Gramsci, Good Sense, and Critical Folklore Studies: A Critical Reintroduction

The following is the author's reply to a comment made by José E. Limón on the article "Gramsci, Good Sense, and Critical Folklore Studies," published in this issue

(Journal of Folklore Research 47/3, 2010).

First, let me acknowledge my appreciation for Professor Limón's response to my article. I am honored that he has offered his criticism and continues a discussion concerning the role of Antonio Gramsci for American folklore. Professor Limón's work is featured prominently in an undergraduate course I teach on critical folklore studies. Indeed, I would cite as a motivation for this and other articles my belief that folklorists have not adequately taken up his calls to engage Western Marxism in a serious way (Limón 1983, 1984). Our disagreements about Gramsci are apparent and copious, but I am pleased to see two folklorists having an argument about him and about the potential for folklore studies to become critical.

Professor Limón raises several objections to my article. I would identify the following question as his most pressing critique: "How can we as folklorists possibly see our academic practice as one that should call for the eradication of our subject matter and, really, our subjects as creative people?" To this demanding query, I would readily affirm that a critical folklore studies might indeed call for the eradication of folklore.

Let me offer a few concrete examples of folklore I would wish to see eradicated. In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, televangelist Pat Robertson claimed on The 700 Club that the event was one of a number of curses brought upon Haitians by their ancestors, who ostensibly made a pact with the Devil before gaining independence from France. Following the election of the first U.S. African American president, a wave of (often white) conspiracy theorists rose to prominence through claims that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen. In conservative political circles throughout the United States, it is increasingly fashionable—if not mandatory—to reject vast scientific evidence demonstrating global warming and evolution. Anti-immigration pundits and white supremacists regularly spread rumors that equate growing Hispanic populations with the rise of maladies ranging from crime to leprosy. After a collapse in Utah's Crandall Canyon killed six miners in 2007, the mine owner rejected criticism of massive safety violations by calling the mountain "evil" and "alive." I see no harm to folklore studies as an academic pursuit if we folklorists seek to disrupt these and other pernicious expressions. And doing so would ally us with a Gramscian perspective.

Although I agree with Professor Limón's recapitulation of Gramsci's negative attitude toward folklore (and especially the folklore of Gramsci's time that nourished a fascist hegemony), I think his characterization is not a charitable representation of Gramsci's aim. Gramsci's point, after all, was that he did not want already marginalized people to be prisoners of their folklore, constrained by a localized vernacular community held in the hands of petty dictators, or unable to wield national political influence. This admonition against a purely vernacular education is not a mere anecdote of an isolated history. We need only consider, for example, the midterm election of 2010, in which the Tea Party/Republican candidate for Senator in Delaware sought to dismantle federal education standards and empower local school boards to teach intelligent design in public schools.

A more charitable representation of Gramsci's criticism of folklore, I submit, would locate it within his comments on education, a concern that remains as compelling and relevant today as it was under Mussolini's rule. Akin to Gramsci, I could not conceive any circumstance in which it would seem just to deprive students of an education in science (or in philosophy or in civics) in the name of promoting local and vernacular conceptualizations of the world and the cosmos. If other folklorists disagree, then our community should debate this rigorously.

The claim that some folklore should be eradicated also necessitates that we folklorists reexamine the scope of our subject matter. I...