Folklore

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Abrahams, Roger D. 1980. “Folklore.” In Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Stephan Thernstrom, ed., Cambridge: Belnap Press, pp. 370-9.

“Folklore”
Roger D. Abrahams

[beginning of page 370]

All groups inherit and develop ways of entertaining and instructing each other, ways that can be described as folklore. These become self-consciously enacted and practiced when the sense of family and community comes under question; this is the situation that commonly arises upon group movement, for migration and resettlement seem to engender cultural dislocation even under the best of circumstances. In these conditions, folklore plays an important role in the lives of ethnic groups insofar as group members maintain connection with each other or with their homeland. To be sure, there are usually strong pressures to adopt the language and lore of the receiving culture. These pressures may raise the question of whether or not the most public and distinctive ways and celebrating one’s cultural heritage should be maintained. Consequently, the study of the folklore of ethnic groups involves an analysis of traditional means of expression as they undergo self-conscious scrutiny both from group members and from outsiders.

The term folklore commonly refers to ways of talking, interacting, and performing, including traditional types of everyday expression such as proverbs, prayers, curses, jokes, riddles, superstitions (or, to use the more neutral term, statements of belief), tales, and songs. The [beginning of page 371] term also embraces the numerous types of story -- anecdotes, testimonies, reminiscences -- that emerge on both casual and ceremonial occasions. Folklore forms thus range from the short and economical devices employed in everyday interactions to the larger expressive genres, like songs and sermons, which are commonly called forth on special occasions.

However, folklore refers also to games, rituals, festivals, foods, health practices and beliefs, traditional crafts, and occupations. It encompasses work forms, serious as well as recreational, and draws from material as well as expressive culture. In the United States, a distinction is often made between folklore and folklife. The former refers primarily to traditional ways of performing and playing, and the latter to the means and manner of work.

The study of folklore began with a special focus on country people and country ways, and folklorists continue to favor the study of small communities, populated by those who interact regularly on a face-to-face basis. However, this emphasis on rural groups did not totally determine the perspective of American folklorists; in the charter of the American Folklore Society in 1888, not only were relics of past agrarian societies mentioned as an appropriate source of data, but also the traditions of American Indian tribes, blacks, and other ethnically distinct communities. The underlying principle bringing together such disparate groups is based on the sense of community they supposedly shared because of their social or geographical isolation, and on the relative intimacy between makers and users, performers and audience.

To the extent that verbal lore both instructs and entertains, it puts into words the most important shared values of group life; folklore in this way reveals attitudes that remind us of how life ought to be lived, conditioning us about the consequences of not following these precepts. Thus, folklore often provides the main patterns for the expression and enactment of group values and ideals.

To see the folk arts only from this instructive perspective, however, is to reduce such formulations to the category of “kernels of wisdom,” or worse, to cliches. However, on those occasions on which such playful forms as riddles, parodies, lampoons, jokes, and jibes are performed, the world view of the group may be given voice and tested -- even turned upside down. Thus, the study of the folklore of a group opens the possibility of revealing the deepest feelings of its members at the same time it may address their ways of playing, joking, and testing the boundaries of the community from within.

In giving voice to values and entering into the celebration of ethnicity, oral traditions are a major component in establishing the boundaries of an ethnic group. A cultural performance may be a means of articulating boundaries in order to include members and exclude nonmembers; but it may also operate as a means of distinguishing separate and even antagonistic segments within the community. Further, the same item of performance may on one occasion be drawn upon as a way of excluding a person or a group by designating them as nonpersons (devils, animals, crazies), and on another may publicly proclaim the community open to view and even membership. Surely this publicizing of otherwise private ethnic ways is the primary thrust of the may recent “folk festivals,” in which a self-conscious attempt is made to celebrate cultural diversity by displaying different culinary, singing, dancing, and craft styles as styles, not really as alternative ways of life. The difference may simply be a matter of translating and explaining what is going on to outsiders, but in sociological terms that is a crucial difference.

Verbal lore is primarily tied to inherited patterns of language use. As linguistic acculturation to mainstream American English norms has occurred, foreign oral traditions have been undermined. Thus, collecting ethnic lore until relatively recently has been a retrieval project -- collections established before the lore dies out with those tradition-bearers who have somehow survived the disruption of being put on a reservation, in a ghetto, or in an immigrant community or neighborhood. Collecting ethnic lore often proceeds on the assumption that the songs, stories, proverbs, superstitions and other practices of the homeland will somehow be lost as soon as linguistic acculturation has taken place -- an assumption not without foundation, even with English-speaking immigrants who are simply adapting to the American varieties of their tongue. But recent studies of the expressive dimension of ethnicity, based on more developmental principles, have been especially useful in understanding the various perceptible stages of Americanization. These are stages that are actually definable by the oral traditions that are maintained, modified, forgotten, or newly developed as a means of coping with new and more complex cultural situations.

Further, there is accumulating evidence that acculturation to the “mainstream” is far from unilinear and that social assimilation must be distinguished from acculturation because it represents a different process and obeys a different timetable. Again and again, groups that have begun to assimilate within the political and economic spheres continue or strive to maintain culturally distinct forms and prefer to live in separate communities or neighborhoods. Further, as this distinctiveness has become a political asset, rewarded by access to affirmative action and political leverage, the ethnic differences have to be self-consciously maintained as a means of making common cause politically or economically. This does not, in fact, demand radical stylistic alternatives as much as it requires a minimal message of cultural uniqueness -- even as superficial as drinking green beer on St. Patrick’s Day. Such practices often draw upon an ethnic stereotype and turn it into a kind of self-conscious performance; that is, one’s identity changes with the role and the relationships one takes on (whether willingly or not). In such a case, asserting one’s ethnic heritage (whether real or derived from a stereotype) simply becomes a role which has become available because of the circumstance of one’s ancestry and upbringing.

