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Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture - Softcover

 
9780252071096: Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0252071093 ISBN 13: 9780252071096
Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2003

Synopsis

Group. Art. Text. Genre. Performance. Context. Tradition. Identity.
No matter where we are--in academic institutions, in cultural agencies, at home, or in a casual conversation--these are words we use when we talk about creative expression in its cultural contexts. Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture is a thoughtful, interdisciplinary examination of the keywords that are integral to the formulation of ideas about the diversity of human creativity, presented as a set of essays by leading folklorists.
Many of us use these eight words every day. We think with them. We teach with them. Much of contemporary scholarship rests on their meanings and implications. They form a significant part of a set of conversations extending through centuries of thought about creativity, meaning, beauty, local knowledge, values, and community. Their natural habitats range across scholarly disciplines from anthropology and folklore to literary and cultural studies and provide the framework for other fields of practice and performance as well.
Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture is a much-needed study of keywords that are frequently used but not easily explained. Anchored by Burt Feintuch’s cogent introduction, the book features essays by Dorothy Noyes, Gerald L. Pocius, Jeff Todd Titon, Trudier Harris, Deborah A. Kapchan, Mary Hufford, Henry Glassie, and Roger D. Abrahams.
 

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Burt Feintuch directs the Center for the Humanities at the
University of New Hampshire, where he is a professor of folklore
and English. From 1990 to 1995, he edited the Journal of American
Folklore.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture

By BURT FEINTUCH

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07109-6

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................ix
INTRODUCTION: EIGHT WORDS BURT FEINTUCH...................................1
1. Group DOROTHY NOYES....................................................7
2. Art GERALD L. POCIUS...................................................42
3. Text JEFF TODD TITON...................................................69
4. Genre TRUDIER HARRIS-LOPEZ.............................................99
5. Performance DEBORAH A. KAPCHAN.........................................121
6. Context MARY HUFFORD...................................................146
7. Tradition HENRY GLASSIE................................................176
8. Identity ROGER D. ABRAHAMS.............................................198
CONTRIBUTORS...............................................................223
INDEX......................................................................227

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

DOROTHY NOYES


Group

Ideas about group are the most powerful and the most dangerousin folklore studies. Our influence as a discipline has often come fromarguing for small groups against big groups. Against imperialism, we arguefor the nation-state; denying the homogeneity of the nation-state, weargue for the ethnic group or the social class; at last, wary of the dangersof essentialism at any level, we turn to the face-to-face community.

It is less comfortable to recall that we have also argued for big groupsagainst small groups: for the historical and racial unity of a nation againstthe diversity within it, for example. Today, on the left, we often participatein efforts to redefine and organize stigmatized social categories as"communities." On the right, we cringe as we see our abandoned structural-functionalist models reborn in claims for "community values."Applying for grants, we know we'll do better if we can frame our projectaround a "community"—that is, a viable political constituency—insteadof a practice.

We prove the reality of a group by demonstrating that it has a culture,unified within and differentiable without (Handler 1988). In documenting,"preserving," and synthesizing this culture into canonicalforms—the Kalevala, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the Catalan sardana,the open-air museum, the American ethnic festival—we diffuse and generalizeit among that group's potential members, thus improving the isomorphyof group and culture (Klusen 1986 [1967]).

And yet, working ethnographically, we are aware of the fragility of thegroup concept put to the test. We learn in interaction of the status differenceswithin a group that may make men public, and women private, performers;we discover the creative individual whose influence galvanizesand directs performance in a particular milieu; we find that a festival declaredby all to be a celebration of unity is in fact animated by vigorousfactionalism; we discover the complex networks of contacts and influencesfeeding into and emerging from an apparently bounded community.

The impossibility of a neat definition of the group became clear to meone day in 1988 when, as part of fieldwork for the Philadelphia FolkloreProject, I was visiting Italian Market Days, the autumn festival that promotesthe market to the rest of the city. With a photographer, I had cometo rest in front of the greased pole, a New World reflex of the albero dicuccagna. The Tree of Cockayne, a common feature of European carnivals,promises infinite satisfaction if only you can get to the top of it. Hereit was, a twenty-five-foot metal pole planted by the city on the base of astreetlamp; from a little platform on the top there hung lengths of salami,whole legs of prosciutto, balls of cheese, and an envelope of money.The length of the pole had been generously rubbed with bacon fat.

