Folklore Rules: A Fun, Quick & Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies: A Fun, Quick, and Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies - Hardcover

McNeill, Lynne S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0874219051 ISBN 13: 9780874219050

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Folklore Rules is a brief introduction to the foundational concepts in folklore studies for beginning students. Designed to give essential background on the current study of folklore and some of the basic concepts and questions used when analyzing folklore, this short, coherent, and approachable handbook is divided into five chapters: What Is Folklore?; What Do Folklorists Do?; Types of Folklore; Types of Folk Groups; and, finally, What Do I Do Now?

Through these chapters students are guided toward a working understanding of the field, learn basic terms and techniques, and learn to perceive the knowledge base and discourse frame for materials used in folklore courses. Folklore Rules will appeal to instructors and students for a variety of courses, including introductory folklore and comparative studies as well as literature, anthropology, and composition classes that include a folklore component.

About this title

About the Author

Lynne S. McNeill, PhD, is an instructor and director of online development for the folklore program at Utah State University and co-founder of and faculty advisor for the USU Folklore Society.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Folklore Rules

A Fun, Quick, and Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies

By Lynne S. McNeill

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2013 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87421-905-0

Contents

Preface....................................................................
ix
Acknowledgments............................................................
xi
For the Instructor: Why You Want to Use This Book..........................
xiii
Chapter 1: What Is Folklore?...............................................
1
Chapter 2: What Do Folklorists Do?.........................................
20
Chapter 3: Types of Folklore...............................................
37
Chapter 4: Types of Folk Groups............................................
65
Conclusion: What Do I Do Now?..............................................
89
About the Author...........................................................
91
Index......................................................................
93

CHAPTER 1

What Is Folklore?

So, you're in a folklore class. Good for you—whatevereducational requirement this course is fulfilling for you, I guaranteeyou've picked the best possible way to fulfill it. Perhaps you're in anIntro to Folklore course, or maybe you're in a special-topics course:something like Folklore and Literature, Folklore and Film, Folkloreand the Internet, or Children's Folklore. No matter what course itis (and hey—maybe you're not taking a folklore class at all. Maybeyou're not even a student, in which case, doubly good for you forreading this book when you don't have to!), you're going to haveto start at the beginning. Unlike in other fields, when it comes tofolklore studies, the beginning can sometimes be the most confusingplace to start.

What is folklore? You'd think this would be an easy question toanswer. "Folklore" doesn't seem like a very complicated idea, doesit? I mean, it's not a rare or unfamiliar word—we use it fairly oftenin daily life. So if someone asked you what folklore is, you couldprobably give them an answer, right? Well ... maybe not. Give it atry and see how it goes. Lots of people answer this question by givinga few examples of stuff they think is folklore. They'll say somethinglike, "Oh, you know, folklore is old stories and songs fromyour parents and grandparents" or "Folklore is stuff like superstitionsand old wives' tales" or "It's like unicorns and sea shanties andquilting—stuff like that."

As you will learn shortly, while these common perceptionsof folklore aren't 100 percent wrong, they're certainly not 100percent right, either. One of the first things that students of folklorediscover is that the word folklore encompasses far more thanthey ever thought it did. It brings together the expected folktales,myths, and legends, and yet also includes jump-rope rhymes,pranks, jokes, graffiti, songs, emoticons, gestures ... basicallya ton of stuff that often leads to the popular first-year-folklore-studentmistake of "I get it now—folklore is everything!" This,sadly, is not true. You'll see by the end of this book that whilefolklore can likely be connected to almost everything, everythingis not, in fact, folklore.

Folklorists have spent a fairly ridiculous amount of time tryingto succinctly define folklore ever since the word was coined in18461 by a guy named William Thoms. Thoms, interestingly, useda pseudonym (he chose Ambrose Merton, for some reason) whenhe proposed the term and revealed himself as the actual source ofthe term only once he'd determined that people were generallyon board with it. He proposed it as "a good Saxon compound" infavor of the then current term popular antiquities. People generallyaccepted it, and voila!—a whole field of study was born.

You might be wondering at this point why it has been so hardfor folklorists to define this basic Saxon compound. Well, you try toexplain what a creation myth, a jump-rope rhyme, a Fourth of JulyBBQ, and some bathroom graffiti have in common, and you'll findit's not a terribly easy task, either. Rest assured, though: the field offolklore studies does have a few basic rules that can help to simplifythings. In the next few sections, we're going to uncover these basicconcepts from within the murky depths of academia and put themto work to answer the question at hand: "What is folklore?"

FOLK AND LORE

To start with, we've got a compound word here—folk-lore—andany decent definition will have to account for both parts. We'llstart with "folk." In order to begin to understand what "folk"means, we first need to back up a bit and understand what "culture"is. Why, you ask? Because I said so. Bear with me—it will becomeclear in a moment.

