SociologicalTheoryOfFolklore

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Abrahams, Roger D. 1978. “Towards a Sociological Theory of Folklore.” In Working Americans, Robert Byington, ed., Los Angeles: California Folklore Society, pp. 19-42.

“Towards a Sociological Theory of Folklore”
Roger D. Abrahams

[beginning of page 19]

Clearly the idea of “folk” is a sociological concept inasmuch as the term commonly refers to social units which manifest a profound sense of shared values, interests, and activities. Even if we define the folk, with Alan Dundes, as any group of two or more people who share something, we focus on the shared elements and the means by which this sharing establishes a minimal sense of groupness. (l) Perhaps not so clearly, folk has carried with it a political and economic meaning, for in most of our employments of the term, an underclass (in analogy to a peasantry) is evoked: one fixed in a marginal socioeconomic relationship to a more centrist and dominant group. The contrast set we usually employ then is folk/elite, realizing at the same moment, however, that elites will have, inasmuch as they adhere in groups, a lore as well. Very recently, this folkloristic interest in the underclassed and the marginal has been carried one step further, and we have addressed ourselves to those emerging traditions which arise in outsider groups -- whether they are excluded ethnic enclaves or the self-isolating “freak” or fanatic groups.

Our early folkloristic interest in peasant peoples reveals an on-going fascination with minority “outsider” groups including Afro-Americans and Gypsies as well as the lore of full-time all-male occupations (seafaring, cowpunching, logging, mining). More recently, however, this concern has been broadened to “voluntary associations,” groups engaged in intense activities-in-common -- like [beginning of page 20] motorcycle “bikers,” cavers, truckers, or dopers. In the main, this reveals our strong bias toward self-contained enclaves who appear to be self-sufficient in their ideals, but who, in fact, pursue activities which arise directly out of a surplus-goods economy.

In the main we have studied occupational lore -- whether of agrarian peoples or those in the cattle, lumber, or sea trades -- with an aim to explore the pursuits of a group brought together in the production of surplus goods but outside of an urban environment and commonly with a sense of the self-sufficiency of those entering into the trade. Folklore comes to be separated from folklife to the extent that we pursue the distinction between their work practices and the life of such socio-economic enclaves (especially their entertainments). Folklore comes to be associated generally with the expressive dimensions of traditional culture; in contrast, folklife commonly means the ways the group works together and the devices deployed by the group in carrying out that work. The two converge, of course, especially when functional objects are described by stylistic and even aesthetic criteria. Most of us get very restless when we are forced to distinguish them, feeling that their conjunction perhaps is more important than the disjunction.

Yet, by not distinguishing between the two, and by retreating from employing the European contrast of material and spiritual culture (artifacts and mentifacts), we have allowed ourselves to pursue our profession without a deep consideration of what we are up to, and -- perhaps more important -- what we are not doing. As Archie Green has long argued, the lore of the entire range of working people deserves serious attention from folklorists. Without acknowledging it, we have remained primarily committed to studying the play (and especially the entertainments) of essentially agrarian peoples. Even when the work is less tied to the land, if worker lore is collected it tends to be that generated by playing while at work, as in Alan Dundes and Carl R, Pagter’s collection of comic documents informally reproduced (often through xerography) and circulated primarily among office workers. (2) For one reason or another, [beginning of page 21] agrarian people celebrate themselves through ceremonial and festive enactments or through elaborate reenactments of the courtship (or family-making) and its relative successes and failures.

However, lore in abundance exists in a wide range of occupations, lore which arises from the social dimension of work itself or from the workers as they group themselves outside of the actual working situation. It is therefore interesting and timely to collect and theorize about the self-expression of workers concerned with telling about their work in stories, songs, formulaic speeches and dialogues, and especially in the special languages that emerge from the community of workers. In this essay I will survey some features American life with reference to patterns and values placed on work and play; by this I hope to add dimension to our own discipline while making a contribution to a sociological theory of social aggregates; group, community, society.

I

We are dealing, then, with social collectivities, at play and at work. Folklore, among other things, is an expression of the means by which membership in a community of understanding, of judgment, is established, maintained, and celebrated. Studies of lore may be found which are explicitly concerned with the making of social boundaries between groups and the exploration of the quality space existing at these boundaries. This intergroup lore primarily has focussed on a group’s stereotype of others and of self. Developing upon William Hugh Jansen’s concept of the esoteric-exoteric (S-X) factor in folklore (3), as well as Fredrik Barth’s comments on the social dynamic of bounding mechanisms (4), these few studies have primarily focused on the iconography of stereotyping in the dynamic [beginning of page 22] of intergroup relations. (5) But unrecognized, for the most part, in recent folkloristic developments has been that the collectivity under scrutiny has changed from communities to smaller and perhaps more serendipitous groupings whose life-in-common is engendered less by a sense of tradition and social and natural place as it is by common purpose and enterprise and shared presuppositions about who the “significant others” are who actively enter into the establishment of boundaries.

