FOLKLORE

FOLKLORE . Folklorists have been interested in religion as an area of research since the beginnings of the discipline in the nineteenth century, although early folklorists often conceived the beliefs of folk cultures not as religion but as superstition or magic. Many folklore scholars were grounded in scientific rationalism to the extent that they dismissed the beliefs of the folk as ignorant superstition, even if these beliefs were part of systems that functioned in ways similar to organized religion. By the early twentieth century, folklorists and other social scientists recognized the link between religion and folk belief, but condescended toward both. From the positivist perspective of folklore studies as a "historical science," superstition and religion were both considered prescientific. In 1930 Alexander Krappe stated in The Science of Folklore : "Superstition, in common parlance, designates the sum of beliefs and practices shared by other people in so far as they differ from our own. What we believe and practice ourselves is, of course, Religion" (p. 203). Krappe implies the dichotomy that later folklorists called folk/elite, with the folk an invention of an intellectual elite who always defined folk as inferior because they were construed as rural, isolated, and uneducated.

On the other hand, folklorists were part of a larger intellectual tendency to romanticize the folk, including idealizing certain beliefs and practices associated with folk culture. Folklorists' attitudes towards the folk were similar to anthropologists' attitudes toward the primitive. According to George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer in Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (1986), anthropologists have idealized the primitive since the nineteenth century: "They—primitive man—have retained a respect for nature, and we have lost it … they have sustained close, intimate, satisfying communal lives, and we have lost this way of life … and they have retained a sense of the sacred in everyday life, and we have lost this [spiritual vision]" (p. 129). Folklorists were similarly nostalgic about the folk and their beliefs, imagining some folk beliefs as representing a spiritual connection to nature that civilized people had lost and perceiving the folk as leading more sacred lives than people in modern urban environments. This romanticized construction of folk belief was maintained simultaneously with the opposite academic construction of folk belief as pathological. For instance, in the United States folklorists represented Appalachian people as a folk in ways that sometimes reinforced the stereotype of the irrational superstitious hillbilly and at other times projected the image of the wise old mountain healer who was spiritually close to nature.

Superstition and Religion

Most folklorists made a distinction between superstition and religion, even when evidence indicated a close connection between beliefs and practices assigned to different categories. The religious orientation and theoretical approach of the researcher were factors in making this distinction, as were issues of race and class. A comparison of the 1920s and 1930s research of white folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett and black folklorist Zora Neale Hurston illustrates the complexity of the cultural representation of folk belief and religion in folklore scholarship. Puckett and Hurston viewed the African American tradition of hoodoo or conjuration in very different ways: Hurston as a religion and Puckett as superstitious behavior. Puckett was still theoretically grounded in the outdated nineteenth-century concept of cultural evolution, while Hurston was trained in the then current school of cultural relativism. Puckett, in his extensive collection Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1926), associates superstition with "uncultured and backward classes of society" (p. 6), people who had not advanced up the ladder of cultural evolution as far as the educated elite. He therefore saw such African American folk practices as midwifery as "murderous lore" that "should be replaced by modern scientific knowledge."

Hurston rejected Puckett's pathological view and saw hoodoo and conjuration as a systematic religion comparable to Christianity. In a 1929 letter to the poet Langston Hughes quoted by Robert Hemenway in his "Introduction" to Hurston's Mules and Men (1935), Hurston writes "I am convinced that Christianity as practiced is an attenuated form of nature worship" (pp. xix–xx). After citing several Christian rituals that contain nature symbolism, she proclaims, "Sympathetic magic pure and simple. They have a nerve to laugh at conjure." She accepted the spiritual efficacy of hoodoo to the point that she studied with a hoodoo priest and was initiated into the practice and came to believe that conjuration worked in particular instances. She argued against the pathological perspective toward folk belief, but in order to present a more positive picture of African American folk belief, she tended to romanticize black southern folk culture as closer to nature and more spiritual than modern societies. Hurston's subjective position as an African American ethnographer caused her to see her own culture in a more positive light than Puckett as a white sociologist/folklorist born and brought up in a southern racist society could. Despite their differences, Hurston and Puckett confronted the same problem that scholars had encountered since the invention of the folk in the eighteenth century: how to differentiate folk religion from other forms of religion.

