Folklore Rules

by Lynne S. McNeill

  As it turns out, in terms of difficulty of definition, “culture” is frustratingly right up there with “folklore.” A common use of the word culture is to think of someone as being “cultured,” as in “enlightened” or “refined”—snooty people attending the opera in fur coats and such—but folklorists (and anthropologists) use the term a bit differently. There have been whole books written on the definition of culture, but since this guide is meant to be short and straightforward, I’m just going to give you one of the most useful ones, created by an anthropologist named Ward Goodenough (and yes, you can insert a pun about it being a “good enough” definition here). He tells us: “A society’s culture is whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to act in a manner acceptable to its members.”5

  This definition tells us several things right off the bat. First, that culture is something that a society, or a group of people, possesses. Second, that culture isn’t really a tangible object, but more of a body of knowledge. “Acting in a manner that’s acceptable” to a group of people encompasses a ton of information: you have to know official things, like on which side of the road to drive, what currency you use to pay for stuff, where you can and cannot be naked—all the things that would get you arrested if you did them wrong. But there’s a more subtle or informal level to “acceptable” behavior, too—stuff that may not get you arrested if you do it wrong, but that may earn you some weird looks and cause people to cross the street to get away from you.

  For example, if you just openly picked your nose while your boss was talking to you, or if you greeted your date’s parents by passionately kissing them, or if you sat down at a table in McDonald’s and tried to flag down a server to come and take your order—these are all things that our informal culture tells us are incorrect ways to act. There’s no official big book about how or how not to do these things; we learn the right way to do them simply by observation, by spending time in our society, and often these expectations are so ingrained in us that we don’t notice them until we go somewhere where people do them differently.

  There’s no official regulation or documentation of how (and how not) to greet strangers—we learn it by observation and experience. Fast-food restaurants don’t print manuals about how and where to order—we learn it informally, by watching our friends or parents go through the line ahead of us when we’re kids. It’s interesting to note that when we travel to other cultures, it’s rarely the official differences (the language, the currency, the laws) that make us feel out of place—we expect those things to be different when we travel. It’s the little stuff—the informal stuff, like how to greet people, or whether to order at the counter or wait to be seated, or how close to stand to strangers on a bus—that really makes us feel far from home.

  This informal or unofficial level of cultural understanding is the “folk” level, the level on which cultural knowledge is shared, enacted, and propagated by regular, everyday people. Instead of laws we have customs; instead of guidebooks we have experience and observation.

  In the past, when scholars talked about the “folk,” they were referring to a distinct class of people: typically rural, uneducated, illiterate peasants. Today when we use the term we’re simply talking about everyone, all of us, as we exist in the informal or unofficial realms of our cultural lives.

  Thus, when folklorists talk about a “folk group,” they’re not talking about a certain type of people; they’re talking about all people who share an unofficial culture together. In fact, the most popular definition of a folk group these days is “any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor.”6 That’s pretty broad, isn’t it? By this definition, a family is a folk group, as is a campus community or a neighborhood. An entire religion can form a folk group, as can the population of an individual synagogue, temple, or parish. A folk group can be national, ethnic, regional, occupational, interest-based—basically anything that unites people and generates a shared cultural understanding. Folk groups can be small, with just a few members,7 or huge, with hundreds of thousands of people included.

  Many of these groups clearly have an institutional culture as well as a folk culture—campuses, churches, occupations, states, and nations will have both official and unofficial aspects of their culture—and when we refer to those groups as a “folk group,” we’re purposefully focusing on their unofficial realm. In contrast, some groups don’t have much of an institutional culture at all—friend groups and families are typically entirely folk or informal8 in their cultural existence and expression. It’s a useful distinction to make, especially when seeking to avoid the “Folklore is everything!” fallacy.

  Right away it should be easy to see that all of us are members of many folk groups all at once, and it takes only a moment of reflection to understand that we use different sets of folk cultural knowledge when we’re with those different groups. There’s often slang or terminology that you use at school or at work that you don’t use at home, not necessarily because it’s vulgar or inappropriate, but just because no one at home would know what it means—they’re not in that other group; they wouldn’t “get it.” There are songs you sing at church that you don’t sing at work, because those songs aren’t a part of your job’s folk culture. There are people who use thicker accents at home than at work, and people who dress one way at certain types of events (like football games) and another way at other types of events (like dinner parties). You won’t get arrested for wearing a cocktail dress to a football game (or face paint to a dinner party), but it’s not the cultural norm. Our awareness of our many overlapping folk groups allows us to adapt ourselves appropriately to different cultural situations.

  So that’s the “folk” part of “folklore”—the unofficial and informal levels of a group’s culture, in which we all participate in a number of intersecting and overlapping circles. But what about the “lore”?

