Folklorists' definitions of folklore
December 2018
Thoms, William. 1846. “Folk-Lore.” The Athenæum 982 (August 22): 862–63.
“Your pages have so often given evidence of the interest which you take in what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature (though by-the-bye it is more a Lore than a Literature, and would be most aptly described by a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore,–the Lore of the People )–that I am not without hopes of enlisting your aid in garnering the few ears which are remaining, scattered over that field from which our forefathers might have gathered a goodly crop” (862).
——-- (1894), qtd. in Emrich, Duncan 1946. “Folk-Lore: William John Thoms.” California Folklore Quarterly 5: 255-74.
Folklore is “that department of the study of antiquities and archaeology which embraces everything relating to ancient observances and customs, to the notions, beliefs, traditions, superstitions and prejudices of the common people” (27).
——-- (1894), qtd. in Edson, W. Richmond. 1983. “Introduction.” In Handbook of American FolkloreRichard Dorson, ed.: xi-xix. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
“The coiner of the word, William Thoms, wrote in an article published in the Atheneum in August 1846 that he intended the word to be employed as ‘the generic term under which are included traditional institutions, beliefs, art, customs, stories, songs, sayings, and the like current among backward peoples or retained by the less cultured classes of more advanced peoples” (xi).
Newell, W.W. 1890. “The Study of Folklore.” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 9: 134-136.
“By folk-lore is to be understood oral tradition – information and belief handed down from generation to generation without the use of writing.”
——-- (1894), qtd. in Moody-Turner, Shirley. 2013. Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
“In an 1894 speech to the Hampton folklorists […] Newel define[d] ‘folk’ as synonymous with race, and ‘lore’ as signifying the ‘learning or knowledge peculiar’ to the race. […] In considering his own racial identity, Newell notes that although he is of English ancestry, he truly can claim no racial affiliation other than that of the ‘human race’” (27).
Cooper, Anna Julia (1894), characterized in Moody-Turner, Shirley. 2013. Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
In a 1894 address to the HFS, Cooper questioned “the need to civilize the ‘folk,’ instead deploying the trope of the ‘folk’ as a critique of civilization rather than a barometer against which the ‘civilized’ could measure their progress,” interrogated the assumptions underpinning ‘civilization’ discourses, discussed the bias of prevailing methods of studying black folklore, and “called for an African American literary tradition rooted in and responsive to the vernacular practices and everyday experiences of African Americans” (89). Within ‘civilization’, “to write as a white man, to sing as a white man, to swagger as a white man, to bully as a white man—this is achievement, this is success,” and African American vernacular traditions should not aspire to this. Folklore comes not from far-away places but in “the whispered little longings of his soul” (91), and folkloristics should not be about objective collection but dynamic interaction (92); black folklore should not be outgrown, but should be celebrated and developed (92); scientific methods often mask bigotry.
Botkin, Benjamin. 1937. “The Folkness of the Folk.” The English Journal 26: 461–69.
Bemoans the vagueness of “folklore” terminology and its constant redefinitions and establishes the constructed character of folklore: “the concept of folkiness is the master creation of folklore” (463). Outlines the trajectory of the folklore concept from philology to mythology to psychology to anthropology, where it has “become more or less fixed in its meaning of (to quote Hutton Webster [uncited]) ‘a branch of social anthropology which deals with primitive culture and also with the vestiges of such culture’” (463). The task now is to prove how folklore can be more than survivals (464); how it can be “germinal rather than vestigial” (465). Older models of “partial uselessness” that see folklore as having outlived its function do not stand up to close inquiry with the folk who use it; as Marett says, “the folklorist […] must attend to the psychological side of the study of survivals by dwelling on that question - How and why do survivals survive? He will thereupon find that, relics of the past though they be, they are something more. They have a present value for old-fashioned minds […]. Survivals in folklore, then, are no mere wreckage of the past, but are likewise symptomatic of those tendencies of our common human nature which have the best chance of surviving in the long run.” This, to Botkin, is the functional view of folklore that “is now generally accepted” (465).
Leach, Maria, ed. 1949. Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. Funk & Wagnalls.
Famously contains a section listing at least 21 definitions.
Gayton, A. H. 1951. “Perspectives in Folklore.” The Journal of American Folklore 64 (252): 147-150.
"In 1945 and 1946 I headed the Committee on Research in Folklore which made an attempt to discover what was being done in folklore, or better, to find out what folklore was to all the people who were doing it. From the results of that survey it appeared that folklore could not be defined - though many were willing to try. Indeed, trying to define folklore seems to be a favorite pastime of its devotees" (147).
Redfield, Robert (1953) characterized in Abrahams, Roger D. 1971. “Personal Power and Social Restraint in the Definition of Folklore.” The Journal of American Folklore 84 (331): 16–30.
“[P]erhaps the classic formulation of the peasant ideal was made by Robert Redfield in his concept of the folk-urban continuum. The poles of this typological spectrum are the ‘folk’ community and the city. The folk society as described by Redfield has many of the attributes of the aboriginal group. It is marked by homogeneity (of course). It is characterized by a sacral view of life, imbued with rituals; preliteracy; small numbers, all of whom are tied by some familylike bond; low level of division of labor with appropriate economic and social conceptions; a personalistic conception of the world and the universe, accompanied by the sue of magic and religion to cope with the nonpersonal forces; and, most important, a behavior system both traditional and uncritical. As Miner has pointed out, the urban polarity is characterized by the absence of these attributes.
“Many commentators have pointed out the fact that this is an ‘ideal’ construct of traits, some using the fact to attack Redfield, other to defend him” (25).
Thompson, Stith. 1953. Four Symposia on Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
“We can, of course, make the differentiation between certain groups of folklorists into those who give a broad interpretation and those who give a narrow interpretation of the field. My impression is that most folklorists in the United States belong to the narrow-interpretation group. They are likely to think of folklore as having something to do with the spoken word” (255).
Bascom, William R. 1955. “Verbal Art.” The Journal of American Folklore 68 (269): 245–52.
“Some five years ago I suggested that, according to anthropological usage, folklore can be defined as verbal art; this was not an independent invention, but grew out of a series of discussions with Richard A. Waterman while we were writing a joint article. Although neither of us can now clearly recall who first suggested it, verbal art was proposed as a term to distinguish folktales, myths, legends, proverbs, and other ‘literary forms’ from the other materials which are commonly considered as folklore, but which anthropologists classify under other categories. Neither of us, apparently, expressed clearly enough that verbal art was proposed only as a definition of what anthropologists customarily refer to as folklore. At least our definitions were vigorously attacked by Samuel P. Bayard as inconsistent with traditional usage” (245).
Dorson, Richard M. 1959. American Folklore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
“‘Folklore’ usually suggests the oral traditions channeled across the centuries through human mouths […]. In the United States, folklore has customarily meant the spoken and sung traditions” (2).
Seeger, Pete. (1960, 1967, 1990) 2012. Pete Seeger in His Own Words, Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal, eds: 67-69. Boulder & London: Paradigm Publishers.
From “A Definition of Folk Music,” 1960:
“[F]olk music is a process.”
“A folk song in a book is like a picture of a bird in mid-flight, printed in a bird book. The bird was moving before the picture was taken, and continued flying afterwards. It is valuable for a scientific record to know when and where the picture was taken, but no one is so foolish as to think that the picture is the bird. Thus also, the folk song in the book was changing for any generations before it was collected, and will keep on changing for many generations more, we trust. It is valuable for a scientific record to know when and where it was collected, but the still-picture of the song is not the song itself” (68). Ultimately, when asked about definitions of folk or folk songs “I do believe the only solution is to confound the enemy” (69).
From “Why Folk Music?”, 1967
“I try not to get in the argument over defining folk music. I like to climb mountains too, but I don’t get in a big argument over the name of the mountain range” (74).
From “On Sing Out’s Subtitle,” 1990:
“Folklore is not an attempt to escape into the Age of Homespun; it is an attempt to enrich today with the humanism of yesterday.” [Footnote:] From the late Norman Strider, director of Camp Woodland in the Catskills, who puts on a festival every year using local fiddlers and ballad singers, as well as songs from the campers, NYC kids.] (71)
Utley, Francis Lee. 1961. “Folk Literature: an Operational Definition.” Journal of American Folklore 74: 193-206.