The dynamic of typing is one of the most important forces in the development of ethnic consciousness. Whether an ethnic group decides self-consciously to assimilate, or to maintain its separateness, the lore that develops in the new situation will reflect the social situation in which the group members find themselves. Thus, if exclusion is a constant problem, a concern with segregation is certain to be the subject of a [beginning of page 372] good deal of the lore shared by the members of the group. But even in those groups that have not encountered segregation, many traditional stories are told that relate the funny embarrassments that repeatedly arise with a strange language and a new culture. There are the problems, shared by most groups, that arise out of repeated linguistic misunderstanding or differences in manners -- how close individuals stand when conversing, for instance, or the embarrassments resulting from a first encounter with an unfamiliar object or process.

An example of this, often recounted by Texas Chicanos, concerns the problems of a newcomer in dealing with his first paycheck. Wishing to buy some socks, he goes to a department store and asks for calcetines. The clerk doesn’t understand, so the buyer repeats his request a few decibels higher. The clerk becomes nervous, as does the customer; the latter repeats his needs in an even louder voice, the former begins flying around holding things up to see if it is what the customer needs. Finally, he holds up some socks, and the customer relievedly says, “Eso, so que es.” To which the clerk replies, “Well, if you could spell it, why in hell didn’t you say so?” This kind of interlingual misunderstanding is frequently a source of common amusement, for both the immigrants and those with whom they regularly come in contact. Thus, one often hears the same story told by individuals in both groups, though seldom in interactions with each other.

It is precisely this private, in-group dimension of ethnic lore that demonstrates the way in which orally transmitted expression can dramatize the ethnic experience for those who are going through it. However, because such lore is amusing and instructive to those attempting to adjust or adapt, and because it lends itself to negative stereotyping, such lore or a discussion of its meaning is seldom found in serious discussions of ethnicity.

Such ethnic lore develops from a self-consciousness about language and cultural difference as it is experienced in the everyday world by the immigrant or refugee. Thus it is not just the life in the old country that is remembered, but the shared experience of the newcomers. There are not only stories about the recurrent embarrassments of the new land and its ways, but also about deeper confusions sometimes labeled culture shock. Leaving home, even for the “promised land,” involves great psychological dislocation, compounded by inevitable failures of expectation. Out of this experience comes a kind of private lore, stories of personal experience that one shares only with one’s shipmates, others of that generation, and perhaps on rare occasions with younger members of one’s family. Immigrants will often have formulaic hardship stories, or remembrances of the funny or awful experiences going through the port of entry.

As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues with great common sense, culture shock places the migrant or the refugee in the temporary position of a cultureless being, analogous to a child. The newcomer is forced to adapt to demands and to assume the role of one who doesn’t know how to perform the most basic life tasks. The first experiences may thus operate in a manner not unlike that of the child, or even more, the initiate -- but without the careful and extensive preparation that commonly goes into the traditional initiation ritual. The culture broker -- the appointed (or self-appointed) member of the ethnic community who leads the new arrivals through the worst spots -- is a fascinating, insufficiently explored feature of the lore of all “minority groups,” including not only immigrants, but Indians, ethnic country folk who find themselves in strange environments, especially cities, and so on. As in other migratory situations, the newcomers look for the “homeboys” -- the relatives, acquaintances, co-religionists or whomever they can find who speak their language and who have found a place in the new society. When it is a family that has migrated, the brokers, too, are often families, husbands and wives who have already made the transition. Such brokers, in addition to providing help in finding housing and work, are commonly bilingual, often literate, and most important, have learned what is essential in order to get along in the new environment. As a way of dramatizing and humanizing this transition for newcomers, the broker often has developed a repertoire of stories, illustrative anecdotes of common embarrassment and crisis situations that provide lessons in getting through such situations with one’s self-respect intact. These stories often float from one ethnic group to another, demonstrating that the sense of embarrassment is shared by many who come to a new country and have to learn new codes and languages.

One story, which appears in many forms in many communities, tells of the attempts of a newly arrived relative to get something to eat during the lunch break at his new job. His relative carefully coaches him to say, “I want a piece of pie and a glass of milk.” On the first day, he successfully negotiates the purchase and is immensely proud of doing so. He repeats the order each day for several weeks thereafter. But one night he says he would like to eat something else for lunch once in a while. Accepting his new task, his benefactor teaches him to say, “I want a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee.” “White or rye?” is the response, which is answered after a long pause, “Gimme a piece of pie and a glass of milk.”

In such a situation of enforced acculturation, the individual who has become accustomed to the new language, new foods, new patterns of living, and new ways becomes something of a hero or heroine. The ability to switch codes (whether linguistic or behavioral) provides the clever immigrant with the power to resolve inadvertent dilemmas and conflicts. Add to this the message that the resolution may be learned and carried out with good humor, and it becomes self-evident why this role remains important in both adapting to the new situation and in remaining the central character in stories that recapitulate the embarrassments long after coming into the new social situation.

The collection and presentation-in-context of ethnic folklores has proceeded from three often overlapping strategies: first, using the devices of tradition to maintain a sense of continuity with Old World life and establishing a new sense of community in the alien New World setting; second, looking closely at the content of the lore -- the reaction to displacement and to the attendant social problems (such as being marginalized, stereotyped, or ghettoized); and third, collecting and an - [beginning of page 373] alyzing the lore that emerges from the new environment, with special focus on the stages of acculturation and the manner in which lore is used, first as a device for surviving and then as a way of achieving a new sense of ethnic identification within a self-consciously pluralistic
population.

