What Folklore Reveals about Humanity  
by Mary Magoulick

Lecture Notes for Introduction to Folklore (or folk art)

FOLKLORE

• Vital and persistent in all our lives

• Broad, common, contemporary and ancient

• In colloquial (everyday) English= falsehood, nonsense, childish, old-fashioned

• But actually interconnected with tradition, community, creativity, and innovation

Rug makers in Turkey, wood carvers in Africa, Navajos performing night-way chant, Maoris telling myth, quilters from Georgia, singers from Appalachia, fiddlers in France, potters in Bangladesh – all learn, use, perform, or display their art IN COMMUNITIES

THE FOLK
    William Thoms coined term "folk lore" (1846) in England

In the PAST (Since 19^th century) – folk were illiterate peasants of a given region

• Collections and recordings of folktales throughout Europe

• Educated, "civilized" people studying the folk did not consider themselves folk, but instead believed themselves "above" the folk, civilized, more rational, more adult

• 19^th c. evolutionary perspectives from science influenced social scientists, leading to explicit notions of primitive versus civilized within and among societies

• Folk (nostalgic) = quaint, childish, foolish in customs, superstitions, and stories

• Many of our conceptions about folklore as childish, insignificant, or untrue reflect the bias of early scholars who thought of the folk, however much they were admired, as being on a lower rung of what was literally conceptualized as a social ladder

In the PRESENT (since the 1960’s)

• Fieldwork (first hand knowledge & observation) revealed similarities as humans (less judgment as “others”/primitives)

• But in fact complex, humane, technically astute, artistically inspired and enriching, philosophically profound, morally deep, and fully mature

• Today we recognize as folk any collectivity (a group or a culture): "Who are the folk? Among others, we are!" Alan Dundes proclaimed in 1977 (1980, 19)

• Reorientation in thinking – universality of the human condition & centrality of folklore to all cultures

THE LORE

In the PAST meant texts (stories and songs)
Now = any willed, individual, creative expression

FOLKLORE DEFINITION: Since the 1960's and 70's folklore has been defined as "artistic communication in small groups" (Ben-Amos 1972) or "the study of human creativity in its own context" (Glassie, 1993)

• “Art” made with an awareness of and a connection to tradition and community

• Tradition & folklore = dynamic processes connected to community & creativity

“AUTHENTICITY” in terms of tradition = created out of a sense of community

• Does not mean “exactly like it was in the past”

• Involves continuity (connection to past)

• Also involves inspiration, insight and will

CULTURES ALWAYS CHANGE – tradition = connecting to past while showing clear awareness of present and accepting responsibility to shape future (as dynamic as the lives and minds of the humans who create)

ART: decorative in form, proportion, and detail (aesthetics primary)

CRAFT: made to serve a specific and important function -- to be used in everyday life (function primary)

o      Furniture, tools, caned chairs, quilts, pots, baskets, etc.

o      Nonetheless decorative in form, proportion, and detail

Transformation of Craft into Art requires enhanced, refined ornamentation, challenging self, but same skills  

EXAMPLE #1 – Pueblo pottery in Acoma, New Mexico

• Pueblo potters attend to very old methods, techniques, materials, and even designs

• Families of potters learn and practice their art together

• But each Pueblo pot is unique in design, decorating, etc.

• Most successful & renowned potters today – as was likely true in the past = fresh and original designers

• They also honor past, learn methods, and borrow techniques of previous generations (continuity)

Henry Glassie: “In a time dominated by industrial production, potters at Acoma and in Georgia have determined to hold to elder techniques, digging their own clay and forming it in their own hands, while their nimble minds direct the process of creation. This mix of accommodation and resistance establishes a frame of adaptive revival within which forms and techniques hold steady but functions shift" (1999 – The Potter’s Art, p. 56)

Functional shift

• Pueblo pots were used primarily to carry water

• Today’s function has shifted 

• Still used in sacred ceremonial context

• More often pots are made today specifically as ornaments

At its best, all art, whether folk art or fine art, either engages a process of "transcendence of consciousness" or leads us "into an awareness of our position in the cosmos" (Glassie, 1999, 119).

Folklore or Folk Art Today

• Not the artifacts you see in the cases in museums

• Art = product of process of convergence (people always significant – community)

• between individual, willed creativity and communal life

• Glassie: Tradition "is rooted in volition and it flowers in variation and innovation. It opposes the alien and imposed . . ." so that the "center [of folklore] is the merger of individual creativity and social order. Philosophically, politically, my discipline upholds the human right to the construction of a meaningful universe through artistic action; it stresses the interdependence of the personal, the social, the sacred; the aesthetic, the ethical, the cosmological; the beautiful, the good, the true. Practically, folklore is the study of human creativity in its own context" (1993, 9).

• Certain examples esp. celebrated, enjoyed, hailed (as best examples) = especially competent, inspired, or profound

• Embodies the values and visions of its makers

• Allows for an expression of how culture has shaped us, even while the artist may challenge the present and try to shape the future

• Unlike most art in museums, such as paintings we are trained to consider as art, folk art is not limited to a frame

• Throughout time and space, many of our most profound arts globally were folk arts like textiles, ceramics, and stories, which urge us to glimpses of excellence even within our daily lives

• Folklore today: urban legends, joke cycles, rap, blues, media-based beliefs like UFO's or Bigfoot, garage bands, internet hoaxes, foodways, and yard art

• Created in community, any art (whether verbal or material)

• Learned from relatives, mentors, friends, even strangers, connects us to each other

• Draws on collective experience and wisdom

When communal learning & individual inspiration flourish, folklore/art thrives 

Our sense of history is built partly from folklore

Folklore directs us or allows us to imagine how to live

EXAMPLE #2 – Myths (very popular and much-studied oral genre)

• Have been considered as spoken versions of history

• Languages like French have same word for history and story

• Word myth itself (from the Greek) means story or word

• Words and symbols form the basis of our communication, which linguistically largely revolves around stories, even today

• Some might describe myths as metaphorical interpretations of the past

• Myth and history both help people to try to understand their tragedies and to imagine the constraints and options of human possibility (and thus they shift)

POLITICS OF FOLKLORE (changing/challenging culture)

• Dynamic conceptualization of folklore à dynamic and fluid nature of all culture

Learning to appreciate the context from which art flows ~ recognizing the artistic genius in communities all around the world  

• Muslims

• Asians

• Africans

• People of color

• Poor people  

• Communities of Women

Henry Glassie: "Wishing truly to understand, we will not merely ask people beyond our walls for facts to assimilate into our schemes. We will learn to engage in collegial exchange with non-academic intellectuals, discovering in conversation new arts of discourse and new theories of time" (1999b, p. 9)

 Understanding folklore helps

• Enlarge circle of those we consider worthy (academically, artistically, historically)

• Attend to the stories and art of folk artists around the world

• Listens to artists in their own context (as part of a community)

• Learn to appreciate others and ourselves more fully

• Eliminate notion of alien or exotic “other” because we realize the logic of their art/community

• Context helps us understand the art

• The art helps us understand the humanity of the so-called others

• Thus we realize our sympathies and interconnections

Realized within the context of both the individual lives & the communities crucial to its creation, folk art teaches us tolerance and understanding

FOLKLORE  resonates locally and globally

• Fundamentally appealing because it typically displays the best of our humanity

• Shows the strengths of our community

• Binds us to traditions while helping to shape our future

• Greatest thing that folklore teaches us is our common humanity

• We are all the folk

• Though not all of us may have the skills/expertise of a given art

• Always there are those whose competency flowers into art

• We are all part of communities that these arts come from and express  

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