11. Or any kind of folklore, really. Return to text.
12. The kind of four-square you played as a kid with a ball, not the kind you play on your phone. Return to text.
13. Or perhaps even with the shopping for ingredients? Return to text.
14. That’s pretty neat, right? Makes folklorists seem like physicists! Return to text.
15. If, at this point, you’re cleverly noticing that “birthdays” as a customary celebration are sort of both a calendar custom and a rite of passage—good for you! Birthdays are unique in that they happen yearly and yet are also a transitional point in one’s life. When it comes to the study of folklore, however, it’s really only the culturally significant birthdays (sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one, fifty, sixty-five, etc.) that get treated as full rites of passage, because the shift in social expectations is so much greater for those years. And, of course, that list really only applies to contemporary American culture—in cultures and times where other birthdays coincide with culturally or legally significant changes, those would be the big years. Return to text.
16. Think of Carnival, or, as it’s better known around here, Mardi Gras, and you’ll get the idea. Return to text.
17. This kind of consciously created tradition is known as an “invented tradition.” Invented traditions can easily become “real” or “authentic” traditions over time, but the term implies an awareness that originally, this was constructed with the intent of becoming folklore, which often makes folklorists wary of assuming that the functions and implications of the event are genuinely representative of the folk group. Return to text.
18. Are you catching the emphasis on fishing yet? Return to text.
19. The rum is called Screech, after the noise an early taster made when sampling it, and provides the ceremony with its name. Return to text.
20. Alicia Cox, “Screech In or Screech Out?” Transmission (Memorial University of Newfoundland) 7, no. 2 (2005): 6. Return to text.
21. Remember cootie-catchers? Those little fortune-telling things you’d make with paper? They had four chambers to put your fingers in, and you could open and close them in different directions and unfold different tabs to reveal different messages. Those were fun. Return to text.
22. Do a Google image search for “travel mascots” or “roaming gnomes” if you don’t know what I’m talking about here. An interesting aspect of this tradition is how it’s now being reappropriated back into mass culture: movies, television shows, and commercials have all featured the roaming gnome tradition. The travel company Travelocity’s spokes-gnome is now so ubiquitous that many people think the connection between gnomes and travel started there, rather than the business having appropriated a folk tradition. Return to text.
23. Check out www.flatstanley.com. Return to text.
24. When folklore is appropriated by the mass media or manufacturers, folklorists refer to that process as the “commodification of folklore,” since a folk item is being turned into a commodity that can be bought or sold. We can also see the opposite process taking place, such as when we make a mass-produced toy into a travel mascot (or take movie lines and make them into inside jokes with our friends). I like to call this process the “de-commodification of pop culture.” Share and share alike, right? Return to text.
25. This term has slightly different meanings in different contexts. There is the general understanding of the word in English to mean an assembled group of things, and there is also the way the term is used in art (where it is typically pronounced in the French way), which indicates a creative process that utilizes found materials to create a work of art. Both uses of the word can apply to the folk process of compiling objects into an expressive collection. Return to text.
26. Check out bookcrossing.com. Return to text.
27. It can be tricky to reconcile the idea of an individual’s customary wearing of a piece of jewelry with the understanding that folklore is, by definition, shared among a group, but take a step back and consider the bigger picture. It’s unlikely that your mother has never heard of anyone else in the world having a special item that is worn or used only on special occasions—this is a common type of behavior in our society. It’s similar to the way that an individual sports fan’s wearing of a lucky shirt—itself unique to the individual who owns it—can still be classified as a folk belief or superstition. The shared cultural expectation that individuals have lucky items or special jewelry that are brought out at traditional times is what makes this process folk. Return to text.
28. This one is genuinely double-booked as something we say and something we believe, as evidenced by its definition as a narrative that’s told as true—the possibility of belief is at the heart of a legend. Return to text.
29. A great example of a true urban legend is a story that circulated widely via e-mail and by word of mouth a few years ago about a pregnant woman who was stopped in a sporting goods store and accused of stealing a basketball. The managers made her stop and show them her pregnant stomach before they were willing to accept that she wasn’t smuggling a basketball under her shirt. So she sued them. True story! Return to text.
30. Mythbusters, Snopes.com, and a ton of people on YouTube are all evidence of this. Return to text.
31. These opposing hypotheses have been described at length by a famous folklorist named David Hufford. Check out the “Want to Know More?” list at the end of this section for a recommendation of some stuff of his to read. Return to text.
32. No, I do not know if Bigfoot really exists—sorry. That’s beyond the scope of my expertise as a folklorist. Return to text.
33. David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). Return to text.
34. You’ve probably noticed that lots of folklore work comes out of Newfoundland—you should visit sometime! Return to text.