FOLKLORE COLLECTIONS:
MEMORY CULTURE TO EMERGENT TRADITIONS

It is hardly surprising that studies of ethnic lore have followed the value preferences of the host culture. Early collections of folklore were carried out, moreover, in an antiquarian spirit, as a means of collecting lore before it died out, a practice typical of folklore collecting in general. From this perspective, texts are collected as a gauge of the extent of ethnic persistence and as a test of the culture-wave theory, which argues that international items in diffusion are often to be found at the peripheries of a culture area long after they have been lost at the center. Thus, folklorists have open been concerned with such lore collected within culturally conservative communities. Collections are made of texts of oral literature deriving from ethnic enclaves that self-consciously preserve their distinctiveness, commonly by maintaining a separate town or neighborhood or by clinging to an ethnic religious or social organization. These collections grow out of a desire to collect Old World rural items of wisdom and performance before the language and its remembered culture dies out. In such studies, the baseline against which the material is placed and judged is the Old World repertoire. Indeed, this is true of the many forms that have made up the mainstream of American folklore studies: British ballads, songs, and folktales. The “relics” of British countryside traditions have been actively sought in every area in the United States. Especially rich areas have been discovered throughout the upland South, in New England, and in the Ozarks. A hierarchy of forms and even items was established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but actual collection of such items in North America was not carried out extensively until the 1920s and 1930s. The research tools that document this collecting effort focus on the oldest and most wide-spread texts of ballads and folktales, illustrating, through bibliographical annotation, how widely the item has been found and in what range of versions and variants. Thus, when the local and regional collections are carried out, they, too, show the historical and geographical spread of the item through comparative annotation.

A number of Old World verbal traditions have been widely and deeply collected employing this essentially antiquarian approach. Especially notable in this regard are studies of Pennsylvania German, Louisiana French, and southwestern Mexican-American lore. These are commonly presented as evidence of the continuity in these culturally and linguistically) conservative areas, a continuity emerging from living in isolated agrarian areas.

Such studies of immigrant and ethnic folklore are still being carried out using the body of Old World traditions as a point of departure. The point of these studies, however, is no longer antiquarian; rather, they attempt to epitomize, in the content of the lore, the complementary processes of tradition maintenance and change. Such community studies are aimed not only at understanding more fully the sociocultural dynamic of transmission, but at drawing upon folklore as a gauge of acculturation and community stability. These works underscore the selective maintenance of traditional forms and practices, those that enter actively into the adaptation of newly located groups. The pressures faced upon entering the new environment emerge from the need not only to learn occupational skills, but also a new language and system of manners. On the other hand, these needs are counteracted by a desire to maintain a sense of family, church, and community through keeping up some of the old practices.

The most important variables here seem to be the extent of the population movement that has taken place, the type of friend and family network that can be maintained, and the degree of development of the ethnic enclave into which the newcomer will enter. The ethnic farming community is susceptible to a high degree of language and culture maintenance, as is the intensive city neighborhood. The same situation of tradition maintenance may hold when the newcomer is received into an occupational community -- into mining, lumbering, or the cattle trade, for example.

Here we have some instructive accounts of ethnic persistence: Robert Georges’ studies of the Tarpon Springs, Fla., Greek community -- in which the traditional employment is sponge-diving -- may be usefully compared to the analysis of the urban Greek community in Philadelphia carried out by Gregory Gizelis. Both of these folklorists examine the narrative lore of a Greek-speaking population. But Georges’ interests are, in the main, tied to the way in which both traditional and personal-experience stories maintain the belief and practice system revolving around the sea and the sponge-fishing trade. Though the folklife reported shows a range of responses to the pressures encountered in being surrounded by non-Greek-speaking American peoples, Georges is generally able to draw upon the Old World cultural baseline much more fully than can Gizelis, who collected from the more economically and geographically diverse Greeks in Philadelphia. Gizelis interviewed a great number of Greek Americans on the ways in which home traditions combine with ethnic awareness in a new environment where the newcomer is both establishing a sense of community and pursuing his individual identity. In contrast to the Tarpon Springs community, the urban Greeks had changed their occupations and lifestyles almost completely in making a place for themselves in the urban environment of Philadelphia. In the main, the character and forms of familiar verbal art displayed by Greek Americans correspond to those of most other groups in the process of acculturation. These forms, perhaps because of their ubiquity, have seldom been noted by folklorists or sociologists, and can thus only be found in joke books and immigrant autobiographies. For instance, Gizelis reports on the stories told about Greeks who have been successful in American life, each told with a strong note of what it is in Greek “character” that has made it possible for them to succeed. Similarly, he analyzes stories that present their perceived stereotype of themselves by Americans, and provide folk rationalization for why these stereotypes, these “misunderstandings,” have arisen in the first place. Gizelis includes [beginning of page 374] many stories, both personal and jocular, about the various cultural and linguistic misunderstandings that the immigrants encountered. He underscores the variety of ways in which these narratives are used: recounting common anxiety situations; making jokes about newcomers, sometimes to share their anxiety; and offering reminiscences by those who needed to make a statement about how hard times had been. Clearly, this is emergent New World lore about an Old World group, lore in which Greek tradition has become subordinate to Greek-American lore.

A number of factors govern the selective maintenance or rejection of traditional practices. Different considerations are brought to bear if, for example, one is examining culinary traditions, in which case availability of foods and fuels might be crucial; or the existence of institutions outside the family that encourage festive gathering; or the health maintenance system, in which the role of healer and protector might or might not be challenged by the dominant medically trained personnel, and traditional remedies (like herbs) might or might not be available. Sometimes an investigator finds that parameters like age and sex are central to such a study. Carla Bianco, for instance, found in her study of the storytelling events in Rosetto, Italy, and Rosetto, Pennsylvania, that among the very old and the young, traditional tales remain important forms of entertainment.

