INTRODUCTION

Folklore and Other Fields

Folklore is at once an independent discipline and an intimate associate of sister disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. Possessing its own scholarly methods and concepts, folklore requires an apprenticeship and a special aptitude the same as does any other field of learning. The qualified folklorist belongs to a separate guild of folklore societies, just as the scholar in other areas attends the professional meetings and reads the esoteric journals of his subject. Yet by the nature of his materials the student of folklore interacts closely with other academic guilds. In reverse, members of other guilds are frequently attracted to and find themselves immersed in folklore collections and treatises.

The composition of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University can illustrate the cross-disciplinary character of folklore studies. Indiana University was the first American institution of higher learning to initiate a doctoral degree program in folklore. An interdepartmental committee was empowered to award such a degree in 1949, and four years later conferred its first Ph.D. in folklore. The day came, in 1963, when the committee blossomed into an independent department with its own faculty. Some of the fifteen members of this faculty hold full appointments in folklore, some hold joint appointments with other departments, and some, who are budgeted wholly in other departments but whose teaching and research interests lie strongly in folklore areas, receive the title Fellows of the Folklore Institute.

Three of these joint appointments unite folklore with anthropology, English, and history. These fields have always intersected at certain points with the realm of the folklorist. Eminent anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits encouraged their students in the field to collect the oral literature of American Indians and tribal Africans in order to appreciate the full measure of their cultures. Courses on “Folklore and cultural anthropology” and “Anthropological folklore” are taught in the institute.

Professors of English literature—and here one immediately thinks of the hallowed names of Harvard’s Francis James Child and George Lyman Kittredge—have demonstrated a fondness for the ballad and other aesthetic products of the folk imagination. Folklore itself may qualify as literature, in the case of artistically pleasing tales, ballads, oral epics, and oral romances. And authors of novels, short stories, plays, and poems have often found inspiration in folklore. A standard course in the institute is “Folklore in its literary relations.”

Historians in Europe, Asia, and Africa have shown greater sympathy for the folklore approach than those in the United States, but the tide is turning. With the acceptance of oral history, black history, and ethnic history into the thinking of American historians, they have begun to recognize the values of tape-recorded interviews and oral historical traditions as sources of information that can complement written records. In particular such sources contribute to the history of the common man. A seminar on “The folk in American history” at Indiana University introduces folklore concepts to students in history and historical concepts to students in folklore.

Music and folklore form another firm academic partnership within their common province of ethnomusicology. Today ballad scholars acknowledge that tunes must be recorded and considered equally with the texts, and Bertrand Bronson’s The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads is the monument to ballad music. Other forms of folk poetry, such as the blues, also require the expertise of a folk musicologist, as does the whole vast body of traditional music in nonliterate societies. The Folklore Institute provides a field of concentration for ethnomusicology majors, supervised by the director of the Archives of Traditional Music, George List, who holds degrees from the Juilliard and Indiana University Schools of Music, as well as the title professor of folklore.

English literature is of course only one of the world’s literatures, and any department of language and literature may harbor a scholar who perceives the connections between his literary studies and folk models. Strongly committed folklorists at Indiana University are found in the Spanish, Slavic, and Uralic-Altaic departments, and they regularly offer courses on Spanish and Spanish-American, Russian, Finnish, Turkish, and Tibetan folklore. Visiting faculty have at one time or another taught French, Italian, Scandinavian, German, Chinese, and Arabic folklore. The folklore program at Harvard University, making available the first undergraduate major in folklore and mythology in the United States, developed from the strong research interests in the Yugoslav oral epic of the Slavic department’s Albert Lord. His well-known book, The Singer of Tales, followed the guidelines of Lord’s colleague in classics, Milman Parry, who conceived the idea of illuminating the Homeric epics through study of living folk epics. One of Indiana’s Folklore Fellows is a classicist who wrote his dissertation on Homer’s use of folklore themes. At the University of California at Berkeley, Joseph Fontenrose, professor of classics and member of the M.A. committee on folklore, composed Python a splendid study of the dragon-slayer myth that examines classical mythology through folklore concepts.

Because of the influence of the Grimm brothers on Volkskunde departments of German have more often than other language and literature departments produced folklore scholars of reputation. Archer Taylor and his student Wayland Hand at once come to mind.

