Humble Theory

Dorothy Noyes

Description

Celebrated folklorist, Dorothy Noyes, offers an unforgettable glimpse of her craft and the many ways it matters. Folklore is the dirty linen of modernity, carrying the traces of working bodies and the worlds they live in. It is necessary but embarrassing, not easily blanched and made respectable for public view, although sometimes this display is deemed useful. The place of folklore studies among modern academic disciplines has accordingly been marginal and precarious, yet folklore studies are foundational and persistent. Long engaged with all that escapes the gaze of grand theory and grand narratives, folklorists have followed the lead of the people whose practices they study. They attend to local economies of meaning; they examine the challenge of making room for maneuver within circumstances one does not control. Incisive and wide ranging, the fifteen essays in this book chronicle the "humble theory" of both folk and folklorist as interacting perspectives on social life in the modern Western world.

Introduction
Part I: The Work of Folklore Studies
1. Humble Theory
2. Group
3. The Social Base of Folklore
4. Tradition: Three Traditions
5. Aesthetic is the Opposite of Anaesthetic: On Tradition and Attention

Part II. Histories and Economies of Tradition
6. Voice in the Provinces: Submission, Recognition, and the Birth of Heritage
7. The Work of Redemption: Folk Voice in the Myth of Industrial Development
8. Festival Pasts and Futures in Catalonia
9. Hardscrabble Academies: Toward a Social Economy of Vernacular Invention
10. Cultural Warming? Brazil in Berlin
11. Fairy-Tale Economics: Scarcity, Risk, Choice

Part III. Slogan-Concepts and Cultural Regimes
12. On Sociocultural Categories
13. The Judgment of Solomon: Global Protections for Tradition and the Problem of Community Ownership
14. Heritage, Legacy, Zombie: How to Bury the Undead Past
15. Compromised Concepts in Rising Waters: Making the Folk Resilient
Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Folclore
• Theory
• Anthropology
• Social
• Folklore
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253023384
• Langue: English