Collections that take into account the persistence or adaptation of Old World traditions in mestizo or creole cultures -- that is, when languages and ways of life are mixed in an alien environment -- pose problems that are very different from those of studies of immigrant-to-ethnic lore. Some strange academic biases enter into the study of the culturally different communities that have emerged in the wake of the plantation and the hacienda, or the ghetto and the barrio. Studies of both Afro-American and Mexican-American folklore emerge in reaction to many of the same conditions of social segregation and subordination as do the sociological and historical accounts of the same ethic groups. And though the folklore studies do underscore the creative process that seems to occur in reaction to these conditions, it is nonetheless the conditions and the exploitation that command our attention.

Moreover, in the attempt to relate the social conditions to the cultural bases of creativity, the investigator-collector has commonly accepted the argument that such folklore emerges in response to these conditions. Somehow, the African or the American Indian repertories or styles have supposedly been eliminated in the process of colonialization. Where specific items or practices have been reported elsewhere, it is presumed that they were learned by “imitation” from the European or Euro-American “masters.” To a certain extent, this bias occurs simply because folklorists have collected and organized the Indo-European traditions much more fully than African or American Indian lore. But the assimilationist bias of the commentators has certainly had an effect on the way they present their position. Such arguments emanate from the notion that all culture rests on the superstructure of the institutions of community life: family structure, economic and governmental systems, and religion. The maintenance of African and American Indian institutions was, indeed, discouraged by the dominant European and Euro-American societies. By extension, it was assumed that all other features of culture would be undermined and replaced through imitating the culture of the dominant society, or through a shared creative reaction against their domination. This deculturation view is most identified with the Afro-Americatrists E. Franklin Frazier and Robert Park, and was maintained by collectors of black life and lore until relatively recently. (The great exception is the work of Melville Herskovits and his students.) One of the earliest and best informed of these scholar-collectors, Richard Dorson, maintains this Europeanist point of view, with special reference to black folktales. He argues that the great bulk of Afro-American narrative lore in the United States, where it exhibits Old World antecedents at all, demonstrates a derivation from European rather than African antecedents.

In rebuttal, a number of commentators have noted that this defies both common sense and the evidence of the data: distributional studies of specific stories, especially of the Uncle Remus variety so widely collected in the United States, demonstrate a strong maintenance of African narrative lore; and morphological analyses of a variety of expressive forms -- tales, dance, song, practices of worship -- indicate that even when specific items are derivable from non-African sources, the deeper learned patterns of both construction and performance are demonstrably African or pan-Afro-American. Herskovits presents a model of acculturation that distinguishes three modes of continuity and adaptation: straight retention; reinterpretation, in which forms are maintained in new environments with new uses and meanings; and syncretism, in which similar elements of two or more cultures merge.

What Herskovits describes are a number of possible ways in which cultural forms and practices change. Those who have continued to study expressive culture in Afro-American communities generally analyze their data not only on the level of traits and practices, in which attributions of specified points of origin in Africa or Europe or the New World are asserted, but also on the deeper level of aesthetic and cosmological organization, or on the micro-behavioral level (walking, running, and dancing styles, ways of greeting, eye-contact patterns). In these areas of culture, the deculturation argument goes against both common sense and the most casual observation. Thus, it is not in the areas of texts or traits that the most fruitful discussion of African retentions has been carried out, but in the practices in which these deeper patterns may be observed most clearly -- as in, say, hand-clapping and drumming, dance patterns, sermons and religious practices, and so on.

The cultural dynamic in which such deeper structures of organization and attitude operate is severely complicated in cases like Afro-American lore because of the constant possibility of introducing cultural elements from contemporary African or from Afro-American communities outside the United States. For instance, Afro-American dance in the United States has produced a great number of indigenous styles from “Jump Jim Crow,” the “Buzzard Lope,” and the “Turkey Trot” to the “Charleston,” “jitterbug,” and various kinds of “the boogie.” But equally important have been the Afro-Latin dance crazes: Mambo, Limbo, Samba, Congo, Bossa Nova.

[beginning of page 375] During the 1960s, when such practices became entwined with the “soul movement,” a number of such display forms took on special meaning. Dashiki shirts and love beads came into the black American repertory through the Cuban Yoruba community newly moved to New York and Miami from Havana and the Oriente in eastern Cuba. The Cubans from this community had never lost contact with their Nigerian cousins -- their religious leaders were often sent back for training, for instance. Thus, when they moved from Cuba they found fertile ground to grow in, and many of their practices came into wider fashion. In addition to the dashiki and beads, the multi-unit handshake and the emphasis on plaited hair decoration were reemphasized. The corn-row (or cane-row), for instance, had been one of many traditional styles in the American South as well as the West Indies. Rejected as a reminder of slavery times in favor of hair-straightening techniques (also found, incidentally, in many parts of traditional Africa), plaiting reemerged in this era of self-conscious cultural revitalization. Perhaps even more important is the fact that through all of the evolving history the importance of hair-styling, and especially of having a family member or friend do the hair in public, remained constant. Perhaps the most potent way of dramatizing the point is to refer to the widespread African saying (also found in the West Indies): “Nothing is sadder to think about than a person with no one to take care of his hair.”

THE INDIGENOUS AND BOUNDARY-MAKING STATEMENTS OF VERBAL ART

The concern with the maintenance and elaboration of relics of the past has become somewhat less central to the study of the folklore of American ethnic groups in the post-World War II era. The indigenous forms have assumed ever greater importance. Thus, more studies have been carried out that concentrate on the lore in which strong attitudes and images of self and other are explored. Here one can reasonably make a distinction between the lore that dramatizes one’s stereotypes of one’s own group and of contiguous cultures, and the forms and styles of traditional practice that are unique to the group. In both cases the lore is of an esoteric sort. The lore of self-typing and stereotyping projects and reinforces intragroup and intergroup conflicts. With such stereotypical material, its in-group character derives from highly biased content features that reveal the attitudes held by one group about another. In the case of the developing form and styles, the expression is so idiomatic to the group, so full of slang, jargon, or other special vocabulary, that it is virtually unintelligible to nonmembers. Perhaps more to the point, such esoteric lore is subject to constant intercultural misunderstanding, thus increasing the sense of in-groupness as well as intensifying the sense of exclusion felt by nonmembers.

