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Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
Simon J. Bronner
Pennsylvania State University
Harrisburg, USA
M
y title is a reverent nod to Dan Ben-Amos’s pivotal essay, “Toward a
Denition of Folklore in Context” (1971), in which he famously proposed a
denition of folklore as “artistic communication in small groups.” I use it as
a starting point to ask whether or not practice theory can inform a revised denition
and concept of folklore, as necessitated by the advent of the twenty-rst century digital
age (Bronner 2012). Such a denition should go beyond folkloric behavior in digital
communication and be applicable to a variety of cultural phenomena or “practices,”
including those not covered by Ben-Amos’s denition. At the time it was published,
his essay sparked discussion not only about the changing characteristics of folklore in
a post-industrial world, but also about folklorists’ need to have a distinctive denition
of folklore for disciplinary identity. I hope my consideration of practice as a keyword
of folkloristic and cultural analysis will renew thinking about the phenomena analysts
observe to be folklore as well as the scholarly enterprise, or discipline, to which this
information contributes. My stab at dening folklore at this time is not coincidental.
I point out that we are in the midst of an auspicious time for this, as current social
and technological factors at work are similar to those that prompted the denitional
discourse around Ben-Amos’s theoretical grounding of performance and contextual
approaches. In both cases, signs point toward similar paradigm shifts.
To proceed, I rst review the conditions and dialogues that prompted Ben-Amos
and other folklorists to undergird their action-oriented study with a denition that
would announce their analytical concerns for a transformative age. I reect on the
efcacy of Ben-Amos’s denition for a rising discipline. I look at the span of time from
the 1960s to the end of the century and move on to assess challenges the dawn of the
twenty-rst century presented to conducting cultural analysis of folklore as “artistic
communication in small groups.” In the concluding section, I propose a denition
around the concept of praxis, growing out of Ben-Amos’s concern for folklore as a
process-oriented subject. I evaluate the ways that such a denition addresses those
challenges, and I explore the ultimate philosophical implications of this move for a
theory of mind in culture.
The Indeniteness and Inertness of Folklore During the 1960s
As a point of departure, Ben-Amos’s denition responded to a European ethnological
precedent of conceptualizing folklore as a product of rooted or peasant communities
(Erixon 1937; Dundes 1966). From the literary side, he addressed the text-based
emphasis on survivals and literary treatment going back to the “Great Team” of
Victorian British folklorists (Dorson 1968; Dundes 1969). However, rather than
revising a denition from the ethnological or literary side, Ben-Amos suggested that
Cultural Analysis 15.1 (2016): 6-27
© 2016 by The University of California.
All rights reserved
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7
folklorists of his generation needed to generate a distinctive conceptualization of their
subject and professional enterprise. As Maria Leach’s twenty-one different denitions
of folklore in Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legends
(1949) showed, there was hardly consensus on the scope of folklore or folklore studies
by the mid-twentieth-century, although various keywords such as tradition, oral,
transmission, culture, and literature frequently surfaced. Anthropological folklorists
tended to underscore culture and transmission while literary scholars were naturally
drawn to literature and orality. As the iconoclastic 1960s began, a probably less
acknowledged, but nonetheless signicant work is Åke Hultkrantz’s eight “headings”
of folklore denitions in General Ethnological Concepts (1960), in which he pointed to
the common ground of tradition among different factions of folkloristic work. Ben-
Amos’s “context” at the time (according to what he calls his “personal narrative” of
making his denitional essay) is the prompting of an innovative, cohesive denition
suited to the rise of an independent, academic and degree-granting discipline (Ben-
Amos 2014, 12).
With the development of the discipline during the 1960s, courses in folklore
proliferated (Baker 1971; Baker 1978). Publishers became interested in folklore
textbooks that called for a denition of the subject, and Ben-Amos reported that he
had a textbook project, along with Alan Dundes in his Study of Folklore (1965) and Jan
Harold Brunvand in The Study of American Folklore (1968). Ben-Amos noted that earlier
in 1946, on the 100
th
anniversary of W. J. Thoms’s denition of “lore” or learning “of the
people,” the denition had received re-examination but it had not resulted in a notable
change of approach (see Herskovits 1946; Thompson 1951). Of signicance to the rst
public unveiling of his denition in 1967 is the American Folklore Society’s rst meeting
in the twentieth century outside the auspices of either the American Anthropological
Association or the Modern Language Association, just the year before. With a spirit of
independence in the air and a number of young, new folklore doctorates in attendance,
Ben-Amos presented his denition as a rushed, last presentation on a panel with the
broad rubric of “Oral and Written Literatures.” Of the participants on the panel, he
was the only one associated with a separate graduate program in folklore, and his
denition addressed narrative process as the core of folklore for oral transmission. For
Ben-Amos, his thinking was affected not only by his degree in folklore from Indiana
University but his appointment to the graduate folklore program at the University of
Pennsylvania (Ben-Amos’s previous appointment at UCLA was in anthropology).
Thus Ben-Amos and other participants at the conference pondered the
distinctiveness of folklore, not only as material but also as the focus of an emerging,
hybridized discipline. As Ben-Amos recalls, American Folklore Society members
were often split between English and anthropology departments and fretted over the
“indeniteness of folklore, or the inertness of the discipline that the term had initiated”
(Ben-Amos 2014, 12; see also Foster 1953, 159). Earlier in the decade, American Folklore
Society President Francis Lee Utley tried to nd consensus by suggesting that the
common denominators in Leach’s twenty-one denitions were orality and tradition.
Leaning toward the literary side of folklore, Utley (1961) offered a succinct denition of
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Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
“literature orally transmitted,” preceded a few years earlier by anthropologist William
R. Bascom’s even more concise phrase “verbal art” (1955; see also Bauman, R. 1975). Yet
this irritated the newly independent-minded students of folklife or “folk culture” who
viewed the scope of the eld more broadly to include ethnological concerns of social
and material culture (Foster 1953; Glassie 1968; Yoder 1963). In the folklife perspective,
many of the cultural phenomena they considered traditional were utilitarian practices
rather than artistic oral performances.
