Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture (review)

"Spun by the rapid changes necessary to capitalism," as Henry Glassie puts it (p. 189), scholars in marginalized fields like folklore tend to pause with some frequency to redefine themselves and their discipline. The problem with such revivals of theoretical interest, Glassie implies, is that they are almost always superficial; by changing "a word or two in a tired formula," the participants quite unconvincingly "proclaim a new theory that will liberate us from the dead hand of tradition" (p. 189). Nuanced attention is paid throughout Eight Words to the various accretions and dispersals of meaning that have developed in association with a set of terms: group, art, text, genre, performance, context, tradition, and identity. Quite delightfully, the book does not proclaim any earth-shattering new theories, and it studiously avoids the sort of theoretical posturing that Glassie critiques.

Folklorists—notorious for their deferrals and periodic dismissals of the very word folklore—might appear to be the most likely candidates for falling into the "new proclamation" trap. That this particular group of theoreticians avoids such a fate is in large part a credit to the book's editor, Burt Feintuch. An earlier incarnation of this book appeared in 1995 as a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore. Eight Words offers entirely new essays in two cases, significant revisions of the others, and an essay on identity that was not included in the JAF special issue. Feintuch's ability to focus the discussion is noticeable throughout the volume. Moreover, the discipline of folklore, despite its habit of periodic reinventions, has itself known a distinguished history of immersion in actualities. A final factor in this fine book's successful avoidance of the predictable may lie within the folds of Glassie's ironic pronouncement. "The dead hand of tradition," from a folklorist's point of view, is rarely dead at all or something from which one must be "liberated." The eight essays in this book, as well as Feintuch's introductory piece, labor not to liberate anyone from anything but rather to encourage the meanings of the key words to sift, settle, and alter at a human pace; the discussions not only keep with current theoretical trends but also highlight the often-sensible patterns of use that gave birth to them in the first place.

Accordingly, each of the essays includes a historical overview of its given word's various invocations by folklorists through the generations. In "Text," for instance, Jeff Todd Titon recounts how the discipline's early practitioners attended to the movement of folk "items" through time and space—the idea being that, at one time, "text" was coincident with "transcript," and implied the (written) replication of an informant's narrative, ballad, or proverb. Rather than discrediting such an apparently obsolete use of text, however, Titon passes on to the next phase without judgment. Indeed, the "old" idea of what a folk text is continues to bear its attractions; with all of the jostling energy that accompanies the reappraisal of bygone meanings and applications, "academics risk forgetting that experiencing a representation of folklore affords pleasure" (p. 72). The old meanings, in other words, like the "old" songs and stories that we sometimes like to study, occasionally seem worthy of appreciative recollection, if not adherence.

In its own way, each essay follows a similar trajectory. As folklorists abandoned the early fascination with "items" and "survivals" in favor of a performance theory of folklore, the words they used began to take on new associations that, in turn, launched new methods of ethnographic documentation, among other things. A case in point occurs in the collection's second essay, "Art," by Gerald L. Pocius. If the "art" in folklore was once to be located in the object itself, performance theory necessitated its being detected in an event. Horizons shifted; a folk text could now only be understood as its audience experienced it in the moment. And as Deborah Kapchan's essay on performance suggests...