This complex of ways in which ethnic lore explores the subject of social and cultural differences has been an especially productive way of drawing on folklore as an index to the intensity of social stratification and the dynamic of intergroup relations. This lore about self and others has been analyzed in terms suggested by William Hugh Jansen and expanded upon by Richard Bauman and numerous others. The esoteric-exoteric (or s-x) complex of factors concerns the techniques of boundary-making and the dynamic arising between the bounded groups as it is revealed within the corpus of an oral literature. These boundaries arise not only from the integrity and sense of shared experience, language, and values within the group, but from that group’s image of the degree to which it is regarded as distinctive by nonmembers and how these differences are, in fact, regarded. Thus, the s-x factor would include not only the stereotypical depictions of self and other, but also the ways in which the lore points to cultural means of fighting against the negative effects of stereotyping.

Many of the more recent studies of both Afro-American and Mexican-American lore underscore this dynamic of stereotyping. For example, Americo Paredes has explored the relationship between “gringos” and “greasers” in the joke-lore of Mexican Americans, underscoring the impact of the antagonism between Chicanos and Anglos as recorded in real events in which social inequities are dramatized. The dynamic of recent Mexican-American lore, especially in-group jokes, provides a way in which the Anglo stereotype of Chicanos is drawn on to establish counter-boundaries, directing both laughter and derision at those who would otherwise be regarded as socially superordinate. This, too, involves the inversion of stereotype traits in which laziness as well as virility become devices of manipulation in encounters and in which supposed animality becomes a resource of sexual superiority. This same process of stereotypical inversion is emphasized in the many studies of urban Afro-American lore.

The expressive forms that arise within these ethnic enclaves, especially Hispanic-American and Afro-American, have received more critical commentary than virtually any other area of folklore and expressive culture in general. Characteristic of this interest in the in-group lore of these groups are many studies of blues -- classic, country, and city. Such analyses often focus on the role of the bluesman as a social representative -- even culture hero -- of the blacks during the post-Reconstruction period.

These studies arise in great part not just from social concerns of the predominantly white commentators, but from a fascination with emergent and creative forms. In a similar manner, other emergent black forms of verbal art have received a great deal of commentary: the sermon, the spiritual, jiving, playing the dozens (mother rapping), and the toast. In all cases, attempts have been made to relate these forms, the nature of these performances, and their subject matter to the sociocultural condition of contemporary Afro-American life.

All of the social sciences might be enriched by the exploration of the content and performance of oral traditions. This becomes especially significant as the thrust of folklore studies has changed from an emphasis on texts to one on performance, play, and enactment. Traditional practices in new environments become a useful way to get to the core of the cultural dynamic of the community. Esoteric lore permits insights into the features of shared identity as perceived in different ways and intensities by individuals within the community under analysis. This extension of the s-x argument underscores the centrality of folklore in performance entering into the “typing” of self and others. This approach underscores features like age-grading, regional identification, occupational roles, kinship, and per- [beginning of page 376] ceived ethnic identity as means of entering more fully into this discussion of the way in which culture operates within social structures.

In essence, this shift in approach calls for an altered status for ethnic enclaves. The assumption of the analysis of ethnic communities has been that as “minorities” or “subcultures,” their separation occurs only so long as power is unequally distributed. With the elimination of inequalities, the very existence of these minorities would be questioned. Assimilation and acculturation are inevitable, then, so long as access to power and responsibility are assured. Such a unilinear developmental approach does not recognize that there are cultural as well as economic exchange relationships that arise out of the cultural coming-together process, even when the exchanges are not actually reciprocal. The reliance of mainstream American culture on the alternative expressive forms and styles provided by Afro-Americans, for instance, resulted in these Afro-American performances achieving a life of their own -- a life that is always ethnically acknowledged, but which may or may not reflect the maintenance of these traditions within Afro-American communities. Due to a combination of active imitation by Euro-Americans and the recording of the performance at some point within black communities (in books, phonograph recordings, or movies), which makes it possible for the imitators to return to the “originals” without returning to the communities, such forms as blues, tap-dancing, skiffle music, and many others have endured. Though they are now popular rather than folk forms, inasmuch as their audience extends far beyond the ethnic community, their folk “roots” are widely acknowledged by their new audience.

Indeed, these dynamic community analyses of folklore often demonstrate precisely the ways in which certain enclaves resist assimilation because of differences in ethos, world view, and secular and religious practice. A self-consciously different religious community, especially, may maintain its deep sense of separation not only through a persistence of traditional religious practices, but also in language-maintenance and in recapitulating a sociocultural sense of community in which the old stories and songs are performed and transmitted because they continue to be employed in the traditional fashion. Though most such studies employ the ethnographic method in describing the group and therefore are not primarily concerned with the processes of oral transmission and dissemination, the lore reported often undercuts the assumption of the inevitability of assimilation in the contemporary world. Not insensitive to certain changes dictated by their new situation, the uses of the lore and the folkloric items themselves must be regarded not only as relics of past practices but as examples of a lively culturally emergent tradition as well. Such a process of tradition-maintenance and revitalization has been widely observed not only in immigrant communities but among American Indians and mestizos.

