Notes
Notes Chapter 1. Introduction 1. Though increasingly residual in folklore studies, well-established views of tradition present it as the passing down or transmission of a time-honored cultural practice, or as a cultural element ‘‘rooted in the past but persisting in the present in the manner of a natural object.’’ Whether they foreground process or product, in these views tradition is bound to the past, and tracing the trajectory of its social force would seem to point one way only to an older time when that tale had a reason for being, a reason we conjure when honoring it in the present. The above definition in quotation marks is included by Richard Bauman in his article ‘‘Folklore,’’ but it hardly reflects Bauman’s position (31). In contrast, my work is informed by an approach that Henry Glassie’s article in the 1995 special issue of ‘‘Key Concepts’’ of the Journal of American Folklore crystallizes. 2. For the scholarly definition of this concept, which I will not be using in my work, see Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition: ‘‘‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, . . . which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past’’ (1). In ‘‘Elision or Decision: Lived History and the Contextual Grounding of the Constructed Past,’’ Laurence Marshall Carucci also makes a distinction akin to the one I am emphasizing on the grounds that ‘‘historical recollections are inherently embedded in the present’’ (82). Laiana Wong writes: ‘‘It would be a mistake to assume that the inability to authenticate tradition on an absolute level eliminates its role in shaping the attitudes of a community’’ (103). See note 16 for how the label ‘‘invented traditions’’ has been discussed in Hawai‘i. Richard Bauman offers a concise articulation of the role that ‘‘traditionality’’ has played in folklore: ‘‘The term tradition is conventionally used in a dual sense, to name both the process of transmission of an isolable cultural element through time and also the elements themselves that are transmitted in this process . To view an item of folklore as traditional is to see it as having temporal continuity . . . . There is, however, an emergent reorientation taking place among students of tradition, away from this naturalistic view of tradition as a cultural inheritance rooted in the past and toward an understanding of tradition as symbolically constituted in the present’’ (‘‘Folklore’’ 31). See In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies by Regina Bendix, especially 211–18, for an exemplary reflection on ‘‘tradition’’ within the history of the discipline of folkloristics. To mark the shift away from a naturalizing time-oriented definition, she cites Dell Hymes who had urged in 1975, ‘‘let us root the notion [of tradition] not in 170 Notes to Pages 2–5 time, but in social life. Let us postulate that the traditional is a functional prerequisite of social life. . . . It seems in fact that every person and group makes some effort to ‘traditionalize’ aspects of its experience’’ (211–12). 3. As Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs have theorized, contemporary folkloristics seeks to consider how the contextualized interplay of tradition and performance ‘‘bears upon the political economy of texts’’ (‘‘Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life’’ 76). 4. I acknowledge that ‘‘colonialism’’ may not tell the whole story and may at times—especially when Hawai‘i was a sovereign nation—obscure the role of Hawaiian agency and the difference between different types of domination; the rights of Hawaiians were eroded while Hawai‘i was a sovereign nation. Some may argue that we need a new term rather than ‘‘colonialism’’ to describe the Hawai‘i situation, but the continued dynamics of domination point to ‘‘colonialism ’’ at this point. See Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason for an effort to discriminate among types of colonialism (especially 172–73). 5. In Western folkloristics, a textbook definition of this genre is that ‘‘legends are stories people tell about events that purportedly really happened. However, one of the identifying marks of a legend is that, in the telling people bring up the issue of whether or not the story is true’’ (Adams, ‘‘Folk Narrative’’ 25). In contrast to tales of magic or folktales whose fictionality demands suspension of disbelief, legends are belief narratives, but they can be told or transmitted by nonbelievers ; they raise the question of belief...
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