American Folklife a Commonwealth of Cultures AMERICAN FOLKLIFE
A COMMONWEALTH OF CULTURES
By Mary Hufford
Library of Congress
American Folklife Center
Washington 1991
Illustration: detail of a photograph of Ukranian Easter eggs. Library of
Congress photo by Carl Fleischhauer, 1981. Select for full image.
AMERICAN FOLKLIFE: A COMMONWEALTH OF CULTURES is a full-color, illustrated,
20-page booklet available from the American Folklife Center. First 25 copies, $2
per copy; therafter, $1 per copy (thus, 30 copies would cost $55). Price
includes postage and handling. To order write to: Library of Congress, American
Folklife Center, 101 Independence Avenue, SE, Washington, D.C. 20540-4610.
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What is Folklife?
Like Edgar Allen Poe's purloined letter, folklife is often hidden in full view,
lodged in the various ways we have of discovering and expressing who we are and
how we fit into the world. Folklife is reflected in the names we bear from
birth, invoking affinities with saints, ancestors, or cultural heroes. Folklife
is your grandfather and great-uncles telling stories of your father when he was
a boy. It is the secret languages of children, the codenames of CB operators,
and the working slang of watermen and doctors. It is the sung parodies of the
"Battle Hymn of the Republic," and the parables told in church or home to
delight and instruct. It is African-American rhythms embedded in gospel hymns,
bluegrass music, and hip hop, and it is the Lakota flutist rendering anew his
people's ancient courtship songs.
Folklife is society welcoming new members at bris and christening, and keeping
the dead incorporated on All Saints Day. It is the marking of the Jewish New
Year at Rosh Hashanah and the Persian New Year at Noruz. It is New York City's
streets enlivened by Lion Dancers in celebration of Chinese New Year and by
Southern Italian immigrants dancing their towering giglios in honor of St.
Paulinus each summer. It is the ubiquitous appearance of yellow ribbons to
express a complicated sentiment about war, and displays of orange pumpkins on
front porches at Halloween.
Folklife is the recycling of scraps of clothing and bits of experience into
quilts that tell stories, and the stories told by those gathered around quilting
frames. It is the evolution of vaqueros into buckaroos, and the variety of ways
there are to skin a muskrat, preserve shuck beans, or join two pieces of wood.
It is the oysterboat carved into the above-ground grave of the Louisiana
fisherman, and the eighteen-wheeler on the trucker's tombstone in Illinois.
Folklife is the thundering of foxhunters across the rolling Rappahanock hunt
country, and the listening of hilltoppers to hounds crying fox in the Tennessee
mountains. It is the twirling of lariats at western rodeos, and the spinning of
double-dutch jumpropes in West Philadelphia. It is scattered across the
landscape in Finnish saunas and Italian vineyards; engraved in the split rail
boundaries of Appalachian "hollers" and in the stone fences around Catskill
"cloves"; scrawled on urban streetscapes by graffiti artists; and projected on
skylines into which mosques, temples, steeples, and onion domes taper.
Folklife is community life and values, artfully expressed in myriad
interactions. It is universal, diverse, and enduring. It enriches the nation and
makes us a commonwealth of cultures.
Folklore, Folklife, and the American Folklife Preservation Act
The study of folklore and folklife stands at the confluence of several European
academic traditions. The terms folklore and folklife were coined by
nineteenth-century scholars who saw that the industrial and agricultural
revolutions were outmoding the older ways of life, making many customs and
technologies paradoxically more conspicuous as they disappeared. In 1846
Englishman William J. Thoms gathered up the profusion of "manners, customs,
observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc., of the olden time" under
the single term folk-lore. In so doing he provided his colleagues interested in
"popular antiquities" with a framework for their endeavor and modern folklorists
with a name for their profession.