Folk Religion

In his seminal 1974 essay "Toward a Definition of Folk Religion," Don Yoder points out that "the discovery of folk religion in Europe had come at the time of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when rationalist clergy attacked folk 'superstitions' in sermons and ministerial periodicals" (p. 3). By the nineteenth century, German scholars had included religion as an important component in the study of Volkskunde (folklife), and by 1901 a German Lutheran minister used the term religiose Volkskunde (religious folklife) for the first time. In the twentieth century, European folklorists conducted extensive research on the religious beliefs and practices of folk groups throughout Europe among both Roman Catholics and Protestants. To German and other European scholars, the folk were uneducated peasants living in isolated rural areas, so that folk religion could be differentiated from other forms of religion on the basis of the elite/folk hierarchy: folk religion was simpler, contaminated by superstition, and often at variance with official church dogma. Yoder used this long-standing dichotomy as the basis for his definition of folk religion as "unofficial" and "relatively unorganized" in opposition to official organized religion: "Folk religion is the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people apart from and alongside the strictly theological and liturgical forms of the official religion" (p. 4).

The same basic dichotomy worked for folklorists and anthropologists as they began to study the religious life of peoples in the New World. Folklorists especially were looking for the equivalent of the European peasant in new environments so that any isolated, rural, and relatively uneducated people were designated folk, and folklorists began to collect such religious expressions as hymns, sermons, customs, and rituals from them. The definition of folk religion as religious practices of peasants persisted well into the twentieth century; William A. Christian Jr., who wrote the entry on "Folk Religion" in the original 1987 edition of The Encyclopedia of Religion, directed his attention to "past and present-day sedentary cultivators and pastoralists of Asia, North Africa, southern Europe, and Latin America, and historically to sedentary cultivators in northern Europe and North America as well" (vol. 5, p. 370). His definition of folk as pastoral leads him to conclude that the folk had disappeared from North America and northern Europe as a result of urbanization and industrialization, in contrast to such folklorists as Richard M. Dorson, who answered "yes" to the question posed in the title of his 1970 article, "Is There a Folk in the City?" Many of Dorson's examples came from European immigrants and southern rural migrants in heavily industrialized Gary, Indiana, so that the peasant idea was still underlying the conceptualization of folk.

Folklorists and anthropologists also conducted field research on religious folklore in both urban and rural areas in Central and South America, where their theoretical concern was with cultural syncretism. They examined the way native religions merged with official religions. Yoder cites the "example [of] the mélange of African primitivism and Roman Catholicism that is in Haiti called 'Voodoo,' or the syncretism between Catholicism and native Indian religious beliefs and practices in Central and South America" (1974, p. 2). The fieldwork of Hurston offers an example of how syncretism also influenced folklore field research in the southern United States, since she recognized the Catholic elements in hoodoo in New Orleans. Anthropologists and folklorists still considered religious folklore in socioeconomic class terms as associated with peasants, although some had migrated to cities bringing their religion with them.

Throughout the history of folklore scholarship on religion, the folk/elite dichotomy has been a basic underlying principle, whether in the study of European peasants, African Americans, Appalachian whites, or people whose religions merge native and European elements. This began to change for some folklorists in the 1960s when they started to study urban and suburban folklore and gradually expanded their research to include educated people of a higher socioeconomic class, recognizing that folklore had adapted to technology so that new genres such as "xerox lore" became the subject of scholarly books. Finally, Alan Dundes could answer the question asked in his 1980 article "Who Are the Folk?" by saying that, in essence, we all are: a folk group is any group with any one linking factor. Once the folk/elite dichotomy had been undermined, folklorists who conducted research on religion were freed to reconceptualize it in nonhierarchical ways.

In 1995, Leonard Norman Primiano, in an important essay entitled "Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife," challenged the assumption of folk as inferior: "Scholars within the discipline have consistently named religious people's beliefs in residualistic, derogatory ways as 'folk,' 'unofficial,' or 'popular' religion, and have then juxtaposed these terms on a two-tiered model with 'official' religion" (p. 38). This implies the existence of a "pure" religion that is "contaminated" by the folk in their everyday religious practices. In order to correct the problems inherent in this hierarchical dichotomy, Primiano suggests a new term and a new theoretical concept: "Vernacular religion is, by definition, religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it" (p. 44). There is no opposition here between folk and elite since all religious practitioners would be included no matter what their socioeconomic class: every individual interprets religion within the context of his or her everyday life (the vernacular dimension of life). Priests, rabbis, prophets, shamans—no matter how high in the hierarchy of their respective religions—would all practice vernacular religion in the sense that they make individual interpretations of religious meaning and practice in everyday circumstances. This approach avoids the condescension of the old elite/folk dichotomy and attempts to treat religious practices with respect by concentrating on the experiential aspects of religion. Primiano recognizes that vernacular contains some of the same pejorative connotations as folk, and some folklorists prefer to continue using folk religion as the scholarly term, but the theoretical concept of vernacular religion has been widely accepted in folklore studies.

