The Practice of Folklore: Essays toward a Theory of Tradition by Simon J. Bronner (review)

In The Practice of Folklore: Essays toward a Theory of Tradition, Simon J. Bronner argues for a future of US folklore scholarship that is committed to applying and developing theories of practice that were once the exclusive purview of European ethnologists. The goal of recontextualizing and adapting practice theories in a North American context is to promote an intellectual ethos centralizing a science of tradition, rooted in a definition of "folklore in practice" as "traditional knowledge put into, and drawing from, practice" (p. 74). Such a definition relies on the "phemic" impact of tradition, explained as the "implicative message that impels transmission" (p. 77), or the behavioral outcome of possessing traditional knowledge. Returning to the 50-year-old question posed by folklorist and linguist Francis Lee Utley, "Shall folklore be studied in its psychological deep structure as well as in its surface structure?" (p. 295), Bronner develops a recasting of folklore texts as the product of shared cognitive patterns manifested in embodied action, harkening back to the work of psychologically oriented theorists such as Alan Dundes. This proto-cognitive framework primes observers to direct attention inward toward the cognitive processes and indeed development, of individual practitioners—not as individual artists, but rather as a single data point on a graph that documents shared collective practice. The author emphasizes the importance of this method especially in the face of the twenty-first century's ubiquitous digital connectedness.

Such an emphasis is made possible by the foregrounding of folklore texts as data points, which Bronner illustrates in chapter 11, "Folkloristic Practices in a Converging Hyper Era," where he contends that "the query of cognitive sources for stylized, variable action is essential to grasp why people do what they do, why they repeat themselves, and why they act, or practice, on what they believe" (p. 293). The author underscores the need to recognize the role of observing and documenting repetitive actions, a method that comes into conflict with popular applications of theories of performance in generations of US folklore scholarship. The establishment of performance theory as a prominent interpretative lens in American folklore scholarship of the mid-twentieth century centralizes conscious enactment of folkloric forms, as well as a social-behavior connection to the content of performance events. Bronner critiques the material outcome of such theories and methods as those that foreground individuality and presentism, which then contribute to a lack of generalizable theory that can contribute to "global folkloristic work" (p. 4). Theorizing tradition in terms of cycles of action provides a compelling longitudinal view of culture comparable over time and creates an outlook that allows folklorists to interpret how traditional action and cognitive structures impact the social spheres in which we live.

However, what the author also implicitly achieves in his explication of the need for practice-oriented studies over those foregrounding what he labels performance-centered social-behavioral studies is to draw a line in the sand dividing future folkloristic scholarship between research methods committed to generalizable folkloristic theories and those invested in specific sociopolitical contexts. This division becomes apparent early in the volume. In the first chapter, "Practice Theory in Folklore and Folklife Studies," the author asserts that symbolic actions are embodied in framed practice. In the doing, singing, cooking, writing, and so on, practice is connected to bodies. However, how can we discuss bodies in action in the twenty-first-century United States without accounting for issues of ethno-racialization? Gender presentation? Or even age? These are just a few of the social factors missing from Bronner's explication of frameworks of practice.

In his discussion of NFL players taking a knee in 2017 to protest police violence, Bronner categorizes it with traditions associated with the "Star Spangled Banner" rather than Black American communities. While race-blind assessment is consistent throughout other examples in the volume, the author makes clear that tradition as practice is...