Folklore Recycled: Old Traditions in New Contexts by Frank de Caro (review)

The title explains it. In his latest book, Frank de Caro, scholar, folklorist, educator, and writer, invites his readers to experience the “lovely messiness” (p. 30) that results when folklore is recycled into new contexts. Folklore Recycled: Old Traditions in New Contexts introduces readers to that messiness, and challenges them to take seriously these new contexts. Since much of contemporary Western society experiences folklore as it is resituated, de Caro insists that folklorists, especially, have an understanding of what is presented and why. Thus, he examines folk art, architecture, and tales as they are recycled and views folklife as it is represented in photographs.

After an introductory overview of the folklore discipline, de Caro discusses Colson Whitehead’s novel John Henry Days (Doubleday, 2001). The novel relates a fictionalized celebration of the folk hero, John Henry, giving multiple examples of “how and why folklore gets recycled” (p. 31). Whitehead’s work offers an illustration of de Caro’s central thesis that enables readers to experience recycling in a folkloric context and to discover some of the multiple motives, “commercial, intellectual, personal, aesthetic, and communal” (p. 51), for repurposing folklore.

This repurposing of folklore is not a new phenomenon but one that de Caro finds stretching back at least to 19th-century studies in which folktales were used by those outside folk communities to establish or express an identity. Both chapter 2, “‘In This Folk-Lore Land’: Establishing Race, Class, and Identity through Folklore Studies,” and chapter 3, “‘Unrivalled Charms’: Folklore, Nonfiction, and Lafcadio Hearn,” address the matter of identity. De Caro sees the activities of the Louisiana Association of the American Folklore Society as indicative of this issue. Membership in the organization, which was founded in 1892, in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, included men and women from a lost South. The Association encouraged intellectual activity, the collecting and sharing of folktales, and discussions about such works. In sharing folktales, particularly those remembered or collected from African Americans, members were creating an identity for themselves as part of a lost but not forgotten life. As de Caro depicts it, those presentations unconsciously identified the members as separate from and superior to the African Americans whose stories they recounted. From our vantage point, we can take issue with the inequities and racism that were represented, but de Caro reminds us of the precarious times that wrought this race and class divide and offers a cautionary tale for those recycling folklore today.

De Caro suggests that both Lyle Saxon (chapter 2) and Lafcadio Hearn (chapter 3) used folklore to create their personal identities. Saxon, a remarkable raconteur but an outsider to much of Louisiana, told stories of participating in Louisiana folklore, customs, and celebrations, and thus presented himself as a part of the community. Lafcadio Hearn, too, used folklore to establish identity in New Orleans and elsewhere. He “would come to folklore to provide himself with connections to place, and as a result with a sense of identity” (p. 84).

Photographs of folklife become another example of an old tradition in a new context, as chapter 4, “Photographing Folklife: Document, Symbol, Propaganda,” suggests. Folklife was easily captured with the camera, and the photos that ensued were used not only to document the life but also to evoke a particular viewpoint. Photography made it easy not only to capture but also to manipulate the subjects presented. Both the Farm Security Administration and the oil industry were groups that used the photography of folklife in Louisiana to support their aims. Not only does de Caro document this recycling of folklife but he also gives an effective example of reading a photograph. He comments on Russell Lee’s “Crab-Boil, Raceland, La.” (p. 120). After noting the use of newspapers on the table to wrap the leftovers, de Caro muses that perhaps the photographer is also suggesting that, in pouring the abundance of their seafood on newspapers, the group is...