“For my own operation, I will stand by the very simple statement that folk literature is orally transmitted literature wherever found, among primitive isolates, or civilized marginal cultures, urban or rural cultures, dominant or subordinate groups. The heuristic value of ‘orally transmitted,’ our key phrase, is great” (xix).
Kongas, Elli-Kaija. 1963. “The Concept of Folklore.” Midwest Folklore 13 (2): 69–88.
Very useful – and sometimes amusingly salty – canvassing of folklore concepts to 1951. Points out that notions and study of folklore long predated Thoms’ 1846 ‘coining’.
The Romantic Concept
“The concept of folklore which was characteristic of Romanticism was, briefly, that folklore is the product of the collectively creating folk soul. It mirrors the characteristics of the folk; but the folk proper is good and wise, only in some cases suffering. Thus, there are only beautiful pieces of folklore” (73).
The Survival Theory
In E.B. Tyler’s Primitive Culture (1871), “Theoretically the by far most important and effective element was his concept of cultural survivals, culture traits which have lost their original function: meaningless customs and the like. The survival theory had many distinguished representatives in England—Andrew Lang, James Frazer—and seems to have influenced the English interpretation of the term folklore for a long time” (74).
“As late as in the year 1949, several American folklorists defined their field as the study of survival. The most extreme opinion was expressed by Charles Francis Potter, who defines folklore as “a lively fossil which refuses to die.” [….] Potter further maintains that there is a strong feminine element in folklore, "because its origin antedates the emergence of reason and belongs to the instinctive and the intuitional areas." He also characterizes folklore as juvenile "because it is the poetic wisdom of the childhood of the race." Finally, he firmly states that folklore is survival: "Folklore is the survival within a people's later stages of culture of the beliefs, stories, customs, rites, and other techniques or adjustment to the world and the supernatural, which were used in previous stages. . ." “Indeed, if there is anything of survival in folklore, it is the survival theory of folklore: John L. Mish in 1949 defines folklore as the entire body of ancient popular beliefs, customs and traditions which have survived among the less educated elements of civilized societies until today. Gertrude P. Kurath, very much in the sameway as Potter, espouses the same survival theory which implies a kind of "high" origin of folklore: "Its narrowest definition confines it to the shadowy remnants of ancient religious rites still incorporated in the lives of illiterate and rustics." She mentions the loss of function; this, she maintains, is the difference between folk dance and folk music on the one hand and ritual forms on the other” (75).
“The concept of survival, in itself, is acceptable in the study of culture. Tylor's classical example of meaningless customs in connection with sneezing—greetings which only a scholar can explain with the help of the old notion of the wandering soul—illustrates his point. Nobody is greeted when he coughs! Folklore can still be the study of survival, but it must not be only the study of survival. As Dr. David Bidney said in a seminar, "All survivals are traditional, but all tradition is not survival. You may have a living tradition. The folklorist has to study traditional culture in both respects” (76).
The Finnish School (76
Folklore as the study of oral literature (78)
Folklore as the study of verbal tradition (80)
Folklore as the study of folk culture (81).
“Are we then back in the situation that folklore, as George M. Foster wrote, "is pretty much what one wants to make it"? (84)
Ultimately argues for ‘mentifacts’ and the centrality of mode of transmission (85).
Dundes, Alan. 1965. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
The folk group is "any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor" (2).
Toelken, J. Barre. 1969. “A Descriptive Nomenclature for the Study of Folklore Part I: The Process of Tradition.” Western Folklore 28 (2): 91–100.
"In spite of more than one hundred years of intensive scholarship in Europe and America, we have produced neither a satisfactory definition for that body of materials on which we fondly spend our lives, nor an acceptable, consistent set of critical terms with which to discuss it. One reason for this state of affairs is no doubt what Kenneth Goldstein has often called the stunning eclecticism of our field. Certainly one result of it has been a continued unwillingness on the part of other scholars to believe that folklorists know what they are doing or that they are doing anything at all. Another lamentable result is that we have seldom been able to be very precise among ourselves" (91).
Abrahams, Roger D. 1971. “Personal Power and Social Restraint in the Definition of Folklore.” The Journal of American Folklore 84 (331): 16–30.
“The working definition of folklore has therefore implicitly emphasized the small, self-sufficient group, part of whose self-sufficiency was the provision of their own education through embodied traditional knowledge [/] and their own entertainment by means of the singers, dancers, and storytellers within their own ranks. […This produced an ideal of ‘pure folklore’.] Dan Ben-Amos has forcefully argued [in an unpublished paper] that reasoning of this sort really means that folklore exists in the confines of the small group, whose members, during personal interactions, are given to in-group, shorthand, orally expressed knowledge and entertainments” (23-4).
We need a “second definition of folklore […] which emphasizes the importance of the performer rather than the stabilizing effect of the group on the performance” (27).
Ben-Amos, Dan. 1971. “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context.” The Journal of American Folklore 84 (331: Toward New Perspectives in Folklore): 3–15.
“In sum, folklore is artistic communication in small groups” (13).
Gets rid of ‘tradition’.
Herskovitz, Meville J. and Archer Taylor in Maria Leach, ed. Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (1972) qtd. in Dundes, Alan, and Carol R. Pagter. 1992. Work hard and you shall be rewarded: Urban folklore from the paperwork empire. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Herskovitz: “[…F]olklore as come more and more to denote the study of the unwritten literature of any group […]” (xviii).
Taylor: “It is usual to define folklore either literally as the lore of the folk or, more descriptively, in terms of an oral literature tradition” (xix).
Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.
“[Folklore study is] the study of communicative behavior with an esthetic, expressive, or stylistic dimension” (133).
Bascom, William R., ed. 1977. Frontiers of folklore. Boulder, CO: Westview.
According to Oxford bibliographies: “Contains six pivotal essays by folklorists advocating for a turn from a text-centered to context or performance approach to folklore. Includes Alan Dundes’s essay “Who are the Folk?” [equivalent in Dundes 1965] with an elastic definition of the folk group and Roger D. Abrahams’s chapter on an “enactment-centered theory of folklore” based on the emergence of folklore from social interaction.”
Abrahams (Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory of Folklore, 79-117):
“For some time, the key terms in the folkloristic synthesis carried out by myself and my colleagues here, have been process and especially performance; this latter concept allowed us to relate the formal features of cultural expression of the social dimensions of enactment, as in the relationship between the performer and audience, how they develop and fulfill patterns of expectation, how license to perform is invoked and used, and so on. My turn to the larger term enactment arose out of a growing recognition that there were a number of events which I and my colleagues have described in performance terms, like games, and rituals, which were stretching the idea of performance somewhat out of shape. […] My drawing on enactment, then, is my attempt to find a term which includes performances, games, rituals, festivals, etc., in short, any cultural event in which community members come together to participate, employ the deepest and most complex multivocal and polyvalent signs and symbols of their repertoire of expression thus entering into a potentially significant experience” (80).
Bauman, Richard. (1977) 1984. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights: Waveland.
“In recent years, the concept of performance has begun to assume central importance in the orientation of increasing numbers of folklorists and other interested in verbal art. As employed in the work of these scholars, the term ‘performance’ has been used to convey a dual sense of artistic action – the doing of folklore – and artistic event – the performance situation, involving performer, art form, audience, and setting – both of which are basic to the developing performance approach. The usage accords well with the conventional meaning of the term ‘performance’ and has served to point up the fundamental reorientation from folklore-as-materials to folklore-as-communication which characterized the thinking of these scholars. Conventional meanings can carry scholarship just so far, however, before the lack of conceptual rigor begins to constrain analytical insight rather than advancing it. In view of the centrality of performance […] the time seems opportune for efforts aimed at expanding the conceptual content of folkloric performance as a communicative phenomenon, beyond the general usage it has carried us up to this point. That is the purpose of this book.
“[…C]onsistent with the chiefly sociolinguistic and anthropological roots of the performance approach, the terms ‘verbal art’ and ‘oral literature’ provide a better frame of reference, at least as a point of departure for the ideas to be advanced here, than the more diffuse and problematic term ‘folklore’. [....] Many things have been studied under the name of folklore, but verbal art has always been at or near the center of the larger [/] domain and has constituted the chief common ground between anthropological folklorists and those of other persuasions” (5).
