Folklore Rules
Folklore Rules
A Fun, Quick, and Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies
Lynne S. McNeill
Utah State University Press
Logan
© 2013 by University Press of Colorado
Published by Utah State University Press
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The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.∞
This paper meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Figure 4.1, “Omikuji,” is courtesy of Alex Anderson (abanderson.com). Figures 4.2–4.7 are based on Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McNeill, Lynne S.
Folklore rules / Lynne S. McNeill.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87421-905-0 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-87421-906-7 (e-book)
1. Folklore—Study and teaching. I. Title.
GR45.M36 2013
398.2071—dc23
2013019566
Cover illustrations, clockwise from top: Alex Anderson (abanderson.com), “Omikuji”; Van E. Porter, “Zonnie ‘Grandma’ Johnson and Barre Toelken”; © Allie Brosh (hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com); Zander Westendarp, “Guanajuato 2013.”
For Barre Toelken
Contents
*
Preface
Acknowledgments
For the Instructor: Why You Want to Use This Book
Chapter 1: What Is Folklore?
Chapter 2: What Do Folklorists Do?
Chapter 3: Types of Folklore
Chapter 4: Types of Folk Groups
Conclusion: What Do I Do Now?
About the Author
Index
Preface
*
The field of folklore studies has had a fascinating and complicated history, growing out of and blending several different established areas of study. It is also, for all its seeming simplicity, a very complicated field to sum up and explain; the fact that definitions for folklore are still being created and debated well over 100 years after the term was coined proves this. On a related note, the field has also long been suffering from a prolonged and depressing identity crisis, one that each new generation of scholars has inherited and must come to terms with, and one that is, unfortunately, often foisted upon students.
The reality is that folklore, as a field of study, is cool. Students know this, they can sense it, and when they find themselves in a class reading a textbook that right from the get-go tries to account for all the difficulty in definition, all the ambiguity of placement in the academy, all the questions of naming and whatnot, they’re disappointed. The field needs a textbook that lets folklore be both fun and complicated. Folklore Rules doesn’t deny the academic rigor of the field; it simply shows new students that there is something both coherent and, yes, cool, to be studied here. Once students buy into that, chewing over the complexities actually becomes fun.
The field also needs a textbook that’s relatively short; it’s not always feasible to take an entire semester introducing new students to the field of folklore studies. Many folklorists are not employed in departments that offer generalized folklore courses; when they teach folklore-related classes, they are often special-topics courses that throw unsuspecting and unprepared students into a field that is new to them but to which there is no time to offer a full introduction. Even at schools with a folklore program there are not always prerequisites for upper-division folklore courses, so there’s no way to ensure that students are familiar with the field in general before launching into a focused special-topics course.
A concise text that introduces students to the field of folklore studies without overwhelming them with case studies or with the complexity of the field’s history will allow students to become familiar with the field quickly but accurately, thus gaining a better understanding of how the topic they’re studying in class is contextualized in the larger field of study. It is a common complaint among graduate students, many of whom do not have undergraduate backgrounds in folklore, that while they become experts on their thesis topics, they don’t have a basic understanding of the breadth of the field. This textbook hopes to ameliorate that situation as well, providing an enjoyable and concise introduction to the basics of folklore studies.
Acknowledgments
*
For a superb grounding in the discipline of folklore, I owe my thanks to Alan Dundes, Dan Melia, John Lindow, Jeannie Thomas, Barre Toelken, Steve Siporin, Randy Williams, Elliott Oring, Michael Owen Jones, Polly Stewert, Cathy Preston, Paul Smith, Peter Narváez, Jerry Pocius, Martin Lovelace, and Diane Goldstein. For their support, guidance, friendship, consideration, scholarship, and time, I would also like to thank Ian Brodie, Jodi McDavid, Andrea Kitta, Tok Thompson, Nelda Ault, Trevor Blank, John Alley, and Michael Spooner. Thanks are due to Matt Bradley for inspiring the title; his enthusiasm for folklore lives on. Special thanks also go to my parents, Mike and Lysbeth McNeill, and to my husband, Stephen VanGeem. I’m lucky to know and to have known so many incredible people.
Folklore Rules
For the Instructor
Why You Want to Use This Book
*
A major issue in the teaching of folklore these days is that folklore programs are few and far between. Many folklorists are working not in dedicated folklore programs but in English, anthropology, history, or communications departments, and while that highlights the incredible interdisciplinarity of our field, it presents an interesting quandary to many instructors.
Without a dedicated folklore program, students are likely to encounter folklore courses randomly, taking an upper-division, special-topic, “Folklore and Fill-in-the-Blank” (film, literature, history, etc.) course without ever having taken Introduction to Folklore. This is great on the one hand, as it helps students discover the field. On the other hand, it means that students are showing up in highly specialized folklore courses without any concept of the basics of folklore studies (or worse, with an incorrect or misguided concept of folklore studies).
