Folklore

Folklore. Folklore consists of cultural expressions learned through oral tradition and custom, typically enacted in social settings. Types of folklore prevalent in America include legends, beliefs, rituals, crafts, food, and architecture. As a lasting record of social expressions, folklore has been an important source of historical evidence for analyzing perceptions and attitudes of groups identified by region, race and ethnicity, religion, occupation, age, and gender, among other categories. Folklore often provides essential information about groups lacking a documentary record. Even when such a record exists, folklore can provide valuable supplementary evidence. Folklore studies have helped scholars reconstruct the everyday life of the past and to comprehend the principal images and symbols that have developed in America. The cultural evidence of folklore has been central to debates over interpretations of a national culture and the role of diverse social traditions within it.

One approach to the study of folklore involves tracing the movement of ethnic folk cultures and their formation of regional groups. Because a group's traditions are usually relatively stable over time and variable over space, when changes occur, they are often a sign of major social structural shifts. One interpretive approach to this process sees cultural diffusion as emanating from four main “cultural hearths” on the eastern seaboard that influenced the formation of American regions. The New England hearth, with its strong British stamp, spread north and west across the upper Middle West. The Chesapeake‐Tidewater hearth influenced the movement across Maryland and Virginia into the Upland South. The Lowland South hearth, featuring both English and African influences, worked its way through South Carolina and Georgia into the Deep South. In Pennsylvania, the last hearth to form, Palatine Germans, Swiss Anabaptists, English Quakers, French Huguenots, and Scots‐Irish people formed a plural society and strong inland Pennsylvania‐German cultural subregion that spread into the Middle West. Further west, arguments have been made for a Mormon culture region (Utah and parts of Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona); the Southwest (New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Texas, Nevada, and Colorado); the Ozarks (Arkansas, Missouri, and part of Illinois); and Cajun country (Louisiana and part of Texas). Beyond the regional ties of ethnic groups, the long‐standing cultural distinctiveness of such groups as African Americans, Chinese Americans, and Pennsylvania‐Germans suggests a pattern of multiculturalism in America dating back to the nineteenth century.

Another perspective, the ethnographic, concentrates less on broad historical‐geographical patterns and more on contemporary observations of localized behavior and communication in a variety of social settings. When such observations can be recovered historically, an ethnographic view of the functioning of folklore in everyday life can be discerned through time. Using this approach, some authorities have characterized American folklore as heterogeneous and dynamic, subject to a variety of social variables, especially gender, age, and social class, in addition to region and ethnicity. From this perspective, folklore is not a historic artifact, but a living process found in such diverse social settings as suburban developments, college campuses, and city neighborhoods. This approach, emphasizing changing settings and individual interactions in everyday life, suggests that cultural identities within America have been more variable, complex, and fluid than static models suggest.

A lingering historical question regarding folklore in America concerns its role in the development of a national culture. To be sure, some critics have questioned whether the culture of a nation‐state as ethnically mixed and young as the United States may be equated with the older and more homogeneous national traditions of Europe and Asia. Others, however, drawing on the example of early American historical experience, posit a new American cultural hybrid forming from the cross‐fertilization of European, Native American, and African traditions. The historian and folklorist Richard Dorson (1916–1981) drew attention to a unique set of historical forces—exploration and colonization, revolution and the establishment of a democratic republic, the westward movement, immigration, slavery and the Civil War, and industrialization and technology—that shaped new folklore or adaptations of older folklore themes unique to American society. Among the favorite subjects for the emergence of such a national cultural consciousness was the American frontier, which bred national folk heroes like Davy Crockett, the legendary lumberjack Paul Bunyan, and the mythic riverboat captain Mike Fink.

Dorson offered a periodization of American cultural history based on the development of folklore. The “religious impulse” represented by lore of witchcraft, divine providences, and supernatural judgments in the form of earthquakes or Indian attacks characterized the Colonial Era. The “democratic impulse,” Dorson suggested, flourished in the Antebellum Era giving rise to legends of larger‐than‐life frontier adventurers and folk heroes. In the later nineteenth century, a changing economy fostered songs and stories of cowboys, lumberjacks, miners, oil drillers, and railroaders. The later twentieth century, some contend, gave rise to “urban legends” and the folklore of a youth culture with its distinctive patterns of speech, fashion, and popular music.

Folklore also figures in the effort to describe, and sometimes create, a unique American historical mythology. According to influential American Studies scholars such as Henry Nash Smith and Russell Nye, American “myths” were not narrative texts in the usual sense. They were driving concepts or “collective representations” that unified Americans. Smith's “myth of the garden,” for example, referred to Americans’ belief in their ability to transform wilderness and desert into an Edenlike garden, while Nye's “myth of superabundance” alluded to the belief in the boundlessness of the nation's natural resources. Comparative studies of proverbs and games suggest that a national “worldview” or set of broadly held “folk ideas” exists, built on such themes as individualism and an optimistic orientation toward the future. Folklore, in short, as a representation in everyday life of deep‐seated values and long‐standing beliefs, can provide a highly useful basis for historical studies examining both national traditions and multicultural movements.
See also Cultural Pluralism; Folk Art and Crafts; Regionalism.

Bibliography

Henry Glassie , Pattern in the Folk Material Culture of the Eastern United Studies, 1968.
Richard Dorson , America in Legend, 1973.
Barre Toelken , The Dynamics of Folklore, 1979.
Alan Dundes , Interpreting Folklore, 1981.
Simon J. Bronner , Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in America, 1986.
Jan Harold Brunvand, ed., American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, 1996.

Simon J. Bronner