Toelken, Barre. 1979. The Dynamics of Folklore. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
“Tradition [means] not some static, immutable force from the past, but those pre-existing culture-specific materials and options that bear upon the performer more heavily than do his or her own personal tastes and talents. We recognize in the use of tradition that such matters as content and style have been for the most part passed on but not invented by the performer.
“Dynamic recognizes, on the other hand, that in the processing of these contents and styles in performance, the artist’s own unique talents of inventiveness within the tradition are highly valued and are expected to operate strongly. Time and space dimensions remind us that the resulting variations may spread geographically with great rapidity (as jokes do) as well as down through time (good luck beliefs). Folklore is made up of informal expressions passed around long enough to have become recurrent in form and context, but changeable in performance.”
“…modern American folklorists do not limit their attention to the rural, quaint, or "backward" elements of the culture. Rather, they will study and discuss any expressive phenomena–urban or rural–that seem to act like other previously recognized folk traditions. This has led to the development of a field of inquiry with few formal boundaries, one with lots of feel but little definition, one both engaging and frustrating.”
Richmond, W. Edson. 1983. “Introduction.” In Handbook of American FolkloreRichard Dorson, ed.: xi-xix. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
“It has long been a cliché that there are more definitions of folklore than there are folklorists. For at least a decade after The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend was published in 1949, it was common for folklorists to initiate articles and books with the statement that The Standard Dictionary included twenty-one different definitions of the word folklore, and to note that these definitions were composed by the then most prominent and influential American scholars involved in the field […]. Moreover, many scholars who searched beyond the entry for ‘folklore’ itself found the number of definitions expanded interminably. Thus the concept of folklore in the 1950s and the immediately succeeding decade was nebulous.
“The discipline had grown out of a study of medieval literature married, albeit without canonical sanction, to certain anthropological studies. This resulted in a synthesized definition of folklore: popular tradition, the French tradition populaire, modified by the creative imagination and the more-or-less retentive memory of the folk, though just who the folk were was moot. Such an emphasis on tradition served to maintain the nineteenth-century precept that folklore was a preserved relic and therefore implied that folklore was a vestigial element in culture, an interesting and revealing key to the past, but of little or no significance for modern society.
“The word folklore is, of course, as abstract a term as are the words love, liberty, and literature. Its precise meaning lies in the mind of its definer, not in the thing itself, which is both as real and unreal as any of the concepts mentioned above. [….] In brief, in the slightly more than one hundred years between Thoms’s creation of the word and the publication of The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend there was little change in its meaning. Since that time, however, there have been great changes, and the word folklore has come to be defined by some as whatever folklorists are interested in” (xi).
“In this evolutionary process two fundamental elements of the definition developed by Thoms and his descendants have been severely modified: tradition [/] and a restricted concept of the word folk. No longer do folklorists confine their studies solely to those things which are perpetuated orally or by precept; no longer do folklorists concern themselves only with backward classes or the less cultured classes of more advanced peoples. They are, instead, concerned with those things which appear and, most importantly, reappear in varied forms whenever and wherever human beings interact” (xi-xii).
Ben-Amos, Dan. 1984. “The Seven Strands of Tradition: Varieties in Its Meaning in American Folklore Studies.” Journal of Folklore Research 21: 97-131.
“[T]radition has survived criticism and remained a symbol of and for folklore” (124).
Oring, Elliott, ed. 1986. Folk groups and folklore genres: An introduction. Logan: Utah State Univ. Press.
Oxford bibliographies: Introductory essays aimed at college students. After an overview chapter discussing various definitions of folklore, essays discuss the major ideas in work on ethnic, religious, occupational, and children’s groups followed by sections on narratives, ballads and folksongs, riddles and proverbs, folk objects, and documenting folklore (in a pre-Internet age).
Glassie, Henry. 1989. The Spirit of Folk Art. New York: Abrams.
"Folklore,” though coined as recently as 1846, is the old word, the parental concept to the adjective "folk.” Customarily folklorists refer to the host of published definitions, add their own, and then get on with their work, leaving the impression that definitions of folklore are as numberless as insects. But all the definitions bring into dynamic association the ideas of individual creativity and collective order.
Folklore is traditional. Its center holds. Changes are slow and steady. Folklore is variable. The tradition remains wholly within the control of its practitioners. It is theirs to remember, change, or forget. Answering the needs of the collective for continuity and of the individual for active participation, folklore…is that which is at once traditional and variable.
Dundes, Alan, and Carol R. Pagter. 1992. Work hard and you shall be rewarded: Urban folklore from the paperwork empire. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press.
Introduction argues against folklore as oral communication because of the role of technology (in this case, photocopiers and facsimilie machines) in generating folk forms.
“The concept of folk as employed by folk was employed by folklorists in Europe normally refers either to a lower stratum of society (vulgus in populo) or to an old-fashioned, backward segment within a so-called civilized society. Frequently, the criterion of literacy was a factor in the definition of folk. Specifically, the folk could not read or write. In this light the folk was defined as the illiterate in a literate society. Societies without a written language did not, according to this definition, qualify as folk at all. Such societies, variously ethnocentrically labeled as preliterate, nonliterate, primitive, or savage, were not folk, and for this reason even today the art or the music of the American Indian is rarely, if ever, referred to as folk art or folk music. Rather they fall under the academic rubric of ‘primitive’ art or music. In the present context, the exclusion of peoples without a form of writing was no more absurd than the exclusion of peoples who could write. One should realize that, in the strict definition of ‘folk,’ there could be no such thing as ‘urban’ folklore. […]”
“The modern definition of folk as any group whatsoever that shares at least one common factor – language, occupation, religion, ethnicity – makes it possible to consider the folklore of various urban groups” (xvii).
“If American folklorists have been willing to extend the rather limited nineteenth-century concept of ‘folk’ as peasant, they have [/] not been equally flexible in their reconsideration of one of the crucial alleged criteria of ‘lore’, namely, the necessity of its having been transmitted orally. American folklorists appear to be united in their virtually unanimous agreement that folklore, by definition, refers to materials orally transmitted. We disagree with this criterion, and it is our hope that publication of the present study will put an end to this misconception once and for all” (viii).
Definitions of Folklore. 1996. Journal of Folklore Research,33(3), 255-264.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. (1968) 1998. The Study of American folklore: An Introduction. 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton.
Oxford bibliographies: A widely used textbook focusing on American folklore, although the introductory chapters on “The Field of Folklore” and “The Study of Folklore” cover the field globally. The organization of the work is by genres—oral, social, and material—with basic definitions of each folkloric form.
“Folklorists generally associate five qualities with true folklore: (1) its content is oral (usually verbal), or custom-related, or material; (2) it is traditional in form and transmission; (3) it exists in different versions; (4) it is usually anonymous ; and (5) it tends to become formularized. Each of these terms is used in a broad sense, and the first three qualities are the primary ones to be considered in arriving at a clear definition of folklore.
“Folklore is oral or custom-related in that it passes by word of mouth and informal demonstration or imitation from one person to another and from one generation to the next. Much folklore is ‘aural,’ reaching the ear either from voices or from musical instruments. While written folklore (such as graffiti or autograph rhymes) is verbal without being oral, its transmission is customary, not institutionalized. The same is true for learning to produce or use folk artifacts, such as whittled wooden chains, hand-sewn quilts, or traditional log cabins. Folklore is never transmitted entirely in a formal manner through printed books, phonograph records, school classes, church sermons, or by other learned, sophisticated, and commercial means.
“Folklore is traditional in two senses in that it is passed on repeatedly in a relatively fixed or standard form, and that it circulates among members of a particular group” (12).
“Generally speaking, then, folklore may be defined as those materials in culture that circulate traditionally among members of any group in different versions, whether in oral form or by means of customary example, as well as the processes of traditional performance and communication” (15).
Elsewhere:
“Folklore comprises the unrecorded traditions of a people; it includes both the form and content of these traditions and their style or technique of communication from person to person.”