Other, younger folklorists with degrees in folklore from American universities had
also expressed discomfort with the “indeniteness” of folklore in the few years before
Ben-Amos’s (Ben-Amos 2014, 15). While teaching at the University of Texas, Roger
Abrahams (who wrote a folkloristic dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania’s
English department) posed an initial challenge by objectifying folklore as “a series
of artifacts which obey culture’s general laws, those generated by the conict of
innovation and stability, and complicated by the interactions of different groups” (1963,
98). Abrahams proposed that folkloristic analysis accordingly focus on the processes
and contexts that produce the artifacts of folklore. Also complaining of the divergent
approaches of literature and anthropology, Abrahams suggested a convergence,
a denition of folklore as “items of traditional performance which call attention to
themselves because of their artice,” or more succinctly “traditional activities” (1968,
145). Accordingly, “the full analysis of a tradition or genre,” he declared, “calls for
study of the organizational elements of both items and performances” or in other
words, the rhetorical use of folklore (1968, 145). His emphasis on tradition and the
agency of tradition-bearers could be viewed as a reconciliation of folklore as oral and
folklife as social-material phenomena.
Abrahams drew attention to performance to underscore the active, relevant uses
of folklore in everyday life, but in doing so, narrowed the scope of materials that
folklorists considered to contemporary verbal expressions. With a degree in folklore
and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in progress, Henry Glassie theorized
that this concentration on orality and performance had an American background
in contrast to a European orientation toward culture and repeated social, non-
performative practices that are “culminations of culturally determined know-how,”
such as plowing, building, and crafting (Glassie 1968, 5). With material folk culture
in mind, Glassie offered a consensus view that “a folk thing is traditional and non-
popular” and pointed out that this holds for the composition of new tales as well as
the construction of a wagon (1968, 6). Although problematic for marking a hard and
fast line between folk and popular, Glassie’s denition attempted to guide a study of
oral and material forms characterized by continuity with the past, localized usage and
association, and non-academic learning by imitation and demonstration.
Attracted to structuralism and intrigued by paremiologist Archer Taylor’s
observation that folklore expresses analogic, or connotative, reasoning (1946, 104;
see also Ben-Amos 2014, 14, who called it “associative thinking”), Elli-Kaija Köngäs,
another recent folklore doctorate, applied her experience in the literary “Finnish
method” of motif and type analysis and sought a keyword to represent a discipline as
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9
well as a body of material. She wrote, “It must be possible to nd the distinctive feature
which shows its [folklore’s] identication and which shows in what respect it differs
from literature or anthropology” (1963, 84). For her, that feature was transmission,
not as an end of study but as evidence of mind, which she argued is what folklorists
should ultimately seek.
Alan Dundes agreed that a cognitive goal would help a discipline nd explanations
in the materials under study, but he criticized the criterion of transmission because
while processes such as driving a tractor and brushing one’s teeth are transmitted, they
would not usually be recognized by folklorists as folklore (1965, 1-2). Dundes answered
the question, “What is Folklore?” in his textbook The Study of Folklore by suggesting a
“folk” rather than a “lore” oriented denition regarding traditions arising out of a folk
group, “any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor” and “help
the group have a sense of group identity” (1965, 2). One of the distinctions in this broad
and exible denition, Dundes asserted, was its difference as an “American concept,”
different from European notions of peasant or class-based denitions. In a complex,
modern society, it could account for the emergence of repeated expressions or practices
used folklorically within a family, locality, or occupation—or more temporary groups
of friends, campmates, or music fans. Without the criterion of oral transmission, the
denition also included the possibility of material traditions and mediation of items
by technology. What it did not dene, however, was the kind of emergent items
considered to be folkloric. Dundes addressed this problem by inventorying folkloric
genres, which the new items presumably resembled, but critics such as Elliott Oring
found this approach still “indenite” (Oring 1986, 2-4).
Oring criticized Dundes’s idea of group as more relevant to North American
situations than to a universal model of folklore because of their absence of a peasantry
and ancient legacy upon which European concepts of folklore were built (Oring 1986,
2-4; see also Cocchiara 1971, 467-95). Hultkrantz, in his summary of European ideas on
folklore, acknowledged that one of the approaches to folklore “that easily developed
in Europe” was an understanding of “the total culture of the folk in contradistinction
to the culture of the higher classes” (1960, 138). But he also identied two other “big
groups of denitions on the subject”: folklore as “cultural traditions” and as a form
of “literature” linked to culture (1960, 138). Hultkrantz abstracted these tendencies as
“the spiritual tradition of the folk, particularly oral tradition” (1960, 137). He derived
this statement from delegates at a 1955 congress of folklorists in Arnhem, Netherlands.
He contextualized the denition as separating their consideration of practices within
living communities from what he called Thoms’s “romantic” mid-nineteenth-century
emphasis on strange, antiquated customs in the characterization of folklore as “the
manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs etc. of the olden time”
(Hultkrantz 1960, 135). Hultkrantz blamed the discrepancy between Thoms’s original
equation of folklore with old traditions and the European ethnological emphasis on
functional interpretation of class-based groups as being “responsible for…the many
divergences in denitions up to the present time, and the dubious relations between
ethnology and folklore” (1960, 135).
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Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
According to Ben-Amos, the collective drive toward a denition during the 1960s
had several purposes. One was to identify folklore in the modern world and another
was to declare differences from other disciplines. Aware of his teacher Richard Dorson’s
campaign against “fakelore” (Dorson 1950; Dorson 1976), he thought another reason
for redening folklore at this juncture was to distinguish it from a spreading mass
or popular culture, while at the same time making its analysis more social, scientic,
or ethnographic. At the time, the folksong revival was taking hold and questions
also arose about the authenticity of folk songs on radio airwaves and commercially
produced concert stages (Dorson 1963, 434-39; Legman 1962). Ben-Amos reected
that, “the denition of folklore became a personal need rather than a task” (2014, 15).
