FOLKLORE DEFINITIONS
Barbro Klein. Folklore. In International Encyclopedia of the Social
and Behavioral Sciences. Volume 8. Pp. 5711-5715. New York:
Elsevier, 2001.
'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. [P. 5711]
Martha C. Sims and Martine Stephens. Living Folklore: An
Introduction to the Study of People and their Traditions. Pp. 1-2.
Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005.
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, chian 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. [Pages 1-2]
Jan Brunvand. The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction,
2nd edition. New York: W.W.Norton, 1978.
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.
Henry Glassie. The Spirit of Folk Art. New York: Abrams, 1989.
"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.
HOMEWORK
Read and translate these definitions into Vietnamese
William A. Wilson. The Deeper Necessity: Folklore and the
Humanities. Journal of American Folklore 101:400, 1988.
Surely no other discipline is more concerned with linking us to the cultural
heritage from the past than is folklore; no other discipline is more
concerned with revealing the interrelationships of different cultural
expressions than is folklore; and no other discipline is so concerned …with
discovering what it is to be human. It is this attempt to discover the basis
of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human existence, that
puts folklore study at the very center of humanistic study.
Mary Hufford. American Folklife: A Commonwealth of Cultures.
Washington: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1991.
What is folklife? Like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, folklife is often
hidden in full view, lodged in the various ways we have of discovering and
expressing who we are and how we fit into the world. Folklife is reflected
in the names we bear from birth, invoking affinities with saints, ancestors,
or cultural heroes. Folklife is the secret languages of children, the
codenames of CBoperators, and the working slang of watermen and
doctors. It is the shaping of everyday experiences in stories swapped
around kitchen tables or parables told from pulpits. It is the African
American rhythms embedded in gospel hymns, bluegrass music, and hip
hop, and the Lakota flutist rendering anew his people’s ancient
courtship songs.
Folklife is the sung parodies of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the
variety of ways there are to skin a muskrat, preserve string beans, or join
two pieces of wood. Folklife is the society welcoming new members at bris
and christening, and keeping the dead incorporated on All Saints Day. It is
the marking of the Jewish New Year at Rosh Hashanah and the Persian
New Year at Noruz. It is the evolution of vaqueros into buckaroos, and the
riderless horse, its stirrups backward, in the funeral processions of high
military commanders.
Folklife is the thundering of foxhunters across the rolling Rappahannock
countryside and the listening of hilltoppers to hounds crying fox in the
Tennessee mountains. It is the twirling of lariats at western rodeos, and
the spinning of double-dutch jumpropes in West Philadelphia. It is
scattered across the landscape in Finnish saunas and Italian vineyards;
engraved in the split-rail boundaries of Appalachian "hollers” and the
stone fences around Catskill "cloves”; scrawled on urban streetscapes by
graffiti artists; and projected onto skylines by the tapering steeples of
churches, mosques, and temples.
Folklife is community life and values, artfully expressed in myriad forms
and interactions. Universal, diverse, and enduring, it enriches the nation
and makes us a commonwealth of cultures.
REFERENCES
http://www.afsnet.org/?page=WhatIsFolklore