“Folklore is the traditional, unofficial, non-institutional part of culture. It encompasses all knowledge, understandings, values, attitudes, assumptions, feelings, and beliefs transmitted in traditional forms by word of mouth or by customary examples.”
Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing The Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
‘Folk music’ has no “descriptive validity [but] the phrase stands as shorthand for people’s conceptions of ‘pure’ vernacular music. […] One might therefore imagine terms like ‘folk’ and ‘pure’ as ciphers waiting to be filled: people imbue them with meanings that have cultural relevance and power to them” (5).
McClelland, Bruce. 2000. “Online Orality: The Internet, Folklore, and the Culture in Russia.” In Culture and Technology in New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in Post-Communist Nations, ed. Laura B. Lengel: 179-91. Stamford: Ablex.
Folklore is “communicative behavior whose primary characteristics […] are that […] it doesn’t ‘belong’ to an individual or group […] and in the modern context therefore transcends issues of intellectual property; and [that…] it is transmitted [/] spontaneously, from one individual (or group of individuals) to another under certain conditions, frequently without regard for remuneration or return benefit. As it is transmitted, it often undergoes modification, according to the inclination of the transmitter’” (184).
Klein, Barbro. Folklore. 2001. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Volume 8. Pp. 5711-5715. New York: Elsevier.
“'Folklore' has four basic meanings. First, it denotes oral narration, rituals, crafts, and other forms of vernacular expressive culture. Second, folklore, or ‘folkloristics,’ names an academic discipline devoted to the study of such phenomena. Third, in everyday usage, folklore sometimes describes colorful ‘folkloric’ phenomena linked to the music, tourist, and fashion industries. Fourth, like myth, folklore can mean falsehood” (5711).
Yoder, Don. 2001. Discovering American Folklife: Essays on Folk Culture and the Pennsylvania Dutch. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books.
“There are of course as many definitions of ‘folklore’ as there are scholars working in the field. But basically there are two main trends in definitions of the term. One trend attempts to limit folklore to the spiritual folk culture, the other attempts to stretch folklore to include both spiritual and material folk culture. […]. The stretching of the term folklore to include the totality of folk culture would seem to be a recent trend, a belated admission of the insufficiency of the term, as usually defined in the English-speaking countries, to deal with folk culture as a whole” (27).
Canvasses the fits and starts with which English-speaking folkloristics has attempted the latter. Points out that older terms in German (Volkskunde) and Swedish (folkliv) encompass material culture. “In fact, ‘folklore’ is an attempt – not a successful one, as time seems to be proving – to find an equivalent in English. ‘Folklife’ […] is a successful rendering which preserves the total range of interest expressed in the highly developed science of Volkskunde.”
Goes on to distinguish ‘folklife’ in European and then in (limited) American scholarship. The first two chapters of this text would be very useful for pursuing this term further.
Noyes, Dorothy. 2004. “Folklore.” In The Social Science Encyclopedia. 3rd edition. Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper, eds.: 375-378. New York: Routledge.
“Folklore is a metacultural category used to mark certain genres and practices within modern societies as being not modern. By extension, the word refers to the study of such materials. More specific definitions place folklore on the far side of the various epistemological, aesthetic and technological binary oppositions that distinguish the modern from its presumptive contraries. Folklore therefore typically evokes both repudiation and nostalgia” (375).
Sims, Martha C and Martine Stephens. 2005. Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and their Traditions. Logan: Utah State University Press.
“Folklore is many things, and it’s almost impossible to define succinctly. It’s both what folklorists study and the name of the discipline they work within. Yes, folklore is folk songs and legends. It’s also quilts, Boy Scout badges, high school marching band initiations, jokes, chain letters, nicknames, holiday food… and many other things you might or might not expect. Folklore exists in cities, suburbs and rural villages, in families, work groups and dormitories. Folklore is present in many kinds of informal communication, whether verbal (oral and written texts), customary (behaviors, rituals) or material (physical objects). It involves values, traditions, ways of thinking and behaving. It’s about art. It’s about people and the way people learn. It helps us learn who we are and how to make meaning in the world around us” (1-2). It’s seems like there’s better stuff elsewhere in this volume.
Haring, Lee. 2008. “America’s Antitheoretical Folkloristics.” Journal of Folklore Research 45 (1 Special Issue: Grand Theory): 1–9.
“To pose these questions leads inevitably back to defining the object of our investigation. [….] The definition game, which never ends among us (Ben-Amos 1971; Dundes 1966; Georges and Jones 1995:231–32), sprang up during the discussion of these papers, as spontaneously as touch football” (4).
Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. University of Chicago Press.
"The discourse that brings the idea of 'the folk' into existence is historically tied to nationalist projects, and more broadly to the discourse of modernity, which needs the concepts of 'folk' and 'traditional' to stand in binary contrast to the conception of 'modern' as a cultural category; that is, we understand 'modern culture' only in relation to what it is not - the 'folk' and 'traditional'. [...] The symbols folk and traditional, as currently understood, make sense only in relation to the broader premises of the discourse of modernity" (156).
Blank, Trevor J., ed. 2009. Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular expression in a digital world. Logan: Utah State Univ. Press.
Oxford bibliographies: The first volume of essays exploring connections of folklore to the Internet. Includes theoretical introductions on adjusting definitions of folklore to meet the scholarly challenges of folk practices on the Internet. Studies in the volume include e-mailed humor, memorials on MySpace, and rumor and legend on the Internet.
Blank, Trevor J. “Introduction: Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet”: 1-20.
Contains useful canvassing of developments in folkloric anxiety and pessimism since Ben-Amos.
“For this book, and hopefully beyond it, folklore should be considered to be the outward expression of creativity – in myriad forms and interactions – by individuals and their communities. The debate then falls to what constitutes creativity or even what constitutes community. That should be the job of the folklorist to argue cogently one way or another” (6). Allies with Ben-Amos in getting rid of ‘tradition’.
McNeill, Lynne S. 2013. Folklore Rules. Utah State University Press.
Cites Ben-Amos 1971 as "possibly the most commonly taught definition of folklore" (17-8), and relates "artistic communication" to lore and "small group" to folk. The "formal or unofficial level of cultural understanding is the 'folk' level, the level on which cultural knowledge is shared, enacted, and propagated by regular, everyday people. Instead of laws we have customs; instead of guidebooks we have experience and observation." Formerly about rurality or literacy; now about "all of us, as we exist in the informal or unofficial realms of our cultural lives." The "folk group" is thus "all people who share an unofficial culture together" (affirms Dundes 1965's definition).
Foster, Michael Dylan. “Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque.” In The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, Michael Dyan Foster & Jeffrey A. Tolbert, eds.: 3-36. Logan: Utah State University Press.
By stressing […] the profit motive […] we also establish a meaningful counter-distinction to similar forms of cultural expression usually labeled folklore. Defining folklore, of course, opens up a whole other (related) can of worms, something I would assiduously like to avoid in this limited space. But I do want to suggest that the processes and products of folklore tend to be oriented toward informal, unofficial, noncommercial, noninstitutional modes of production, transmission, and consumption. Even in contexts in which traditionality, aesthetics, and the dynamics of ‘small-group’ or face-to-face communications are questionable, we can usually still maintain that the processes and products of folklore are rarely created with official, institutional, or commercial sanction and mass sales or profit in mind” (7).
“Folklore as a concept is, of course, notoriously difficult to define, and this is not the place to explore its discursive history. For the purposes of the present discussion, however, I characteristic folkloric items and events as generally unofficial, noninstitutional forms of expressive culture. No author or designer or professional artist dictates what is correct or incorrect; often the item in question is of anonymous origins and/or the shared property of a particular group – from a family or village to an online community or nation. Of course, none of this is cut and dried: this is less a definition than it is a set of tendencies or orientations (see Oring 1986). For 'textbook' introductions to the concept and its (possible) definitions, see, e.g., Georges and Jones 1995; McNeill 2013; Oring 1986; Sims and Stephens 2011; Toelken 1996” (29).
Bronner, Simon J. 2017. Folklore: The Basics. New York: Routledge.
Very cogent, useful canvassing of the development of the term, focusing on tradition.