Folkloristic Approaches to the Study of Religion

Concepts of the folk and definitions of folk religion have had a basic influence on theoretical approaches folklorists have used in the study of religion, and as these concepts and definitions have changed, so have the approaches. Since most folklore studies are grounded in field research, the best way to understand theoretical approaches in folklore scholarship is by examining representative individual studies since the early 1900s. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, antiquarians were interested in religious folk customs as survivals of previous savage or barbarian times; they thought collecting the beliefs and customs of peasants could provide an understanding of the past. The concept of cultural evolution that was the basis for the survivalist approach had been discredited by the late nineteenth century, but some anthropologists and folklorists continued to base their interpretations of folk beliefs and religion on it well into the twentieth century. Puckett clung to cultural evolution as an explanation of African American folk beliefs in the 1920s, and Ovidiu Birlia used cultural evolution as the basic approach for his entry on "Folklore" in the 1987 edition of The Encyclopedia of Religion. However, for most anthropology and folklore scholars, cultural relativism had replaced cultural evolution by early in the twentieth century. The history of anthropological and folkloristic studies of religion continued to overlap as the new paradigm of cultural relativism developed models that then became dominant influences on the study of religious folklore.

Especially important was the anthropological approach that came to be known as functionalism. Bronislaw Malinowski's fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders became the basis for the functional explanation of magic belief and related behavior that he articulated in a 1931 essay, "The Role of Magic and Religion." His "anxiety ritual theory" influenced the anthropological and folkloristic study of a wide range of behaviors, from primitive magic to everyday superstitions to rituals in religious settings. He invited this widespread application by suggesting that such behaviors were found in both primitive and modern life: wherever there is uncertainty in human endeavors, there will be magic and ritual to help relieve the anxiety that arises from that uncertainty. Rituals, whether they are as mundane as not walking under a ladder or as elaborate as Catholic priests blessing fishing fleets, function to give a psychological sense of control over uncertainties in life. The functional approach was grounded in scientific rationalism as a way of explaining what seemed to be irrational behaviors; a functionalist might say that when modern educated people base their actions on "magico-religious" beliefs, their behavior is analogous to primitives. As folklorist Bonnie Blair O'Connor pointed out in her 1995 book, Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicines and the Health Professions, the functionalist approach is implicitly condescending to the people whose beliefs are being studied; "they" are not capable of understanding their own behavior the way "we" educated researchers are. This was a submerged problem as long as the subjects were classified as "primitive" or "folk," but as the concept of folk expanded beyond rural, isolated, relatively uneducated groups, the issue emerged as politically significant.

In retrospect, present-day scholars can see that condescension toward research subjects was a theoretical problem all along for folklorists, including those conducting research on folk religion in the United States. Most American researchers in folk religion concentrated their field research on fundamentalist Christians in the rural South. These American versions of European peasants were conceived of as the folk, and if a researcher wanted to study the full range of their traditional life, then their religion had to be included—a circular way of defining folk religion, but it went uncontested throughout most of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that there were a range of religions to study in the South, folklorists concentrated on the most conservative fundamentalist and evangelical Christian denominations, undoubtedly because they were large in number but also because they fit preconceived notions about the folk. The very conservatism of their religion made it seem more traditional, and from the educated perspective of the folklorist, fundamentalists were seen as more exotic than mainstream religions that were in many cases closer to the folklorists' own religious background.