As it turns out, in terms of difficulty of definition, "culture"is frustratingly right up there with "folklore." A common use ofthe word culture is to think of someone as being "cultured," as in"enlightened" or "refined"—snooty people attending the opera infur coats and such—but folklorists (and anthropologists) use theterm a bit differently. There have been whole books written on thedefinition of culture, but since this guide is meant to be short andstraightforward, I'm just going to give you one of the most usefulones, created by an anthropologist named Ward Goodenough (andyes, you can insert a pun about it being a "good enough" definitionhere). He tells us: "A society's culture is whatever it is one hasto know or believe in order to act in a manner acceptable to itsmembers."

This definition tells us several things right off the bat. First,that culture is something that a society, or a group of people, possesses.Second, that culture isn't really a tangible object, but moreof a body of knowledge. "Acting in a manner that's acceptable" toa group of people encompasses a ton of information: you have toknow official things, like on which side of the road to drive, whatcurrency you use to pay for stuff, where you can and cannot benaked—all the things that would get you arrested if you did themwrong. But there's a more subtle or informal level to "acceptable"behavior, too—stuff that may not get you arrested if you do itwrong, but that may earn you some weird looks and cause peopleto cross the street to get away from you.

For example, if you just openly picked your nose while yourboss was talking to you, or if you greeted your date's parents by passionatelykissing them, or if you sat down at a table in McDonald'sand tried to flag down a server to come and take your order—theseare all things that our informal culture tells us are incorrect ways toact. There's no official big book about how or how not to do thesethings; we learn the right way to do them simply by observation,by spending time in our society, and often these expectations are soingrained in us that we don't notice them until we go somewherewhere people do them differently.

There's no official regulation or documentation of how (and hownot) to greet strangers—we learn it by observation and experience.Fast-food restaurants don't print manuals about how and where toorder—we learn it informally, by watching our friends or parentsgo through the line ahead of us when we're kids. It's interesting tonote that when we travel to other cultures, it's rarely the officialdifferences (the language, the currency, the laws) that make us feelout of place—we expect those things to be different when we travel.It's the little stuff—the informal stuff, like how to greet people, orwhether to order at the counter or wait to be seated, or how closeto stand to strangers on a bus—that really makes us feel far fromhome.

This informal or unofficial level of cultural understanding isthe "folk" level, the level on which cultural knowledge is shared,enacted, and propagated by regular, everyday people. Instead oflaws we have customs; instead of guidebooks we have experienceand observation.

In the past, when scholars talked about the "folk," they werereferring to a distinct class of people: typically rural, uneducated,illiterate peasants. Today when we use the term we're simply talkingabout everyone, all of us, as we exist in the informal or unofficialrealms of our cultural lives.

Thus, when folklorists talk about a "folk group," they're nottalking about a certain type of people; they're talking about allpeople who share an unofficial culture together. In fact, the mostpopular definition of a folk group these days is "any group of peoplewhatsoever who share at least one common factor." That's prettybroad, isn't it? By this definition, a family is a folk group, as is acampus community or a neighborhood. An entire religion can forma folk group, as can the population of an individual synagogue,temple, or parish. A folk group can be national, ethnic, regional,occupational, interest-based—basically anything that unites peopleand generates a shared cultural understanding. Folk groups can besmall, with just a few members, or huge, with hundreds of thousandsof people included.

Many of these groups clearly have an institutional culture aswell as a folk culture—campuses, churches, occupations, states,and nations will have both official and unofficial aspects of theirculture—and when we refer to those groups as a "folk group," we'repurposefully focusing on their unofficial realm. In contrast, somegroups don't have much of an institutional culture at all—friendgroups and families are typically entirely folk or informal in theircultural existence and expression. It's a useful distinction to make,especially when seeking to avoid the "Folklore is everything!" fallacy.

Right away it should be easy to see that all of us are members ofmany folk groups all at once, and it takes only a moment of reflectionto understand that we use different sets of folk cultural knowledgewhen we're with those different groups. There's often slang orterminology that you use at school or at work that you don't use athome, not necessarily because it's vulgar or inappropriate, but justbecause no one at home would know what it means—they're notin that other group; they wouldn't "get it." There are songs you singat church that you don't sing at work, because those songs aren'ta part of your job's folk culture. There are people who use thickeraccents at home than at work, and people who dress one way atcertain types of events (like football games) and another way atother types of events (like dinner parties). You won't get arrested forwearing a cocktail dress to a football game (or face paint to a dinnerparty), but it's not the cultural norm. Our awareness of our manyoverlapping folk groups allows us to adapt ourselves appropriatelyto different cultural situations.

So that's the "folk" part of "folklore"—the unofficial andinformal levels of a group's culture, in which we all participate ina number of intersecting and overlapping circles. But what aboutthe "lore"?

Well, "lore" is what gives form to folklore. Rather than simplybeing the general shared awareness of how to behave in a group or asociety, folklore comprises the specific expressive forms that a groupuses to communicate and interact. We call these forms the genresof folklore, and just as literature students study different genres ofliterature (poems, plays, novellas) or film students study differentgenres of film (drama, comedy, action-adventure), folklorists studydifferent genres of folklore, such as customs, narratives, and beliefs(there are a lot more than just these three—we'll discuss this morein depth in chapter 3). While many folklorists are certainly interestedin the generalized folk culture of a group, they commonlyfocus their work on one or more of the expressive genres that a folkgroup produces and shares.

