds more academic than in betweenness, which isn’t actually a word anyway). This is where we see crazy fun stuff happening—all conventions go out the window. We spank people for their birthdays, eat and drink in copious quantities, act silly and out of character—all the stuff we typically associate with “celebration.” Because this middle stage is so often equated with normalcy being turned upside down, folklorists will often use the word carnivalesque to describe the types of things that go on.16 The final stage is when the subject is reincorporated back into regular everyday life, but with a greater ability to accept the new role or new responsibilities that come with the new stage of life. The rite of passage helps the transition feel less arbitrary.

  It’s important to note that the middle stage, the liminal stage, is really the most interesting. This is where folklorists get to jump in and apply all sorts of cool theoretical ideas about the ways that humans function in groups. One particularly cool idea is that in the liminal middle stage of a rite of passage, not only are norms and conventions set aside, but all cultural identifiers are dropped—things like class and gender and relationship status. So, during these times we may see children ordering their parents around, we may see dressing down, dressing up, or cross-dressing, we may even go around kissing strangers. Folklorists have theorized that this loss of identity is what allows a new identity to be donned when the celebration is over—we have to be undressed before we can put on new clothes. Some folklorists also think that the occasional release afforded by rites of passage helps maintain order the rest of the time. Knowing you can cut loose and go crazy once in a while makes it easier to maintain order on the whole.

  We can see this three-part structure on both large and small scales, even for the same transition point. Take engagement, for example. On its own, the entire period of engagement could be seen as the middle stage of the rite of passage of marriage—the point where the couple is in between singledom and marriage. Or, we could look at a specific celebration during this time, such as a bachelor or bachelorette party, and consider the three phases of that event: when the person is singled out as the focus of the party (the bride-or groom-to-be may be made to wear silly clothing or identifying accessories), followed by the carnivalesque celebration itself (which may include excessive consumption of food and drink, flirtatious or licentious behavior, or the purposeful embarrassment of the bride or groom), and then the reincorporation into normal life, better prepared socially for the upcoming change.

  An interesting thing to consider is the way in which this often-unconscious pattern, once recognized, is used by groups that want to consciously create a new identity for someone. Whether it’s a fraternity or sorority bringing in new pledges, an office bringing a new employee into the fold, or even a family welcoming a new in-law, there are often rites of passage that consciously follow this pattern, incorporating symbols that reflect the group identity into the custom.

  When I was a student, I attended Memorial University of Newfoundland (a good school for folklore studies). Newfoundland is an island off the eastern coast of Canada, and Newfoundlanders—a culture with a wonderfully strong and self-aware sense of group identity—have developed a rite of passage17 that they employ to turn visitors and outsiders to their culture into “honorary” Newfoundlanders. The process, referred to as getting “screeched in,” involves a number of activities that use many stereotypical markers of Newfoundland identity: kissing a dead cod fish, eating local food like cods’ tongues, wearing a fisherman’s coat or hat, standing in a bucket of seawater,18 drinking a locally made rum,19 and reciting a complicated sentence in an extreme local vernacular speech and accent. The symbolism of Newfoundland identity that’s employed in the screech-in is completely over the top, and isn’t necessarily representative of all (or even many!) Newfoundlanders (just as the stereotypical American love of apple pie and baseball doesn’t necessarily apply to most individual Americans). The screech-in has been criticized by many Newfoundlanders as offensive and demeaning, and yet the tradition persists.