In the context of the turbulent 1960s, with the rise of counter-cultures and subcultural
youth communities, Ben-Amos sought a new path that established, in his words, “a
correspondence between the socio-cultural and the scholarly-analytical conceptions
of folklore” (2014, 18). In other words, for a rising discipline, he wanted to nd more
connection between folklore in social reality and the way scholars analyzed the subject
of folklore, primarily in the textual manner of the historic-geographic school.
Fresh from eldwork on storytelling events in Nigeria, Ben-Amos viewed folklore as
a special form of communication separated from everyday life. Particularly inuenced
by a special issue of American Anthropologist edited by John Gumperz and Dell Hymes
and titled “The Ethnography of Communication” (1964), he adapted the keyword of
communication to a view of folklore as performance (Ben-Amos 2014, 17). Although
rst met with resistance, his denition of “artistic communication in small groups”
caught on as more folklorists representing a disciplinary perspective, particularly in
the United States, embraced event-oriented analysis and developed ideas of folklore
as performance (Ben-Amos 2014, 17). Yet the descriptive micro-functionalism of most
performance analyses and the extreme localization of expressions, mostly oral, raised
criticisms as to a lack of comparability between performative situations and limiting
folklore’s cultural phenomena to “verbal art.” Without a structural or comparable
basis, the idea of folklore as performance or “artistic communication” as applied in
analysis served to contribute further to the indeniteness of folklore.
Rethinking the Idea of Folklore and Tradition in the Digital Age
I contend that a similar conuence of factors compels folklorists to re-examine
denitions that guide folkloristic analysis at this exigent moment. As Ben-Amos
grasped the challenge of popular culture to the identication of folklore, folklorists face
questions in the digital age about the inuence of the Internet on the notion of “small
groups.” Whereas he self-critically questioned whether folklore existed in social reality,
folklorists openly voice concern about folklore’s applicability in virtual reality (Blank
2009; Blank 2012). If folklorists struggled to dene themselves between anthropologists
and literary scholars during the 1960s, arguably scholars with folkloristic identities
now seek their place among a myriad of integrative studies such as cultural studies,
women’s studies , ethnic studies, and performance studies, all of which claim their
own disciplinary locations. In addition, as the historic-geographic method of literary
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analysis and the idea of “etic analysis” came under critical scrutiny, so has performance
taken its hits for a narrowing of folkloristic analysis in addition to implying a lack of
generalization and historicity for cultural phenomena (Bronner 2006; Dundes 2005).
In practice, the denition of “artistic communication” led to detailed descriptions of
expressive narrative style rather than explanations for an array of traditional activities
or the thinking upon which they were based (Ben-Amos 1995; Bronner 2006). Although
considered a signicant aspect of folkloric transmission, performance in its limited use
appeared problematic for building a general, inclusive theory of folklore.
Consequently, tradition as a keyword received fresh review in the early twenty-
rst century as a unifying concept in folklore (Blank and Howard 2013; Bronner 2000;
Bronner 2011). However, scholars noted the ambiguity of tradition and the need
to clarify its position for folkloric processes in contradistinction to art, literature,
and history. Ben-Amos’s cohort was concerned about distinctive perspectives that
mark folkloristics as an analytical study and folklore as a subject, so too were new
complaints voiced about an “indeniteness” of their subject and “inertness” in the
discipline, even with tradition as a bedrock that covered oral and material “folkness.”
Instead of concerns about folk versus popular culture and fakelore versus folklore,
one reads anguish in the twenty-rst century over differences between folklore and
folklorism, and even folklore and the folkloresque (Foster and Tolbert 2015; Roginsky
2007; Šmidchens 1999).
One counter argument is that indeniteness is a virtue. Roger Welsch (1968)
protested Ben-Amos’s 1967 paper, for example, by maintaining that folklorists did
not need a denition. He contended that a standard denitoin potentially restricted
collecting material with arbitrary criteria. He warned that because of their compulsion
to craft a lofty discipline taking its place beside English and anthropology, “folklorists
seem to be possessed by some denitional demon” and should maintain their
independence from conventional approaches (1968, 262).
Richard Bauman (1969) retorted that a denition was essential to outlining a guiding
concept that allowed folklore to take its place as a discipline. Bauman emphasized
behavior rather than mind and appreciated that Ben-Amos “contextualized” folklore
studies as a science, particularly a social and behavioral science instead of, in his
words, “drifting aimlessly along the stream of idle and idiosyncratic speculation”
(1969, 170). Welsch brusquely replied that a denition for a diverse eld like folklore
studies sounded too much like “unanimity of thought,” and he preferred an open,
humanistic attitude that allowed for the “inevitable diversity” of methodologies. In
other words, if a folklorist studies it, it must be folklore. The implication of Welsch’s
open door policy is that folklore is what folklorists want it to be, which creates the
possible scenario that folklore is everything, and therefore nothing (Ben-Amos 1971,
10; Claus and Korom 1991, 31). Folklorists, then, provide little guidance to popular,
and often pejorative or misunderstood, views of folklore as crude relics, falsehoods,
and signs of backwardness.
I propose that folk is signicant as a modier of culture or learning or lore.
Qualifying folklore as a special type of creation, learning, and practice creates the
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Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
possibility that folk evidence is distinctly available for cultural analysis versus other
materials. If the categories of folk and popular culture, or a view of folk as non-
popular, are meaningful, then some identifying characteristics or patterns need to be
conrmed and tested. Therefore, denitions of folklore can be perceived as hypotheses
to determine what Abrahams called “dynamic qualities” of both the material and its
analysis (1968, 147). Folklorists evaluate cultural phenomena as they emerge or as they
have been documented in the past in order to test whether they fall within the scope
of a denition and can be useful to analyze cognitive, behavioral, and social processes.
Ben-Amos’s application of context to the signicance of dening folklore is similarly
apt when he states that “the denition of folklore is not merely an analytical construct,
depending upon arbitrary exclusion and inclusion of items; on the contrary, it has
a cultural and social base” (1971, 10). For Ben-Amos, folklore “is a denite realistic,
artistic, and communicative process” and there are denite “boundaries between
folklore and nonfolklore” (1971, 10; emphasis added).