In the 1960s and 1970s, folklorists studying fundamentalist Christian conversion experiences began to use such theoretical approaches as the one Victor Turner described in his 1969 book, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. One of the first folklorists to use ritual process theory was William Clements in his 1976 article "Conversion and Communitas"; he identified Turner's ritual states of "liminality" and "communitas" in the experiences of fundamentalists he interviewed in Arkansas. Clements posits that since "many folk Christians are poor, uneducated, and without social prestige," their experience of communitas functions "in a compensatory manner" to make up for their lack of "social commodities" (pp. 44–45). Following Clements, Patrick B. Mullen discerned the same ritual pattern in conversion narratives among evangelicals in "Ritual and Sacred Narrative in the Blue Ridge Mountains" (1983), and Jeff Todd Titon applied Turner's theory to religious expression in Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church (1988).

Unfortunately, ritual process theory continued the tendency toward condescension in the study of folk religion by applying it mainly to lesser-educated religious groups. Although folklorists concentrated fieldwork on lower socioeconomic fundamentalist religious groups in the rural South, Turner's ritual pattern can be seen across a wide spectrum of religions among various socioeconomic classes and in rural, urban, and suburban contexts. There was also a residual effect of scientific rationalism in this approach in that ritual process suggests social and psychological explanations for religious conversion experiences, rather than considering the possibility that they are spiritual experiences. A valuable corrective to the tendency to condescend toward fundamentalists was the 1988 collection of essays Diversities of Gifts: Field Studies in Southern Religion. The editors, Ruel W. Tyson Jr., James L. Peacock, and Daniel W. Patterson, and the contributors self-consciously tried to counter stereotypes by depicting fundamentalist religion as complex beliefs and behaviors in closely observed cultural contexts.

Folklorists theoretically refined the ritual process approach by applying it to contexts that required multiple interpretations, recognizing that communitas and liminality have significance beyond their religious meanings. A good example of this is Sabra Webber's study of the Islamic tradition of Ramaḍān. In "Ramadan Observed" (1984) she synthesizes Turner's ritual theory with cultural politics, seeing Ramaḍān as a space for the negotiation of religious and political meanings. She bases her study on her own fieldwork in Tunisia and on other ethnographic accounts from North Africa, where Ramaḍān combines elements of ritual and festival. Ramaḍān is a lunar month-long fast in which the breaking of the fast at the end is an important element. Webber sees Ramaḍān as a local liminal event that must be examined within a larger "liminal period in North African and Arab-world history" (p. 187), a publicly recognized awareness of great change between more stable periods. "Ramadan at its most basic … has become a paradigm that various political and social groups, as well as individuals, are seeking to use to represent their values" (p. 188). This multivocality complicates the concept of communitas: "while at a community level a kind of communitas is achieved, at the individual level it provides, for some people, an opportunity for intensification of pious or recreational behavior" (p. 191), and for others an opportunity for coming of age, an expression of Muslim identity in opposition to other religions, a statement of acceptance or rejection of modernity, and even, for some, a declaration of revolution. Webber's field research indicates an ongoing negotiation by Muslims about the meaning of Ramaḍān. Unlike the research on ritual among fundamentalist Christians, where the interpretation comes from outside observers, Webber's use of ritual theory incorporates interpretations from within the group, thus avoiding conde-scension.

Webber's research is one indication of a broader shift in the study of folk religious behavior from the nineteenth century to the present: a movement away from considering the folk and their beliefs as inferior. Folklorists accepted the underlying elite/folk hierarchy for a very long time, but once that was questioned, resistance to it created an effort to remove pejorative judgments from the documentation and analysis of folk religion. One result of this movement is folklorist David J. Hufford's "experience-centered" theory, which tries to avoid prejudging religious experiences. In a book and a series of articles, Hufford has identified the condescension toward and dismissal of spiritual experiences as a major scholarly problem in folk belief and folk religion studies. He began to formulate his approach to such phenomena in his 1982 book, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, by researching the cross-cultural "old hag" or "Mara" tradition in which people wake up paralyzed in the night thinking that some supernatural entity is pressing down on their chests. The experience transcends religious difference with reports from Jewish and Christian believers, as well as from Islamic sources, where the experience is related to the jinn, an evil or mischievous spirit that visits during the night.

Hufford has also applied his approach to other spiritual phenomena, such as out-of-body experiences and visitations from the dead, in his essay "Beings without Bodies: An Experience-Centered Study of the Belief in Spirits" (1995). His approach to these experiences is grounded in phenomenology: he is critical of preconceived assumptions that explain the behavior in psychological or cultural terms, as, for instance, having Freudian symbolic meaning. Rather, his approach concentrates on the experience itself as reported firsthand by the person involved, opening up the possibility that the experience was an actual contact with another dimension.