As Thoms and his successors combed the British hinterlands for "stumps and
stubs" of disappearing traditions, the folklife studies movement was germinating
in continental Europe. There scholars began using the Swedish folkliv and the
German Volksleben to designate vernacular (or folk) culture in its entirety,
including customs and material culture (the ways in which people transform their
surroundings into food, shelter, clothing, tools, and landscapes) as well as
oral traditions. Today the study of folklife encompasses all of the traditional
expressions that shape and are shaped by cultural groups. While folklore and
folklife may be used to distinguish oral tradition from material culture, the
terms often are used interchangeably as well.
Over the past century the study of folklore has developed beyond the romantic
quest for remnants of bygone days to the study of how community life and values
are expressed through a wide variety of living traditions. To most people,
however, the term folklore continues to suggest aspects of culture that are
out-of- date or on the fringe -- the province of old people, ethnic groups, and
the rural poor. The term may even be used to characterize something as trivial
or untrue, as in "that's just folklore." Modern folklorists believe that no
aspect of culture is trivial, and that the impulse to make culture, to
traditionalize shared experiences, imbuing them with form and meaning, is
universal among humans. Reflecting on their hardships and triumphs in song,
story, ritual, and object, people everywhere shape cultural legacies meant to
outlast each generation.
In 1976, as the United States celebrated its Bicentennial, the U.S. Congress
passed the American Folklife Preservation Act (P.L. 94-201). In writing the
legislation, Congress had to define folklife. Here is what the law says:
"American folklife" means the traditional expressive culture shared within the
various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational,
religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and
symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature,
art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft;
these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance,
and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction or
institutional direction.
Created after more than a century of legislation designed to protect physical
aspects of heritage -- natural species, tracts of wilderness, landscapes,
historic buildings, artifacts, and monuments -- the law reflects a growing
awareness among the American people that cultural diversity, which distinguishes
and strengthens us as a nation, is also a resource worthy of protection.
In the United States, awareness of folklife has been heightened both by the
presence of many cultural groups from all over the world and by the accelerated
pace of change in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, the effort
to conserve folklife should not be seen simply as an attempt to preserve
vanishing ways of life. Rather, the American Folklife Preservation Act
recognizes the vitality of folklife today. As a measure for safeguarding
cultural diversity, the law signals an important departure from the once
widely-held notion of the United States as a melting pot, which assumed that
members of ethnic groups would become homogenized as "Americans." We no longer
view cultural difference as a problem to be solved, but as a tremendous
opportunity. In the diversity of American folklife we find a marketplace teeming
with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for
Americans who constantly shape and transform their cultures.
Sharing with others the experience of family life, ethnic origin, occupation,
religious beliefs, stage of life, recreation, and geographic proximity, most
individuals belong to more than one cultural group. Some groups have existed for
thousands of years, while others come together temporarily around a variety of
shared concerns -- particularly in America, where democratic principles have
long sustained what Alexis de Tocqueville called the distinctly American "art of
associating together."
Taken as a whole, the thousands of grassroots associations in the United States
form a fairly comprehensive index to our nation's cultural affairs. Some, like
ethnic organizations and churches, have explicitly cultural aims, while others
spring up around common environmental, recreational, or occupational concerns.
Some cultural groups may be less official: family members at a reunion,
coworkers in a factory, or friends gathered to make back-porch (or kitchen, or
garage) music. Other cultural groups may be more official: San Sostine
Societies, chapters of Ducks Unlimited, the Mount Pleasant Basketmakers
Association, volunteer fire companies, and senior citizens clubs. Sorting and
re-sorting themselves into a vast array of cultural groups, Americans
continually create culture out of their shared experiences.
The traditional knowledge and skills required to make a pie crust, plant a
garden, arrange a birthday party, or turn a lathe are exchanged in the course of
daily living and learned by imitation. It is not simply skills that are
transferred in such interactions, but notions about the proper ways to be human
at a particular time and place. Whether sung or told, enacted or crafted,
traditions are the outcroppings of deep lodes of worldview, knowledge, and
wisdom, navigational aids in an ever- fluctuating social world. Conferring on
community members a vital sense of identity, belonging, and purpose, folklife
defends against social disorders like delinquency, indigence, and drug abuse,
which are themselves symptoms of deep cultural crises.