In the years since Ben-Amos’s denition of “artistic communication in small
groups,” it has been vigorously debated, and even Ben-Amos appeared to argue against
himself when he questioned its omission of tradition in an essay, “The Seven Strands
of Tradition” (1984) (see also Ben-Amos 1979; Jones, S. 1979; Joyner 1975; Wilgus 1973).
His original point, he reected, was not that tradition was inconsequential, but that
in response to other denitions, it was not the sole criterion (Ben-Amos 2014, 18).
Nonetheless, it is not a stretch to say that “artistic communication in small groups”
has stood as the main benchmark of folklore in North America for over forty years,
particularly in a spate of folklore textbooks at the end of the twentieth century
emphasizing the “dynamics of folklore” (see Sims and Stephens 2005; Toelken 1979;
Webber 2015). Yet most textbooks in the twenty-rst century evade the denitional
issue or refer broadly to tradition and learning. A Companion to Folklore edited by
Regina Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem (2012) gave no denition, but, in the lead
essay, appeared to assume a social basis for the identication of folklore. Some
textbooks of around the same time, such as Living Folklore (2011) by Martha Sims and
Martine Stephens, also avoided denition by stating “folklore is many things, and it’s
almost impossible to dene succinctly,” though the authors take a stab at it anyway
by emphasizing, as Jan Harold Brunvand and Richard Dorson before them, that
“folklore is informally learned, unofcial knowledge about the world, ourselves, our
communities, our beliefs, our cultures and our traditions, that is expressed creatively
through words, music, customs, actions, behaviors and materials.” (2005, 8; emphasis
added; see also Brunvand 1968; Dorson 1972).
They fall into the trap, outlined by Elliott Oring in the textbook Folk Groups and
Folklore Genres, of a denition by inventory that is hardly a denition. Oring’s rst
sentence of chapter one is that a “precise denition presents a problem.” Like Welsch,
Oring concludes that “denition is not really necessary” to “approach inquiry,”
although he advocates for an orientation, that is, concepts that regularly inform
folklorists in their research. Avoiding a ippant attitude of folklore is what folklorists
do. Oring cites communal, common, informal, marginal, personal, traditional, aesthetic, and
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13
ideological as such concepts (noticeably absent is “performance” and “context”), or I
might characterize them as aspects, of cultural practices to which the folklorist is drawn.
As Charlotte Burne, the British folklorist in The Handbook of Folklore way back in 1913
profoundly asserted, “[I]t is not the form of the plough which excites the attention of
the folklorist, but the rites practiced by the ploughman when putting it into the soil; not
the make of the net or the harpoon, but the taboos observed by the sherman at sea:
not the architecture of the bride or the dwelling, but the sacrice which accompanies
its erection and the social life of those who use it” (1913, 2; emphasis added). In this
expression of the importance of practice, she had as a goal uncovering, in her words,
human “psychology,” although arguably she did not extensively theorize the idea of
“practice.” In her evolutionary thinking, the practitioners of folklore came early, were
primitive, and did not progress, and yet she cited as precedent for this view the more
general denition attributed to W.J. Thoms of folklore as “the learning of the people.”
Actually Thoms wrote “lore of the people,” by which he meant the common folk,
and it is signicant that Burne, through the handbook, encouraged readers to give
attention to folklore as learning, whether as vernacular knowledge or a social process
(Thoms 1965, 5).
In American folkloristics, attention to learning is evident indirectly through the
characteristic repeatability of folklore. In their textbook Folkloristics (1999), Robert
Georges and Michael Owen Jones emphasized an orientation involving repetition of
expressive forms, processes, and behaviors apparent in (1) face-to-face interactions,
and (2) judged to be traditional. Taking technologically mediated folklore such as
photocopied humor into account, Alan Dundes moved from the folk group as the
basis of folklore to emphasizing multiple existence and variation as folklore’s dynamic
qualities. Georges and Jones extend this dening idea of folk practice as repetitive
patterns in their assertion that folklore represents “continuities and consistencies
through time and space in human knowledge, thought, belief, and feeling” (1999, 1).
Their mention of knowledge is distinctive, and I think critical, for moving forward,
because of the connection of their denition to the principle that folklore is signicant to
study, because it is “an integral and vital part of our daily lives,” rather than separated
into novel or occasional special performances (1999, 2). I believe their connotation
of knowledge is of quotidian or vernacular know-how or content, although it is also
possible to dig deeper to their additional mention of thought, belief, and feeling to a
cognitive meaning of mental and emotional states.
Applying Ben-Amos’s assertion of denition as having a social and cultural basis,
it might be said that the nature of knowledge in a digital age changed thinking about
face-to-face interaction and the kinds of transmission recognizable as folklore in
relation to mediated culture. “Context” as used by Ben-Amos referred typically to face-
to-face gatherings of people in which expressive behavior could be observed, whether
in tribal storytelling events in Nigeria or teen slumber parties in North America.
At least ve “challenges” have emerged to contextual denitions in the digital age
that force, if not another paradigm shift, then at least an adjustment that encourages
explanations on an array of practices as well as processes perceived to be “folk.”
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Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
First, there is the consideration of digital culture and its “analytical” 1.
characteristic. That is, it is based upon variable repetition rather than a
social “relational” core, characteristic of what has been called analog culture.
With so much made of the social base of folklore, digital culture provides
a challenge to the idea of folklore arising out of “face-to-face interaction.”
The case for its mediated expressions goes back before the digital age. In
Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter’s case, they labeled photocopied humor as
folklore because of their repetition and variation. This view opened the
door for other mediated forms created by “users” such as digitally altered
photographs, so-called memes, vernacular animations, and virus hoaxes
(Blank 2012; Ellis 2015).
Second is re-examination of tradition as the keyword of folklore in works 2.
such as Tradition in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Rob Howard
and Trevor Blank (2013). Whereas tradition was noticeably absent in
earlier contextual denitions, because it supposedly did not account for
the emergence of forms and the styles of performance, tradition is re-
conceptualized as a mode of thought with reference to precedent action that
allows for human agency, rather than historical authority (see Bronner 2011;
Jones, M. 2000). The use of tradition has also brought material and social
practices into consideration, or what Kongas (1963) called mentifacts, under
the umbrella of folklore as something individually created, often routinely.