Whereas folklorists began with studies of the lore of communities, more recently our interest in the lore of play-groups and of occupations has grown. This has been accompanied by an interest in the simpler, and yet more heterogeneous contemporary groups, the “ad-hocracies” to use Alvin Toffler’s term for the more spontaneous gatherings that arise for some common (but not necessarily productive) activity. (6) There are numerous ironic inconsistencies of conception with regard to the relationships between folklore, tradition, and the homogeneous community, inconsistencies that may force us to rethink our value orientation, our idea of “the good life.” To be sure, our ongoing interest in traditions of expression (and traditional expressivity) takes for granted that lore arises and persists in communities, groups with a deep sense of common purposes and values, which share a vocabulary of reasons and motives by which a deep sense of commonality may be acted on. What we find on close perusal, however, is that these very expressions and events ostensibly most expressive of community are to be found (and sometimes in just as great or greater abundance) in more casual kinds of groupings. I am thinking here of gatherings which arise from the shared situation at conventions, on an airplane, even while standing in a line. In such situations, the participants share expectations and existential state, and bring with them rules more or less in common with regard to how to handle the situation and the encounters with others that grow out of the situation. But in the encounters, formulaic observations about life and the weather, quips and more formal jokes, and personal experience accounts of similar past ex- [beginning of page 23] periences arise spontaneously. (7) Here, an experience in common rather than membership in a group brings individuals together. When this goes on in an especially intense environment, like at a retreat or a traditional market place, individuals are often type-cast as performers, and engage in the very kinds of storytelling, singing, or even crafting of objects that produce the objects and texts that have been the folklorists’ stock in trade. Yet they do not perform, in such circumstances, to members of their own community; indeed community has little to do with situations of this sort.

One could begin to generate commonsense hypotheses about social groups and folklore that ignore -- or at best sidestep -- the usual sociological preconceptions about the relation between traditional expressivity and such homogeneous communities. The performing of items of lore in stress situations creates a sense of groupness in itself, especially when the lore addresses the common problems of the individuals in that situation. Further the greater amount of time any gathering spends together, the more the “goings on” will find spontaneous coordination, and the greater number of points of common reference and items of expression members of the collectivity will tend to produce. Similarly spatial constriction will contribute to the sense of the organic character of the collectivity, thus producing an increasingly shared expressive repertoire. Further, the more goal-oriented and threatening the enterprise in common, the more lore will develop from the experience (for instance, stories will be produced by individuals telling of similar past experiences). Finally, as soon as a group begins to sense its enduring “groupness” through both shared goings on and the expectation of what is to come (as in waiting in a queue overnight or being stranded at an airport for days), the development of new expressive lore will go from small items to larger ones; special in-group terms (jargon, slang, cant), nicknames, proverbs, superstitions and situated joking will arise. Only in later and highly repeated situations of this sort will rituals (like initiation) or songs become a part of the life of the group. Therefore, the intensity of the goings on, the depth of the involvement in the celebration of the situation and the amount [beginning of page 24] and type of lore encountered within self-defined groups might serve as a gauge to how long the group has existed, as well as to how common the group-making situation is.

These factors would be more widely recognized had folklorists not been going through a long period in our history as a discipline during which lore rather than folk was our primary concern. In our thirst for collection and analysis in terms of transmission and distribution of stable items, we have assumed that for lore to persist, a conservative sense of community had to be maintained. Furthermore, because much lore observably could be collected more easily and readily from older people in conservative agrarian or pastoral settings, the folklorist assumed that this was the most appropriate kind of group to approach in search of such items of wisdom and entertainment. But it should be noted that it is not just this type of economic enterprise that produces groups or even communities of the sort that will entertain each other within a confined social space; in fact, there are numerous other occupational situations in which traditional expression takes root.

There are other reasons, of course, why folklorists have looked to agrarian communities as the source of our materials -- not least of which is our basically pastoral sympathies; our need to sentimentalize our immediate agrarian past. An extension of this direction of thought argues that somehow the modern industrialized and urbanized world has so fractionalized lives that people do not communicate with each other during work, much less talk about their work. The received notions on the matter, since the beginning of the philosophical response to the Industrial Revolution is that there is a basic distinction between work and leisure (or play) and that the more repetitive the work, the greater the sense of alienation. (8) This alienated state, it is assumed, arises because workers [beginning of page 25] not only are given repetitive jobs but are discouraged from communicating either on the job or off. The conditions of the assembly line are, then, presumed to prevail in all other mechanized work situations. But, as Martin Meissner notes in his recent survey, the spatial arrangement of work and workers, and the technical requirements calling for attention to detail is more central in defining the communication situation than the repetitiveness of the work or the institutional setting in which the work takes place. (9)

This set of assumptions concerning alienation is unwarranted. Not only do we have indications of a great deal of occupational expressive lore arising out of certain occupations (such as working on the railroad), but even in industrial jobs that involve an assembly-line approach to the production of goods, other factors arise -- often fact, in response to the mechanization of the job -- that encourage the workers to group, make common cause, and produce the kinds of slogans and exemplary satires that quickly become not only traditional but the core of feeling and understanding characteristic of the classic homogeneous community.

Barbara Garson’s recent study of routine work and workers, All the Live-Long Day, for instance, resounds with talk about how people maintain their sanity by developing joking and stalling techniques “on the line,” how they develop a sufficient sentiment of common cause by drinking together in off-hours, thus developing a sense of groupness resulting in an informal collective bargaining session. (10) This interesting book, however, is far from original in making this point. The classic case study in this area, Donald F. Roy’s “Banana Time,” details how a number of individuals in a factory engaged in highly routine and repetitive work found themselves in a conversational group organized around a number of pranks which, at one and the same time, both articulate and undermine the status system, if only for a moment. (11) By develop- [beginning of page 26] ing situational joking on the job, hierarchy can be celebrated at the same time as status is somehow equalized. (12) It is, of course, precisely in such areas of repeated and often formulaic interaction that folklorists will begin to find common ground with sociologists and social anthropologists. The ways in which ad hoc groups arrange themselves often occurs, as in this factory setting, by the cleverness by which items are given voice as much as by the statuses assigned within the hierarchy of the commercial institution. In fact, the ability to joke or even “lecture” informally but effectively may create an alternative status structure on the job, one that may undercut to some extent the company’s hierarchy. Further, examining the content of these repeated expressive items and routines leads us into the area of how individual members begin to articulate who is included in the group and who is regarded as a significant outsider.