As cultural groups invest their surroundings with memory and meaning, they
provide, in effect, blueprints for living. For American Indian people, the
landscape is redolent of origin myths and cautionary tales, which come alive as
grandmothers decipher ancient place names to their descendants. Similarly,
though far from their native countries, immigrant groups may keep alive
mythologies and histories tied to landscapes in the old country, evoking them
through architecture, music, dance, ritual, and craft. Thus Russian immigrants
flank their homes with birch trees reminiscent of Eastern Europe. The
call-and-response pattern of West African music is preserved in the gospel music
of African- Americans. Puerto Rican women dancing La Plena mime their Jibaro
forebears who washed their clothes in the island's mountain streams. The passion
of Christ is annually mapped onto urban landscapes in the Good Friday
processions of Hispanic Americans, and Ukrainian-Americans, inscribing Easter
eggs, overlay pre- Christian emblems of life and fertility with Christian
significance.
Traditional ways of doing things are often deemed unremarkable by their
practitioners, until cast into relief by abrupt change, confrontation with
alternative ways of doing things, or the fresh perspective of an outsider (such
as a folklorist). The diversity of American cultures has been catalytic in this
regard, prompting people to recognize and reflect upon their own cultural
distinctiveness. Once grasped as distinctive, ways of doing things may become
emblems of participation. Ways of greeting one another, of seasoning foods, of
ornamenting homes and landscapes may be deliberately used to hold together
people, past, and place. Ways to wrap proteins in starches come to distinguish
those who make pierogis, dumplings, pupusas, or dim sum. The weave of a blanket
or basket can bespeak African American, Native American, or Middle Eastern
identity and values. Distinctive rhythms, whether danced, strummed, sung, or
drummed, may synchronize Americans born in the same decade, or who share common
ancestry or beliefs.
Traditions do not simply pass along unchanged. In the hands of those who
practice them they may be vigorously remodelled, woven into the present, and
laden with new meanings. Folklife, often seen as a casualty of change, may
actually survive because it is reformulated to solve cultural, social, and
biological crises. Older traditions may be pressed into service for mending the
ruptures between past and present, and between old and new worlds. Thus Hmong
immigrants use the textile tradition of paj ntaub to record the violent events
that hurled them from their traditional world in Vietnam into a profoundly
different life in the United States. South Carolina sweetgrass basketmakers
carry on a two- centuries-old tradition that reaches back to Africa. And a
Puerto Rican street theater troupe dramatizes culture conflict on the mainland
in a bilingual farce about foodways.
Retirement or the onset of old age can occasion a return to traditional crafts
learned early in life. For the woman making a memory quilt or the machinist
making models of tools no longer in use, traditional forms become a way of
reconstituting the past in the present. The craft, the recipe, the photo album,
or the ceremony serve as thresholds to a vanishing world in which an elderly
person's values and identity are rooted. This is especially significant to
younger witnesses for whom the past is thus made tangible and animated through
stories inspired by the forms.
Cultural lineages do not always follow genealogical ones. Often a tradition's
"rightful" heirs are not very interested in inheriting it. Facing indifference
among the young from their own cultural groups, and pained by the possibility
that their traditions might die out, masters of traditional arts and skills may
deliberately rewrite the cultural will, taking on students from many different
backgrounds in order to bequeath their traditions. Modern life has broadened the
pool of potential heirs, making it possible for a basketmaker from New England
to turn to the craft revival for apprentices, or a master of the Chinese Opera
in New York to find eager students among European Americans.