Many folklorists who study religion have accepted Hufford's theoretical model as a useful balance to the social construction of reality that might view all such spiritual experiences as "deconstructed 'situated hallucinations,'" a phrase used by Margaret Mills in a 1993 article in which she urges folklorists to strive for a sense of what "feels real" in the lives of the people that they study. On the other hand, Patrick B. Mullen in his 2000 essay, "Belief and the American Folk," points out that researchers can never determine the exact nature of the "core experience" itself, that the experience is always mediated by the person in the act of telling it to the researcher. Mullen argues that folklorists should not just be interested in the core experience but also in the "examination of narrating, the process of communicating a supernatural or spiritual experience in a specific cultural context" (p. 137). A folklorist does not have to accept or reject a spiritual experience as real in order to examine the cultural process whereby the experience was communicated to others. This suggests that the performance approach, which has been a major component of folklore studies since the 1960s, still has relevance for the study of the expressive dimension of folk religion today.

Performance Approaches

Performance theory was part of a 1960s and 1970s paradigm shift in folklore studies that incorporated the contextual analysis of anthropology with the ethnography-of-speaking approach of sociolinguistics and the Kenneth Burke rhetorical approach of literary critical theory in order to examine folklore not as static text but as part of a dynamic cultural process. The emphasis was on the specific situation in which the folklore was communicated, the performance context. Richard Bauman defined performance in 1992 as "an aesthetically marked and heightened mode of communication, framed in a special way and put on display for an audience" (p. 41). This certainly describes many cultural expressions that occur within a religious context, and although folklorists concentrated on verbal art in secular storytelling at first, it was not long before theoretical principles from the performance approach were being used to interpret narrating in religious contexts.

Kirin Narayan's 1989 book, Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching, is based on field research in India, where she observed and participated in storytelling sessions conducted by a Hindu holy man, Swamiji. Narayan employs performance and other approaches to analyze the way Swamiji uses storytelling to teach people who come to him seeking spiritual guidance. She focuses on eight folk narratives in specific performance situations, taking into account the personality and character of the storyteller and dynamic interactions with his audience in order to explain how religious "truths … are made comprehensible and persuasive … through the medium of stories" (p. 243). Swamiji's stories communicate general religious principles, "yet by telling a story instead of making a generalizing statement, Swamiji endows these principles with a vital immediacy" (p. 244). Narayan's study of Hindu storytelling has application to storytelling in a wide range of other religious settings.

The performance approach mainly concentrated on narratives, but it has been applied more broadly to sermons, hymns, rituals, and other religious expressions. One of the first studies of religious expression as performance was Bruce Rosenberg's The Art of the American Folk Preacher (1970), but he goes back to an earlier model, the oral-formulaic approach, for his primary theoretical focus. In many ways, the oral-formulaic approach of Albert B. Lord and Millman Parry was a precursor of performance theory because of its emphasis on oral performance. In The Singer of Tales (1960), Lord formulated the oral-formulaic thesis based on fieldwork he and Parry had conducted on performances by South Slav epic poets that provided the evidence of certain oral formulas that also occur in written poetry. Rosenberg identified similar themes and formulas in improvised oral sermon performances by American preachers. Gerald Davis later argued in "I've Got the Word in Me and I Can Sing It, You Know": A Study of the Performed African American Sermon (1985) that formulas are indeed part of the African American preacher's performance, but they are culture specific and related to rhythmic patterns that are not the same as those used by epic poets. In both studies, belief is not so much an issue as the artistic dimension of the performance, and this gets at one of the problems that folklorists have faced in using a performance approach to religious expression: such studies contextualize traditional religious communication in terms of the specific circumstances of performance, but tend to leave out the dimension of belief.

As Diane E. Goldstein states in her 1995 article, "The Secularization of Religious Ethnography and Narrative Competence in a Discourse of Faith," many researchers treat "belief issues as essentially external to the scope of research. The folklorist's concern with verbal artistry provides grist for such an approach in that it often lays stress on 'the verbal' and 'the art' to the neglect of the underlying cognitive aspects of culture" (p. 23). We are reminded of Mills's concern that folklorists are leaving out the felt experiential nature of belief and practice in ethnographic descriptions. Goldstein points out that scholars tend to separate language from religion in order to avoid belief as a factor, and consequently they have not fully understood the cultural meaning of religious experience. She says that the performance approach concentrates on art in a way that leaves out the performer's sense of the divine, thus secularizing religious communication and making the approach inadequate as a means of understanding the cultural process being examined. The term performance suggests a metaphor underlying the theory, which prompts Goldstein to ask, "Why would you use the dramatistic metaphors of stages and actors if you knew about religious experience?" (p. 29).