  Well, “lore” is what gives form to folklore. Rather than simply being the general shared awareness of how to behave in a group or a society, folklore comprises the specific expressive forms that a group uses to communicate and interact. We call these forms the genres of folklore, and just as literature students study different genres of literature (poems, plays, novellas) or film students study different genres of film (drama, comedy, action-adventure), folklorists study different genres of folklore, such as customs, narratives, and beliefs (there are a lot more than just these three—we’ll discuss this more in depth in chapter 3). While many folklorists are certainly interested in the generalized folk culture of a group, they commonly focus their work on one or more of the expressive genres that a folk group produces and shares.

  As later chapters in this handbook will show you, the genres of folklore are typically divided into different types of expressive forms (some genres are in the form of narratives, some are customary behaviors, some are conceptual, etc.). For now, given our current goal of defining folklore in general, we can set that aside and think about what separates all kinds of folklore from all other types of cultural expression. Because, of course, while we have folk customs and folk music and folk stories, we also have legal procedures, symphonies, novels, plays, TV shows and the like, and we need to consider what sets “folklore” apart from these other forms of cultural expression.

  Well, if you were paying attention just a few paragraphs ago, you’ll likely remember that “folk” culture is the informal or unofficial parts of culture. It makes sense, then, to say that “folk anything” (folk stories, folk music, folk customs) are the unofficial instances of those things. “Folk” becomes an adjective that applies to “lore”: What kind of lore? Folklore!

  For example, if we’re talking about a story it’s easy to see that “stories” can occur in both folk and official ways: our culture has not only folktales and urban legends, but also comic books and mystery novels. The former are folklore; the latter are not. Similarly, we have not only folk songs, but pop songs and symphonies, too. Not only do we have folk customs,
but we have laws and governmental regulations.

  The thing that distinguishes folklore from these other forms of cultural expression is the way it’s transmitted. (You can tell by the fact that those words are italicized that they’re important—you should probably write that part down in your notes.) For all that we might try to define folklore by what it is, it’s actually much more clearly defined by how it’s used and shared. We can’t simply say that folklore is stories, because so are TV shows and so are novels. The difference is in how the story moves through a population.9

  Variation and Tradition

  In folk culture, the lore is typically shared by word of mouth; more generally, we can say it’s shared person to person (which could include direct conversation, indirect observation, e-mail, phone calls, online chats, etc.). So, I tell an urban legend to a few of my friends, and they in turn tell it to some people they know, who in turn tell it to others, who then pass it on to more people, and so on. A good analogy is the game “telephone”—a bunch of kids sit in a circle and someone starts off a message by whispering it to the person next to him or her, who then whispers it to the next person, and so on. The main difference between folklore and the telephone game is that folklore doesn’t go in a tidy circle. If we were to draw the folk process of transmission, it might look like this:

  Fig. 1.1

  Lots of people are hearing the same story, but most of them hear it from a different source. In contrast, the mass-or pop-culture model has lots and lots of people hearing the same story from a single source, such as the television, a news website, or a published book. Millions of people might all watch the same show, but they all get it from the same source, and so the version they all get is identical. This process might look like this:

  Fig. 1.2

  The differences between these two modes of transmission are pretty obvious. Even if the same number of people end up hearing the folk story as watch the TV show or read the book, the folk story was told and retold anew all along the way. And it probably changed a bit as it was told over and over again, just like the message in the telephone game, the point of which, as you probably recall, was always to compare the final message to the original, to see the (hopefully hilarious) ways it evolved during transmission. The study of folklore is pretty much the same thing (minus the expectation of hilarity).

  With a TV show or a published book, every single person who watches or reads the story gets the exact same version, and that single version is usually tied to a specific director or writer. With a folk story, each new audience gets a unique, contextually specific version, and each new teller is as much the rightful “owner” as the next. This, of course, is what makes folklore so interesting. If I tell you a joke, and you turn around and tell it to someone else and the details change a bit, you didn’t tell it wrong, you just told a different version of it.10 You also didn’t steal it from me—you might tell your friends where you heard it, but even if you don’t, I don’t get to file a copyright lawsuit against you. Folklore is mostly anonymous,11 so it can easily belong to whoever is telling it. In contrast, if I take a novel and change some of the words, it’s not just “another version” or “my own version” of the novel; it’s wrong. If I went out and sold “my version” of the novel, I could be arrested.

  So folklore, by the nature of its transmission, is malleable, adaptable, changeable, and mostly anonymous, and this makes it way more culturally and expressively communicative than a TV show. I don’t get to alter an episode of TV to make it more relevant to my life, but I can alter an urban legend or a joke in order to make it more specific to me and my situation. Considering that folklore is being slightly adapted and molded every time it’s passed on, after a while it’s quite representative of the group as a whole rather than of a single individual. The stuff that no one found meaningful or illustrative or entertaining will eventually get leeched out, and the stuff that most people thought was especially important or relevant or significant will remain in. Group consensus shapes folklore, and so folklore is a great measure of group consensus.