A group of teenage boys clustered around the pole, trying to get up.By their looks they were working-class Italian Americans, the kids whowork in the market. They had come up with a collaborative strategy,forming a tight circle of bodies at the base and a second layer of lighterboys on their shoulders. They had to decide on the best way of linkingarms and scrambling up backs, and they tumbled down several timesbefore getting it right. Then a few boys tried for the top, inching up withtheir knees, sometimes wiping the fat off with a towel, always slidingback down at the end. At one point a girl came in and climbed up to thesecond layer, but the hands and the jokes of the boys became too much,and she soon retreated. Later we were agreeably surprised to see an AfricanAmerican boy stepping in; he was dressed like the others and seemedto be a friend, remaining part of the group until the end. Exhibition labeltext began composing itself in my head: here was the freedom of themarketplace fostering multiethnic collaboration for the common prize.I checked myself—was my subconscious turning Republican on me?—andthe boys also decided to take a rest. We and a large crowd had beenwatching them, rapt, for a good hour and a half.

The advent of a Southeast Asian man prevented that text from everbeing written. Perhaps from the new Vietnamese neighborhood adjacentto the market, the man looked thirty; he was wearing nothing but a briefpair of white shorts, and he strode straight to the pole through the gapmade by the relaxing boys. Then, with no help whatsoever, he started up,using his feet instead of his knees. On his second try he had reached thetop and grasped the leg of prosciutto, grinning hugely.

The boys on the ground, who had been frozen with surprise, nowbegan to stir. They shouted at him, struck at the low part of the pole. One,then another, threw a sneaker at him, narrowly missing. Then they beganto shake the pole from side to side. The man decided to come downbefore the shoes became stones and, trying to treat it as a joke, smiledand walked away rather quickly.

As we caught our breath—imagining the consequences if there hadbeen a larger Vietnamese presence in the crowd—the boys started up atthe pole again. This time, galvanized by the competition and having observedthe Asian man's technique, they made it up within a quarter ofan hour. The boy on top scrambled onto the platform, enjoying his triumph,and gestured to the crowd, tossing small toys down to them andwaving his clasped hands in victory. Eventually he took the envelope ofmoney and slid down to the cheers of his companions.

The photographer approached him and asked what we were bothwondering: "What happened? That black kid was with you, and that wasokay. Why couldn't the Asian guy get it?"

He was not at all embarrassed. "We know that kid," he said. "We goto school together, he works in the market with us, he's a friend. But thisChinese guy—" ("Chinese! I hate Chinese!" interjected one of his friends)"—just came out of nowhere. This is an Italian festival, an Italian shouldget it. He's got his own festival to win at." Then he excused himself: hewas ready for a beer.

The first time I told this story in class I learned that the incident wasnot unique: a student interrupted my recital to say that he had seen anAsian shaken off the pole that year. The story highlights many of thefamiliar contradictions of contemporary American identity politics.

— "Italian Market" is in fact an outsider's term, a tourist label. Localscall it the Ninth Street Market and are aware that it used to be Jewishand that its clientele is increasingly African American. Nonetheless,the market sells itself to the city at large as Italian. And theAsian man, though a neighbor, was clearly not a member.

— Ethnic and racial prejudice diminishes with frequency of interactionand—crucially—with common economic interests. The Italianowners of Ninth Street businesses depend on African American laborand customers. The Vietnamese, however, shop in their ownstores and compete in the restaurant business. They have only beenaround for fifteen years or so, having "come out of nowhere" andbeen resettled in this depopulating neighborhood. To most ItalianAmericans in the neighborhood, they are still strangers.

— As we know from the theorists of creolization, childhood is the keymoment of mixing: those you grow up with are Americans, theones who come after are strangers.