II

To address ourselves to such factors as these is simply to relate the objects and items of lore more freely in a theoretical manner to both groups and communities; thus we provide ourselves with sociological frames of reference by which lore may be related to other objects in the life of a social grouping. Folklore, from this perspective, is the expressive means by which a sense of participation in a life larger than self is achieved through shared activities and the common values and experiences that underlie them. To be sure, this is a circular argument: groups, even of the most ad-hoc variety, exist because they draw upon a common fund of expressive and instrumental features of culture which are, in fact, the major evidences of this sense of groupness. To use the existence of such [beginning of page 27] lore then to establish that a sense of groupness exists is self-evident. However, by looking at lore from this perspective, the esoteric and exoteric factors of the lore are underscored, and aspects of the dynamic of the group are focused upon which otherwise might go unnoticed.

The principles surrounding the discussion of the esoteric-exoteric factor in folklore might usefully be extended to include not only stereotyping mechanisms as they are manifested in lore, but slang or jargon or any other device by which in-groupness and common experience are given expressive embodiments. Looking at lore in this way would focus on the ways in which the dynamic of group boundary-making is asserted, emphasizing with equal strength the devices of social structure and the status-making forces which emerge both from within the group and from outsiders’ perceptions of the group and its members. To be sure, this dynamic is most clearly seen in the operation of stereotypes in minority or “freak” communities -- social groups whose status in the larger society is under constant surveillance. But this lore of social groups is paralleled by the expressive productions of occupational groups in which social status in the larger society is far from the major focus of group concern.

Nonetheless, it is evident that groups which identify themselves by the work they do (rather than by the ways they play and celebrate) also employ the same esoteric-exoteric devices as the primary means by which they establish and maintain their sense of groupness. An extension of the hypotheses concerning the social base of lore, then, would be that the amount of folklore produced will be directly proportional to how exceptional are the activities carried on in common. Certain occupational as well as social groups are regarded as more strange, either because of the special skills involved, especially when they lead to high risk situations repeatedly, or because of the deviant or marginal status of its members. Such a perception by themselves and by outsiders will inevitably affect how members choose to express membership when together, both in private and public. How often do we hear the most stable members of the larger community expose themselves as “mad” or as “freaks” when it comes to vans or gems, boats, birds, or whatever. We see this outsider image operating most fully in workgroups operating in isolated settings: seamen, lumberjacks, cowboys, whalers, miners, [beginning of page 28] railroad men, and in some regards, criminals, in prison and out. (13) Folklorists have been attracted to collecting from members of such occupations because they are full-time as well as “outside,” and because the work was carried on in controlled and intense environments close to what Goffman has called “total institutions.” (14) They are also high risk male occupations in which experience and expertise enter into the life of the group constantly, leading to the development of traditional modes of educating and initiating in the special languages as well as activities of the working community. Here we are involved with living situations in which all involved must commonly instruct and entertain each other; thus, a great deal of lore can be collected in such groups. But we cannot disregard the outcast factor operating in these work groups. Men, it is assumed, enter them as alternatives to and retreats from “straight” family life. Larger society therefore tends to fear and shun individuals who are engaged in this occupation and its accompanying life-style. Their emerging traditions of lore emphasize and to some extent rationalize this exclusion, commonly by emphasizing the greater vitality (or virility) of those who follow this lifeway. This same separation from society not only invoked aspects of negative stereotyping (underscoring the anti-social qualities of rowdiness, lack of cleanliness, and so forth) but also positive aspects emphasizing the hardiness, and adventurous characteristics of such work.

The history of folkloristics offers little to one interested in the occupational lore of these groups, and even less to one interested in groups engaged in more mechanized work. For that matter, there is very little reflection of the socio-economic situation of those from whom most of our data has been collected, the peasants. All too obviously the interest of our profession has lain elsewhere (in the content of the lore). However, it has become increasingly evident that [beginning of page 29] the major problem explored in expressive traditions of agrarian peoples relates to aspects of what Freud called “the family romance” -- relationships within the family unit including how they are affected by the introduction of others into it. For every folktale or song explicitly concerned with farming there are tens and maybe hundreds that focus on leaving home and community in search of wealth or wife or both.

There is an obvious relationship between the agricultural enterprise and the family romance, for in such enterprises the family is the basic unit of production and consumption. To see the love-death song, so characteristic of the Anglo-American classic tradition, as a first-level projection of the problems encountered by those living in such restricting circumstances is hardly a profound sociological observation.

I bring up this gap in the scholarship only because it contrasts so dramatically with the lore of occupational groups in the same culture area: loggers, whalers and sailors, cowboys, even miners. The major difference between these occupations and farming or ranching is that these jobs involve wage labor and the need to leave home and family, and are carried on in all-male environments, in situations which often make it difficult for a man even to have a family. In common with folk communities, performers in these occupational groups come from within the group and have repertoires which are an accumulation of the old items of tradition and pieces which are the inventions of the performers themselves. Somehow, however, these new if highly formulaic inventions focus on the working group itself and its activities in common, making heroes or clowns of notorious workers, and celebrating event in which we hear of the most dangerous aspects of the work (even while surrounding the record of these deeds with descriptions of working life as dirty, lonesome, and boring). In this lore, much is made of the difference between those who work in those trades and others, either the “greenhorns” who can never understand the demands of the job, the bosses who don’t provide the proper equipment or who try to trick their men out of wages due, or other outsiders with whom the workers are called on to deal on a regular basis.