FOLKLORE AND THE CONCEPT OF CREOLE CULTURE

The same questions are asked of ethnic enclaves as are asked about regional cultures: to what extent are their ways unique, and how much is really shared with other communities within the American polity? This becomes even more problematic as the most marked features of regional or ethnic culture become part of popular iconography and, by extension, part of mass culture -- the general expressive and symbolic vocabulary of the United States. We witness just such a process in the development of various regional and ethic cuisines into national franchise operations. Going public in such a way often means needing to draw upon the very stereotypes that have operated as exclusionary techniques in other times and other intercultural situations. The way in which the masters of popular culture manipulate the images of the sleepy, sombrero-wearing Mexicans to sell tacos and burritos, or the white-suited Southern Colonels, or the pearly-toothed Uncle Bens, is fascinating -- if a little fearsome -- to behold.

Considering culture from such a perspective places emphasis on the interaction between cultures, especially on the importance of a coming-together of the expressive elements from a range of traditional backgrounds. The most common and in many ways the most productive way of studying such a synthesizing process would underscore the privileged status of those forms shared by the larger society, and would therefore involve a study of lore and language as it gravitates toward national norms and forms.

From a sociolinguistic point of view, individuals in ethnic groups in multi-ethnic settings often draw upon a range of codes or varieties of talking, ranging from the most archaic or ceremonial to the most recent slang or jargon. Each speaker within an ethnic enclave, then, might be studied in terms of the range of codes and varieties of speech in which he or she has developed a receptive (understanding) or productive (speaking) competence. In the language-contact situation arising from the mass movements of peoples, one language and one range of codes within that language are commonly accorded high prestige (H), often because they are the forms employed on literary occasions or in radio broadcasts. Other codes are given lower status (L), especially when they represent the language of old and often illiterate, backward, or defeated and enslaved people. Individuals are judged on the one hand by an ability to control the prestige form, or alternatively to switch at will between different varieties. Some seek to gain a place of importance in the community by enacting the widest range of speaking styles and codes; others will make their name by their total mastery of one form, such as oratorical English (one kind of H) or talk that demonstrates quick wit and a control of slang or jargon (forms of L).

This range of interactive and expressive codes has been called the creole continuum because in cultural contact situations new codes are produced during the earliest stages of the process of coming together. When these codes are predominantly organized around exchange (or trade) relationships between heretofore discrete language communities, the product is commonly referred to as pidgin. When social and familial situations draw on this in-between way of talking and broaden its expressive capacities, it is referred to as a creole language. But it remains a low-status means of interacting unless it develops a literature (as with the Anglo-Norman Middle English) or some-other means of being adopted by a prestige group. If it remains an L [beginning of page 377] code, then, it will constantly be compared with H and will tend to be affected by such a comparison. But one cannot assume that this will produce a change in the lower-status varieties in the direction of the higher. The relationships, in fact, go both ways. The first folklore collectors to actively employ the idea of the creole continuum worked in Afro-American communities in the United States and elsewhere in the New World. “Talking bad” or “broken” has become part of the apparatus of identity management of some blacks (especially males) in conflict and in festive entertainment situations. Such ways of performing even in casual streetcorner situations are regarded as a contest between the “good” or respectability norms and ideals of the community and the more hilarious “bad” reputation-seeking means of expression. As the linguistic varieties employed in such bad-talk are furthest away from so-called Standard English in the speech continuum, these ways of talking are maintained as an alternative means to respectability of achieving status within the community. Further, the ability to employ such varieties in performance forms like the epic toasts or in blues enables the performer to assume a kind of leadership over the reputation-seeking segment of the community. Conversely, speaking well (especially in oratorical or philosophical standard forms) places one at the potential center of the respect-seeking segment of the community. Thus we find a good deal of actual discussion within the community about the bluesman with regard to the preacher, and about the different ways of talking and performing in general. A very wide range of codes and varieties may be maintained within the same community as a means of continually dramatizing the (usually playful) opposition between these two value systems. And the person who can control all of these codes in their appropriate place is given very high status, indeed. From the perspective of the history of codes and varieties, this situation in which a number of historically distinct forms are maintained for expressive purposes runs counter to the usual way in which the language and lore of ethnic communities are studied. More commonly, of course, immigrant groups have been observed and judged with regard to how quickly and effectively they acculturate from the Old World language to American English. But in social situations in which the ethnic group and alternative languages have been in this country for some time, as with Afro-Americans, Mexican Americans, and American Indians, this immigrant model of change does not pertain. Rather, the concern of the sociolinguistically oriented folklorist has been to document the language situation as it maintains a number of codes or varieties as expressive resources.

In the only work of folklore scholarship that explicitly focuses on a native language as it gravitates toward English, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett brings together a corpus of materials from Toronto’s eastern European Jewish community. She demonstrates that in the midst of the common acculturation situation, a complex of verbal traditions arose which calls for a variable control of both Yiddish and English and which develops an intermediate code which she names “Yinglish.” Not only were Old World verbal forms kept alive while new ones were emerging from the immigration experience, but a large body of lore arose which turns on the active and usually witty commingling of these languages and cultural forms. Primary forms in such a situation are the stories told in English with Yiddish punchlines, and vice versa. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett demonstrates that learning a new language is a more complicated process than is generally recognized, because the very situation of change engenders verbal artistic forms as a means of displaying the centrality of a range of performance competencies. This emergent lore is, in the main, metacommunicative -- made up of lore focusing on the character of communicating in a new sociocultural environment. The concept of being multicultural, then, becomes not so much a matter of shedding one culture and donning another, but of acquiring new cultural and linguistic resources which, by their very quality of newness, are “foregrounded” as flexible and functional devices of communication. There is an automatic foregrounding effect in such a transitional situation; through cultural contact the verbal lore becomes increasingly self-conscious as it draws upon an ever-widening range of expressive resources. Narrative lore especially comes to be employed as the means of asserting and testing (and later rehearsing) the newly learned competencies. In this situation, the multilingual narrator becomes the model for successful acculturation. Capitalizing on the otherwise dying language resources, the narrator maintains the usefulness of the old vocabulary, the old sayings, even if they serve only as a resource for humorous effects.