There are several great intro textbooks out there for folklore students, but they all share one thing in common: they’re long. As any folklorist can tell you, folklore sounds simple, but isn’t. Most introductory textbooks are way too long for students to consume and comprehend in the mere week or two that their professors can sacrifice to getting everyone on the same page about the basics before moving on to the specific topic of the course.
Other fields don’t have this problem in the same way, because other fields aren’t quite so unfamiliar to the general public as academic disciplines. Even without taking Introduction to Literature, most college students can join in a “Literature and Fill-in-the-Blank” (the West, race, identity, etc.) course without being too far out of the loop. Even if they’re not totally prepared, they at least learned the generic distinctions between a poem and a play in high school. Try asking a college student who hasn’t taken an Introduction to Folklore class the difference between a folktale and a legend, and you’re not likely to get a correct answer. It’s simply not a subject tha
t’s mainstream enough (though we all know it should be) to go forward without an introduction to the basics.
Enter this book. It’s short, it’s simple, and, most important, it’s true to the field of academic folklore studies. Students will get a sense of the basics—the accurate basics, not the foreshortened it’s-not-just-old-wives’-tales-and-quilting-but-that’s-all-we-have-time-for basics—without having to read an entire lengthy textbook.
For the sake of brevity, you’re not going to find a whole lot of drawn-out or exotic case studies here—that’s not the point of this book. What this book does offer is relatable, illustrative scenarios, ones that will make students feel closer to the field rather than farther away from it. And that’s not to say that there’s no room for any extended examples to grow out of this book; bringing students’ own experiences in as concrete case studies should be quite easy.
In fact, this is one of the greatest things about folklore studies: students show up knowing some folklore, even if they don’t yet know they know it. This is due to the unique fact that folklorists (and folklore students) are, across the board, also members of the folk. As folklorist Jay Mechling once noted, thinking like a folklorist involves “a sort of ‘double consciousness’ about everyday life”1—participating in it normally and yet simultaneously stepping back to observe it critically. Very few other fields of study allow for this dual level of engagement, especially in the humanities.2 How many Shakespeare classes can say that 100 percent of incoming students show up already knowing (not to mention ready to perform) at least two or three Shakespeare plays inside and out? None.3 Folklore has the advantage,4 as all students have at least some folklore in their lives and so can immediately begin applying cool analyses and theories to stuff they already know about. I find that this leads to a higher engagement in folklore classes than in almost any other course that deals with the analysis of culture or literature—the analysis is the fun and challenging stuff, and folklore students are able to jump right in.
In addition to the preponderance of highly specific special-topics classes and a glaring lack of required introductory courses, the field of folklore studies also suffers from another unique problem. In general, folklorists are really into validating/justifying/illustrating-the-nuanced-complexities-of the field in the face of perceived judgment from more universally recognized academic programs. This is great, but let’s consider the student’s perspective—it’s one heck of a complicated field. While it certainly can all come together in the end (fairly simply, too), a rundown of all the famous and infamous attempts to account for all the ambiguities and complexities up front often leads to turning a really, really awesome subject into the driest of all dry classes.5 Students find themselves looking around, going, “Hey, I thought this was a folklore class! Isn’t it supposed to be fun and easy?” While we shouldn’t say yes to the latter, we should absolutely be saying yes to the former: folklore is fun. Period. And students need to know that.
I can relate to the need to successfully sum up the entirety of folklore studies. When I was a student I kept a notebook (three, actually, by the time I was done with school), and every time I came across a great summary of the field, I’d write it in there and try to memorize it, mainly so I could explain to my relatives at the holidays what, exactly, I was studying. Most students, myself included, don’t achieve such succinctness until the end of their studies, and it’s easy for all the fun stuff to get momentarily lost in the lack of simplicity.
So here’s the thing: folklore is fun and yes, its complexities and depths and nuances and difficulties need to be addressed and comprehended, but let’s be honest: it should be fun first, to let students know why exactly they’ll want to spend the rest of their lives (or at least the rest of the semester) thinking about all the complexities. As an instructor, although I want my initial explanation of folklore to my students to be academically impressive, I want it to be interesting and engaging, too.
Folklorists also have a tendency to overstate the complexities of the field, especially to new audiences. The downside of the name “folklore” is that it’s an easily trivialized concept (by people who don’t fully understand it, at least), and it appears that most folklorists shy away from any explanation of the field that could potentially support this trivialization. Thus, we get incoherent, excessively qualified, overwrought explanations of a field that, whether we like it or not, does have some basic rules.