“Simply put, folklore is ‘traditional knowledge put into, and drawing from, practice.’” (46).
“Your pages have so often given evidence of the interest which you take in what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature (though by-the-bye it is more a Lore than a Literature, and would be most aptly described by a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore,–the Lore of the People )–that I am not without hopes of enlisting your aid in garnering the few ears which are remaining, scattered over that field from which our forefathers might have gathered a goodly crop” (862).
——-- (1894), qtd. in Emrich, Duncan 1946. “Folk-Lore: William John Thoms.” California Folklore Quarterly 5: 255-74.
Folklore is “that department of the study of antiquities and archaeology which embraces everything relating to ancient observances and customs, to the notions, beliefs, traditions, superstitions and prejudices of the common people” (27).
——-- (1894), qtd. in Edson, W. Richmond. 1983. “Introduction.” In Handbook of American FolkloreRichard Dorson, ed.: xi-xix. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
“The coiner of the word, William Thoms, wrote in an article published in the Atheneum in August 1846 that he intended the word to be employed as ‘the generic term under which are included traditional institutions, beliefs, art, customs, stories, songs, sayings, and the like current among backward peoples or retained by the less cultured classes of more advanced peoples” (xi).
Newell, W.W. 1890. “The Study of Folklore.” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 9: 134-136.
“By folk-lore is to be understood oral tradition – information and belief handed down from generation to generation without the use of writing.”
——-- (1894), qtd. in Moody-Turner, Shirley. 2013. Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
“In an 1894 speech to the Hampton folklorists […] Newel define[d] ‘folk’ as synonymous with race, and ‘lore’ as signifying the ‘learning or knowledge peculiar’ to the race. […] In considering his own racial identity, Newell notes that although he is of English ancestry, he truly can claim no racial affiliation other than that of the ‘human race’” (27).
Cooper, Anna Julia (1894), characterized in Moody-Turner, Shirley. 2013. Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
In a 1894 address to the HFS, Cooper questioned “the need to civilize the ‘folk,’ instead deploying the trope of the ‘folk’ as a critique of civilization rather than a barometer against which the ‘civilized’ could measure their progress,” interrogated the assumptions underpinning ‘civilization’ discourses, discussed the bias of prevailing methods of studying black folklore, and “called for an African American literary tradition rooted in and responsive to the vernacular practices and everyday experiences of African Americans” (89). Within ‘civilization’, “to write as a white man, to sing as a white man, to swagger as a white man, to bully as a white man—this is achievement, this is success,” and African American vernacular traditions should not aspire to this. Folklore comes not from far-away places but in “the whispered little longings of his soul” (91), and folkloristics should not be about objective collection but dynamic interaction (92); black folklore should not be outgrown, but should be celebrated and developed (92); scientific methods often mask bigotry.
Botkin, Benjamin. 1937. “The Folkness of the Folk.” The English Journal 26: 461–69.
Bemoans the vagueness of “folklore” terminology and its constant redefinitions and establishes the constructed character of folklore: “the concept of folkiness is the master creation of folklore” (463). Outlines the trajectory of the folklore concept from philology to mythology to psychology to anthropology, where it has “become more or less fixed in its meaning of (to quote Hutton Webster [uncited]) ‘a branch of social anthropology which deals with primitive culture and also with the vestiges of such culture’” (463). The task now is to prove how folklore can be more than survivals (464); how it can be “germinal rather than vestigial” (465). Older models of “partial uselessness” that see folklore as having outlived its function do not stand up to close inquiry with the folk who use it; as Marett says, “the folklorist […] must attend to the psychological side of the study of survivals by dwelling on that question - How and why do survivals survive? He will thereupon find that, relics of the past though they be, they are something more. They have a present value for old-fashioned minds […]. Survivals in folklore, then, are no mere wreckage of the past, but are likewise symptomatic of those tendencies of our common human nature which have the best chance of surviving in the long run.” This, to Botkin, is the functional view of folklore that “is now generally accepted” (465).
Leach, Maria, ed. 1949. Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. Funk & Wagnalls.
Famously contains a section listing at least 21 definitions.
Gayton, A. H. 1951. “Perspectives in Folklore.” The Journal of American Folklore 64 (252): 147-150.
"In 1945 and 1946 I headed the Committee on Research in Folklore which made an attempt to discover what was being done in folklore, or better, to find out what folklore was to all the people who were doing it. From the results of that survey it appeared that folklore could not be defined - though many were willing to try. Indeed, trying to define folklore seems to be a favorite pastime of its devotees" (147).
Redfield, Robert (1953) characterized in Abrahams, Roger D. 1971. “Personal Power and Social Restraint in the Definition of Folklore.” The Journal of American Folklore 84 (331): 16–30.
“[P]erhaps the classic formulation of the peasant ideal was made by Robert Redfield in his concept of the folk-urban continuum. The poles of this typological spectrum are the ‘folk’ community and the city. The folk society as described by Redfield has many of the attributes of the aboriginal group. It is marked by homogeneity (of course). It is characterized by a sacral view of life, imbued with rituals; preliteracy; small numbers, all of whom are tied by some familylike bond; low level of division of labor with appropriate economic and social conceptions; a personalistic conception of the world and the universe, accompanied by the sue of magic and religion to cope with the nonpersonal forces; and, most important, a behavior system both traditional and uncritical. As Miner has pointed out, the urban polarity is characterized by the absence of these attributes.
“Many commentators have pointed out the fact that this is an ‘ideal’ construct of traits, some using the fact to attack Redfield, other to defend him” (25).
Thompson, Stith. 1953. Four Symposia on Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
“We can, of course, make the differentiation between certain groups of folklorists into those who give a broad interpretation and those who give a narrow interpretation of the field. My impression is that most folklorists in the United States belong to the narrow-interpretation group. They are likely to think of folklore as having something to do with the spoken word” (255).
Bascom, William R. 1955. “Verbal Art.” The Journal of American Folklore 68 (269): 245–52.
“Some five years ago I suggested that, according to anthropological usage, folklore can be defined as verbal art; this was not an independent invention, but grew out of a series of discussions with Richard A. Waterman while we were writing a joint article. Although neither of us can now clearly recall who first suggested it, verbal art was proposed as a term to distinguish folktales, myths, legends, proverbs, and other ‘literary forms’ from the other materials which are commonly considered as folklore, but which anthropologists classify under other categories. Neither of us, apparently, expressed clearly enough that verbal art was proposed only as a definition of what anthropologists customarily refer to as folklore. At least our definitions were vigorously attacked by Samuel P. Bayard as inconsistent with traditional usage” (245).
Dorson, Richard M. 1959. American Folklore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
“‘Folklore’ usually suggests the oral traditions channeled across the centuries through human mouths […]. In the United States, folklore has customarily meant the spoken and sung traditions” (2).
Seeger, Pete. (1960, 1967, 1990) 2012. Pete Seeger in His Own Words, Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal, eds: 67-69. Boulder & London: Paradigm Publishers.
From “A Definition of Folk Music,” 1960:
“[F]olk music is a process.”
“A folk song in a book is like a picture of a bird in mid-flight, printed in a bird book. The bird was moving before the picture was taken, and continued flying afterwards. It is valuable for a scientific record to know when and where the picture was taken, but no one is so foolish as to think that the picture is the bird. Thus also, the folk song in the book was changing for any generations before it was collected, and will keep on changing for many generations more, we trust. It is valuable for a scientific record to know when and where it was collected, but the still-picture of the song is not the song itself” (68). Ultimately, when asked about definitions of folk or folk songs “I do believe the only solution is to confound the enemy” (69).
From “Why Folk Music?”, 1967
“I try not to get in the argument over defining folk music. I like to climb mountains too, but I don’t get in a big argument over the name of the mountain range” (74).
From “On Sing Out’s Subtitle,” 1990:
“Folklore is not an attempt to escape into the Age of Homespun; it is an attempt to enrich today with the humanism of yesterday.” [Footnote:] From the late Norman Strider, director of Camp Woodland in the Catskills, who puts on a festival every year using local fiddlers and ballad singers, as well as songs from the campers, NYC kids.] (71)
Utley, Francis Lee. 1961. “Folk Literature: an Operational Definition.” Journal of American Folklore 74: 193-206.