35. Lots of people say that Hufford has “explained away” the supernatural belief with medical jargon, but that’s really not the case. What he’s done is show the connections between the traditional and the institutional languages used to describe the same phenomenon, and noted that both are equally accurate. We should wonder why we assume that the medical phenomenon “explains” the traditional belief. What if the traditional belief explains the medical phenomenon? Rather than saying that someone experiences the Old Hag because they have sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucinations, maybe people experience sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucinations because the Old Hag has come to visit. Think about that when you’re falling asleep tonight. Return to text.
36. He did this partly by posting “Wanted!” posters all over the place, which nearly got him in trouble with his university. Can you imagine a zoologist or a biologist today putting up posters saying, “Wanted, Dead or Alive: One Unicorn!”? They’d be fired. Return to text.
37. Skinner, “‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 38 (1947). Return to text.
Chapter 4
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Types of Folk Groups
It may seem a bit arbitrary to pluck just a few random folk groups from the vast array of possibilities to talk about here, but too bad, because that’s what we’re going to do. There are some groups that folklorists have studied more than others, and it’s more likely that a student in a folklore class will have the opportunity to collect from some groups rather than others, and the examples here reflect those realities. In this chapter we’re going to look at folk groups based on work, age, beliefs, and interests, considering some of the main types of folklore that crop up in them. If you’re interested in a folk group that’s not discussed here, that’s okay—it’s likely that you’ll still gain some insights that can translate.
Remember that a folk group is half the equation of folklore: when folklorists looks at a given folk group, they’re seeking the folklore that exists within that group as a means to better understand that grou
p as a cultural unit. While certain types or genres of folklore may exist more in one kind of folk group than another (college students may be heavy on the legends while a workplace may have many customs), it’s important to note that any kind of folklore can appear in a given folk group: to say that there’s such a thing as “occupational folklore” or “campus folklore” is not to say that these are types of folklore distinct from other genres such as legends, jokes, and customs. It’s simply to apply a shared theme (occupation, education) to all the legends, material objects, and customs that can be found in that group. It’s important to keep the distinction between “folk” (the group of people) and “lore” (the genres or forms of expression) straight: a folklorist can approach the field from either or both of these angles, starting with a particular group (college students), a particular type of folklore (political jokes), or the intersection of both (political jokes told by college students).
We should also remember that many folk groups have both folk and institutional components to them. Occupations have the rules and regulations of the company, along with the stuff that a new employee learns informally from coworkers on the job. Religions have the doctrinal expectations for believers, along with the cultural expectations that come from the community rather than from the officials. In these instances, the word alongside is often used to describe the relationship between the folk and official cultures of the group. Folk religion exists alongside the institutional aspects of a religion; occupational folklore exists alongside the business’s rules and regulations. This emphasizes an important fact about the culture of folk groups: the folk culture is no more or less important than the official culture.1 It doesn’t exist above or beneath the official culture, but right next to it, affecting how we act toward, interact with, and react to the other people in the group.
My students one semester came up with a great example of this: the cultural knowledge we have about driving a car. The folk group here is a broad one—people who are licensed drivers. On the institutional level, members of this folk group are aware of the many legal requirements for drivers: that they be licensed and that they take an official test in order to become so, that they obey traffic lights and speed limits, that they wear a seatbelt and have working turn signals and lights, and so on. On the folk level, we have the common folk belief that you are allowed to drive up to five miles per hour over the speed limit without getting a ticket,2 we have the custom of kissing your hand and hitting the roof of your car when you drive through a yellow light, of lifting your feet when you go over train tracks or a cattle guard, of holding your breath through a tunnel or past a cemetery. We know that cars with only one working headlight are called padiddles (or perdiddles, spadoodles, or padinkles), that the proper acknowledgment for being allowed to merge ahead of someone in heavy traffic is a friendly wave, and that we pass time on long car rides by playing the license plate game (or the punch buggy game). All this folk knowledge exists right alongside, and is employed at the same time as, the official knowledge.
Of course, not all folk groups have an institutional level to their culture: families, for instance, rarely have a truly institutional level to their culture—everything is on the folk level. The same goes for groups united by more abstract concepts: knitters, high-school cliques, fishermen, mothers, really tall people … remember that a folk group is made up of any two or more people who share at least one thing in common. Lots of groups created by that definition aren’t going to share an official culture.3 That’s okay—a group, especially a smaller group,4 can get by with only folk culture quite easily.
Occupational Folk Groups
Occupational folk groups were one of the earliest areas of folkloristic inquiry in this country. Since America didn’t have a peasant class in quite the same way as European countries did, American folklorists turned to various occupations, especially labor-intensive occupations like lumberjacks, steelworkers, or firefighters, in search of traditional expressive culture. Of course, they found a treasure trove of lore: work techniques that are learned on the job rather than through formal training, lingo and jargon pertaining to tools and skills, legends of especially great (or especially awful) past workers, customs for initiation into the labor force or ascension to a new rank, and so on. Occupations create intense shared identities—especially when the work is risky or dangerous and workers have to rely heavily on each other for safety—and any time there’s a shared identity, there’s usually folklore to reflect and reinforce it.