The reduction of folklore to verbal art, literature orally transmitted, or
performance commonly excludes this material.
Third, is more of a call for nding cognitive sources for the production 3.
of folklore, rather than leaving it to surface behavioral descriptions of
social interaction-based outcomes. Logically, the emphasis on “artistic
communication” as performance has not explained action; it has
contextualized an occasional form of it (Ben-Amos 1995; Bronner 2006). But
more work is needed to get at the question of why people repeat themselves
and frame activities as vernacular practices, particularly in modern societies
that value the novel and unprecedented (see Abrahams 2005). More data
are needed on the patterning and organization of everyday life, and on
folklore as a cognitive process, or praxis, of organizing experience (Bronner
2011).
Fourth, maybe most profoundly, is the idea of dropping the group 4.
requirement of folklore, presented by Jay Mechling (2006) as “solo folklore”
and Michael Owen Jones (2000) as “symbolic construction of self.” What
Mechling and Jones both imply, perhaps radically, is that one does not
need people in the plural to possess and produce folklore. Individuals by
themselves or within organizations can propagate, adapt, and manipulate
folkloric ideas (Jones, M. 1996).
Finally, there is the so-called “practice turn” in contemporary philosophy 5.
dened by Theodore Schatzki in 2001 as attention to “arrays of activity,” and
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particularly important for the practice-oriented folklorist, the explanation
of “skills, or tacit knowledges and presuppositions, that underpin everyday
and ceremonial activities” and the constructed “cognitive frames” that
direct, embody, and contextualize these activities as something expressive
and cultural (2001, 2). To be sure, there is not a unied practice theory, but
there is consensus on a need to shift the collectivist thinking of the past
to “practical reasoning,” that is, a philosophical concept of framing action
as purposeful and connotative experience arising from analogic, symbolic
reasoning (Bauman, Z. 1999; Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu 1998;
Bronner 1986; Bronner 1998, 469-73; Schatzki 1996).
A Denition of Folklore in Practice
Based upon these challenges, I submit a practice-centered denition that retains a
consideration of context to account for the processes associated with the folkloric
expression, but focuses attention to the knowledge domain, or cognition, at the basis of
the production of tradition. I invite your contemplation on the way that the following
identies “arrays of activity” that benet from analysis as folklore and equally guides
the activity’s (and the array in which it is a part as well as the human agents for whom
it is signicant) explanation: “traditional knowledge put into, and drawing from, practice.”
By emphasizing activity or practice, the analyst connects repeated action across oral,
social, and material forms. Some folklorists who are concerned for folklore’s artistic
or performative aspect might question the absence of “artistic communication” as a
criterion. However, I introduce a broader conceptualization of folklore’s signicance
as cultural phenomena in relation to popular and elitist forms in terms of phemic
processes identied by sociolinguists. The denition of practice begins with the
identication of knowledge gained or learned typically from phemic (i.e., stylized,
culturally situated, or expressive) processes of repeated, perlocutional communication
in visual, oral and written means as well as imitation and demonstration (often for
social and material traditions) (see Austin 1968; Bronner 2016).
Let me explain my use of “phemic” as an additional qualier to folklore’s
characteristic of variable repetition because it is critical, I maintain, to a theory
of folk practice as evidence of mind. Many utilitarian practices that are socially or
geographically situated such as craft, medicine, and agriculture would not be perceived
as art, performance, fantasy, or play and yet are viewed as noticeable traditions by virtue
of their repetition through time and space. Phemic material denotes an implicative
message that impels transmission, and the material becomes associated with the
process of its transmission. Philosopher J.L. Austin approaches the analysis of these
messages similarly to pragmatic gestures to account for the way they are ordinarily
used, or transacted with others, to produce symbols and elucidate meaning (Austin
1961; Austin 1968; see also Warnock 1989). To be sure, folk practices can be artistic,
such as the creative adaptation of a song or story, but what connects these practices to
quotidian behaviors such as choosing a favorite seat and ritually arranging food on a
plate is the implicative or phemic messages of activities as the outcomes of traditional
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Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
knowledge.
Linguist J. L. Austin’s contribution to a theory of tradition based upon practice is
to rubricate forms of transmission that result in actions (he called them “illocutionary
acts”) that people recognize as traditional. Austin calls the production of sound a phone,
whereas a pheme is a repeated utterance with a denite sense of meaning (a subset of a
pheme in his system is a rheme to refer to a sign that represents its object). Colloquially,
the pheme may be said to “say something” that might be used on different occasions
of utterance with a different sense (Warnock 1989, 120). The nuance to tradition as
“regularities” that Austin introduces is that the illocutionary act is one performed in
saying something; the locutionary act is one in the act of saying something while the
perlocutionary act occurs by saying something. Indeed, the example in everyday life
that Austinian philosopher John Searle uses to exemplify this distinction among the
acts invokes the role of the hand as the response that signals a transaction and the
occurrence of a tradition. The locution might be a query of whether salt is on the table
and the illocution is of requesting it. The perlocution is causing someone to hand the
container of salt over or “pass it” (Searle 1969, 53). The frames or traditions governing
the transaction are often unstated and learned by participation in cultural scenes or
regular responses to what Searle calls “the presence of certain stimuli” or “intentional
behavior” (1969, 53; see also Cothran 1973).