“For my own operation, I will stand by the very simple statement that folk literature is orally transmitted literature wherever found, among primitive isolates, or civilized marginal cultures, urban or rural cultures, dominant or subordinate groups. The heuristic value of ‘orally transmitted,’ our key phrase, is great” (xix).
Kongas, Elli-Kaija. 1963. “The Concept of Folklore.” Midwest Folklore 13 (2): 69–88.
Very useful – and sometimes amusingly salty – canvassing of folklore concepts to 1951. Points out that notions and study of folklore long predated Thoms’ 1846 ‘coining’.
The Romantic Concept
“The concept of folklore which was characteristic of Romanticism was, briefly, that folklore is the product of the collectively creating folk soul. It mirrors the characteristics of the folk; but the folk proper is good and wise, only in some cases suffering. Thus, there are only beautiful pieces of folklore” (73).
The Survival Theory
In E.B. Tyler’s Primitive Culture (1871), “Theoretically the by far most important and effective element was his concept of cultural survivals, culture traits which have lost their original function: meaningless customs and the like. The survival theory had many distinguished representatives in England—Andrew Lang, James Frazer—and seems to have influenced the English interpretation of the term folklore for a long time” (74).
“As late as in the year 1949, several American folklorists defined their field as the study of survival. The most extreme opinion was expressed by Charles Francis Potter, who defines folklore as “a lively fossil which refuses to die.” [….] Potter further maintains that there is a strong feminine element in folklore, "because its origin antedates the emergence of reason and belongs to the instinctive and the intuitional areas." He also characterizes folklore as juvenile "because it is the poetic wisdom of the childhood of the race." Finally, he firmly states that folklore is survival: "Folklore is the survival within a people's later stages of culture of the beliefs, stories, customs, rites, and other techniques or adjustment to the world and the supernatural, which were used in previous stages. . ." “Indeed, if there is anything of survival in folklore, it is the survival theory of folklore: John L. Mish in 1949 defines folklore as the entire body of ancient popular beliefs, customs and traditions which have survived among the less educated elements of civilized societies until today. Gertrude P. Kurath, very much in the sameway as Potter, espouses the same survival theory which implies a kind of "high" origin of folklore: "Its narrowest definition confines it to the shadowy remnants of ancient religious rites still incorporated in the lives of illiterate and rustics." She mentions the loss of function; this, she maintains, is the difference between folk dance and folk music on the one hand and ritual forms on the other” (75).
“The concept of survival, in itself, is acceptable in the study of culture. Tylor's classical example of meaningless customs in connection with sneezing—greetings which only a scholar can explain with the help of the old notion of the wandering soul—illustrates his point. Nobody is greeted when he coughs! Folklore can still be the study of survival, but it must not be only the study of survival. As Dr. David Bidney said in a seminar, "All survivals are traditional, but all tradition is not survival. You may have a living tradition. The folklorist has to study traditional culture in both respects” (76).
The Finnish School (76
Folklore as the study of oral literature (78)
Folklore as the study of verbal tradition (80)
Folklore as the study of folk culture (81).
“Are we then back in the situation that folklore, as George M. Foster wrote, "is pretty much what one wants to make it"? (84)
Ultimately argues for ‘mentifacts’ and the centrality of mode of transmission (85).
Dundes, Alan. 1965. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
The folk group is "any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor" (2).
Toelken, J. Barre. 1969. “A Descriptive Nomenclature for the Study of Folklore Part I: The Process of Tradition.” Western Folklore 28 (2): 91–100.
"In spite of more than one hundred years of intensive scholarship in Europe and America, we have produced neither a satisfactory definition for that body of materials on which we fondly spend our lives, nor an acceptable, consistent set of critical terms with which to discuss it. One reason for this state of affairs is no doubt what Kenneth Goldstein has often called the stunning eclecticism of our field. Certainly one result of it has been a continued unwillingness on the part of other scholars to believe that folklorists know what they are doing or that they are doing anything at all. Another lamentable result is that we have seldom been able to be very precise among ourselves" (91).
Abrahams, Roger D. 1971. “Personal Power and Social Restraint in the Definition of Folklore.” The Journal of American Folklore 84 (331): 16–30.
“The working definition of folklore has therefore implicitly emphasized the small, self-sufficient group, part of whose self-sufficiency was the provision of their own education through embodied traditional knowledge [/] and their own entertainment by means of the singers, dancers, and storytellers within their own ranks. […This produced an ideal of ‘pure folklore’.] Dan Ben-Amos has forcefully argued [in an unpublished paper] that reasoning of this sort really means that folklore exists in the confines of the small group, whose members, during personal interactions, are given to in-group, shorthand, orally expressed knowledge and entertainments” (23-4).
We need a “second definition of folklore […] which emphasizes the importance of the performer rather than the stabilizing effect of the group on the performance” (27).
Ben-Amos, Dan. 1971. “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context.” The Journal of American Folklore 84 (331: Toward New Perspectives in Folklore): 3–15.
“In sum, folklore is artistic communication in small groups” (13).
Gets rid of ‘tradition’.
Herskovitz, Meville J. and Archer Taylor in Maria Leach, ed. Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (1972) qtd. in Dundes, Alan, and Carol R. Pagter. 1992. Work hard and you shall be rewarded: Urban folklore from the paperwork empire. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Herskovitz: “[…F]olklore as come more and more to denote the study of the unwritten literature of any group […]” (xviii).
Taylor: “It is usual to define folklore either literally as the lore of the folk or, more descriptively, in terms of an oral literature tradition” (xix).
Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.
“[Folklore study is] the study of communicative behavior with an esthetic, expressive, or stylistic dimension” (133).
Bascom, William R., ed. 1977. Frontiers of folklore. Boulder, CO: Westview.
According to Oxford bibliographies: “Contains six pivotal essays by folklorists advocating for a turn from a text-centered to context or performance approach to folklore. Includes Alan Dundes’s essay “Who are the Folk?” [equivalent in Dundes 1965] with an elastic definition of the folk group and Roger D. Abrahams’s chapter on an “enactment-centered theory of folklore” based on the emergence of folklore from social interaction.”
Abrahams (Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory of Folklore, 79-117):
“For some time, the key terms in the folkloristic synthesis carried out by myself and my colleagues here, have been process and especially performance; this latter concept allowed us to relate the formal features of cultural expression of the social dimensions of enactment, as in the relationship between the performer and audience, how they develop and fulfill patterns of expectation, how license to perform is invoked and used, and so on. My turn to the larger term enactment arose out of a growing recognition that there were a number of events which I and my colleagues have described in performance terms, like games, and rituals, which were stretching the idea of performance somewhat out of shape. […] My drawing on enactment, then, is my attempt to find a term which includes performances, games, rituals, festivals, etc., in short, any cultural event in which community members come together to participate, employ the deepest and most complex multivocal and polyvalent signs and symbols of their repertoire of expression thus entering into a potentially significant experience” (80).
Bauman, Richard. (1977) 1984. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights: Waveland.
“In recent years, the concept of performance has begun to assume central importance in the orientation of increasing numbers of folklorists and other interested in verbal art. As employed in the work of these scholars, the term ‘performance’ has been used to convey a dual sense of artistic action – the doing of folklore – and artistic event – the performance situation, involving performer, art form, audience, and setting – both of which are basic to the developing performance approach. The usage accords well with the conventional meaning of the term ‘performance’ and has served to point up the fundamental reorientation from folklore-as-materials to folklore-as-communication which characterized the thinking of these scholars. Conventional meanings can carry scholarship just so far, however, before the lack of conceptual rigor begins to constrain analytical insight rather than advancing it. In view of the centrality of performance […] the time seems opportune for efforts aimed at expanding the conceptual content of folkloric performance as a communicative phenomenon, beyond the general usage it has carried us up to this point. That is the purpose of this book.
“[…C]onsistent with the chiefly sociolinguistic and anthropological roots of the performance approach, the terms ‘verbal art’ and ‘oral literature’ provide a better frame of reference, at least as a point of departure for the ideas to be advanced here, than the more diffuse and problematic term ‘folklore’. [....] Many things have been studied under the name of folklore, but verbal art has always been at or near the center of the larger [/] domain and has constituted the chief common ground between anthropological folklorists and those of other persuasions” (5).