— Festival politics in Philadelphia today territorializes, essentializes,and compartmentalizes ethnicity. Each group that has arrived at politicalrepresentation has its "own" festival, in which others are invitedas spectators and consumers, but in which the "insiders"alone have the right to participate. Ideally, festivals are located incenters of historical settlement that still retain a high residentialconcentration of the group celebrated. The miniaturization of theideology of the bounded nation-state in the urban village can beseen in the T-shirts, sold during Italian Market Days, that layer themap of Italy over the map of South Philadelphia. In contrast, thepan-African diaspora celebration of Odunde has suffered continualharassment from claiming a site on South Street, a historical centerof African American culture but now the border of a gentrified area.Odunde has repeatedly been treated by the city as requiring containment,and the city has sponsored alternative festivals in moreclearly African American and less "central" locations, such asNorth Philadelphia. Alternatively—and better yet from the city'spoint of view—festivals are put in the neutral spaces of Penn'sLanding and the Parkway, each group getting its turn at these barrensites devoid of everyday resonances. Here one finds the ethnicfestival at its most formulaic: only the colors of the flag and thespice in the sausage change from Sunday to Sunday.

— White people cannot tell Asians apart: hence, to obtain civic recognitionand civil rights, such historical enemies as the Vietnameseand the Cambodians, both possibly seen as "Chinese," are obliged toform Asian American Associations and work together as a bloc. Thesame goes for Latinos; the diverse Africans brought to these shoresby slave traders went through the process long ago, and new Africanand Caribbean immigrants are confronting the issue of "blackness"as a social category that erases their own distinctiveness.

— The most spectacular performance genres of such festivals aremarked explicitly as ethnic but might just as well be labeled by gender.The exclusion of the Asian man was breathtakingly visible; theexclusion of the Italian-American girl was effected by a quieter andmore intimate transgression of her person to inform her that she wastransgressing male space. This level of "intimate difference" (Mills1993) easily goes unnoticed in larger political-economic debates.


Several definitions of collectivity are at play (at war?) in this incident.The group created in everyday interaction, the group united by commoninterest, the group made by exoteric ascription, the bounded descentgroup, the group defined by territory, the gendered peer group, the groupas a category of political and touristic representation, and the groupemerging from performance all make their cases here.

But perhaps we may simplify the problem. At bottom, folklorists havebeen interested in the group as the locus of culture and as the focus ofidentity. Our difficulties with such concepts as "folk," "nation," "race,"and so on may be seen as resulting from the confusion of the two. Startingfrom the formulations of the "Toward New Perspectives" paradigm,we can distinguish between the empirical network of interactions inwhich culture is created and moves, and the community of the socialimaginary that occasionally emerges in performance. Our everyday wordgroup might best serve as shorthand for the dialogue between the two.


Toward New Perspectives on the Folk:Small Groups and Differential Identities

The essentialism and othering inherent in the word folk are now suchcommonplaces of our discipline that I need not discuss them here: it isfor this reason, I am sure, that I was assigned the less loaded term groupfor this volume. Certainly the prestige of Dan Ben-Amos's definition offolklore was another reason. When, as part of the would-be scientificrevolution that culminated in the publication of Towards New Perspectivesin Folklore, Ben-Amos defined folklore as "artistic communicationin small groups" (1972), he intended the sociological conception of smallgroup to overcome some of the difficulties inherent in the notion of folk.The classist, racist, and antimodern connotations of folk were all problematicin an American context; moreover, the word was tied to an oldparadigm that understood the people as bearers, not makers, of tradition.Following Alan Dundes's assertion that a folk group could be "any groupof people whatsoever who share at least one common factor" (1965:2),Ben-Amos identified two conditions that must hold "for the folkloric actto happen": "both the performers and the audience have to be in the samesituation and be part of the same reference group" (1972:12). The face-to-facecriterion of the sociologists focused attention on the interactionsof the performance situation and the shaping role of audience; the notionof reference group carried this concern with audience into the interpretiverealm, implying the specificity of meaning to a particular group withshared codes and values, a common identity.