The term pheme comes from the goddess Pheme of Greek mythology who
personied renown and was characterized by the spreading of rumors. Symbolically
important to the idea of folklore as phemic is her status as a daughter of the earth and
one of the mightiest, if not the most elegant or beautiful, of the goddesses (Burr 1994,
231). She had a proclivity to repeat what she learned for better or worse (in art, she is
often depicted with multiple tongues, eyes, and ears or with a trumpet broadcasting
messages), to the point that it became common knowledge. Along the way, though, the
information had varied greatly and was often made larger or stylized in proportion to
the original bit of news. Pheme did not fabricate knowledge; her skill was in framing
material in such a way that it would be passed around in ways that drew attention
to itself or formed localized versions. She was a relay station of sorts, serving as both
recipient and transmitter of earthy material that, being shared from person to person,
became aestheticized, elaborated, and localized. The knowledge transmitted was
known as much for the process it went through as for its content; in its expressive
forms, it carried a message, often symbolized, or connotative. The process became
manifested as a recognizable, differentiated practice, so a story was conveyed within
the expectations of storytelling, or cultivating crops became identied, and potentially
symbolized, as plowing in a certain fashion for a particular place or people. Because
a message, action, or gesture was subjected to this verbal and non-verbal transmittal
process associated with earthy rumor, the content invited evaluation as to its truth
and value. In its “larger” form, the material raised questions about its sources and its
combinations and recongurations, forming a whole with multiple connotative layers
created along the path of transmission.
Phemic transmission can be distinguished from phatic communication in what
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Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
17
anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski characterized as a “type of speech in which ties
of union are created by a mere exchange of words” (Laver 1975, 215; see also Warnock
1989, 120-22). As action, phatic speech corresponds to the routine intended, according
to linguist John Lyons, “to establish and maintain a feeling of social solidarity and
well- being” (1968, 417). Tradition often serves this social function as well, but it is
distinguished as purposeful activity with a repeatable, multi-layered message that can
be called phemic, because it compels “handing down/over” and variation in the long
term by means of social interaction. Saying the greeting “How are you?” might appear
routine/phatic (characterized with the folk term of “small talk”), but the responses of
“Hunky dory,” “Just ducky (peachy, dandy),” “Fair to middling, mostly middling,”
“Couldn’t be better,” “Can’t complain,” “Still among the living,” “Still breathing
(standing, living),” “Fine as a frog’s hair,” “Fine as a frog’s hair and twice as fuzzy,”
“Not dead yet,” and “Old enough to know better, And you?” often ritually signal a
special connection between the speakers/texters. Further, the practice contextualizes
phemic or connotative meanings characteristic of a folkloric frame of action (such as
references to aging, anxiety/”troubles,” lifestyle choices, medical inquiries, friendship
or family relations, and insider, localized knowledge) (see Coupland, Coupland, and
Robinson 1992; Coupland, Robinson, and Coupland 1994; Rings 1994; Wright 1989).
The action of producing or transmitted “lore” is perceived or constructed as
traditional, characteristically through its repetition and variation, and connotative
evocation of precedent. It can be viewed as distinct from, although, sometimes integrated
into, the notion of popular culture as xed in form and commercialized (folklore can
also be “popular” and broad-based beyond the small group or subculture). Reference
to the actions of “put into and drawing from” suggests the framing of connotative,
purposeful enactments as an adaptation from precedent or an outcome of repeatable
behavior. This outcome can be material and social as well as verbal. It can be created
by and enacted for the individual.
Think for a moment of the practice of hitting one’s head with the palm of the hand
and saying, “What was I thinking?” The words alone might be rendered literally but
rhetorically framed in action and intent as folklore. The symbolic gesture in words
and action that are recognized from precedent carry meaning, usually of having made
a preventable mistake. The person hits the head to indicate that the brain was not
working correctly, much as one might in fact, hit a machine to get the gears moving.
The interrogative phrase might not even be heard by another person, but it constitutes
a framed, stylized, repeatable, variable action along with an uttered text that is based
on precedent, even if it is individualized. It can be visualized on the Internet and sent
to a friend who probably recognizes the reference to tradition. It might be used in
popular culture by writers and lmmakers, but they use “folklore” rhetorically whereas
individuals hitting their foreheads with their hands are enacting, or practicing, the
lore.
Even without the utterance, the gesture of hitting one’s head could be construed
as a signal of consternation. Combining the gesture towards the thinking “head” with
the line, “What was I thinking?” and, typically, facial gestures of dismay, persons
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Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
symbolize the precarious connection of their reasoning to action. The utterance could
be varied with the insertion of a swear word or a metonymic phrase such as “What
the hell (fuck, crap)?” or clipped as “What the?” In the absence of people witnessing
the gesture, the practice based upon traditional knowledge connotes motivations
occurring in various circumstances or contexts that merit explanation. Indeed, the
agent’s account of the practice might be insufcient explanation, because persons
might not be fully cognizant of their reasons for saying or doing what they did. The
analyst therefore strives to discern what people are thinking from the practices they
frame and explain in a range of possible behaviors why they do what they do.
Praxis as an Answer to Analytical Challenges
By way of conclusion, and I hope further dialogue and test my denitional hypothesis,
I will revisit the ve challenges I previously mentioned to view how a practice-centered
denition addresses concerns and shapes analysis. Concerning the challenge of digital
culture, the rhetorical use of practice as a repeatable, variable activity suggests that
speaking is not the only form of expressive activity made traditional by individual
agency. The use of technology channels communication in ways that are different
from face-to-face interactions but nonetheless produces actions that are recognizable
as traditional. The actions of forwarding, replying, and photoshopping are part of
the process that give these technologically mediated messages and images dynamic
qualities that can be called folk. Yet the idea of practice, rather than performance, does
not negate applications in “analog” and pre-industrial culture, for folklorists can study
reasons for why people repeat themselves beyond the supposed forces of tradition or
isolation. The identication of practice presumes a comparability of forms and contexts
that allows for analytical operations without sacricing attention to process.
The second challenge was the reconguration of tradition for a modern context.
Tradition in practice theory has both an emic and etic dimension. Folklorists should
note the ways that people invoke, and evoke, tradition as a term as well as a force in
their lives. Indeed, the invocation of phrases such as “It’s a tradition in my family,”
“Here’s a traditional dish,” or “For tradition’s sake” are themselves phemic practices
that carry metafolkloric implications. Although I noted that folklorists working with
contemporary materials use tradition to represent a mode of thought rather than a
historical authority, one can trace different manifestations, and sometimes conicts, of
tradition within communities. From an analytical vantage point, folklorists in a practice
orientation are concerned with the often individualized permutations of traditional
knowledge in repeatable, variable practices, or folklorists trace the thinking (i.e.,
analogical, associative, and symbolic reasoning) behind the formation of traditional
knowledge back from practices.
