Humble Theory: Folklore's Grasp on Social Life by Dorothy Noyes (review)

Humble Theory presents revised, expanded, and updated versions of 15 papers by Dorothy Noyes, a major scholar possessed (as Gertrude Stein said about herself) by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of reality. Noyes shows "what might hold together the centrifugal field of folklore studies" (p. 2), defining folklore anew as "the social life of cultural forms" (p. 134). A theory demands explanatory adequacy; she achieves this through "disciplinary stock-takings" that show how imbricated folkloristics is with intellectual and social history and also through allying folkloristic concepts with the issues confronting the politics of culture. By historicizing her field and herself, and especially when she inserts updates of earlier work, the author acknowledges her own episteme. Offering broad theoretical notions tied to a formidable array of definite facts, her book is a new vision of the study of folklore: it's a grander field than you thought.

The book has three sections: "The Work of Folklore Studies" (chaps. 1-5), "Histories and Economies of Tradition" (chaps. 6-11), and "Slogan-Concepts and Cultural Regimes" (chaps. 12-15). Chapter 1 sets aside any aspiration to the grand by pointing to "the necessary complexity of folkloristic practice" (p. 13), a complexity that will become manifest in every ensuing chapter. Three concepts that will unify what follows are transmission, performance, and differentiation. In chapters 2 and 3, the recounting of folklore studies is the most understandable history I have seen. The author's most-cited article, "Group" (chap. 2), supports her all-embracing interest in the "social base" of folklore (the title of chap. 3 and updated there) with lively field observation, both in Philadelphia's Italian Market and in Catalonia. Tracing the "variety of insights into the role of cultural form in social bonding" (p. 67) leads her into the concept of network, which she will employ increasingly to show diverse, unintegrated sources existing in the same historical moment. Her many references give the reader an idea of the author's level of erudition.

Chapter 4, "Tradition: Three Traditions," further complicates the study of folklore. Tradition, Noyes says, has been conceived as "communication, ideology, and [communal] property" (p. 96). She produces another new definition: tradition is the transferring of a cultural object, which carries a notion of responsibility for doing something. Originally an encyclopedia article, this is the chapter from which a student with enough energy and dedication could learn most just by chewing and digesting the 271 works listed in the endnotes. The author's critical review of accumulated disciplinary knowledge, and of the successive assumptions behind its production, is a great strength of the book. About every topic she is saying "it's more complicated than you think," and explaining why.

Chapter 5, "Aesthetic is the Opposite of Anaesthetic," while being stunningly elaborated and admitting some self-criticism (p. 136), disarmingly preserves its original oral character. Starting from Roman Jakobson and with the aid of cognitive research, Noyes develops questions about the nature of attention. Then starting from Roger Abrahams, she develops a table of scholarly orientations toward aesthetic form in four divisions: folklore is perceivable as art, as occasion, as news, and as surround. The last is a key concept: surround means seeing things like vernacular architecture, material culture, food-ways, bodylore, children's lore, and conversational routines in the background. She then produces a chart showing the ways her four orientations meet and cross. Beyond surround, folklore also is perceived by modernity as something more visible, something aesthetic, something eliciting nostalgia, or as evidence of difference. So the currently fashionable, palliative notion of diversity is not far behind. Penultimate parts of this chapter are a brilliant, personalized discussion of flower arranging, in both the author's life and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and a reference to a collaboration between the author and Regina Bendix. Its final update is a pair of endnotes calling for an "unavoidable" next step in the public sphere: "costly, precarious, and sustained intervention...