GOING PUBLIC

The idea of employing the creole continuum to understand the processes affecting ethnic folklores arises from the need to recognize what alternative expressive resources exist for a community at any time in its history. By underscoring such alternatives, we become conscious of the ways in which verbal creativity may operate in situations otherwise described as ones of alienation, marginalization, and exploitation. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that ethnicity is often a dimension of the performing self, a choice made individually of a role to be played, made possible by the persistence of these older ways of expression.

Looking at the coexistence of the many ethnic groups in the United States from outside these groups, however, presents a very different perspective, for the outsider is made especially aware of his nonstatus within the community, and of the difference between his or her traditions and those of the group. When there is any kind of defensiveness or social strain between such outside observers and the group being observed, the result is often a stereotypical one. “Different” comes to mean chaotic, acting like children or even animals; expressing another culture, then, signs having no culture -- no style, no taste. But when such differences are dramatized in an environment of good will, the lack of understanding may be translated into willingness to learn about such cultural alternatives and even to enjoy them. Thus, outsiders are invited in to witness how life is lived, traditions carried on within the ethnic group. Naturally, the activities most available for observation and even participation are those in which the group is on its “best behavior” -- as in rites [beginning of page 378] and ceremonies and festive meals -- or when performing is in progress. In a shrinking world, the activities that attract the attention of outsiders will be those which have a strong sense of style and decorum. Indeed, it is such traditional and styles as dance, clowning, acrobatics, song (and music in general), ceremony, the decorative arts, crafts, and cooking that are the most easily understood and that transcend language differences. Consequently, it is in these realms that we witness traditional ethnic expression going public. Within any cultural enclave, some genres of traditional lore and some situations of performance will be more private and family oriented, and some will be more public. Scenes or events carried on within the family or peer group are obviously more private and more topical in references and thus more limited in audience than the larger gatherings. With the growing value placed on ethnic diversity, some of these more private forms of aesthetic encounters are increasingly being developed into public presentations. We find this acceptance operating especially in those folk festivals employing professional folklorists, which were greatly accelerated by political demands to be part of the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations.

Typical of this drift has been the use of festivals or fairs or some other kind of announced public event as a means of dramatizing ethnic persistence in a community or neighborhood, church, or social group. What has been immigrant folklore and then ethnic folklore becomes the folklore of ethnicity. Essentially this calls for the employment of the already public, community-wide events as a means of gaining an even wider public of noncommunity member participation. Events which at one point in the history of the community were employed as a means of asserting and maintaining ethnic boundaries become the very instrument by which the boundary is opened up -- at least for the moment. Similarly, the more private forms become available for greater public exposure. Thus, for instance, the most in-group of black verbal contests become the focus of the staged street celebration in the African Diaspora presentations in the Festival of American Folklife at the Smithsonian Institution in the summers of 1976 and 1977, while nearby, surrounded by an audience, bartenders and cab-drivers sat in a tent telling stories they usually reserve for their customers or for each other.

The concept of the living-museum or folk-museum increasingly attempts not only to reconstruct home behaviors like cottage-industry-style work and cooking; in addition, performances or reports of performances of the games, riddles, stories, and songs which are associated with the hearth or the dining-room are imported into these essentially tourist presentations. It is just these public demonstrations that make distinctive ethnic behaviors available for performance by anyone who chooses to learn them. Thus, ethnic style as well as items of performance become detached from the folk communities that gave rise to them and are employed for entirely different popular effects. (In fact, this has characterized American shows since the development of the blackface minstrel show, which drew originally on Afro-American traditions.) Rather than being employed within essentially homogeneous communities in which members meet face-to-face to entertain and instruct each other, these ways of performing are employed in groups that come together only for the occasion of entertainment. Media of record (such as print, movies, and recordings) as well as the microphone vastly increase the audience, and individuals perform to others not known personally. Folk traditions provide the materials for a celebration of stylistic diversity that has little to do with the ethnic community out of which it emerges; the performance of ethnicity, far from becoming a statement of cultural continuity and rootedness, rather emerges as a way of entering the marketplace economy by those carrying on the ethnic style of performance or presentation. Everyone, at this point, can learn how to play a banjo or even a Japanese koto, just as they can take lessons in how to cook (or at least eat properly) grits or sukiyaki.

This process of making public the private also often means dramatizing what heretofore has not been dramatic, performing acts which are not inherently performative. For instance, in the development of folklife festivals, the problem of how to present crafts and work techniques has arisen constantly. It early became evident that folk festival audiences are as interested in the process of craftmaking and other work as they are in music and dance. Consequently, illustrating these crafts on the spot develops into performances as much as demonstrations. At such a point, the intermediacy of presenters is called for, individuals who can explain the process while it is being carried out. Such a figure often employs traditional narratives such as jokes, hero tales, and personal anecdotes as important features of the framing performance. At such a point, though items of verbal art are essentially the same as those found within the folk community, their context and thus their meaning is substantially changes. With the tremendous growth of ethnic-based folk festivals, the figure of the presenter begins to take its place beside the costumed tour guide and the folksinger as a popular culture role in the business of purveying ethnic folk culture.