For different historical reasons, German Volkskunde also found itselfuncomfortable with the Volk in this period. Klusen, in his article"The Group Song as Group Object" (1986 [1967]) proposed the same terminologicalshift as Ben-Amos: he would use the social-science notionof the primary or face-to-face group. Group, he declared, is more objectivea conception than "community"—like "folk," an idealization of amore complex reality. Instead, group "defines an exact unity of peoplewho interact" (1986 [1967]:186). It can be ad hoc or short-lived and neednot be grounded in a historical identity. "It must be guaranteed that theyall know each other, that all can communicate directly with each otherand that they can interact directly, i.e., from two to a few dozen people.It is necessary that every group have at least one dominant element inits make-up and function, what folklorists have called the 'creativethought'" (1986 [1967]:187)—that is, Dundes's common factor or theunity of Ben-Amos's reference group.

Like Ben-Amos, Klusen begins to suggest a redefinition of the groupin his critique of the notion of community. He insists that the communitysought by folklorists is not a vanishing survival, but a project for thefuture, and likewise, that the national song did not exist until Herder createdit. The diffusion through print of the songs collected by early folkloriststurned them into national culture (Klusen 1986 [1967]:198–99).

Intimations that the group is a product of interaction rather than itsprecondition were followed up by the Texas school. The Texas approachemerged from the quiet insistence of Américo Paredes on the role of cross-bordergazing in both performance and scholarship and from the awarenessof folklorists (themselves often African American or Latino) doingfieldwork on the borders that the face-to-face group is by no means theonly and certainly not the most dangerous locus of performance (seeKodish 1993). The Texas concern with "neighborly names" and interethnicperformance both hostile and hospitable, culminating in Abrahams'sconcept of the display event (1981), called on an implicit network modelof interaction between different social positions. Bauman pointed out thatscholars had previously tended to conceptualize the folklore-bearinggroup as a social category, that is, as people sharing a given status or label.Instead, the sociological idea of group proposed by Ben-Amos dependednot on shared identity but on the fact of regular interaction (1972). AsBauman demonstrated, much folklore in fact takes place in regular interactionbetween people belonging to different social categories and playsupon this very fact of difference. Boasting, competition, denigration,hospitality, teasing: all depend on and highlight the difference in sociallocation between performer and addressee. The large-scale display eventsthat have become characteristic of plural societies draw boundaries as lociof political, economic, and cultural conflict.

The Texas approach lets us see how, in the greased-pole contest, thecategory of "Italian" is situationally invoked as a boundary device: itquietly encompassed the African American male, silently excluded theItalian American female, and noisily expelled the Asian. The genre ofdisplay event, or, more specifically, ethnic festival allows us to understandthe rules unwittingly—or deliberately?—breached by the stranger. Thereat the "traditional" core of the festival, the part most highly marked asesoteric, instead of watching and admiring as his role called for, he showedthe Italians up on their own turf. In punishing this serious breach of displayevent etiquette, one of the boys proffered the culturally sanctionedalternative: "He's got his own festival to win at."

The display event model presumes a larger society of complex linkageswithin which boundaries are regularly drawn and redrawn. Performance,sanctioned and unsanctioned, becomes a key means of boundaryconstruction and maintenance, each festival or demonstration declaringdifference between copresent individuals.


Network, Transmission, Boundary Drawing

That groups are not homogeneous is the first realization of any scholardoing fieldwork. The first stages of fieldwork are a trajectory through asocial network, from the margins toward the center. Initially we are oftensent to the high-status marginals of a network: its "brokers," those accustomedto dealing with outsiders and representing the inside to them.If we show ourselves to be at all open, the low-status marginals also gravitateto us—eccentrics, alcoholics, "street-corner philosophers." All ofthese, high and low, transform their enforced social distance into criticaldistance: attempting to defend their distinction, their exclusion, ortheir chosen exile from a group and its habits, they think a great dealabout the group and develop a discourse that sounds rather close to ourown theory. Initially, at least, we may find them the most articulateconsultants. From us, bearers of alternate and sometimes more prestigiousvalues, they in turn seek validation for their own distance.


(Continues...)
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Publisher
University of Illinois Press
Publication date
2003
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0252071093
ISBN 13 
9780252071096
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
248
Editor
Feintuch Burt