This book is designed to present those rules in a user-friendly manner and to serve in a variety of capacities: as a quick reference guide for an intro class, as the introductory reading for a special-topics class, as a reminder of the basics for grad students, as a gift for relatives who still don’t get what it is you do. Its whole purpose is to help nonfolklorists “get it” initially, so that they’re ready to move on to deeper or related issues.
Set to teach a class on traditional English Morris dancing? Great! Contextualize it within the field of folklore studies with this handy book! Want to assign a grad class the forty-two great articles that shaped the field of folklore as we know it? Great! Use this handy book as a simple background guide. There will be plenty of time for you to nuance and problematize all the information here, so take the opportunity initially to make it seem more straightforward.
Personally, I found that the famous foundational works made the most sense to me after I was done with my PhD anyway, when I was finally ready to admire the simplicity those scholars strove to achieve with their theories and definitions. So use this book as you will, and never let yourself lose sight of (or fail to pass on to students) the very first reason you chose to study folklore: folklore rules.
Notes
1. Jay Mechling, “How Do You Know What You Know?” Working Papers of the Ohio State University Center for Folklore Studies 2, no. 3 (October 2011), https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/handle/1811/46895. Return to text.
2. Psychology, a field that folklore studies often utilizes when divining the motivation behind tradition, is perhaps the most similar in this regard. Return to text.
3. Okay, I’ll admit I didn’t research that one. But it makes for a dramatic sentence, doesn’t it? And it’s probably true. Return to text.
4. Yes, this book is shamelessly pro-folklore. Return to text.
5. I know this, because I’ve done it myself. Return to text.
Chapter 1
*
What Is Folklore?
So, you’re in a folklore class. Good for you—whatever educational requirement this course is fulfilling for you, I guarantee you’ve picked the best possible way to fulfill it. Perhaps you’re in an Intro to Folklore course, or maybe you’re in a special-topics course: something like Folklore and Literature, Folklore and Film, Folklore and the Internet, or Children’s Folklore. No matter what course it is (and hey—maybe you’re not taking a folklore class at all. Maybe you’re not even a student, in which case, doubly good for you for reading this book when you don’t have to!), you’re going to have to start at the beginning. Unlike in other fields, when it comes to folklore studies, the beginning can sometimes be the most confusing place to start.
What is folklore? You’d think this would be an easy question to answer. “Folklore” doesn’t seem like a very complicated idea, does it? I mean, it’s not a rare or unfamiliar word—we use it fairly often in daily life. So if someone asked you what folklore is, you could probably give them an answer, right? Well … maybe not. Give it a try and see how it goes. Lots of people answer this question by giving a few examples of stuff they think is folklore. They’ll say something like, “Oh, you know, folklore is old stories and songs from your parents and grandparents” or “Folklore is stuff like superstitions and old wives’ tales” or “It’s like unicorns and sea shanties and quilting—stuff like that.”
As you will learn shortly, while these common perceptions of folklore aren’t 100 percent wrong, they’re certainly not 100 percent right, either. One of the first things that students of folklore discover
is that the word folklore encompasses far more than they ever thought it did. It brings together the expected folktales, myths, and legends, and yet also includes jump-rope rhymes, pranks, jokes, graffiti, songs, emoticons, gestures … basically a ton of stuff that often leads to the popular first-year-folklore-student mistake of “I get it now—folklore is everything!” This, sadly, is not true. You’ll see by the end of this book that while folklore can likely be connected to almost everything, everything is not, in fact, folklore.
Folklorists have spent a fairly ridiculous amount of time trying to succinctly define folklore ever since the word was coined in 18461 by a guy named William Thoms. Thoms, interestingly, used a pseudonym (he chose Ambrose Merton, for some reason) when he proposed the term and revealed himself as the actual source of the term only once he’d determined that people were generally on board with it. He proposed it as “a good Saxon compound” in favor of the then current term popular antiquities. People generally accepted it, and voila!—a whole field of study was born.2
You might be wondering at this point why it has been so hard for folklorists to define this basic Saxon compound. Well, you try to explain what a creation myth, a jump-rope rhyme, a Fourth of July BBQ, and some bathroom graffiti3 have in common, and you’ll find it’s not a terribly easy task, either. Rest assured, though: the field of folklore studies does have a few basic rules that can help to simplify things. In the next few sections, we’re going to uncover these basic concepts from within the murky depths of academia and put them to work to answer the question at hand: “What is folklore?”
Folk and Lore
To start with, we’ve got a compound word here—folklore—and any decent definition will have to account for both parts.4 We’ll start with “folk.” In order to begin to understand what “folk” means, we first need to back up a bit and understand what “culture” is. Why, you ask? Because I said so. Bear with me—it will become clear in a moment.
Folklore Rules Page 1