The United States is not a melting pot, but neither is it a fixed mosaic of
ethnic enclaves. From the beginning, our nation has been a meeting ground of
many cultures, whose interactions have produced a unique array of cultural
groups and forms. Responding to the challenges of life in the same locale,
different ethnic groups may cast their lot together under regional identities as
"buckaroos," "Pineys," "watermen," or "Hoosiers," without surrendering ethnicity
in other settings. Distinctive ways of speaking, fiddling, dancing, making
chili, and designing boats can evolve into resources for expressing and
celebrating regional identity. Thus ways of shucking oysters or lassoing cattle
can become touchstones of identity for itinerant workers, distinguishing
Virginians from Marylanders or Texans from Californians. And in a Washington,
D.C., neighborhood, Hispanic- Americans from various South and Central American
countries explore an emerging Latino identity, which they express through an
annual festival and parade that would not occur in their countries of origin.
Over the past two centuries, the intercultural transactions that are so
distinctly American have produced uniquely New World blends whose origins we no
longer recognize. When one tradition is spotlighted, others fade into the
background. We tend to forget that the banjo, now played almost exclusively by
white musicians, was a cultural idea introduced here by African-Americans, and
that the tradition of lining out hymns that today flourishes mainly in African
American churches is a legacy from England. Without this early
nineteenth-century interchange, perhaps these distinct traditions would have
disappeared. And out of the same cultural encounters in the upper South that
produced these transfers, there grew distinctly American styles of music
suffused with African- American ideas of syncopation.
Other forgotten legacies of early cultural encounters spangle the landscape.
Early American watermen freely combined ideas from English punts, Swedish
flatboats, and French bateaus to create small wooden boats that now register
subtleties of wind, tide, temperature, and contours of earth beneath far-flung
waters of the United States. Thus have Jersey garveys, Ozark john boats, and
Mackenzie River skiffs become vessels conveying regional identity. The martin
birdhouse complexes commonly found in yards east of the Mississippi River hail
from gourd dwellings that American Indians devised centuries ago to entice the
insect-eating birds into cohabitation. Descendants of those American Indians now
live beyond the territory of martins, while the descendants of
seventeenth-century martins live in houses modelled on Euro- American
architectural forms.
The early colonists' adoption of an ingenious form of mosquito control
exemplifies a strong pattern throughout our history, the pattern of one group
freely borrowing and transforming the cultural ideas of another. We witness the
continuance of this pattern in the appropriation of the Greek bouzouki by
Irish-American musicians, in the influence of Cajun, Yiddish, and African styles
on popular music, in the co-opting of Cornish pasties by Finnish Minnesotans,
and in the embracing of ancient Japanese techniques of joinery by American
woodworkers.
American folklife stoutly resists the effects of a melting pot. If it simmers at
all it is in many pots of gumbo, burgoo, chili, goulash, and booya. And the
American people are the chefs, concocting culture from the resources and ideas
in the American folklife repertory. Folklife flourishes when children gather to
play, when artisans attract students and clientele, when parents and
grandparents pass along their traditions and values to the younger generations,
whether in the kitchen or in an ethnic or parochial school. Defining and
celebrating themselves in a constantly changing world, Americans enliven the
landscape with parades, sukkos, and powwows, seasonally inscribing their
worldviews on doorways and graveyards, valiantly keeping indeterminacy at bay.
Our common wealth circulates in a free flowing exchange of cultural ideas, which
on reflection appear to merge and diverge, surface and submerge throughout our
history like contra dancers advancing and retiring, like stitches dropped and
retrieved in the hands of a lacemaker, like strands of bread ritually braided,
like the reciprocating bow of a master fiddler.
Folklorists
As a field of study, folklore straddles the humanities and social sciences. Like
cultural anthropologists, folklorists conduct much of their research by
observing and interviewing people "in the field." An interest in human
expressions links folklorists with humanities scholars as well. However, unlike
their colleagues in the humanities concerned with the study of written texts,
folklorists attend to living traditions, curious about how they are created,
transformed over time and space, and rendered meaningful.