Extrait

Humble Theory
Humble Theory
Folklore s Grasp on Social Life
Dorothy Noyes
I NDIANA U NIVERSITY P RESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
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
2016 by Dorothy Noyes
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 Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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
DOI: 0.2979/humbletheory.0.0.00
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Noyes, Dorothy, author.
Title: Humble theory : folklore s grasp on social life / Dorothy Noyes.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016019837 (print) | LCCN 2016032583 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253022912 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023148 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023384 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Folklore-Philosophy. | Folklore-Study and teaching. | Ethnology-Philosophy. | Ethnology-Study and teaching.
Classification: LCC GR40 .N69 2016 (print) | LCC GR40 (ebook) | DDC 398.2-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019837
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
For Mike Krippendorf, who got me through it all
Contents
Introduction
PART I: THE WORK OF FOLKLORE STUDIES
1 Humble Theory
2 Group
3 The Social Base of Folklore
4 Tradition: Three Traditions
5 Aesthetic is the Opposite of Anaesthetic: On Tradition and Attention
PART II: HISTORIES AND ECONOMIES OF TRADITION
6 Voice in the Provinces: Submission, Recognition, and the Birth of Heritage in Lower Languedoc
7 The Work of Redemption: Folk Voice in the Myth of Industrial Development
8 Festival Pasts and Futures in Catalonia
9 Hardscrabble Academies: Toward a Social Economy of Vernacular Invention
10 Cultural Warming? Brazil in Berlin
11 Fairy-Tale Economics: Scarcity, Risk, Choice
PART III: SLOGAN-CONCEPTS AND CULTURAL REGIMES
12 On Sociocultural Categories
13 The Judgment of Solomon: Global Protections for Tradition and the Problem of Community Ownership
14 Heritage, Legacy, Zombie: How to Bury the Undead Past
15 Compromised Concepts in Rising Waters: Making the Folk Resilient
Index
Humble Theory
Introduction
Had it not been for the stern advice of more than one friend, I would have relieved my own anxieties by entitling this introduction, What s Wrong With This Book? Better scholars than I have introduced their work with disclaimers of performance, even or especially since Richard Bauman first called our attention to the practice (Bauman 1977; Jackson 2013a). In a book called Humble Theory , I cannot help feeling that I have much to be humble about. The essays here are likely to satisfy neither ethnographers nor theorists, and assuredly they will not satisfy historians.
But life is short and art is long and fools rush in where angels fear to tread. (At this point in my career I no longer fear clich s: they save time.) By temperament, circumstance, and my sense of a need at this period in the history of folklore studies, I have found myself again and again in the discussant s chair: hazarding generalizations, drawing up provisional schemata, trying to connect the dots across a field of fragmented engagements and localized knowledges. These essays record some of my attempts to capture the big picture.
Some scholarly trajectories are the product of will and focus. My more winding path owes everything to serendipity and context. A formative context was of course the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, from which I obtained my PhD in 1992. As Karl Mannheim long ago observed, intellectuals take direction from the crisis of their generation ([1923] 1952), and my graduate education coincided with the height of the postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the ethnographic disciplines. I remember it as a time of tears and tension at folklore meetings, followed for many years by fragmentation and a sense of paralysis. Everything seemed impossible, both ethically and intellectually. Ethnography was appropriation, comparison was reduction, and theory was playing God-a God of a particularly patriarchal, monotheistic, and Western tendency. All representation was at best distortion.
The critique was necessary, well-grounded, and far more nuanced than my presentation of it here, but in the heat of debate it was often oversimplified and converted from critique to crisis. What then was to be done? Two alternatives were prominent in my academic neighborhood: the literary and the activist escapes from the burden of representation. At first more among anthropologists than folklorists, there was a turn toward fiction and autobiography: the field adventure became an acknowledged voyage of self-discovery, tethered more or less tenuously to the voices of others. I did not feel this option was open to me: my self was of no interest to a larger audience, and if I had had creative talent I would have become a novelist. It must be said that some of the work of the period was self-indulgent; to me, at any rate, it seemed a dead end.
The other, activist line took shape as the profession of public folklore was reconfiguring itself, its business tilting from documentation and celebration toward advocacy, collaboration, and technical assistance. Here my experience was more fruitful, if difficult: in three years of work for the Philadelphia Folklore Project I learned the extent of my na vet and sheltered past. With all my admiration for the models then being developed by Bill Westerman and Debora Kodish, among others, I came to understand that I would have to work for years to build the moral courage and social acumen required for this path, while my temperament and existing abilities might serve me better elsewhere. Instead of trying to kill off my inner dead European academic, therefore, I decided to provincialize it, as Chakrabarty proposes (2000): to think hard about what use I might be as a scholar and how I could do more good than harm from my compromised position. At the same time, I set out to consider what might hold together the centrifugal field of folklore studies.
Of course I had any number of examples of useful work before me in the Penn faculty and across the field. I was best able to follow the lead of my dissertation advisor Roger D. Abrahams and my outside reader, James W. Fernandez. One taught me appropriate ambition, the other an enabling humility before the task. With a restless intellect like my own, Roger was always trying out the boundaries of the field, looking at what folklore and other disciplines had to say to one another. He taught me the value of the academic game and the need to play at a higher level; the need, indeed, to play, for he was incomparably fertile in invention, always trying out new formulations for identifying the effects and devices of vernacular performance. Still today, whenever I have an idea that strikes me as particularly clever, I know that within a day or so I will remember it as an aside that Roger let drop one day.
Jim Fernandez put me back at ease with representation. His recognition that we are all inchoate pronouns, struggling to represent ourselves and the world so that action can become possible, taught me to live with the imperfection of our work as well as the imperfection of the human efforts we study. It is all essay, in the etymological sense: a trying-out and trying-on of language always subject to revision or redirection by others. Particularly fruitful for folklorists, and for me as an ethnographer of Spain, was his later work on irony, the most resonant trope in all of the post-fascist, post-socialist, postindustrial, and post-modern worlds we inhabit. I have accepted, and become deeply interested in, the fact that the repertoires most ready to hand are not of our making, carry baggage, and are not going away any time soon.
Like other folklorists, I adapted to my opportunities. I began my career as a painfully timid but committed fieldworker, first working with Italian American craftspeople in Philadelphia, then beginning with my dissertation fieldwork a deeper involvement of many years in Catalonia. Despite my affinity for the ethnographic and philological minutiae, my training did not equip me to be a regional specialist in a language department; jobs in Catalan studies were in any case still thinner on the ground than those in folklore. After four years of depending on the kindness of colleagues for lecturer positions, in 1996 I had the exceptional good fortune of landing a tenure-track folklore job in the Department of English at the Ohio State University. This sent me into a different direction.
Thanks to the charismatic teaching and interdisciplinary reach of the core faculty at that time-Patrick Mullen, Amy Shuman, and Sabra Webber-Ohio State was already the most diversely networked of any folklore program, anchored in both the English Department and the Department of Comparative Studies and radiating into the language departments, education, the arts, and the social sciences. Th