Toelken, Barre. 1979. The Dynamics of Folklore. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
“Tradition [means] not some static, immutable force from the past, but those pre-existing culture-specific materials and options that bear upon the performer more heavily than do his or her own personal tastes and talents. We recognize in the use of tradition that such matters as content and style have been for the most part passed on but not invented by the performer.
“Dynamic recognizes, on the other hand, that in the processing of these contents and styles in performance, the artist’s own unique talents of inventiveness within the tradition are highly valued and are expected to operate strongly. Time and space dimensions remind us that the resulting variations may spread geographically with great rapidity (as jokes do) as well as down through time (good luck beliefs). Folklore is made up of informal expressions passed around long enough to have become recurrent in form and context, but changeable in performance.”
“…modern American folklorists do not limit their attention to the rural, quaint, or "backward" elements of the culture. Rather, they will study and discuss any expressive phenomena–urban or rural–that seem to act like other previously recognized folk traditions. This has led to the development of a field of inquiry with few formal boundaries, one with lots of feel but little definition, one both engaging and frustrating.”
Richmond, W. Edson. 1983. “Introduction.” In Handbook of American FolkloreRichard Dorson, ed.: xi-xix. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
“It has long been a cliché that there are more definitions of folklore than there are folklorists. For at least a decade after The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend was published in 1949, it was common for folklorists to initiate articles and books with the statement that The Standard Dictionary included twenty-one different definitions of the word folklore, and to note that these definitions were composed by the then most prominent and influential American scholars involved in the field […]. Moreover, many scholars who searched beyond the entry for ‘folklore’ itself found the number of definitions expanded interminably. Thus the concept of folklore in the 1950s and the immediately succeeding decade was nebulous.
“The discipline had grown out of a study of medieval literature married, albeit without canonical sanction, to certain anthropological studies. This resulted in a synthesized definition of folklore: popular tradition, the French tradition populaire, modified by the creative imagination and the more-or-less retentive memory of the folk, though just who the folk were was moot. Such an emphasis on tradition served to maintain the nineteenth-century precept that folklore was a preserved relic and therefore implied that folklore was a vestigial element in culture, an interesting and revealing key to the past, but of little or no significance for modern society.
“The word folklore is, of course, as abstract a term as are the words love, liberty, and literature. Its precise meaning lies in the mind of its definer, not in the thing itself, which is both as real and unreal as any of the concepts mentioned above. [….] In brief, in the slightly more than one hundred years between Thoms’s creation of the word and the publication of The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend there was little change in its meaning. Since that time, however, there have been great changes, and the word folklore has come to be defined by some as whatever folklorists are interested in” (xi).
“In this evolutionary process two fundamental elements of the definition developed by Thoms and his descendants have been severely modified: tradition [/] and a restricted concept of the word folk. No longer do folklorists confine their studies solely to those things which are perpetuated orally or by precept; no longer do folklorists concern themselves only with backward classes or the less cultured classes of more advanced peoples. They are, instead, concerned with those things which appear and, most importantly, reappear in varied forms whenever and wherever human beings interact” (xi-xii).
Ben-Amos, Dan. 1984. “The Seven Strands of Tradition: Varieties in Its Meaning in American Folklore Studies.” Journal of Folklore Research 21: 97-131.
“[T]radition has survived criticism and remained a symbol of and for folklore” (124).
Oring, Elliott, ed. 1986. Folk groups and folklore genres: An introduction. Logan: Utah State Univ. Press.
Oxford bibliographies: Introductory essays aimed at college students. After an overview chapter discussing various definitions of folklore, essays discuss the major ideas in work on ethnic, religious, occupational, and children’s groups followed by sections on narratives, ballads and folksongs, riddles and proverbs, folk objects, and documenting folklore (in a pre-Internet age).
Glassie, Henry. 1989. The Spirit of Folk Art. New York: Abrams.
"Folklore,” though coined as recently as 1846, is the old word, the parental concept to the adjective "folk.” Customarily folklorists refer to the host of published definitions, add their own, and then get on with their work, leaving the impression that definitions of folklore are as numberless as insects. But all the definitions bring into dynamic association the ideas of individual creativity and collective order.
Folklore is traditional. Its center holds. Changes are slow and steady. Folklore is variable. The tradition remains wholly within the control of its practitioners. It is theirs to remember, change, or forget. Answering the needs of the collective for continuity and of the individual for active participation, folklore…is that which is at once traditional and variable.
Dundes, Alan, and Carol R. Pagter. 1992. Work hard and you shall be rewarded: Urban folklore from the paperwork empire. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press.
Introduction argues against folklore as oral communication because of the role of technology (in this case, photocopiers and facsimilie machines) in generating folk forms.
“The concept of folk as employed by folk was employed by folklorists in Europe normally refers either to a lower stratum of society (vulgus in populo) or to an old-fashioned, backward segment within a so-called civilized society. Frequently, the criterion of literacy was a factor in the definition of folk. Specifically, the folk could not read or write. In this light the folk was defined as the illiterate in a literate society. Societies without a written language did not, according to this definition, qualify as folk at all. Such societies, variously ethnocentrically labeled as preliterate, nonliterate, primitive, or savage, were not folk, and for this reason even today the art or the music of the American Indian is rarely, if ever, referred to as folk art or folk music. Rather they fall under the academic rubric of ‘primitive’ art or music. In the present context, the exclusion of peoples without a form of writing was no more absurd than the exclusion of peoples who could write. One should realize that, in the strict definition of ‘folk,’ there could be no such thing as ‘urban’ folklore. […]”
“The modern definition of folk as any group whatsoever that shares at least one common factor – language, occupation, religion, ethnicity – makes it possible to consider the folklore of various urban groups” (xvii).
“If American folklorists have been willing to extend the rather limited nineteenth-century concept of ‘folk’ as peasant, they have [/] not been equally flexible in their reconsideration of one of the crucial alleged criteria of ‘lore’, namely, the necessity of its having been transmitted orally. American folklorists appear to be united in their virtually unanimous agreement that folklore, by definition, refers to materials orally transmitted. We disagree with this criterion, and it is our hope that publication of the present study will put an end to this misconception once and for all” (viii).
Definitions of Folklore. 1996. Journal of Folklore Research,33(3), 255-264.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. (1968) 1998. The Study of American folklore: An Introduction. 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton.
Oxford bibliographies: A widely used textbook focusing on American folklore, although the introductory chapters on “The Field of Folklore” and “The Study of Folklore” cover the field globally. The organization of the work is by genres—oral, social, and material—with basic definitions of each folkloric form.
“Folklorists generally associate five qualities with true folklore: (1) its content is oral (usually verbal), or custom-related, or material; (2) it is traditional in form and transmission; (3) it exists in different versions; (4) it is usually anonymous ; and (5) it tends to become formularized. Each of these terms is used in a broad sense, and the first three qualities are the primary ones to be considered in arriving at a clear definition of folklore.
“Folklore is oral or custom-related in that it passes by word of mouth and informal demonstration or imitation from one person to another and from one generation to the next. Much folklore is ‘aural,’ reaching the ear either from voices or from musical instruments. While written folklore (such as graffiti or autograph rhymes) is verbal without being oral, its transmission is customary, not institutionalized. The same is true for learning to produce or use folk artifacts, such as whittled wooden chains, hand-sewn quilts, or traditional log cabins. Folklore is never transmitted entirely in a formal manner through printed books, phonograph records, school classes, church sermons, or by other learned, sophisticated, and commercial means.
“Folklore is traditional in two senses in that it is passed on repeatedly in a relatively fixed or standard form, and that it circulates among members of a particular group” (12).
“Generally speaking, then, folklore may be defined as those materials in culture that circulate traditionally among members of any group in different versions, whether in oral form or by means of customary example, as well as the processes of traditional performance and communication” (15).
Elsewhere:
“Folklore comprises the unrecorded traditions of a people; it includes both the form and content of these traditions and their style or technique of communication from person to person.”