Since the American Folklore Society was founded in 1888, its membership has
increased from 105 to some 1500 people, many of whom hold advanced degrees in
folklore. Fifteen colleges and universities in North America now offer such
degrees, while nearly eighty other institutions offer concentrations in
folklore. Some folklorists teach in universities and colleges, training others
to become folklorists or contributing their perspective to the intellectual life
of departments in related fields such as English, anthropology, American
studies, art history, historic preservation, and musicology. Others (including
many in universities and colleges) work closely with cultural groups to educate
the wider public about folklife and its significance. Folklorists are involved
in public programs at local, regional, state, and national levels. They often
are affiliated with museums, libraries, arts organizations, public schools, and
historical societies, and some work for a growing network of public folklife
programs and organizations. Most states, and a number of major cities, now
employ folklorists who carry out a variety of activities related to the
presentation and preservation of the cultural traditions in their regions.
Because living people and cultures are what folklorists study, scholars must be
sensitive to the potential effect of scholarly research upon traditions and
their practitioners. Increasingly, folklorists are called upon to serve as
middlemen between mainstream cultural institutions and traditional cultural
groups. Today, for example, folklorists may be found helping health care
professionals to accommodate their practice to patients whose traditional
beliefs about illness and health are at odds with contemporary medical views.
Folklorists may speak to natural resource managers on behalf of traditional
craftspeople denied access to necessary natural materials, or may help
traditional artists gain access to a broader clientele in order to market their
wares. Folklorists may also advise planners regarding traditional patterns of
land use, or alert city council members to the impact of particular laws upon
cultural cornerstones such as ethnic social clubs and marketplaces. Folklorists
join with historic preservationists to identify traditional histories lodged not
only in objects but in a broad array of expressive forms. Folklorists also work
with professional educators in museums, parks, and classrooms to devise settings
in which respected bearers of tradition may impart their wealth of knowledge and
skills to the younger generations.
Although the American Folklife Preservation Act suggests that folklife can be
"preserved," in truth, something as fluid and dynamic as folklife does not lend
itself to preservation in the sense that buildings and material artifacts do. We
can record folklife on paper, film, and tape, which we in turn preserve in
archives, libraries, and museums. Such preservation does not directly protect a
living culture from the outside forces that disrupt the dynamics governing
cultural change from within: the department of transportation that divides an
urban village with a freeway; the development of traditional hunting and
gathering grounds into condominiums or wilderness preserves; or the governmental
regulation that discourages languages on which cultures depend for their
survival. However, the documentation of folklife may come in time to be the only
record a community has of a way of life so disrupted. Ultimately, particular
traditions endure because someone chooses to keep them alive, adapting them to
fit changing circumstances, continually crafting new settings for their
survival. Working to inform the public about folklife and its significance,
folklorists can assist this process.
The American Folklife Center
In passing the American Folklife Preservation Act in 1976, Congress bolstered
its call to "preserve and present American folklife" by establishing the
American Folklife Center. The Center, a part of the Library of Congress,
fulfills its mandate in a variety of ways. It includes the Archive of Folk
Culture, which was founded in the Music Division at the Library of Congress in
1928 and has grown to become one of the most significant collections of cultural
research materials in the world, including manuscripts, sound and video
recordings, still photographs, and related ephemera.
The Center has a staff of professionals who conduct programs under the general
guidance of the Librarian of Congress and a Board of Trustees. It serves federal
and state agencies, national, international, regional, and local organizations;
scholars, researchers, and students; and the general public. The Center's
programs and services include field projects, conferences, exhibitions,
workshops, concerts, publications, archival preservation, reference service, and
advisory assistance.
Mary Hufford is a folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center and a
member of the executive board of the American Folklore Society. She is the
author of One Space, Many Places: Folklife and Land Use in New Jersey's
Pinelands National Reserve and many articles on American traditional culture.
Publication of this pamphlet has been made possible by a special arrangement
with Heidelberg Press.
Go to the American Folklife Center Home Page
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