The identication of praxis as a basis of practice-oriented methodology addresses
the fourth challenge of nding sources and explanation for what people do. Indeed,
Zygmunt Bauman (1999) characterizes the symbolic quality of connotative, repeatable
action, or praxis, in custom and tradition as the heart of what we come to know as culture
and its inuences. To explain the analytical purpose of praxis, I need to distinguish the
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19
use of practice as a traditionalized genre in the Latin sense of traditum (and therefore
a reference for custom, item, or version in folkloristic rhetoric of cultural practice”)
versus the theoretical orientation of practice as a perspective and process (traditio). A
prominent way that this distinction has been made is to use the Greek root of practice,
praxis. Unlike the bifurcation of action into performance and everyday, the basis for
praxis is a trichotomy, with Aristotle’s categories of knowledge resulting from activities
of theoria (knowing for its own sake or intellectual processes that result in truth), poeisis
(in which the end goal is production, such as building a house or writing a play),
and praxis that results in actions accomplished in a particular way (e.g., organizing,
speaking, celebrating, making) and therefore connoting or symbolizing the meaning
of its action. A parade, for example, is recognizable as an organization of walking,
and within this framed, stylized activity, it takes on the meaning of celebration. Often
associated with the production of noise, a parade in silence displays a distinctive
praxis and takes on a different meaning as protest, often with the connotation that
the surrounding society is conicted or “sick” (Margry 2011). Even if one does not
perform the silence, or gives a eulogy at a memorial service, it might be said that one
participated in a practice because he or she “went” and therefore shared in a cultural
meaning within the framed action.
The binary of praxis and theoria is often constructed in the philosophy of science
to differentiate what scholars do from the ideas they contemplate, but that does not
mean that praxis does not have a psychological or ideational component as praxis is
concerned with activities predominant in ethical and political life. Thus philosopher
Richard Bernstein writes, “A person with this characteristically contemporary sense
of ‘practical’ in mind may be initially perplexed when he realizes that what we now
call “practical” has little to do with what Aristotle intended by ‘praxis’” (1971, x). In
emphasizing the actions of individuals’ free will as praxis, Aristotle opened inquiry
into the way that decisions are made about activities in diverse, everyday life situations
in interaction with others and within the context of the polis, the traditions and rules
imposed by or perceived in a society. Following attention to practice, one can identify
many methodological applications of praxis that appear quite different but owe
essentially to the Aristotlean distinction of praxis as meaning arising from doing as a
social and ethical act. To get at the folkloristic implication, I will employ the praxis of
sorting through the top ve.
First, we address the concern for “usages” in English or “Brauch” in German as a
trend in European ethnology and folklife studies. It subsumed oral traditions or verbal
art under social and material practices and set them in the context of community. Of
folkloristic import is that praxis in this view necessitates studying others to know what
works in a situation that is often dened by residence, for the end itself is only specied
in deliberating about the means appropriate to a particular setting. In Hultkrantz’s
General Ethnological Concepts (1960), this use of practice underscores the importance
of repetition with reference to the past. Custom is distinguished by its sanctioning
force and is more normative. In addition, unlike habit, practice encompasses custom
and usage presupposes tradition. One might argue that American folkloristics is not
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Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
usually concerned with these distinctions, especially in relation to issues of authority
imposed by tradition and particularly not within communities that may be class or
geographically bound. The European intellectual heritage of Volkskunde or ethnology
has been to divide practice into cultural and behavioral patterns, with the former
being within the purview of the folklorist who uncovers the sources and functions of
repeated actions perceived as traditional. It therefore does not invoke the dramaturgical
metaphor of performances or arts, but instead constructs tradition around the idea of
activity within the course of life. More than other denitions, Georges and Jones’s
categorization of folklore as behaviors “based on known precedents and models” and
that “customarily learn, teach, and utilize or display during face-to-face interactions”
appears to follow this approach, especially when they divide actions of people “as
we interact with each other on a daily basis” into practices denoted as folklore or
activities that are “readily distinguishable, often [in] symbolic ways” (1999, 1).
Toward the advancement of a discipline, this statement suggests that activities are
comparable, and generalizations about the relation of practices to one another, across
time and space, are possible. The praxis of the folklorist is to engage in eldwork as an
action comparable to custom; the activity captures and in some regard, constructs, the
enactment of culture.
From this rst sense of praxis, a question arises about what is to be analyzed in
enactments of culture. The French sociologist Michel de Certeau in The Practice of
Everyday Life (1984) argues for identifying the rules of operation in daily life, which he
dichotomizes into practices of making and using. Advocating for a structuralism of
cultural behavior, he declares, “There must be a logic of these practices” (de Certeau
1984, xv). Folk culture can be read in the reference to “local stabilities,” which he argues,
“break down... no longer xed by a circumscribed community” (1984, xx). Folklorists
might infer from de Certeau, that folklore is a form of marginalized cultural production
that, in his words, is “massive and pervasive” (1984, xvii). With its special purview,
another signicant place for folkloristics is in the logics (construed as a process in the
sense of traditio differentiated from traditum) that communities devise for themselves.
Inasmuch as logic suggests constraints as well as form for improvisation and variation,
they invite analyses of power because one set of rules may be in conict with another
as local stabilities come up against dominant systems.