  There’s another level of culture in which any given expressive genre can emerge, and that’s “elite” culture. It’s more like pop culture than folk culture, but the audience is typically smaller as the content is typically thought to have less of a broad appeal. This is where we find the expressive forms that we tend to think of as “snooty” and limited to highly educated audiences: the opera, modern art museums, symphonies, and so on. If we drew a model of this one, it might look like this:

  Fig. 1.3

  There’s not just a single source, as there is with pop culture—different ballet companies can all perform the same famous ballet and each company’s production will be slightly different—but there’s not the numerous and accessible re-creations of the folk method of transmission either. You can see how a single expressive form, like a drawing, a story, or a song, could emerge in each of the three different levels: as graffiti, a comic book, and a museum piece; as a folktale, a romance novel, and a literary novel; and as a children’s rhyme, a pop song, and a symphony, respectively. The difference isn’t so much in the form; it’s in the way that form is transmitted within a population.

  Now, we need to make something clear here: there’s no judgment intended in comparing “folk” culture to “popular” and “elite” culture—once upon a time elite culture may have been considered “better” than folk culture, but that’s a thing of the past. These are terms that describe transmission, not ascribe value. And in fact, these categories really aren’t all that clear-cut. Is this tidy three-level breakdown an oversimplification? Totally. Are these categories permeable and inconsistent? Yup. Can stuff move from one level to another, or exist in two at the same time? Of course! This model is a useful tool for illustrating how folk forms of expression move through a population differently than other forms, but in truth, these categories are quite permeable and vague.

  Consider, for example, the number of symphonic melodies that are used and shared in a folk way. Many of us hum the first few notes of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony when we want to indicate that something dramatic has happened or is about to happen—dun-dun-dun-DUN—and most of us do that because we’ve heard others do it, not because we attended the symphony. Pop culture gets in on the action, too: remember that lilting melody that always accompanied Porky Pig when he skipped through a lovely nature scene? That’s Humoresque No. 7 in G flat major, by Dvorak. The folk can also borrow from pop culture: how many of us have whistled the theme to Gilligan’s Island when we thought a trip was going poorly? So we can clearly have a folk appropriation of elite and pop forms, and a pop appropriation of an elite form, just as Béla Bartók incorporating Hungarian folk songs into his compositions is an elite appropriation of folk culture. And just to round out the borrowing nicely, the Boston Pops would be an example of elite culture borrowing from pop culture.

  This type of cultural appropriation isn’t limited to songs, either. TV shows and movies (and sometimes even the news) love using urban legends, folktales, and current jokes; and folk culture steals narrative content from pop culture in return. There are tons of people out in the world saying the phrase “May the force be with you,” not because they’re big fans of Star Wars, but simply because their friends keep saying it. So again, while these categories are illustrative, they’re definitely not airtight.

  It should be clear by now that defining folklore is as much about understanding how it moves as understanding what it is. Folklore is a part of informal12 culture, it moves via word of mouth and observation, rather than by formal or institutional means. And as we discussed earlier, what this means is that the lore, the stuff that’s being passed around (which could be stories, customs, beliefs, whatever) isn’t limited to a single correct version. When a cultural expression is (re)created anew each time it gets shared, it varies a bit, and it’s this variation that allows us to identify a particular cultural form as folklore. Got that? Variation is the marker that we look for
when trying to identify the folk process.

  Here’s an example: let’s say that you write a great story and publish it in the school newspaper. You grab a bunch of copies of the paper to give your friends, and you e-mail the e-edition of the paper to your family. Let’s say the Associated Press eventually picks up your story (wow—you’re clearly a great writer!). Suddenly your story is running in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other impressive newspapers. If you gathered up all those different versions of your story and compared them side by side, they’d all be identical. That’s because, of course, they were transmitted via mass media—they’d all be attributed to you, and they’d all have the same exact content.

  Now let’s change the situation: say you hear a neat story from a friend and tell it to another friend. The person you told it to then turns around and tells it to some more people. Those people, however, don’t know the person the story was originally about, so some of the details that only a good friend would care about get dropped. One of those people then decides to type up the story to e-mail it to a sibling who lives far away. The sibling then e-mails it to some more people, maybe adding a few sentences to the top of the e-mail to explain where it came from and the reason for forwarding it. Then those people forward it on, too, but they may erase the explanation that the e-mail came with, and they’ll probably also erase the list of previous recipients at the top of the e-mail just to save space, so the identity of the person who first typed it up is lost. Maybe one of the next recipients is a grammar fanatic who goes in and rewrites some of the more awkward sentences before forwarding it on again. A few more steps down the line, maybe someone else changes the city the story takes place in, so that it’s more relatable to the people she plans to forward it on to. Perhaps some of those recipients don’t really like burdening their friends with e-mail forwards so they don’t forward it on, but it’s such a good story that it ends up being told at a dinner party or around the water cooler or while just hanging out. Now, if you held all those different versions of your story side by side, they’d be different—folklorists would say that they “exhibit dynamic variation.” Without ever talking to you, a folklorist could determine that your story had been transmitted via the folk process, rather than via mass media, by recognizing the variation. This is one way we identify folklore.