“Folklore is the traditional, unofficial, non-institutional part of culture. It encompasses all knowledge, understandings, values, attitudes, assumptions, feelings, and beliefs transmitted in traditional forms by word of mouth or by customary examples.”
Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing The Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
‘Folk music’ has no “descriptive validity [but] the phrase stands as shorthand for people’s conceptions of ‘pure’ vernacular music. […] One might therefore imagine terms like ‘folk’ and ‘pure’ as ciphers waiting to be filled: people imbue them with meanings that have cultural relevance and power to them” (5).
McClelland, Bruce. 2000. “Online Orality: The Internet, Folklore, and the Culture in Russia.” In Culture and Technology in New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in Post-Communist Nations, ed. Laura B. Lengel: 179-91. Stamford: Ablex.
Folklore is “communicative behavior whose primary characteristics […] are that […] it doesn’t ‘belong’ to an individual or group […] and in the modern context therefore transcends issues of intellectual property; and [that…] it is transmitted [/] spontaneously, from one individual (or group of individuals) to another under certain conditions, frequently without regard for remuneration or return benefit. As it is transmitted, it often undergoes modification, according to the inclination of the transmitter’” (184).
Klein, Barbro. Folklore. 2001. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Volume 8. Pp. 5711-5715. New York: Elsevier.
“'Folklore' has four basic meanings. First, it denotes oral narration, rituals, crafts, and other forms of vernacular expressive culture. Second, folklore, or ‘folkloristics,’ names an academic discipline devoted to the study of such phenomena. Third, in everyday usage, folklore sometimes describes colorful ‘folkloric’ phenomena linked to the music, tourist, and fashion industries. Fourth, like myth, folklore can mean falsehood” (5711).
Yoder, Don. 2001. Discovering American Folklife: Essays on Folk Culture and the Pennsylvania Dutch. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books.
“There are of course as many definitions of ‘folklore’ as there are scholars working in the field. But basically there are two main trends in definitions of the term. One trend attempts to limit folklore to the spiritual folk culture, the other attempts to stretch folklore to include both spiritual and material folk culture. […]. The stretching of the term folklore to include the totality of folk culture would seem to be a recent trend, a belated admission of the insufficiency of the term, as usually defined in the English-speaking countries, to deal with folk culture as a whole” (27).
Canvasses the fits and starts with which English-speaking folkloristics has attempted the latter. Points out that older terms in German (Volkskunde) and Swedish (folkliv) encompass material culture. “In fact, ‘folklore’ is an attempt – not a successful one, as time seems to be proving – to find an equivalent in English. ‘Folklife’ […] is a successful rendering which preserves the total range of interest expressed in the highly developed science of Volkskunde.”
Goes on to distinguish ‘folklife’ in European and then in (limited) American scholarship. The first two chapters of this text would be very useful for pursuing this term further.
Noyes, Dorothy. 2004. “Folklore.” In The Social Science Encyclopedia. 3rd edition. Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper, eds.: 375-378. New York: Routledge.
“Folklore is a metacultural category used to mark certain genres and practices within modern societies as being not modern. By extension, the word refers to the study of such materials. More specific definitions place folklore on the far side of the various epistemological, aesthetic and technological binary oppositions that distinguish the modern from its presumptive contraries. Folklore therefore typically evokes both repudiation and nostalgia” (375).
Sims, Martha C and Martine Stephens. 2005. Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and their Traditions. Logan: Utah State University Press.
“Folklore is many things, and it’s almost impossible to define succinctly. It’s both what folklorists study and the name of the discipline they work within. Yes, folklore is folk songs and legends. It’s also quilts, Boy Scout badges, high school marching band initiations, jokes, chain letters, nicknames, holiday food… and many other things you might or might not expect. Folklore exists in cities, suburbs and rural villages, in families, work groups and dormitories. Folklore is present in many kinds of informal communication, whether verbal (oral and written texts), customary (behaviors, rituals) or material (physical objects). It involves values, traditions, ways of thinking and behaving. It’s about art. It’s about people and the way people learn. It helps us learn who we are and how to make meaning in the world around us” (1-2). It’s seems like there’s better stuff elsewhere in this volume.
Haring, Lee. 2008. “America’s Antitheoretical Folkloristics.” Journal of Folklore Research 45 (1 Special Issue: Grand Theory): 1–9.
“To pose these questions leads inevitably back to defining the object of our investigation. [….] The definition game, which never ends among us (Ben-Amos 1971; Dundes 1966; Georges and Jones 1995:231–32), sprang up during the discussion of these papers, as spontaneously as touch football” (4).
Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. University of Chicago Press.
"The discourse that brings the idea of 'the folk' into existence is historically tied to nationalist projects, and more broadly to the discourse of modernity, which needs the concepts of 'folk' and 'traditional' to stand in binary contrast to the conception of 'modern' as a cultural category; that is, we understand 'modern culture' only in relation to what it is not - the 'folk' and 'traditional'. [...] The symbols folk and traditional, as currently understood, make sense only in relation to the broader premises of the discourse of modernity" (156).
Blank, Trevor J., ed. 2009. Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular expression in a digital world. Logan: Utah State Univ. Press.
Oxford bibliographies: The first volume of essays exploring connections of folklore to the Internet. Includes theoretical introductions on adjusting definitions of folklore to meet the scholarly challenges of folk practices on the Internet. Studies in the volume include e-mailed humor, memorials on MySpace, and rumor and legend on the Internet.
Blank, Trevor J. “Introduction: Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet”: 1-20.
Contains useful canvassing of developments in folkloric anxiety and pessimism since Ben-Amos.
“For this book, and hopefully beyond it, folklore should be considered to be the outward expression of creativity – in myriad forms and interactions – by individuals and their communities. The debate then falls to what constitutes creativity or even what constitutes community. That should be the job of the folklorist to argue cogently one way or another” (6). Allies with Ben-Amos in getting rid of ‘tradition’.
McNeill, Lynne S. 2013. Folklore Rules. Utah State University Press.
Cites Ben-Amos 1971 as "possibly the most commonly taught definition of folklore" (17-8), and relates "artistic communication" to lore and "small group" to folk. The "formal or unofficial level of cultural understanding is the 'folk' level, the level on which cultural knowledge is shared, enacted, and propagated by regular, everyday people. Instead of laws we have customs; instead of guidebooks we have experience and observation." Formerly about rurality or literacy; now about "all of us, as we exist in the informal or unofficial realms of our cultural lives." The "folk group" is thus "all people who share an unofficial culture together" (affirms Dundes 1965's definition).
Foster, Michael Dylan. “Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque.” In The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, Michael Dyan Foster & Jeffrey A. Tolbert, eds.: 3-36. Logan: Utah State University Press.
By stressing […] the profit motive […] we also establish a meaningful counter-distinction to similar forms of cultural expression usually labeled folklore. Defining folklore, of course, opens up a whole other (related) can of worms, something I would assiduously like to avoid in this limited space. But I do want to suggest that the processes and products of folklore tend to be oriented toward informal, unofficial, noncommercial, noninstitutional modes of production, transmission, and consumption. Even in contexts in which traditionality, aesthetics, and the dynamics of ‘small-group’ or face-to-face communications are questionable, we can usually still maintain that the processes and products of folklore are rarely created with official, institutional, or commercial sanction and mass sales or profit in mind” (7).
“Folklore as a concept is, of course, notoriously difficult to define, and this is not the place to explore its discursive history. For the purposes of the present discussion, however, I characteristic folkloric items and events as generally unofficial, noninstitutional forms of expressive culture. No author or designer or professional artist dictates what is correct or incorrect; often the item in question is of anonymous origins and/or the shared property of a particular group – from a family or village to an online community or nation. Of course, none of this is cut and dried: this is less a definition than it is a set of tendencies or orientations (see Oring 1986). For 'textbook' introductions to the concept and its (possible) definitions, see, e.g., Georges and Jones 1995; McNeill 2013; Oring 1986; Sims and Stephens 2011; Toelken 1996” (29).
Bronner, Simon J. 2017. Folklore: The Basics. New York: Routledge.
Very cogent, useful canvassing of the development of the term, focusing on tradition.
“Simply put, folklore is ‘traditional knowledge put into, and drawing from, practice.’” (46).