Some folklorists respond that no matter how divinely felt the experience itself is, it is communicated from one human to another in social contexts that sometimes require the speaker to engage a listener through artistic means. The specific context of communication must be taken into account; some contexts require performance techniques and others do not. As most performance scholars recognize today, an effective theoretical approach to folk religion would combine performance and culturally based theories. The "keys" that define performance in Bauman's Verbal Art as Performance (1977) are culturally relative, so that a specific religious performance situation must be examined within its larger cultural frame, including the role of belief. The researcher needs to be "fluent" in the keys of the particular culture being studied. Goldstein points out that this has not been the case in many performance studies of folk religion, but this is not the result of a flaw in the theory, but in its application.

Goldstein's example from her own fieldwork illustrates the importance of taking the group's beliefs into account when examining communication about religious experience. She compares testimonies by two different women in an evangelical worship service; one seems to the researcher to be more articulate and effective and the other halting and ineffective, but to people in the congregation the inarticulate testimony was deemed more sincere and ultimately more authentic and divinely inspired, at least partially because it was not a smooth performance. Their belief system privileged effect over style: "touching the hearts" of people in the congregation was thought to be a sign of divine inspiration. In Bauman's terms, the competency of performance was not evaluated on the basis of artistic keys, but on authenticity of belief. Performance theory still seems relevant here: even if the qualities of performance are lacking in one testimony, they are made apparent by the presence of performance keys in the other. The important thing is for the researcher to be familiar with the relationship between aesthetics and belief in the particular religious culture under scrutiny.

Cultural Studies Approaches

Performance approaches to folk religion concentrated so much on the aesthetic dimensions of a specific situation that they neglected larger cultural and ideological issues that informed the performance itself, as J. E. Limon and M. J. Young point out in their 1986 critique of performance studies in general, "Frontiers, Settlements, and Development in Folklore Studies, 1972–1985." Limon and Young also criticized folklorists doing performance studies for their concentration on verbal art and neglect of material culture. These imbalances were partially corrected by the growing influence of cultural studies on folklore scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s.

Folklorists using cultural studies approaches helped fill in the gaps by examining power relations within folk religion contexts, including numerous studies of both oral traditions and material culture. For instance, in the 1993 essay "Multivocality and Vernacular Architecture: The Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank, Staten Island," Joseph Sciorra traces the history of a neighborhood grotto built by a group of Italian-American men in New York. He interviewed some of the builders to situate the tradition within local culture, and he also placed his study in the larger context of the history of Catholic grottoes in Europe and elsewhere. His research indicates the social and political reality of the official/unofficial dichotomy in folk religion. This may be an imagined construct, but it was manifested in the exercise of power by local church authorities in an attempt to keep religious activities within the control of the priests after local parishioners started their own neighborhood processions and grottos. The struggle took place over many years, but the folk parishioners were able to maintain the Mount Carmel grotto that still stands today as an attraction for thousands of visitors to an out of the way neighborhood on Staten Island.

A similar study by Suzanne Seriff in 1991, "Homages in Clay: The Figural Ceramics of José Varela," focuses on a Mexican-American folk artist whose clay figures often depict religious themes. Like Sciorra, Seriff's theoretical approach to folk religion is grounded in cultural politics and ethnic identity, focusing on power relationships between dominant and minority cultures. Seriff, Sciorra, and other folklorists concerned with cultural politics see religious and spiritual issues not just in aesthetic terms, but also within ideological contexts. Varela's folk art can be understood best through his "concern for community and his passion for the past as a fortification against the spiritual and cultural isolation of being Mexican in an Anglo-dominated world" (p. 162). Varela worked for low pay at an Anglo-owned brick and tile factory in a small Texas town; he "surreptitiously" used clay from the factory to create his figures and fired them in the factory kiln. Some of these he gave or sold to friends, and later in life he sold them at markets in San Antonio. He also donated his time to the local Catholic Church in order to build an outdoor grotto to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who "symbolizes the sacred essence of the Mexican community" (pp. 148–149). Varela "has created a productive niche for himself and his fellow Mexicans … in part by creatively manipulating the conditions of his own oppression—that is, by transforming the materials of the factory in which he works into familiar and fantastic forms to be circulated … among members of his own community" (p. 163). Folklorists often assume the role of advocates for the people they study, and Seriff and Sciorra's research suggests that they have defined the folk as oppressed and disenfranchised within the context of their religious practices in order to argue for their rights.