  This is an excellent example of a rite of passage that is not what it seems to be on the surface. It consciously uses all the tropes of a rite of passage to transition a person from one state to another (from a non-Newfoundlander to a Newfoundlander), though all parties involved are fully aware that the honoree has not in any way become a true Newfoundlander, even at the end of the ceremony. And while the symbolism appears to play to a potentially offensive stereotypical image of a Newfoundlander (a cod fisherman who eats questionable food and speaks unintelligibly), the undercurrents of offense are more complicated them simple mockery. A fellow student of mine explained her opinion that the screech-in isn’t offensive by observing, “First, Newfoundlanders, in general, can take a joke. Secondly, we can laugh at ourselves along with others. Third, we know that the way in which the Newfoundland ‘screecher’ is portrayed is not at all representative of Newfoundlanders or of the province as a whole. The joke thus falls on the outsider.”20 So, despite a
ppearances, we have neither of the two most obvious possibilities for analyzing or understanding this custom. It’s not a genuine initiation, nor is it an offensive mockery of the local culture. It’s a complicated mix of purposes and meanings, and the goals and outcomes are likely different for insiders and for outsiders. As simple as the idea of a rite of passage may be, there’s typically more going on than meets the eye.

  Here’s a fun thing to try: take a moment and consider what a rite of passage to make someone an honorary person-who’s-from-where-you’re-from would entail. What foods would you make someone eat, what clothing would they wear, what would they have to say or do to embody a generalized local identity? How much do you yourself conform to the stereotypical identity that you’d construct for your hometown or school or region or state? How much more accurate would the representation be if you were creating a ceremony to induct someone into your family versus your city or state? Considering these questions highlights the level of complexity that goes into any analysis of customary folklore.

  Want to Know More?

  Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960).

  This book, first written in French in 1909, is the one to read if you’re interested in rites of passage; almost all other studies written since reference it. If you find the three-part breakdown interesting, this is where you’ll find a full elaboration of the concept.

  Jack Santino, Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994).

  If calendar customs interest you, then this is a good resource to check out. The focus of the collected essays is (obviously) on Halloween, but hey, it’s one of the most fun holidays, and there is good generalizable information on the concept of seasonal festivals as well.

  Things We Make

  When most people think of folk objects (often referred to as “material culture” by folklorists), they usually think of handmade goods: furniture, tools, clothing, quilts, decorative cross-stitching, and the like. Handcrafts are, indeed, one of the most studied forms of material culture. For a long period of history, if you wanted something you had to make it; one result of this is that the qualities of folklore (variation and tradition) were easily found in many of the objects that people had in their homes—they had learned the general form and style of furniture from those around them (tradition), and through varied levels of ability and creativity they’d add their own individual touches (variation).

  These days, we get most of the “necessary” goods in our lives from commercial rather than social processes, and so any obvious folk qualities in things like furniture, tools, and clothing are diminished. As much as you want to claim that your IKEA chair is based on a traditional Swedish form, it was still produced (if not put together) in a factory somewhere, identical to all other chairs produced the same way.

  The stuff that the majority of us tend to make by hand these days is usually (though not always) the unnecessary stuff—paper airplanes, crafts, yard art, and so on—and it’s in these types of creations that we can still find a lot of folk variation. Interestingly, the materials used for these kinds of objects are often appropriated or found objects: jewelry or accessories made from food wrappers, yard sculptures made from bottles or old machine parts, notebook paper transformed into airplanes or cootie-catchers.21 Rather than the romantic idea of harvesting and hand-hewing the goods we need from the natural landscape, our contemporary material culture reflects our contemporary reality: we’re finding creative ways to use junk and excess and make it an expressive component of our lives. This is absolutely a form of “traditional material culture,” just as much as a handmade object made from natural substances.

  Not only do mass-produced objects become folk objects when they are turned into something else, but even when they are used in an unexpected, traditional way we can start to identify them as a part of folklore. Ever gone on a trip and taken a small toy or figurine with you to photograph in different places? Ever seen all the pictures online of garden gnomes on vacations in different spots? This tradition of travel mascots22 is another way in which a mass-produced object can become a folk object, and some institutions have even picked up on the process. The Flat Stanley project,23 in which schoolchildren draw a picture of a flat boy and then mail him to faraway family and friends with a request for photos of Stanley in different spots, is basically the commodification24 of the folk travel mascot model.