The collection of occupational lore begins, then, with groups of people who embody their work concerns in their leisure creations. Like [beginning of page 30] peasants, they are people who provide their own entertainment. But their social isolation, being voluntary in the main, is somehow attached to their sense of being and belonging. Proud of their calling, yet conscious of being considered rootless and strange, they talk and sing of the hardships of the job and its comic aspects. (15)

The lore of peasants and of these special occupational groups shares an important feature. With farmers, as with loggers and cowboys, work and play are separate endeavors, the relative time of work and play being determined by seasonal conditions and the demands of the market. Folk performance is carried on in the main during slack seasons when the weather cycle prevents the hard work from being carried on, or in the case of the lore surrounding festivals, at those special creases in the seasons, those places set aside to dramatize the passage of the year and its work-cycle. (16) The domain of work and play tends to be rigidly separated in such occupations, play being the subordinate activity.

These were often jobs taken to make enough money to buy land and set up a home and family. They were carried on, then, by people in transition, or by ones who became accustomed to and stayed with these essentially outsider trades -- marginal people. It is interesting to note that this feature has, in great part, been inherited by those who enter to into service occupations; especially those which call for intense server-client relationships, like bartenders, cabdrivers, or prostitutes.

[beginning of page 31]

IV

Up to this point, I have been implicitly drawing upon a model of social and technological change, in which agricultural enterprises have been superseded by industrial ones, and now beyond this to both a new conjunction of occupational opportunities, and a new value system vis a vis work itself.

There are a number of ways at getting at the process and the result of social and cultural change that have relevance for folklorists. Usually we look at alterations in shifting modalities of social organization such as family, governance, exchange, or religious enactments and conceptions. More useful for the present purpose will be to look at the shifts in patterns of work and leisure, and how, as the organization of work grew more rationalized and complex, and more oriented toward the production of demand-created goods, the physical and psychological distance between the producer and the consumer became ever greater.

Edward Shorter, in his recent and self-consciously simplified survey of the history of work rehearses some common notions of change:

There was, once upon a time, such a thing as traditional society. What we have now and have had for the last fifty years or so is clearly modern society. And the social history of the West may be written as the story of how one gave way to the other... All the threads in the fabric of popular life were unraveled and then rewoven together: how people lived in families, how they interacted with their neighbors in communities, ... how men and women earned their livelihoods. (17)

Shorter goes on to outline the different “stages” in this transformation: from artisanal work, in which the trained individual or workshop is responsible for the production of a piece of merchandise, and in which the worker recognizes both the total process of production and the quality of workmanship expected; to industrial work, in which the worker is only one part of a complex fabricating process, does not necessarily know what that place is nor what the product “means” in the largest sense (much less what quality is demanded); and technological work, in which multi-competence is [beginning of page 32] demanded from highly trained and versatile workers, who, artisanlike, know the whole production process. (18) Shorter’s concerns, with those of many other sociologists, is on how the worker regards himself, his fellow workers, and the products being turned out. As noted, the received sociological notion about mechanization of employment has been that by dividing up the job so greatly, by making the worker feel a part of (or even subservient to) a machine, and by separating the producer from the consumer, the very notion of community is undermined. Questions of quality of products and of life in this condition come to be neglected as no one is assignable to responsibility.

Robert Heilbroner also breaks our work history into three periods that coincide in great part with Shorter’s divisions. He notes that between 1800 and 1850 while still primarily an agrarian nation, our farm production doubled not because of an increase in demand but by virtue of the invention of machinery. “Between 1800 and 1900,” Heilbroner notes, “the race between technology and demands on the farms was won by technology at the expense of the farmer.” (19) This not only led to a demographic shift from country to city, but a change in the nature of products as well as the extent of productivity.

He regards the year 1869 as the turning point in this process, for from that point we switched from an economic focus on farm goods, to the production of “goods that have been taken from the earth, fabricated, processed, packaged and transported to the place of sale.” (20) This was the period of the factories and the railroads, then, in which the self-made man, that American brand of radical individualist, ironically became himself the product of mass-production, making himself by learning to exploit new power sources and an expanding inflowing labor supply. The wandering outside hero of this saga was the Yankee peddler (later the traveling salesman) who was on the road creating this demand. Then, we enter what Heilbroner calls “a curious period” from 1900 to the present in which the growth of marketing calls forth “demand-creating inventions,” devices we don’t need but learn to want. Heilbroner makes this tripartite division to point up the characteristics of the [beginning of page 33] major shift which has occurred in the make-up of our present workforce, which has gone from being heavily agrarian, to manufacturing, to what has come to be called “service occupations.” His explanation: with food production, demand is relatively fixed (or “inelastic”): with manufactured goods, it is relatively fixed (“elastic enough to provide a kind of staple layer of employment”); and with services, demand is considerably elastic. (21) With those services regarded as most demeaning (i.e., most repetitive and therefore boring), again technology comes through and machines are invented to do “the work.” But the more affluent we become, the more services we can be convinced we need.

A tenet of this theory of occupational stages is that the industrial process somehow destroyed the sense of community characteristic of the family farm or trade. Corollary to this destruction was an acceptance of the fiction of alienation due to dehumanizing work routines. In great part, therefore, folklorists have rarely looked to the factory or the blue-collar worker as participants in the kinds of traditional expressive activities which most interested us, for we have accepted the sociological “given” that there would be a disappearance of lore with the destruction of the folk community. This presumption was encouraged by realistic and naturalistic fiction, as in the novels of Thomas Hardy in England and William Faulkner in the United States; literature which explicitly details the loss of pride in craft in the onslaught of industrialization, and the concomitant dissolving of community situations in which folk values and attitudes were reflected in performance. The triumph of naturalism in fiction parallels, then, sociological studies which underline the growing sense of alienation of city-folk. The fact that those involved in the movement from farm to small town to urban neighborhood emphasized that they carried with them into the cities numerous features of an operating sense of community had little effect on the thesis that urbanization is anathema to the ideal of homogeneity and cooperation.