One can read this Marxian basis in the use of praxis by Pierre Bourdieu in the
proposition that people who impose “practical taxonomy” wield power. In this view,
the cultural activity of naming, categorizing, and organizing is critical to shaping
worldview, and analysts need to consider the way that they respond to, as well as enact,
the typically invisible, constructed structures of culture. Bourdieu’s praxis relates to
performance because of the emphasis on an actor’s understanding of engagement with
the world. Thus cultural theory supposedly moves away from the study of rules and
to the analysis of practice. From eldwork in Algeria and France, he adopted terms to
further the relation of rules to practice. The doxa are aspects of the society’s norms and
values that are not discussed or challenged because they are deeply rooted through
socialization and taken for granted. Habitus, relating to usage, are normative aspects
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21
of behavior or dispositions that are acquired through socialization, but are produced
unreectively rather than totally unconsciously. In Bourdieu’s theory, practice is based
on the dispositions inherent in habitus and takes the form of strategic improvisations,
goals, and interests pursued as strategies, against a background of doxa that ultimately
limits them. Unlike the ethnological application of usage as practice, though, Bourdieu
disavows rational choice and implies that socialization guides behavior. To be sure,
performance-oriented folkloristics has embraced some of Bourdieu’s ideas about the
inequality of power in particular “social elds,” but has been open to the charge leveled
against Bourdieu of a functionalist tautology in which the consequences of action are
mistaken for their causes. Bourdieu’s praxis relates to Goffman’s social interactionism
(1967) and Geertz’s “interpretive anthropology” (1973) in interpreting bounded events
as texts of social structure. Instead of describing processes of praxis, critics have sought
a psychological praxeology by which, in the words of Gunnar Skirbekk, author of
Praxeology, “human activities are interwoven with their agents and with the things at
which they are directed within our everyday world” (1983, 9).
That is, in response to the post-structuralist lack, or avoidance, of explanation as
arbitrary and uncertain, inquiry into praxis allows for consideration of the symbolic
ways that activities are expressive and can be traced to sources in cognition. I would
characterize Alan Dundes’s “modern” denition of folklore as socially sanctioned
expression that can be semiotically and cognitively explained ts into this praxeological
perspective, even if one did not follow his Freudian analysis (Bronner 2008). The
psychological processes of projection and projective inversion he suggested along
with Gregory Bateson’s idea of “play frames” are important examples of identifying
cognition representative of “traditional knowledge drawn from or put into practice”
(Bateson 1972; Dundes 1976; see also Briggs 2015; Bronner 2010; Mechling 2008; Wallis
and Mechling 2015).
This praxeological idea of explanation in cognition for behavior that composes
the third analytical challenge is based on the psychology guiding repetition of
customs to manage social relations. The fourth challenge owes more to the individual
construction of self as a cultural praxis. Although some critics might view the examples
by Mechling and Jones of individualized “traditions” as anomalous, they represent
a broader expectation in modern societies that individuals create an identity out of
many cultural options and demonstrate this identity in practices that might only be
known to the individual. The individualized use of praxis by Mechling, Abrahams,
and Jones anticipates social philosopher Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of culture arising
from the mediation of tradition and creativity, but is distinguished by a behavioral
component. Folklorists want to know how tradition is expressed and how people
behave when it is enacted. Jones, Mechling, and Abrahams go further in suggesting
certain actions, such as “organizing,” “playing,” and “speaking” as pivotal and
aesthetic activities that underlie rather than divide everyday life or has it has been
conceptualized recently, “public culture” (Abrahams 2005; Jones, M. 1987; Mechling
2008; Mechling 2009). They have been reective on pragmatism as a philosophy,
particularly the work of William James in Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), in
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Toward a Denition of Folklore in Practice
which he explores the instrumental functions that beliefs bring to one’s life rather than
dismissing them as irrational. In 1985, when introducing a special section of Western
Folklore, “William James and the Philosophical Foundations for the Study of Everyday
Life,” Mechling underscored that folklorists have a special role in a modern practice
theory, because, “The folklorist brings to the interpretive approach the additional
insight that practical reason is ‘artlike,’ that we are studying not ‘mere’ discourse but
stylized communication that is often as expressive as it is instrumental. In fact, despite
some careless lapses, folklorists have tended to see the ‘consummatory experience’ as
being both expressive and instrumental, rejecting again the Cartesian dualism” (1985,
303-4). At the same time, Mechling complains that folklorists, as pragmatists, have not
sufciently sought a philosophical basis for their discipline. By his account, what is
necessary is not an accounting of performative acts but their basis in mind and belief.
For my part, in shaping my perspective on praxis, I have looked to another
pragmatist, George Herbert Mead, for more specically proposing that a social act
rather than social interaction is the central symbol that pairs divergent attitudes within
a situation. He emphasized that the most complex intellectual processes “come back
to the things we do.” Although Mead was often accused of being ahistorical, I have
tried to show in Grasping Things (1986) to Folklore: The Basics (2016) the signicance
of historical as well as cultural contexts for the perceptions of actions as symbolic by
different participants often at odds with one another in social scenes, whether at a
pigeon shoot, football game or presentation of a carved chain. Its generalization for
folkloristics, taking into account the intellectual heritage of folkloristics in identity,
expression, and representation, is to suggest analytic purpose in uncovering the
repetition of individual acts involving taking the attitude of the other, the formation
of signicant symbols, dynamic qualities, and rhetorical agency.
Philosophically, as evident in the fth analytical challenge of practice as a key to
the conduct of everyday life in modern settings, folklore’s signicance in the study
of repeatable practices—stylized, ritualized, and often organized—that people deem
traditional, connotative, and meaningful is its evidence of the thinking that goes
into the formation of culture on various levels from the individual to the nation. The
manifestation of folk practice individually and socially indicates that humans have a
psychological need for tradition and reshape traditions constantly in negotiation with
various cultural forces (Bronner 1992; Bronner 2011, 1-62). The denition of “traditional
knowledge drawn from or put into practice” not only serves to identify the cyclical
link between thought and action in the organization of culture—folk, popular, and elite
as well analog and digital—but also encompasses an array of materials with similar
dynamic qualities. As many of us have learned, the more we practice the luckier, or
more folkloric, we get.
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23
Acknowledgments
This essay is a revision of a paper delivered in different forms at the American Folklore Society annual
meeting in Long Beach, California, October 2015, and the Western States Folklore Society meeting in
Los Angeles, April 2015. Anyone reading this essay should recognize that I could not have completed
it without discussing its contents with Dan Ben-Amos. I am grateful for the time and wisdom he gave
me in revisiting events and ideas of the 1960s. In addition, I thank Jay Mechling, Anthony Buccitelli,
Daniel Wojcik, Rosemary Zumwalt, Barbro Klein, and Elliott Oring for their incisive comments and
clear thinking about folk practices.
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