  Collections of objects, or, to use a fancier term, assemblages,25 are another example of this phenomenon. Since people rarely go around designing and making their stuff by hand anymore, we see people expressing their material individuality through the traditional practice of collecting things: souvenirs, spoons, magnets, shot glasses, and even more unusual things like colorful socks or midcentury lamps. Anything that involves the bringing together of a set of like objects can qualify as a traditional collection, whether the likeness is found in theme, function, source, or whatever. We also see group collections, compiled not by an individual but by a bunch of people together, like the collection of candles, figurines, notes, and flowers that appears at spontaneous shrines to memorialize accident victims.

  In addition, mass-produced items can become traditional in the way they are passed on: items of family history that are handed down generationally, prank pass-around gifts that regularly go back and forth among families or between two friends, bookcrossing books26 that are passed from reader to reader. This emphasizes one of the more important aspects of resituating a mass-produced object as a folk object: there needs to be some kind of repeated pattern. Keep in mind that an object can be important and meaningful without being a “folk” object—we’re going to need some evidence of both tradition and variation in order to call it a folk object, and looking for a repeated pattern can help us do that.

  The pattern that helps us identify a meaningful object as specifically a folk object can be a pattern of use (an object is repeatedly used at certain times and in certain ways, like a travel mascot or a special platter brought out for every holiday dinner), a pattern of creation (a type of object that is created regularly, over and over again, like a paper airplane or bubblegum-wrapper chain or a collection that’s always growing), or a pattern of passing on (an object that has been continually handed on, shared, or circulated among a group of people, like a family heirloom or a pass-around gift). Once there’s a pattern there, we start entering into the realm of tradition and open the door for the possibility of variation.

  Imagine that you’re planning to collect material culture from your own family members, and after you explain the concept to them, they deliver to you a variety of objects: a friendship bracelet made by your sister, a necklace that once belonged to your great-great-grandmother that your mother wears every year at the holidays, and a small dog figurine that your nephew bought with his allowance and gave to your brother for his birthday. Clearly you’ve got a variety of meaningful objects in front of you, but determining whether or not they’re folk objects isn’t the easiest thing. All three of these things are clearly very personally meaningful within your family, and if you interviewed the donors you’d get some really great explanations of how the objects came into their lives and what makes them meaningful. In order to determine if you’re dealing with folklore, though, you’ll want to consider each object with regard to the patterns of use, creation, or passing on that they all entail.

  The friendship bracelet is pretty straightforward, right? There’s obviously a pattern of creation: this object is handmade, using a technique that your sister learned from her friends on the swim team, and this individual bracelet, like all the others she’s made, uses a common and easy-to-produce design that your sister has enhanced with her own creative embellishments and color choices. Other girls on the swim team make similar, but not identical, bracelets on a regular basis. There’s tradition in the style and technique, and variation in the color choices and unique pattern of knots. Clearly a folk object.
<
br />   What about the necklace? It once belonged to your great-great-grandmother and now it belongs to her great granddaughter, your mother. It’s not handmade—it probably came from a jewelry store, though no one knows for sure. There’s the possibility that you can find a pattern of passing on here, since the necklace once belonged to an older family member and now belongs to a younger, but your mother admits that her great-grandmother didn’t necessarily set the necklace aside for her, and neither did any of the generations in between. It was simply kept in the family, and when your mother discovered it in her mother’s things, she kept it for remembrance. That leaves us with a possible pattern of use—is this object used in a way that makes it traditional? It seems it is: your mother wears it at the same time every year, at the holidays. She doesn’t wear it all the time, or even often, but she subscribes to a repeated, traditional use of this object as part of her celebration of a calendar custom. The necklace, through its pattern of use, has become a folk object.27

  Which leaves the dog figurine. Initially, this one may seem similar to the necklace—it’s not handmade, so there’s no pattern of creation, and while it was given as a gift, there’s no pattern of passing on regularly. Is there a pattern of use? Let’s imagine that your brother tells you that ever since he got the dog figurine from his son, he’s kept it on his bedside table. This isn’t really a pattern of use, it’s more an issue of consistent display—the object may be meaningful, but there’s no pattern that involves any action or intent on your brother’s part, not in the creation, use, or passing on of this object. Survey says: not a folk object.