As later chapters in this handbook will show you, the genresof folklore are typically divided into different types of expressiveforms (some genres are in the form of narratives, some are customarybehaviors, some are conceptual, etc.). For now, given ourcurrent goal of defining folklore in general, we can set that asideand think about what separates all kinds of folklore from all othertypes of cultural expression. Because, of course, while we have folkcustoms and folk music and folk stories, we also have legal procedures,symphonies, novels, plays, TV shows and the like, and weneed to consider what sets "folklore" apart from these other formsof cultural expression.

Well, if you were paying attention just a few paragraphs ago,you'll likely remember that "folk" culture is the informal or unofficialparts of culture. It makes sense, then, to say that "folk anything"(folk stories, folk music, folk customs) are the unofficial instancesof those things. "Folk" becomes an adjective that applies to "lore":What kind of lore? Folk-lore!

For example, if we're talking about a story it's easy to see that"stories" can occur in both folk and official ways: our culture hasnot only folktales and urban legends, but also comic books andmystery novels. The former are folklore; the latter are not. Similarly,we have not only folk songs, but pop songs and symphonies, too.Not only do we have folk customs, but we have laws and governmentalregulations.

The thing that distinguishes folklore from these other formsof cultural expression is the way it's transmitted. (You can tell bythe fact that those words are italicized that they're important—youshould probably write that part down in your notes.) Forall that we might try to define folklore by what it is, it's actuallymuch more clearly defined by how it's used and shared. We can'tsimply say that folklore is stories, because so are TV shows andso are novels. The difference is in how the story moves through apopulation.

VARIATION AND TRADITION

In folk culture, the lore is typically shared by word of mouth;more generally, we can say it's shared person to person (whichcould include direct conversation, indirect observation, e-mail,phone calls, online chats, etc.). So, I tell an urban legend to a fewof my friends, and they in turn tell it to some people they know,who in turn tell it to others, who then pass it on to more people,and so on. A good analogy is the game "telephone"—a bunch ofkids sit in a circle and someone starts off a message by whisperingit to the person next to him or her, who then whispers it to thenext person, and so on. The main difference between folklore andthe telephone game is that folklore doesn't go in a tidy circle. Ifwe were to draw the folk process of transmission, it might looklike this:

[FIGURE OMITTED]

Lots of people are hearing the same story, but most of themhear it from a different source. In contrast, the mass- or pop-culturemodel has lots and lots of people hearing the same story from asingle source, such as the television, a news website, or a publishedbook. Millions of people might all watch the same show, but theyall get it from the same source, and so the version they all get isidentical. This process might look like this:

[FIGURE OMITTED]

The differences between these two modes of transmission arepretty obvious. Even if the same number of people end up hearingthe folk story as watch the TV show or read the book, the folk storywas told and retold anew all along the way. And it probably changed abit as it was told over and over again, just like the message in the telephonegame, the point of which, as you probably recall, was alwaysto compare the final message to the original, to see the (hopefullyhilarious) ways it evolved during transmission. The study of folkloreis pretty much the same thing (minus the expectation of hilarity).

With a TV show or a published book, every single person whowatches or reads the story gets the exact same version, and thatsingle version is usually tied to a specific director or writer. With afolk story, each new audience gets a unique, contextually specificversion, and each new teller is as much the rightful "owner" as thenext. This, of course, is what makes folklore so interesting. If I tellyou a joke, and you turn around and tell it to someone else and thedetails change a bit, you didn't tell it wrong, you just told a differentversion of it. You also didn't steal it from me—you might tell yourfriends where you heard it, but even if you don't, I don't get to filea copyright lawsuit against you. Folklore is mostly anonymous, soit can easily belong to whoever is telling it. In contrast, if I take anovel and change some of the words, it's not just "another version"or "my own version" of the novel; it's wrong. If I went out and sold"my version" of the novel, I could be arrested.

So folklore, by the nature of its transmission, is malleable,adaptable, changeable, and mostly anonymous, and this makes itway more culturally and expressively communicative than a TVshow. I don't get to alter an episode of TV to make it more relevantto my life, but I can alter an urban legend or a joke in order to makeit more specific to me and my situation. Considering that folkloreis being slightly adapted and molded every time it's passed on, aftera while it's quite representative of the group as a whole rather thanof a single individual. The stuff that no one found meaningful orillustrative or entertaining will eventually get leeched out, and thestuff that most people thought was especially important or relevantor significant will remain in. Group consensus shapes folklore, andso folklore is a great measure of group consensus.

There's another level of culture in which any given expressivegenre can emerge, and that's "elite" culture. It's more like pop culturethan folk culture, but the audience is typically smaller as thecontent is typically thought to have less of a broad appeal. Thisis where we find the expressive forms that we tend to think of as"snooty" and limited to highly educated audiences: the opera, modernart museums, symphonies, and so on. If we drew a model ofthis one, it might look like this:

[FIGURE OMITTED]

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Folklore Rules by Lynne S. McNeill. Copyright © 2013 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0874219051
• ISBN 13: 9780874219050
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 100