Methods and Tools of American Folklore and Folklife Studies

This article provides an overview of the analytical and fieldwork methodologies that are employed in the study of American folklore and folklife. It considers the history of method in folkloristics, as well as the historical tension between textual and ethnographic methods. It describes contemporary methods and tools, as they have taken shape since the discipline’s last major reorientation in the 1970s. The discussion of methodology includes different forms of ethnography, field collection, repertoire collecting, and analysis. Tools considered include indexes and archives, audio and video recording, photography, field notes, drawing and measurements, and mapping. Finally, the article covers emerging and potential methods and tools. This section gives particular attention to the integration of digital technologies into folkloristic research. It discusses ways that folklorists are working in digital settings, using powerful digital tools for data collection and analysis of both digital and nondigital folklore, and methods for collaborative work with participants. Informed by practice theory, this article makes the case that the study of aggregated performances and everyday practices of folklore is not only easier with the advent of digital tools, but it could also represent an important new way of linking the concerns for situational meaning-making of performance studies to practice-oriented scholars’ concerns with social structure.

Latinx Folklore and Folklife

This article, which focuses on the traditional cultural expressions of the Latinx community in the United States, first traces the history and development of Chicanx and Latinx folklore studies. Second, it presents the ways that the study and engagement with these expressions serve as tools for addressing social justice issues faced by Latinxs in the United States in the twenty-first century. To guide future work in the field, it concludes with an assessment of Latinx folklore studies and its role in reconfiguring and reimagining folklore and folklife studies in general. Within this discussion, the essay presents two key aspects of Latinx folklore and folklife that have defined the field—the academic study of folklore and the public-sector engagement by community scholars. Both have affected the ways that Latinx folkloristics have changed the field during the last hundred years and are shaping it as we leave behind outmoded and limited ways of seeing the cultural production of the second-largest ethnic minority in the United States.

Introduction

Introducing the contents of The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies, this essay first reviews major English-language handbooks for the study of folklore and folklife since the late nineteenth century. It finds that the handbooks produced for the United States claimed special conditions in the country such as the diversity and mobility of its population that necessitated distinctive approaches to the subject. The study of American folklore and folklife studies embraced the study of contemporary culture and nonpeasant groups. Second, the essay reviews various definitions of folklore and folklife produced by American folklorists and the spread of process-oriented perspectives initially in performance and later in practice-oriented definitions. A background for definitional debates is the tension between advocates for conceptualizations of folklore as verbal art or communication and folklife as an ethnological or sociological subject and efforts in the twenty-first century to integrate the two. Toward this end, the essay closes with a general outline of folkloristic inquiry: (1) establishment of a problem statement or thesis, (2) the identification and annotation of folk material and processes in depth, (3) engagement of analysis and proposal of explanation, and (4) formation of implications and applications. Although authors in the handbook discuss methods specific to their fields, the introduction contends that the outline consistently is used. Common characteristics of folklore and folklife studies are identified, including attention to traditional knowledge; variable, repeated cultural practices; and everyday life.

Internet and Media in American Folklore and Folklife

The media of print, radio, film, television, and especially the Internet are subjects as well as sources of folklore and folklife. Following the rise of the Internet in the late twentieth century, and its proliferation in the early twenty-first century, bringing with it Web 2.0 and the performative folk web, folklorists increasingly turned to the Internet to research folk processes and compare them to the kinds of transmission in face-to-face communities. Digital folklore—with “memes” being most recognizable—flourishes online, and the Internet creates new traditional forms and practices. The Internet challenges long-standing assumptions, definitions, methods, and theories in what has been called the predigital or analog era. Folklore and folklife research of media and digital technology contributes to the broader field of communication and media studies by emphasizing the continued importance of informal culture and group aesthetics in technologically mediated environments.

Regions, Borders, and Nation in American Folklore and Folklife

The study of regions and borders in American folklore and folklife is essentially about the cultural significance of place and land. It has been of political interest more widely because of the implication of the way that national feeling developed after the establishment of a New Republic in the nineteenth century despite sectional division born out of cultural differences. It has been of folkloristic significance because of region as an important marker of cultural identity, in some places more than others. Along both these lines, folklorists have asked about the relative stability of regional cultures in the United States and the use of regional folklore as an expression of social belonging in relation to others, including race, ethnicity, occupation, family, and religion. Objective and subjective approaches to investigating these issues are presented. For the former, historical-geographical surveys of folk items that demonstrate diffusion and hybridization are covered, and for the latter, rhetorical criticism of narrative and visual expressions and frame or situational analysis of cultural scenes are discussed. The essay introduces the concept of regional “homelands” in a mobile society such as the United States—social constructions that are often imagined in folklife rather than in the reality of a cultural landscape. Addressing the view that place and region carry less cultural meaning with the advent of the digital era of the twenty-first century, the essay closes with research trajectories for assessing the continued need for “sense of place” in a modern context of heightened mobility, globalization, and digital communication.