Whether or not work during this period created a sense of isolation among workers and induced anomie, the most recent developments in occupational structuring pointed to by Shorter, Heilbroner, and many others, would promise that there have been countervailing forces successfully contending with alienation. The kinds [beginning of page 34] of expressive devices which folklorists collect and analyze will be discovered as people group in common purpose. When that purpose is the communication of knowledge and the creation of exchange (albeit commercial) relationships, one can predict that routined, patterned, and self-consciously rehearsed expressive means will develop and be transmitted as an essential -- if not always acknowledged -- element of carrying out the job. In all low status jobs, but especially those in which the worker “serves” (whether it be a master, a customer, or even one’s community or nation), one can witness traditions passed on from worker to worker, ways in which the recurrent problems of the interactions occasioned by the job are routinely solved.

V

All manual labor has maintained its position as low-status work, as have those jobs in service which involve keeping other people’s material lives in order: being a day laborer, working construction, delivering milk, or being a waitress, bartender, or a body-massager, all of these remain low status work -- but only if one manifests a long term commitment to the job. If life goals involve further education and thus more technological or professional work, and one takes a job as a bartender or custodian as part of the process of “finding yourself,” that transforms the low-status occupation into part of one’s education. In such a case, serving becomes a way of proclaiming one’s individuality and yet one’s willingness to be a productive member of society. The transformation of an occupation into part of one’s education means essentially the redefining of that work in positive social terms. In such a situation, work at these “low” positions is regarded by one’s elders as “good for you,” a character-building experience which leads to being a good citizen.

Being in a service occupation involves putting oneself in a position of performing activities which normally would be regarded as demeaning. The study of such occupations, though not as interesting to folklorists because they sometimes involve only a part-time career and are not as isolating or dangerous as say logging or whaling, are nevertheless in a highly illustrative social position in our society because they mark a time of transition. Ironically, their very marginality is a major part of the attraction of such jobs because, [beginning of page 35] when limited by time they provide access to an egalitarian social move. By taking on a low-status service job, everyone appears to begin at the bottom and work toward the top; thus the fiction is maintained featuring the self-made man. In fact, the success of many service enterprises relies on attracting workers who have no long-term ego-investment in the job, regarding it as only a way of proving themselves while paying their way through school, or providing enough where-with-all that they can get by until they “get their shit together.” By putting on such employees at less than fulltime, employers can sidestep the need to pay the legal minimum wage.

Reflecting this work situation in which it is often difficult to diagnose what kind of person (status-wise) is serving you, we have placed an ever greater stress on the importance of a social egalitarian style of interaction in serving encounters. Though social distinctions remain between the boss and the worker as well as between the various levels in a work hierarchy, nonetheless all workers hope and expect to be treated “as human beings.” More and more, those in charge wish to be known as an open and available person, one who, when in contact with his subordinates, will nevertheless interact with them in languages of equality -- by “just talking,” or more important, by holding open the possibility of such conversation turning into more intensive interaction like joking or arguing. Joking and arguing are, of course, two activities that place those engaged in the talk on the level of equal standing; status considerations only arise from the tendenz of the actual joking or vilification, and not from any received social status.

Though conversations or having a talk tend to be catch-all native terms for a wide range of our speech activities, the common thread of these diverse interactions are that: 1) theoretically there is equal access to the state-of-talk for everyone involved; 2) all will listen to what the speaker is saying; (3) all are expected to impart significant information, i.e., have a point and make it during a turn; and (4) no one should deliver prepared speeches in such engagements, but rather interact spontaneously and responsively.

This drift places the roles of service occupations in an especially anomalous social position. The service interaction carries, in many dimensions, an inherited social apparatus; performing services, being “in service,” or having employment as a servant or a [beginning of page 36] serving-man hold strong low-status connotations. Being forced to serve someone, to take orders or directions, means placing oneself in a social position sufficiently subservient that though interactions are carried on conversationally, joking or arguing is precluded. However, there is a strong potential for embarrassment for both, for few people today wish to dramatize status in this manner. Thus a great deal of negotiation commonly takes place in service encounters in an attempt to get served and yet not be accused of being superior. Thus, one must play an interactional role as either server or served which all involved recognize as somehow departing from the desired egalitarian norms. Furthermore, everyone in the interaction retreats from being accused of either playing a game or playing a role. Openly making a game of the service encounter too may involve either the response of lack of seriousness and therefore being on the edge of the disorderly; or alternatively, being inappropriate coercive, manipulative, needlessly engaging in a contest of wills. Overtly playing the service role, on the other hand, places one in the way of being accused of overly demeaning self and ceremony, or of “having a line” -- that is, of being unspontaneous, rehearsed, and therefore cunning.

In spite of this, we ask for service knowing that the one serving us has in fact had to rehearse a variety of “lines” and that in being served we are equally practiced in appropriate lines of response. The most profound irony is that in such engagements we all operate under the fictions of spontaneity in conversation but judge the server by the criteria of style in performance -- that is, by the appropriateness of the routines performed and by the style by which the service is carried out.

It is precisely these routines, and the ways in which they are learned and used, that have proven to be rewarding places to begin the study of the folklore of service occupations. Inevitably, stories arise in which examples of the recurrent problems of the group are reenacted, thereby causing other things drawing the line between the members of the occupational group and the significant others -- those on whom they wait and to whom they deliver. These are further spelled out in the personal experience stories in which testimony is given to the professional abilities of the service-person, or an account provided for some challenge to the teller’s status. (22) [beginning of page 37] Such stories, in combination with the jargon of “the trade” (the in-group names for paraphernalia, routine activities, and types of outsider-customers dealt with) make up the largest part of the lore to be collected from members of service occupations.

