Folklore Concepts

Dan Ben-Amos

Description

By defining folklore as artistic communication in small groups, Dan Ben-Amos led the discipline of Folklore in new directions. In Folklore Concepts, Henry Glassie and Elliott Oring have curated a selection of Ben-Amos's groundbreaking essays that explore folklore as a category in cultural communication and as a subject of scholarly research. Ben-Amos's work is well-known for sparking lively debate that often centers on why his definition intrinsically acknowledges tradition rather than expresses its connection forthright. Without tradition among people, there would be no art or communication, and tradition cannot accomplish anything on its own—only people can. Ben-Amos's focus on creative communication in communities is woven into the themes of the theoretical essays in this volume, through which he advocates for a better future for folklore scholarship. Folklore Concepts traces Ben-Amos's consistent efforts over the span of his career to review and critique the definitions, concepts, and practices of Folklore in order to build the field's intellectual history. In examining this history, Folklore Concepts answers foundational questions about what folklorists are doing, how they are doing it, and why.

The Project / Henry Glassie
The Contours of the Book / Elliott Oring
Foreword / Dan Ben-Amos
1. The Idea of Folklore: An Essay
2. The Encounter with Native Americans and the Emergence of Folklore
3. Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context
4. Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres
5. The Seven Strands of Tradition: Varieties in Its Meaning in American Folklore Studies
6. A History of Folklore Studies – Why Do We Need It?
7. The Concept of Motif in Folklore
8. "Context" in Context
9. Two Benin Storytellers
10. "Induced Natural Context" in Context
11. The Name is the Thing
12. A Definition of Folklore: A Personal Narrative
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Essays
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Folclore
• Mythology
• Folklore