In such presentations, the folklore of an ethnic group is no longer a means of keeping the family and community together, nor even a way of maintaining the old practices. Rather, folklore becomes part of the vocabulary of communicating across cultures in a situation in which the old stereotypes and boundary-making mechanisms are rejected as inappropriate. Ironically then, in such public presentations, both ethnic differences and the old folkways are kept alive but in a cultural setting as far away as one can imagine from the small face-to-face group in which they persisted. Yet the very event which most opens up family and community to outside observation and participation has elevated the tradition-bearer to eminence, and has brought generations within families to perform or demonstrate together in ways that seem to have been dying when carried on only within the home. It now seems easier, in other words, to get members of younger generations to enact ethnically in public rather than in private. It has been a working proposition in the folk festival movement, in fact, to bring public approval to these old-fashioned ways so that members of the community will find more than family reinforcement to learn the traditional performances and practices. Moreover, such festivals, in seeking out traditional performers, often find them- [beginning of page 379] selves dealing with individuals who have been regarded as eccentric or even deviant within their home locale.

These public occasions in which demonstrations and performances are carried out in a real sense run contrary to ethnic persistence, for they become events aimed in the main at a popular audience. This tendency undermines the actual social base of ethnic persistence and relegates the fact of ethnic identification into that strange place in the possible repertory of roles in which to be an “ethnic” is to be a conveyor of stylistic alternatives, interesting ones no doubt, but with little of the sense of alternatives held in opposition to each other. In such popular displays, the esoteric-exoteric factor no longer is terribly important in teh operation of the lore, for who is now being included and excluded? Something like this dislocation of boundaries seems to underlie the Polack-cycle and other such recent joke-lore. This cycle is just the latest rendering of the “noodle” or “moron” principle, the derogation of a class of people because of their semi-human character, their strange eating and sexual habits, their ugliness and lack of intelligence, and so on. Though on the surface the Polack joke turns on traits imputed to Poles in general, it becomes clear that those who tell these stories are not really directing them at the Polish people, nor even implying thta Poles exhibit such traits. Rather, they are like the elephant jokes that find elephants wearing tennis shoes, climbing and jumping from trees, and taking baths -- a background of what-if suppositions against which generally absurd behavior can be projected and laughed at. These jokes are not tendentious, directed at a specific social problem. They maintain the language and the witty techniques of derision and exclusion, but on a supposed group that has little to do with the lives of those who tell the jokes. Ethnic behavior and, in this case, invented ethnic behavior has become a matetr of depicting cultural differences as eccentric rather than deviant. The result is a strange kind of bonding rather than the exclusionary motive contained in the older kind of ethnically directed humor, such as dialect jokes. Thus, the Polack joke seems to operate within a popular culture environment -- one which, like the “ethnic” programs on radio and now television, attempts to use stereotyping as a path to social acceptance. The Polack joke, like “Abie’s Irish Rose,” and the folk festival, like the earlier fairs and world expositions, operate on the principal of the acceptability of cultural pluralism.

Bibliography

Large-scale studies of folklore and ethnicity in America are a comparatively recent phenomena, and most of them are not yet available in book form. Many of those written prior to 1970 are conveniently listed in Alan Dundes, Folklore Theses and Dissertations in the United States (Austin, Tex., 1976). More recent studies are referred to passim in the special issue of Western Folklore 36 (1977): 1-108, Larry Danielson, ed., which includes not only an important introductory essay by the editor, but Stephen Stern’s groundbreaking article, “Ethnic Folklore and the Folklore of Ethnicity,” 7-32. One doctoral dissertation, that of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Traditional Storytelling in the Toronto Jewish Community” (University Microfilms: Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972) is of enormous importance.

Representative monographs on the folklore of specific ethnic communities are: Jerome Mintz, Legends of the Hasidim: An Introduction in the New World (Chicago, 1968); Robert Georges, “Matiasma: Living Folk Belief,” Midwest Folklore 12 (1962): 69-74; Gregory Gizelis, Narrative Rhetorical Devices of Persuasion (Athens, Greece, 1976); Carla Bianco, The Two Rosettos (Bloomington, Ind., 1974); Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand (Austin, 1959); and Bruce A. Rosenberg, The Art of the American Negro Folk Preacher (New York, 1970). Richard Dorson’s unique study, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers (Cambridge, Mass., 1952; reprint, 1972), surveys the lore of a multi-ethnic region, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

In Roger D. Abrahams, Positively Black (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970), the narrative lore of Afro-Americans is surveyed with regard to the ways in which it reflects stereotypes of self and others. The roles of bluesmen and preachers are explored in Charles Kiel, Urban Blues (Chicago, 1966) and John Szwed, “Musical Adaptation Among Afro-Americans,” Journal of American Folklore 82 (1969): 112-121. A number of other works are surveyed in John Szwed and Roger D. Abrahams, An Annotated Bibliography: Afro-American Folklore and Culture (Philadelphia, 1978).

The authority on African communities in the New World remains Melville Herskovits; see The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston, 1941). The argument goes on between the deculturizationists and the Africanists; the most recent summary of the latter point of view may be found in Daniel Crowley, ed., African Folklore in the New World (Austin, 1977).

The developmental model is derived, in part, from the work of Herskovits, as well as Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston, 1969). Other vauable studies are: Linda Degh, “Survival and Revival of European Folk Cultures in America,” Ethnologia Europaea 2-3 (1968-1969): 97-108; William Hugh Jansen, “The Esoteric-Exoteric Factor in Folklore,” Fabula: Journal of Folklore Studies 2 (1959): 205-211; Robert Klymasz, “From Immigrant to Ethnic Folklore,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 10 (1973): 133-137; and Richard Bauman, “Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore,” Journal of American Folklore 84 (1971): 31-41. A recent textbook which covers American traditions from the perspective of the performance of culture and ethnicity is Barre Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore (Boston, 1979). See also the sociolinguitic work of Dell Hymes, especially his Foundations in Sociolinguitics (Philadelphia, 1974). Charles Ferguson discusses the distinction between H (High) and L (Low) in “Diglossia,” Word 15 (1969): 325-340.