An example: in Studs Terkel’s Working, an airline stewardess is discussing the various tensions of her job. After going through the indignities of being told by her supervisors exactly how to dress, smile, put on make-up, and so forth, she turned to the problems posed by passengers:

There’s an old story on the airline. The stewardess asks if he’d like something to drink, him and his wife. He says, “I’d like a martini.” The stewardess asks the wife, “Would you like a drink?” She doesn’t say anything, and the husband says, “I’m sorry, she’s not used to talking to the help.” When I started flying, that was the first story I heard.” (23)

The story leads to a discussion of the proverb “the customer is always right,” and from there to the strangely ambiguous status felt by many people today thrust into service positions vis a vis not only their customers but their supervisors: “They call us professional people but they talk to us very young, childishly.” (24)

The development of lines and routines as part of one’s work are as characteristic of professional interactions as service encounters. Doctors or lawyers, teachers or social workers, whoever is called upon to regularly engage in the delivery of “professional” services, operate under the same conversational fiction but to different ends. Each profession develops certain routines by which its practitioners explain the nature of the service; the much joked about “bedside manner” of the doctor is only one of many presentational strategies and sets of routines that members of that profession develop as a means of maintaining professional identity. There are key differences, of course, between the service-worker and the professional; for one, the professional gives advice about our own lives, in the [beginning of page 38] main, while the service person sells or delivers or fixes things. With professionals then, his “good talk” is not intended to produce anything but a reaction on the part of the client or patient. With others providing services, the talk they engage in is at least supposed to be subordinate to the products being purveyed or maintained. (25) Indeed, the issue of professionalism is at the center of workers’ attitudes toward self, fellow-workers, and those significant outsiders with whom the workers come into contact. Consequently, a great many of the stories which occupation members tell to each other (as well as to clients, customers, and employers, where appropriate) turn on status considerations such as whether those who practice that occupation generally operate professionally, whether they are treated “like pros,” or in very special cases, whether an occupation is to be regarded as a profession -- as opposed to serving, “just doing a job,” or as work outside such considerations, as with artists. Such discussions of professionalism also often turn to accounts of the way things used to be, and then stories illustrating pride in craft emerge -- usually followed by a lament focusing on why considerations such as care, craft, even art have disappeared.

Anyone, of course, may be a real pro at what they do, simply by being so good one gets paid for it. Or someone may be referred to as being professional in some dimension because of the extent of education, training, or experience he has gone through to get to his present position. Clearly, having a professional commitment to one’s work and being a member of a profession involve different (if related) considerations of status. (26)

Being a professional may refer to a number of personal qualities, most of which relate to the control one is able to assert expressively and personalistically within the working situation. A real pro is someone who has both learned the operation of a job and is able to [beginning of page 39] transcend the routine character of the occupation, bringing an individual “something” to it -- a personal style, a unique strategy, or simply a competence to endure in the face of the boredom or the tension. Where style becomes an especially marked feature of one’s abilities, the worker is called an artist as well as a professional at the job. Both make references to the source of personal control of the individual, and arise as themes in occupational stories as a means of maintaining the status potential involved in the work. But more than this, the focus on style and intensity of focus inherent in the ideal of professionalism has actually provided a middle term between work and play. A professional approach, after all, is characteristic of both.

This change is part of a larger social questioning going on concerning place and importance of work in our lives. Until recently for most Americans, our name in the community was determined, in the main, by our work -- “what we do” -- while we did not care to be known as a player. Playing, playing at, with, or around was not something of which we wanted to be accused. Our work determined much of our public selves, and play was kept a private matter. Progressively, play as it became professionalized has come to be more acceptable as a public activity; being known as a player, a performer, even a ”gamesman” in business, is not only no longer stigmatized but applauded. (27)

Certainly an important feature of this changeover has been that the family is no longer primarily a unit of production but rather has become the locus for the consumption of goods and services. This, of course, is a by-product of ongoing technological mastery and the onset of the post-industrial age. As the occupations which have been important in the past become obsolescent they are put onto a stage or in some other kind of play-frame -- we look at them more and more as interesting performances. Thus we go to a blacksmith today not so much to have something made as to witness the process and style of something being made by hand. (28) What was a process of product-making becomes, in such a situation, an occasion for talk about the process. (29)

[beginning of page 40]

Thus, one can see at folk festivals, theme parks, and living museums, a capsule history of homo faber in a series of tableaux performances. Not only does this framing make hand-workers into players as well, but it casts work itself as leisure activity. This process produces numerous ironies, ones which do not go unnoticed or uncommented upon by the elders of our tribe when they encounter work cum show.

Further, and perhaps more important, this recapitulation contributes to our nostalgic and reflexive sense of our own past and present. Just as we replay the entire history of man’s experiences in the visual arts or in music, not only at museums and the concert hall but in books, phonograph records, and on the radio and television, so we can also be brought to experience in one place and event our immediate past developments, in the area of work. Folklorists have, in fact, played no little part in promoting this popular educational experience. But strangely enough, in our fieldwork and in our writings, we have little analyzed the very social changes we have lamented.

The importance of such discussion for folkloristics is patent; but what has not been sufficiently discussed has been how this shift has affected the ways in which we view our mission. We have been collecting and analyzing lore from those many small groupings who are either “folk” (i.e., peasant) or folk-like inasmuch as they share language, attitudes, and values. With regard to the occupational groups which we have studied, the groups make up a unit of socioeconomic behavior, inasmuch as groups like cowboys and loggers carry on both economic and social activities together; that is, both working with and entertaining each other. Nevertheless, such occupational groups do not make up a community in the same sense that agrarians or pastoralists do, much less hunters and gatherers. For they are now engaged in an enterprise that: 1) is part of a larger economic process, and 2) is one which actually calls for them to voluntarily give up family and home-community, and take on a group made up of peers.