Folklore and Folklife of European Americans

This article covers the traditional practices of groups who trace their heritage to Europe. It includes a historical overview of immigration from Europe to the United States, as well as consideration of how European national, regional, and local traditions were reproduced, adapted, or recreated in different parts of the United States. It gives an overview of contemporary ethnic traditions as they have been studied across the country. Consideration is given to groups such as Italian, Irish, Polish, and German Americans, who have typically been studied as part of the core of European ethnic cultures in the United States. But at the same time, the essay poses questions of how European folk traditions were maintained and adapted by groups not often placed as “European American” ethnics. These include Latinx peoples, British Americans, and African Americans. In doing so, this article will underline the fluidity of ethnic boundaries, a fluidity that is mirrored in the traditions of folklore and folklife.

American Folk Art and Crafts

This chapter addresses the wide range of folk art and crafts related to the study of those who make, use, and find meaning in the handmade object in America. The definitions of folk, popular, visionary, outsider, and fine arts have long been challenged and reassessed by scholarly and public communities, communities that sometimes but not always overlap. Debates have raged over the boundaries between art and craft, the viability of the handmade traditional object in the digital, postmodern age, and the discernible distinctive aesthetic characteristics of this body of American expressive culture. This chapter presents a flexible, interdisciplinary perspective on defining folk art and craft in America. It also offers avenues for folk art and craft scholarship such as relationships of aging, human rights, migration, sexuality and gender, and health to the study of folk artists and their communities, and encourages building on the legacy of material culture scholarship from the collections and research of museums and governmental agencies in addition to higher education institutions.

Folklore and Folklife of American Organizations and Networks

Building on the landmark Supreme Court case Dukes v. Wal-Mart (2011), which involved the issue of whether folklore provided evidence of a corporate culture affecting managerial decision making, this chapter addresses the context of organizations and networks that are distinguishable from communities and groups. Following the typology of sociologist Max Weber, organizations and networks are defined by their strategic formation and usually are formalized, in contrast to the fluid nature of communities and groups. Folklorists often avoided analyzing folklore of organizations and the traditional praxis of organizing because of the formalism of organizations and networks, frequently associated with businesses, but this chapter argues that as social entities they rely on folklore internally to create an identity for participants and externally to convey a cultural character. Organizations and networks vary in their use of folklore, often in relation to whether they are “high context” and fostering ritual and narrative or “low context” and therefore less conducive to cultural formation. Historically, organizational folklore and folklife have become more pervasive in American society with the dominance of a service and information economy and an “organizational society” since the late twentieth century. This chapter discusses the similarities and differences in the kinds of folklore and folklife in three major types of organizations and networks: unions and advocacy groups, corporations and businesses, and voluntary organizations and support groups. Research on organizations and networks often has an applied aspect to reform organizations and improve the lives of Americans who necessarily engage them.

American Gravemarkers and Memorial Assemblages

As representations of mourning and beliefs about death, gravemarkers and memorial assemblages (also referred to as spontaneous shrines and makeshift memorials) are often cast in binary opposition, defined by temporal intention on the part of the maker(s). Gravemarkers have been studied for their materialization of ideological, socioeconomic, and aesthetic values and trends. As artifacts intended to be permanent, gradual changes in markers may provide a record of the twin forces of folklore, conservatism and dynamism, at work in shaping themes in funerary practices over time. In contrast to gravemarkers, memorial assemblages are marked as ephemeral, underscoring human mortality. Folkloristic research seeks to understand the participatory and performative nature of both markers and assemblages, noting the memorial, celebratory, and other communicative intentions and possibilities embodied by ritual and assemblage in addition to considerations of form. Moreover, these lieux de memoire are more holistically understood in relation to each other, as elements of dynamic memorial complexes.

American Folk Music, Folk Songs, and Ballads

Folk music, folk songs, and ballads are nested categories of traditional expression: folk songs are folk music that has words, and ballads are folk songs that tell stories. These genres are universal; all people make music, and almost all start with what scholars would call “folk music.” Nevertheless, this chapter suggests specific ways to find and study them in an American context. Music, songs, and ballads are created by individuals, circulate orally, are adapted by other individuals, and thus become communally re-created works of art. Finding and studying such works is a challenge, requiring us to combine aspects of historical inquiry, literary and linguistic analysis, musicological study, and ethnography. These genres have also become part of popular culture in ways that have been called “folkloresque,” one of which is the movement generally known as “the folk revival.” Virtually all Americans hear folk music in the context of these folkloresque adaptations.