Feminist Approaches

Feminist approaches to folk religion share the political perspective of cultural studies while providing a more specific ideological focus. Seriff and another folklorist, Kay Turner, conducted field research that produced the 1987 essay "'Giving an Altar': The Ideology of Reproduction in a St. Joseph's Day Feast." "This woman-centered altar tradition provides a splendid case in point for understanding folklore practice and performance through a feminist orientation" (p. 446). Their approach combines performance and feminist concerns by viewing the feast of Saint Joseph as a creative symbolic expression of women's power of reproduction. The feast "gives dramatic and aesthetic recognition to the sustaining values of nurturance, care, comfort, and support—the birthright of the mother," but it moves from the religious to the ideological in that "religious belief is specifically wedded with the ideology of reproduction…it is through the care and nurturance shown to the Holy Family on this day that the importance of women's daily caretaking of the earthly family is sacralized" (p. 458). This study indicates how folklorists have gone beyond performance in a narrow aesthetic sense by viewing religious artistic communication within a broader ideological frame including feminist principles, and beyond verbal art to consider foodways and other aspects of material folk culture. Turner expanded the scope of her research in folk religion to include a variety of women's altars across cultures in Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women's Altars (1999).

Susan Starr Sered uses a similar feminist perspective to examine an entirely different religious group in Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (1992), and the principle of women's empowerment underlies her research as well. She moves beyond the focus on one genre of religious expression to consider a range of expressions and behaviors including life stories, rituals, nonverbal gestures, and everyday experiences. As in other feminist folklore studies, Sered analyzes women's religious activities within the context of a dominant patriarchal culture and identifies strategies whereby these largely illiterate women become experts at rituals that are concerned with maintaining the wellbeing of their families. She traces their empowerment in terms of both gender and age: "The Jerusalem women describe a shift from relative ritual powerlessness when young, to intense ritual respect and involvement in old age and especially widowhood" (p. 138). By focusing on illiterate women, Sered may be reinforcing the old concept of the folk as an oral culture, but this reinforces her feminist ideological perspective by concentrating on a group that is socially marginalized in the modern world.

Like Sered, Elaine J. Lawless began her scholarly research by concentrating on subjugated women within an already marginalized culture in Handmaidens of the Lord: Pentecostal Women Preachers and Traditional Religion (1988), but then she switched to more middle-class religious cultures in Holy Women, Wholly Women: Sharing Ministries of Wholeness through Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography (1993). The development of her research over those years illustrates a broader shift in folk religious studies from rural, relatively uneducated, fundamentalist religions to urban and suburban, educated, "mainstream" religions. In Handmaidens of the Lord, Lawless examines the process whereby women in a religion that considered them inferior and submissive to men could become respected preachers and leaders in their congregations. She concentrates on their life stories and sermons using both feminist and performance approaches. She analyzes preaching styles in performance terms, but the keys to performance reveal images directly related to their experiences as women. These stylistic devices then become verbal strategies that work to secure leadership roles for women in the church; specifically, the reproductive images used in women preachers' sermons are seen as part of a "maternal strategy" to reinforce the role of preacher as "Mother" to the congregation. As with other cultural studies approaches to folk religion, power relationships are the focus within a religious setting.

Lawless used her research in fundamentalist churches to begin to formulate the concept of "reciprocal ethnography" in which the field-worker is obliged to share her research findings with the subject. This collaborative research process requires an ongoing relationship between the folklorist and the person providing information about his or her culture, including discussion between ethnographer and subject on possible scholarly interpretations, and then incorporating the consultant's response in the final report. This approach is complicated by differences in levels of education, socioeconomic class, and religious belief between researcher and subject. Lawless writes in a 1992 essay, "'I Was Afraid Someone Like You … An Outsider … Would Misunderstand': Negotiating Interpretive Differences Between Ethnographers and Subjects," that she failed to take her consultants' responses into account in the published version of Handmaidens of the Lord, but she began a dialogue with one of the preachers later. This woman felt that because Lawless was a religious outsider she had misinterpreted her sermons, and Lawless herself came to believe that the preacher's responses should have been included in the book in order to make the scholarly interpretation fuller and richer.