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253052445
• Langue: English

Extrait

FOLKLORE CONCEPTS
FOLKLORE
CONCEPTS
Histories and Critiques
Dan Ben-Amos
Edited by
Henry Glassie and Elliott Oring
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2020 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04955-1 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04956-8 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-05244-5 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 25 24 23 22 21 20
In memory of Roger David Abrahams (1933-2017), a folklorist, a folk singer, and a friend.
CONTENTS
The Project / Henry Glassie
The Contours of the Book / Elliott Oring
Preface / Dan Ben-Amos
1 The Idea of Folklore: An Essay
2 The Encounter with Native Americans and the Emergence of Folklore
3 Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context
4 Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres
5 The Seven Strands of Tradition : Varieties in Its Meaning in American Folklore Studies
6 A History of Folklore Studies-Why Do We Need It?
7 The Concept of Motif in Folklore
8 Context in Context
9 Two Benin Storytellers
10 Induced Natural Context in Context
11 The Name Is the Thing
12 A Definition of Folklore: A Personal Narrative
Index
THE PROJECT
Henry Glassie
O N F RIDAY , J UNE 2, 2017, R OGER A BRAHAMS GAVE me a call. After Roger moved to California in 2013, we often enjoyed lengthy chats on the phone; our constant topics were the fortunes of the Philadelphia Phillies, the development of folklore scholarship, and the cultural richness of the black Atlantic. This time, Roger was excited by a recent article by our friend and colleague from the old days at Penn, Dan Ben-Amos. The paper inspired Roger to imagine editing a volume of Dan s theoretical writings. We had frequently talked about the need for such a volume of Roger s own writings, and had even sketched together the outline of an autobiographical introduction, but the task proved too much for him. Too big, too personal, it would launch him into a nightmarish whirl of endless revisions and explanations. Roger thought he could manage it for Dan, though, and he wondered if some press would be interested.
On the following Monday, I met with Gary Dunham, the director of the Indiana University Press. A man with a degree in anthropology, a firm friend of folklore, Gary said he would be interested in a volume of Dan s essays edited by Roger. He knew their work, admired them both. I called Roger with the news, and he was delighted. The next day, I was off to do fieldwork among the talented potters of North Carolina. When I returned, Roger was dead; he left on June 20, 2017. In passing, Roger had placed an obligation on me, an obligation both intellectual and emotional, to bring this last project to completion. To get it done, I brought into partnership my old friend Elliott Oring, who shares my commitment to folklore scholarship and my affection for Dan Ben-Amos.
Dan Ben-Amos gave our discipline its most generally accepted definition of folklore: artistic communication in small groups. That definition, offered without fanfare to undergraduates in introductory classes today, was startlingly fresh in the 1970s, and it served to propel the discipline forward when Dan Ben-Amos was among the leaders who were bringing into pragmatic adjustment the new directions set in the sixties.
In the sixties, the discipline came to professional stability, and in that decade, the long sweep of American folklore scholarship spun through a turning point in one miraculous year. All of this happened in 1964: Kenneth S. Goldstein (Kenny) published A Guide for Field Workers in Folklore , calling folklorists into awareness of the methods that would hasten a change from random collecting to rigorous ethnography. Edward D. Ives published Larry Gorman: The Man Who Made the Songs , featuring a singular individual, and he would follow that book with studies of Lawrence Doyle and Joe Scott. Roger D. Abrahams published Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia , deftly swinging from collected texts to cultural interpretation, as he would later do in his folkloristic masterpiece, The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture . Alan Dundes published The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales , demonstrating the importance of formal analysis and opening the door to structuralism and the logic of the unconscious. Alan Merriam published The Anthropology of Music , precipitating a paradigmatic shift in the adjacent and allied discipline of ethnomusicology that paralleled the change in folklore. And in 1964, Dell Hymes published two of the major essays that were leading him to the grand concept of committed and conditioned creation-generally called performance theory by folklorists-which Dell would later bring to full presence in Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach .
The folkloristic interests in orderly methods, creative individuals, cultural interpretation, formal analysis, the patterned unconscious, and musical diversity were all comfortably accommodated in performance theory. It does no injustice to the bright, particular genius of Dell Hymes to say that he was articulating the common murmur, bringing into coherent clarity ideas scattered among his contemporaries. In fact, it helps to explain the acceptance and eventual prevalence of performance theory-though it is often enough debased and misunderstood in practice-among folklorists. Nor does it diminish Dell s originality to note that performance theory did not arrive as a flash in the dark but at the end of a long train of development, and Dell always scrupulously acknowledged his influences, notably Edward Sapir and Kenneth Burke.
Back before the disruptions of death and distance, we-Dell, Dan, Kenny, Roger, and I-were friends in Philadelphia, members of a small group united by communications that were not less artistic than those we studied. On the phone from California, Roger praised Dell but argued that performance theory was the logical consequence of many long years of fieldwork during which folklorists came to be more interested in the people they met than in the old theories that ostensibly took them into the field. It had to do with reading texts in context and understanding people amid their circumstances, and in retrospect, reading history backward. Roger and I agreed that signs of an emergent performance theory could be found in books published before 1960 by American folklorists who had done serious fieldwork: Vance Randolph, Zora Neale Hurston, George Korson, Leonard Roberts, and Richard Dorson.
Roger and I went into the field early, hunting for the singers of old songs. Separately, we befriended Paul Clayton Worthington and followed him as an apprentice does a master. Paul, a singer of folk songs who recorded many LPs and composed hit songs recorded by others, was also a dedicated scholar of the ballad. He lived in a beautiful log cabin on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge, and he diligently recorded the full repertory of Mrs. McAllister, a neighbor of his in the mountains. In the sixties, Roger recorded the full repertory of Almeda Riddle, and I recorded the full repertory of Ola Belle Reed. All three were bold southern women and grand performers of song.
Here is the point. The norm when we began was to use the headnotes in ballad collections and the indexes compiled by Tristram Coffin and Malcolm Laws to place a song in relation to other versions in order to gain a historical and geographical understanding of the song. Following Paul, Roger and I placed a song in relation to other songs in the repertory in order to understand the singer. Those approaches were both old and new, the old one governed by historic-geographic considerations, the new one ethnographic and headed toward performance theory. But folklorists, of all people, should not be ruled by fashion, by the urge to the merely new. Both approaches, the old and the new, are rational and productive. As performance theory became dominant, historic-geographic methods still proved useful and enlightening in studies of material culture and in the search for the African sources of American traditions. Still, I am glad to say, performance theory prevailed and continued to direct folkloristic practice long past a time when it could reasonably be called new.
Now return to the time when performance theory was new. Fieldwork had prepared us to center ethnographic inquiry on individuals, to record their creations with precision, to stay long enough to be able to say something intelligent about them. The existentialists we had read encouraged us to encounter individuals as the authors of their own tragedies. No longer passive bearers of traditions, people appeared before us as actively volitional-as human beings, that is, who exploited traditions and adjusted to conditions in the predicament of the performative moment.
At this early point, Dan Ben-Amos provided us a definition of folklore fully congruent with performance theory