Dynamics Of Folklore

8. Surrounded by Folklore

C.hapter S ~U\l-~UND£D tpy fOLI'LO\l-££V£~YFOL" SINCE WE ARE SURROUNDED BY FOLKLORE FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE, NEARLY everyone must be a folklorist; some are professionals at it. To put it another way, although some people choose to study folklore and obtain the training necessary in that profession, all of us, to one extent or another, must learn, collect , and use folklore as a natural consequence of being members of close groups. The mill worker needs to learn and use the hand signals that allow communication in a noisy shop; the college student needs to know how long to wait for a late professor; we all learn how late is late-at a cocktail party, a wedding , a class, a picnic; we must know what connotations are available to us in our language (or else risk not understanding most of what is said to us); we need to know what a joke is and where the punch line goes (or risk exasperating our friends and losing out on fantasy and enjoyment); we learn the proper food for breakfast and the proper dress for supper or for eating out ("No shoes, no shirt, no service"). All of these and many more "rules," customs, mores, observances , and communicative traditions we learn and use through the dynamics of folklore. Indeed, unless we "collect" and "perform" the folklore of our close groups, we may be thought of as nearly outsiders. Just to belong to a close group we need to be amateur folklorists then; how rapidly we become members of new close groups and how deeply we remain members of others stand in direct proportion to our command of the group's folklore. Levels of Fol~ Involvement There are two kinds of involvement with the processes offolklore: cultural and intellectual. By cultural involvement I mean that gut-level personal relationship to the close group felt and acted out by the individual in the very performance of folklore under normal circumstances (Yanagita's level 3). The performances and responses in this kind of involvement are geared more to the group-the culture-than to the individual. In the intellectual, intentional engagement with folklore, we stand aside with some objectivity, actually studying and analyzing those dynamic processes that, as members of a close group, we may have participated in culturally without self-consciousness. 315 Unfortunately, the jump from cultural to intellectual involvement is farther than we may suspect, and many people are not willing or able to become objective about actions and assumptions so closely related to their own sense of cultural propriety, personal stability, or ethnic identity. For this reason, people are often more willing to study the folklore of others than the traditions of their own group. Until recently, folklorists and anthropologists had an inclination to run off to the South Sea Islands, to Africa, to the Native American reservations in the United States, and to immigrant colonies to study their folklore. Probably this is related to the continued interest in rural folklore by urban-bred and university-trained folklorists, too. And it probably relates to the terminology one finds until recently in the study of religion: ours is religion, theirs is myth-with the corollaty that we can be objective about them and their myths while we simply accept our own as truth. Fo\~\ore and £motion I bring up this interesting dichotomy for two reasons. First, some people resent it when an outsider analyzes their folklore because they suddenly sense that their views are not as unique or as universal as they had assumed. Moreover, to many, just the conscious discussion of assumed values implies criticism. Professional folklorists need to recognize that they run the risk of offending people by being objective about matters which are normally registered on the subjective level. These attitudes are obviously opposite sides of the same coin, and they represent one of the greatest potentials for misunderstanding in the field of folklore : people often become angty when their own unexamined cultural involvement is held up for intellectual scrutiny. This means that people who seek to become intentional, professional folklorists must realize that they will be dealing with the most delicate and potentially volatile of human expressions: those that relate the individual solidly and emotionally to a close group-those that can therefore undergird such dynamic matters as the frictions between Celt and Saxon in Ireland, between Arab and Israeli in the Middle East, between soldier and marine on leave, between logger...