[beginning of page 41]

There have recently been some attempts by sociologists and anthropologists as well as a few folklorists to study the expressive traditions of other kinds of groups, ones which are considerably less full in their sense of community. In collecting and analyzing data from such voluntary groups as sororities and musical organizations on the one hand, or whorehouses and cocktail bars on the other, we have arrived at a point where we seem to mean something different by community, or perhaps more simply, we encounter and observe other kinds of social grouping than ones based on the concepts of home-place, family, and friendship networks. For some time, it has been an article of faith that with the growth of heterogeneous and capitalistic societies, we are living alienated lives, in what Robert Nisbet has classically called “the quest for community.” Nisbet provided us with a classic description of community -- one which comes close to the ideal of “the folk” that folklorists and anthropologists have been employing and which, in opposition to society or civilization, informs the thinking of the pastoral or primitivistic social theorists from Rousseau to Tonnies. “Community,” Nisbet argued, “is the product of people working together on problems of autonomous and collective fulfillment of internal objectives, and of the experience of living under codes of authority which have been set in larger degree by the persons involved.” (30) The codes of authority he contrasts with power; authority has the conviction of past practice, of tradition, while power is control imposed from a political and economic center far removed from the group.

Liberal sympathies demand that we reject such power and join in the lament over the loss of community which attends the loss of local autonomy. In fact, one of the strongest unstated motives for the study of folkways has been to preserve the practices of work and play characteristic of autonomous and homogeneous groups. But it would be folly indeed to idealize to any great extent the way of life actually found in such communities, for there is much constraint involved in such communities that we would find anathema to our democratic predilections -- not least of which is the obligatory statuses of association and the rituals that articulate this sense of received and ordained social and economic order. Furthermore, Nisbet’s notion of community is couched in terms of the very ideology he seems to wish to have us reject -- community he says is [beginning of page 42] a “product” of group members “working together” toward a common end. A more contemporary notion, it seems to me, would be to emphasize the shared psychological states of communion and communitas, and thus to emphasize the centrality of celebration, of playing as well as working together in our emerging notions of what meaningful social groupings ought to look like. Thus we might reform Nisbet’s definition of community to mean “the process of people working and playing together, attaining a sense of shared enterprise and values through an agreement on rules, appropriate styles of interaction, and reasonable outcome to the activity in common.” To the utilitarian notion of community as a means to arrive at agreed upon ends would be added the semiotic notion of community as a group sharing a system of signs and meanings, motives and values, and scenes and events in which meaning may be put into practice intensely. The question which such an approach poses would be: is the possibility of productivity and usefulness what really brings people together, or is it rather the expanding of possible events and the development of styles by which our energies may be successfully coordinated? The quest for community in these terms would not point away from work. Rather, it would have us look at work as an important way in which our collective energies might be coordinated and shared. In such a case, community would be a state of mind, and living in one might be momentary or it might take many lifetimes.

The University of Texas
Austin, Texas

Notes

For Archie.

1. Alan Dundes, The Study of Folklore (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963).

2. Alan Dundes and Carl R. Pagter, Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (Austin, 1975). Though this material is most commonly circulated within office settings and employs office technology for its reproduction and dissemination, the authors assume that the reader is so familiar with “office culture” and its material manifestations that we hear nothing about who it is that uses these entertainments, nor why and how they are produced.
In a similar vein, those few works on occupational lore which have appeared in the United States by George Korson, Mody C. Boatright, and Archie Green are discussed in surveys of folklore resources as regional or contextual studies of texts; for example, see Jan Brunvand’s Folklore: A Study and Research Guide (New York, 1976), pages 21, 56, and 71, and D. K. Wilgus’ Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick, 1959). Brunvand does have a paragraph on p. 82 on occupational-group lore, but mentions only two representative works; Wilgus devotes ten pages to the subject of work-related songs (189-90, 204-5, 226-27, 317-20). But see Elliott Oring, “Whalemen and Their Songs: A Study of Folklore and Culture,” New York Folklore Quarterly (1971): 130-152, for a signal attempt to recapture occupational concerns through a close reading of already collected lore.

3. William Hugh Jansen, “The Esoteric-Exoteric Factor in Folklore,” in Dundes, 43-51.

4. Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston, 1969).

5. Representative examples are Richard M. Dorson's works among many ethnic American groups, especially his Bloodsloppers and Bearwalkers (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), as well as my own Positively Black (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970).

6. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York, 1970), 108-129.

7. There are some interesting sociological studies of role-making in such ad-hocracies. See, for instance, Leon Mann, “Queue Culture: The Waiting Line as a Social System,” American Journal of Sociology 75 (1969): 340-54, as well as Erving Goffman's summative statement in Relations in Public (New York, 1971).

8. For an extended discussion of the relation between work and alienation, see Alisdaire Clayre, Work and Play (New York, 1974). Clayre establishes the essential fictional base of this notion, and, in passing, notes many worker commentaries which dispute the alienation hypothesis without a firmer set of contextual factors. Nonetheless it is a presumption of many intellectuals, Marxist and otherwise, to view automation as dehumanizing, and to assume that there are no countervailing factors. But see the many sociological-ethnographic studeis that would modify this position by studying the entire range of communications between workers on the job. For a recent survey of the relevant scholarship, see Martin Meissner, “The Language of Work,” in Handbook of Work, Organization and Society, Robert Dubin, ed. (Chicago, 1975).