Holy Women, Wholly Women is a product of reciprocal ethnography, taking into account the detailed responses of the women preachers who were the subjects of the research. However, in this case, the women were closer to Lawless in terms of education and religious beliefs, making the reciprocal process less difficult and the results more collaborative. Lawless uses feminist and performance approaches, but this time with mainstream, more highly educated preachers, again interpreting figurative language in their sermons, especially metaphors of nurturing, as revealing particular views and strategies of women. Differences in class and education have been transcended by gender in her two studies, and in both cases Lawless has situated herself subjectively within the study of religion.

Reflexive Ethnography

Subjectivity has taken on increasing importance in folk religion studies, developing from the earlier "invisible ethnographer" of "objective" research to the visibly foregrounded first-person narrator of reflexive ethnography. David J. Hufford has made the most comprehensive statement of the significance of reflexivity in folklore studies of belief in his 1995 essay, "The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice: Reflexivity in Belief Studies." Hufford argues for the necessity of the researcher situating himself or herself subjectively within the ethnographic enterprise, saying that this is especially important in studies of belief and religion because of the need to make clear the influence of the researcher's assumptions on the representation of the religious belief system of an "other." He points out that all too often the "objective" stance masks a position of disbelief in religious ethnography. "A reflexive analysis of our scholarship enables us to distinguish among the beliefs of our informants, our scholarly knowledge, our personal beliefs and our occupational ideology. This permits coherent discourse and various warranted moral actions" (p. 71). Instead of hiding one's own beliefs, the scholar should make them clear, thereby allowing different interpretations, including moral or ideological ones, to be stated directly, rather than implied as subtext.

Reflexivity in religious ethnography also opens up the possibility of fieldwork and analysis by members of the religious group, and this is a growing approach in folk religion studies. The "native" perspective is another position among many subjectivities and is legitimate as long as it is recognized reflexively; no longer can the insider's position be seen as less objective than the outsider's since they are both subjective. A good illustration of this is Nikki Bado-Fralick's Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual, in which she uses her dual perspectives as a Wiccan priestess and as a scholar trained in folklore and religious studies to examine a Wiccan religious ritual. Bado-Fralick frames her study in terms of her subjectivity, allowing her to explore such ethical problems as dealing with secrecy and to examine processes of identity formation from within. Her research also indicates how folklorists have blurred the line between folk and popular religion, recognizing that both are systems of belief and practice as complex and worthy of study as the more academically privileged mainstream organized religions, and thus resisting the dismissal of such religions often implied in terms such as New Age.

Another study of what might be classified as New Age religion is Roseanne Rini's 1997 dissertation, "Elizabeth Kelly: Contemporary Spiritual Teacher and Healer," which was based on extensive interviews with a healer and psychic, Elizabeth Kelly, who was widely respected and consulted by well-educated people in the small college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Rini initially contacted the woman healer for personal advice and came to know her as a friend and to consult with her on a regular basis. Their personal relationship gradually expanded to include a researcher/consultant dimension, and Rini was able to gain a greater understanding of Kelly's belief and practice from a perspective that included her roles as scholar and believer. Reflexive ethnography has legitimized this kind of research within one's own religious groups in ways that were unimaginable in the past.

These examples of research in New Age religion illustrate that the scholarship in folk religion has expanded well beyond the old paradigm of the folk as peasant, and these and other examples from folklore scholarship since the early twentieth century indicate that the theoretical approaches have grown from simple survivalism to a complex pluralism of choices. The folk are now conceived as any group of people with any linking factor, although approaches grounded in cultural politics tend to focus on disenfranchised and oppressed minority groups as the folk. Folkloristic approaches to the study of religion have developed along similar lines as the general shifts in postmodern theory, with a special emphasis on performance, cultural studies, and feminism. Underlying all the various definitions and approaches used by folklorists to study religion is the ongoing concern for individual experience within specific everyday situations and broader cultural contexts.

See Also

Anthropology, Ethnology and Religion; Folk Religion, overview article; Popular Religion.

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Patrick B. Mullen (2005)