Even in jobs that aren’t labor intensive, however, there’s still occupational folklore. Many office or service industry workers learn within their first few weeks how things actually work—whom to approach for help or with questions, whom to avoid about certain projects, when to follow procedure and when not to, how long a break actually lasts, which customers are notorious and how best to treat them—and this sometimes ends up being the more important skill set, at least on a daily level.
A student of mine once collected a story from her coworker about a past employee who had been simply terrible at his job. He was so terrible that he didn’t last long, and by the time she collected the story he hadn’t worked at the organization for many years. His popularity as a subject for conversation and storytelling, however, was undimmed by the passage of time. Certain mistakes that he was infamous for had been named after him and specific instances of his ineptitude were so familiar to current employees that his name became synonymous with them. Employees would say things like “He’s a new Dave!” or “Watch out for Dave v2.0!” when someone would make a mistake, or they would warn each other, “Don’t pull a Dave!” when it seemed that someone might be headed toward a misstep. Stories like this5 are clear cautionary tales; when a new employee hears the story, or even when longtime employees rehash it over and over, it’s a symbolic reminder to not act like Dave, to not do what Dave did or make the kind of mistakes Dave made. Personifying incapability helps illustrate incapability, and provides a group of employees with a neutral (well, neutral once Dave didn’t work there anymore, at least) character through which to offer advice, give warnings, and reflect norms and expectations. Workplace stories like this serve as ongoing training and education, reaffirming the values of the business and the expected traits of its employees.
Rites of passage are also a popular form of folklore in the workplace, as people are often arriving as new employees or being promoted to new levels. My students have told me stories about new movie theater projectionists being made to drink shots of popcorn butter, apprenticed butchers being dunked in cow’s blood, and new customer service reps being prank-called by coworkers with purposefully unanswerable questions—these initiations help bond new employees to old ones and can create a sense of camaraderie. One great example of a workplace rite of passage was at Henry Ford’s “English School” graduation celebration during the early 1900s. Since Ford hired so many immigrant workers, he wanted to find a way to unite them all and ease their transition into American culture. His school taught not only the English language but also American customs and manners. For the graduation ceremony, the workers would exit a large model of a boat (representing their arrival as immigrants to the United States), and then enter into a giant “melting pot” wearing the traditional dress of their home countries. They would eventually emerge from the pot wearing a business suit and waving an American flag.6 It seems strange in this day and age, when we are taught to respect and encourage diversity, that so obvious an effort would be made to culturally homogenize a group of people, but it’s an excellent example of the power of a rite of passage in the workplace. Ford found a need to unite his workforce, and he consciously created a folk custom in order to do so.
Similarly self-conscious forms of occupational folklore—wherein a company decides to institute a tradition for its workers to share—exist today. Casual Fridays, monthly office lunches, and promotion and retirement parties are common examples of office customs that, while they may be initially fabricated, can grow in
to genuine components of an office’s culture. Seeking the ways in which folklore grows organically in a workplace and comparing that to the purposefully invented traditions can help to highlight the nature of an occupational experience in a unique way. Business students would do well to consider the utility of occupational folklore studies to their future endeavors.
Imagine that you’re interviewing a coworker about your shared occupational folklore. You bring up the monthly office tradition of going out for drinks on the final Friday of each month, a custom that you felt helped you to get to know your colleagues when you first joined the company, and that you feel reflects a friendly, cohesive office community. Your coworker, who has been working at the company longer than you have, has a different perspective. She tells you that not long before you arrived, your boss decided that she wanted to encourage her employees to be friendly with each other and basically forced everyone to postpone their weekend free time once a month and put on a show of being friends rather than colleagues for an hour or two. No one had wanted to do it, your coworker tells you, and everyone basically resents the fact that while they’re not “officially” required to show up, they pretty much have to if they want to stay in the boss’s good graces.
How does this affect your perception of the custom, which you genuinely appreciated and considered successful at creating group cohesion? Is your coworker simply cynical, or are you blind to the actual attitudes of your officemates? Is your boss a responsive leader with a belief in office friendships, or a manipulative aggressor imposing her will on her underlings?
People spend enormous amounts of their lives at work, and the culture (and folk culture) of the workplace is therefore an important element of modern life. Some folklorists have begun using the concept of “organizational folklore”7 (another way of saying occupational folklore, but with an emphasis on complex corporate structure) as a form of public-sector work, taking academic theories and putting them to use on behalf of human resources departments trying to best serve their employees.
Folklore Rules Page 9