9. Meissner, “Language of Work,” 227 ff.

10. Barbara Garson, All the Livelong Day (New York, 1976), 99-126.

11. Donald F. Roy, “Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informed Interaction, Human Organization 18 (1959-60): 158-68. See also Don Handelman and Bruce Kapferer, “Forms of Joking Activity: A Comparative Approach,” American Anthropologist 74 (1972): 484-517, which introduces the important distinction between setting-specific and category-routinized joking, using a workshop to characterize the emergent traditions arising from status-provoked tensions on the job. The paradoxical and self-cancelling qualities of joking are noted throughout the literature on joking relationships. Renato Rosaldo notes, for instance, that in such situations, those in the relationship come to “laugh about what divides and unites them.” “Metaphors of Hierarchy in a Mayan Ritual,” American Anthropologist 30 (1968): 535. See also Mary Douglas, “The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joking Perception,” Man 3 (1968): 361-76, passim.

12. For a representative view, with interviews and examples of joking, see Charles R. Waller and Robert H. Guest, The Man on the Assembly Line (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 65-79; Pamela Bradney, “The Joking Relationship in Industry,” Human Relations 10 (1957): 179-87; Craig C. Lundberg, “Person-Focused Joking: Patterns and Function,” Human Organization 28 (1969): 22-28; and A. J. Sykes, “Joking Relationships in an Industrial Setting,” American Anthropologist 68 (1966): 188-193. Again see Meissner, “The Language of Work,” for a review not only of joking but other ingroup occupational languages.

13. But see Archie Green, “The Workers in the Dawn: Labor Lore,” in Our Giving Traditions, Tristram P. Coin, ed. (New York, 1968), 251-62, where he argues that this sense of community membership in isolation was maintained in some degree in early labor and industrial lore, especially in connection with union activities.

14. Cf. Erving Goffman, Asylums (New York 1961). Of course, these work situations are total, in the main, only by virtue of circumstance, not by the usual enslavement or incarceration.

15. Bruce Jackson argues in his series of books on Texas prison lore that this sense of choice, this retreat from the family and the straight world, operates in the lives of most caught criminals. See Jackson, In the Life (New York, 1974); Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); Wake Up Dead Man (Cambridge, Mass. 1972).

16. For reasons beyond me, the literature on folklore and periodicity in which celebration is tied to life passage has provoked little interest in American folkloristics. This may simply be a retreat in the face of the excesses of the Anglo-American tradition of myth-ritual criticism which is just a by-path in the “calendar custom” literature. On the other hand, American intellectual tradition has focused more on space than time in constructing our distinctive pioneer-puritan world view. Truly our overwhelming fascination with spacializing time through our focus on life as a pilgrimage, a journey, a trip seems to have subordinated the temporal dimension of our traditions. The French, on the other hand, seem to operate exactly the opposite, temporalizing space -- i.e., turning spatial determinants into temporal factors. This is the essential thrust of Van Gennep's work, notably on rites of passage but seasonal celebrations in France as well. See Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage (Chicago, 1960); and more recently, Jean Duvignau, Fetes et Civilizations (Paris, 1973), and A. Van Gennep, Manuel du Folklore Francais Contemporaire (Paris, 1947), Vol. I.

17. Edward Shorter, ed., Work and Community in the West (New York, 1974), 1.

18. Shorter, 3-5.

19. Robert Heilbroner, “Work and Technological Priorities: A Historical Perspective,” in The Future of Work, Fred Best, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973), 53.

20. Ibid.

21. Heilbroner, 54-57.

22. For a discussion of this kind of personal experience narration, see my “Negotiating Respect” in Talking Black (Rowley, Mass., 1976), 59-69; “The Most Embarrassing Thing that Ever Happened: Conversational Stories in a Theory of Enactment,” Folklore Forum, in press.

23. Studs Terkel, Working (New York, 1973), 45.

24. Terkel, 47. There are similar discourses on professionalism and its tests in various occupations throughout this work, as well as in Carson, All the Livelong Day, and, with even greater detail in James Spradley and Brenda Thomas, The Cocktail Waitress (New York, 1975), esp. 29-58 and 87-100. The importance of joking relationships on the job with co-workers, bosses, and customers is stressed throughout these sources.

25. There are a number of interesting sociological studies of service routines, focusing on specific occupations and the jargon and slang developed out of both service encounters and the passing of service techniques to other workers. See, for instance, Stephen J. Miller, “The Social Base of Sales Behavior,” Social Problems 12 (1965): 15-24; Jerome J. Salomone, “The Funeral Home as a Work System”; Fred Davis, “The Cabdriver and his Fare”; John P. Reed, “The Lawyer-Client: A Managed Relationship" all in The Social Dimensions of Work, Clifton D. Bryant, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ., 1972); T. E. Levitin, “Role Performance and Role Distance in a Low Status Occupation: The Puller,” Sociological Quarterly 5 (1964): 251-260.

26. For a recent history and critique of the ideal of professionalism, see Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1977).

27. E.g., Robert Maccoby, The Gamesman (New York, 1977).

28. For a detailed discussion of family work into a show, see Dean McCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Clan (New York, 1976).

29. This is hardly a new phenomenon. It seems to go back at least to the beginnings of self-consciousness about manufacturing. Factories seem to have developed tours of some sort in the United States at least as early as the Lowell Experiment. For a recent discussion, see John Kasson, Technology and Civilization (Baltimore, 1977). That such tours were being held in England and the Continent is certain, though I know of no study of their phenomenon. But see George Moore’s novel, The Mummer’s Wife (New York, 1961), for a humorous scene which takes place in a tour of a ceramics factory in Stoke-on-Trent in the late nineteenth century.

30. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (New York, 1970), xvi.