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DOI: 10.7330/9780874218992.c08 8 The “Handiness” of Tradition Simon J. Bronner Iargue in this essay that grasping the “handiness” of tradition is the key to the analytical strategy of folklore studies; the way people perceive the hand (active, immediate, instrumental, gestural, and visible), particularly in relation to the mind (passive, remote, nonproductive, individualized, and unseen), dictates the way scholars conceive folklore as pervasive, relevant, contemporary, functional, expressive, and ultimately meaningful. Being a cultural resource at hand, tradition represents everyday processes of social control and expression, and these processes are often set in contrast to modernization associated with standardization, commercialization, discontinuity , and artificiality. The idea of tradition is “handy” or effective in the sense that people regularly invoke it to refer to a purposeful, creative process of sustaining social connections through cultural expression, whether literally, in greeting traditions of shaking hands and celebratory customs of clapping hands for applause, or figuratively, in handing down stories and songs— and values—between generations. That is not to say that the influence of tradition on present-day life is easily averred, particularly by an intellectual elite. Because of a modernist concern that tradition restricts individualism, progressivism, and free will, the force of tradition has been denied or even protested (Adorno 1993; Giddens 1994, 66–74; Nussbaum 2010, 2, 25; Williams 1983, 318–20). The handiness of tradition is not the only consideration in how people think with tradition, but it is arguably the central one. In other publications, I have traced the rhetorical use of tradition in scholarly discourse to the idea of social authority evident in references to the “following” of tradition, The “Handiness” of Tradition 187 both as an analytical strategy of tracking activity perceived to be traditional and an assumption about tradition serving as a guide to action (Bronner 1992, 1998, 2000; see also Bronner 2009a, 2009b, 2011). Another concern I have addressed is the variability of tradition as a result of creative and elaborative processes (rather than creation, which suggests the fabrication of something totally new) in the conceptualization of folklore. I have pointed out that despite the humanistic construction of tradition and creativity as polar opposites, they are intertwined in the process of transmission and reproduction of cultural practices (Bronner 1992; see also Bronner 2012). In this essay, I ask why the hand is rhetorically emphasized to express the character of tradition and how folklore embodies this metaphorical meaning. My answer hinges on the historical and linguistic roots of the term tradition in Roman law and language and culturally on the cognitive categories created between brain and brawn. Bringing the use of tradition up to the present, I examine the way that the handiness of tradition both embraces and resists modernity. Against this historical and cultural background, I draw on practice theory and the philosophy of language to interpret the handiness of tradition as a phemic quality that drives an analytical agenda for folklore study into the future (Bronner 2011, 2012). As I maintain that this agenda challenges modernist conceptualizations of twenty-first-century Western society as being “post-traditional,” and hence postmodern, in the end, I discuss a theoretical reorientation to account for the hand that tradition has in modern life. Defining Folklore with the Hand of Tradition The hand figures prominently in definitions of folklore that invoke tradition. Such definitions imply handing involves social learning. This kind of knowledge acquisition leads to expressive practice and involves repetition and variation characteristic of folklore. References to the hand as a learning process imply a contrast to cerebral, elite, or academic learning that appears removed from everyday life and often practical, social engagement with lived experience. For example, a popular set of pamphlets on various traditions compiled and re-titled Handy Folklore (Cooperative Recreation Service 1955) emphasizes folklore’s characteristics of facilitating social expression, participation, and activity. Under the opening heading of “Do You Like People?,” the anonymous writer declares that “folklore is a means of communication everywhere. It is a sharing of mutually enjoyable skills, The “Handiness” of Tradition 188 of our common humanity.” Tradition enters the picture because “these arts must be learned anew by each generation, nurtured by parents, and schools” (Cooperative Recreation Service 1955, 1). Rhetorically, the material in this popularized presentation is “handy” because it is easily accessible, involves social as well as expressive exchange, and is handed down—that is, socially learned or “passed” and practiced through generations. Stith Thompson’s classic academic statement of folklore being socially “handed down,” and therefore...

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