Wisconsin Folklore (review)

James Leary offers resonant insight into his own orientation in this impressive and path-clearing work on the opening page of Wisconsin Folklore, where he self-identifies as a "hardcore cheese-head" (p. xv). Leary is aware, like Emily Dickinson, that all of us "discern . . . [p]rovincially," and his expression of regional affiliation suggests that place of origin can determine collective, as well as personal, epistemologies. From start to finish, Wisconsin Folklore offers much more than sound scholarship; the book is an unabashed celebration of cheesehead culture. Indeed, the book's strengths and flaws both derive, as I see it, from the insider perspective that Leary and many of his featured essayists bring to bear on the subject matter.

The materials that are gathered here are certainly diverse. Sections of the book are devoted, respectively, to articles by a century's worth of chroniclers on dialect, storytelling, musical, customary and material traditions, all with a Wisconsin provenance. Cultural groups represented in Wisconsin Folklore include Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, Native Americans of several tribes, Irish, French Canadians, and African Americans. Leary's "provincial" perspective, in other words, is not intended to shut out the larger world, but—on the contrary—to invite it in. Like many other contemporary folklorists and scholars writing about region, he is obviously interested in pluralising or re-ethnicizing region. His home state, he argues, is not a state of removal but one of engagement—Wisconsin is the world, or at least the United States, in microcosmic form.

So far, so good. Wisconsin Folklore is as rich and as provocative as it is because of its compiler's knowing enthusiasm for his home state's diverse cultures. Leary mentions as well his commitment to "cultural democracy," which I understand to be his populist view on the comparative value of folk materials: "Powwow drums and polka bands say more about who we are," he observes, "than symphonies" (p. 25). Indeed, the varied origins of all this Wisconsin material bring about an almost utopian result. The reader encounters what appears to be an enviable coexistence of Menomini wild-rice gatherers, German American brewers, Hmong qeej players. The question to which I kept returning to as I read the book, however, is never answered, nor even asked, for that matter: aside from the fact of their residence in Wisconsin, what do the individuals and groups featured in this book have in common with one another? What makes a "cheesehead" a "cheesehead"?

This is where it seems to me that Leary's own cultural affiliation may be imposing a certain amount of blindness. As a native Wisconsinite, it may be difficult for him to see that nonnatives might emerge from a book such as this one still wondering about the terms of "cheesehead" identity. Does anyone born or living within the state qualify for membership in the regional group? Potential answers to this nagging question may lie in the introductory discussion of Packermania (pp. 6-7), which includes one of my favorite bits of quoted lore in the volume—a rewritten version of the Lord's Prayer, which concludes with the following lines: "For thee is the MVP, the best in the NFC, and the glory of cheeseheads now and forever. Go get 'em." Packer worship, a pastime that appears to transcend ethnic and class divisions, may be one of the few examples given in this book of something that approaches status as a Wisconsin-wide cultural phenomenon. (Not surprisingly, another statewide and presumably multiethnic pastime is the telling of Illinois and Iowa jokes; regional identity always seems strongest as the members of one group pit themselves, humorously or otherwise, against their "foreign" counterparts.) But as soon as the reader gets into the body of anthologized materials that constitute the book's central portions, he or she is left to struggle with nearly 500 pages' worth of material that may be only accidentally Wisconsin specific.

Are the members of Milwaukee gospel groups (article by Peter Roller, pp. 284...