The teacher and researcher in folklore coming from a language department usually follows a literary approach in his handling of folk materials. In area studies programs, a looser conglomerate unit in the academic structure, folklore plays a needed role, and here it will often be taught and studied from an ethnological viewpoint. The link here is between folklore and culture. Folklore courses have been associated with all the large area programs at Indiana University: African Studies, Afro-American Studies, American Studies, Asian Studies, Latin-American Studies, and the Russian and East European Institute. Only American Studies, which every year attracts some folklore co-majors, involves a perspective neither literary nor ethnological but sui generis, and in my own teaching of “American Folklore in American Civilization” I attempt a synthesis of folklore with cultural history.

Still other fields in the humanities have folklore implications. Departments of art, often called fine arts, like music departments, display a highbrow bias, but the folk too engage in graphic and plastic arts, and courses in “folk arts, crafts, and architecture” may be cross-listed by art historians. Folk drama or folk theater occasionally enters the curriculums of departments of theater and drama, although a distinction needs to be made between the regional theater guided by Frederick Koch in North Carolina and Robert Gard in Wisconsin, which is art theater utilizing local color themes, and traditional drama proper. Folk dance as an academic subject finds its way, if at all, into departments of physical education. The philosophic values in traditional folk wisdom have not noticeably attracted professors of philosophy, but at the 1971 annual meeting of the American Folklore Society a philosopher conducted a forum on philosophical problems in the theory and methodology of folklore studies. Religion, or religious studies, represents a growing department on a number of college campuses that draws on folklore in the sphere of popular supernaturalism. Courses on “Folklore and Religion” and “Folk Religions” attract students at Indiana University. Ministers, priests, and nuns, who have completed their own religious training, and indeed support themselves on the side with parish work, have enrolled in the Folklore Institute.

Younger folklorists in the United States today evince a strong orientation toward the social sciences, and their manifestos are arousing the interest of social scientists. The Social Science Research Council sponsored a conference in New York in 1967 on “Social Science and Folklore,” in which a panel of folklorists faced a mixed group of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and historians. Theories of social interaction, role-playing, expressive behavior, and communication systems, formulated by social psychologists and ethnosociologists, have entered the thinking of the new generation of folklorists. (See, e.g., the January-March 1971 issue of the Journal of American Folklore titled “Toward New Perspectives in Folklore.”) Structural linguistics in particular has influenced these rising folklorists to explain folktales and other folk genres in terms of universal models. A course on “Folklore and Linguistics,” taught at Indiana University by Thomas A. Sebeok, professor of linguistics and Fellow of the Folklore Institute, stimulated the subsequent work of such students as Alan Dundes and Elli Köngäs Maranda. The linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes ignited folklore students with his concept of the ethnography of communication and, responding to their enthusiasm, he made an unprecedented move, late in 1971, from his home department of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania across the hall to the department of Folklore and Folklife. While a graduate student in anthropology at Indiana University, Dell Hymes took all the folklore courses given by Stith Thompson.

One doctoral candidate in the Folklore Institute applied psychological theories of learning behavior to his study of the transmission of folklore in an immigrant urban family. The faculty member from the psychology department serving on his committee became himself interested in the potentialities of folklore and recommended it as one of the so-called tool-skill options for doctoral candidates in psychology in lieu of a foreign language requirement. It fell to my lot to deal with these clinical psychology majors, and while at first they viewed the unfamiliar subject with some reservations, their reading reports at the semester’s end testified eloquently to their appreciation of a novel scholarship with values for their work. For an example, they saw in folk stereotyping projections of individual feelings of hostility, aggression, and frustration. The psychoanalytical school of psychologists from the days of Freud and Jung to the present have of course devoted considerable attention to the symbolism in folklore that corresponds to symbolism in dreams.

Another year I dealt with half a dozen candidates in the doctoral degree program of mass communications who had elected a minor in folklore. The quantity of folklore daily dispersed in diluted forms through newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and films is apparent to the folklorist and soon became so to these analysts of the mass culture. In effect the folk and the mass cultures feed upon and reinforce each other.

Not all is a success story. Political scientists remain largely impervious to the charms of folklore. But once a graduate student in political science, a young woman planning a field study of political organization in the black ghetto of Roxbury, in Boston, found her way to my office and asked if she could do a reading course on black folklore. After her field experience she reported back to me that she would never have been able satisfactorily to comprehend the political mechanisms of Roxbury without some knowledge of Negro traditions. But her professors laughed when she mentioned her interest in folklore. Later, on a visit to the campus of Western Kentucky University at Bowling Green, I did discover a course on political folklore being offered in the political science department. It seems that the instructor was married to a folklorist, who had contaminated him, so that he devised this course, in which students collected sayings, slogans, slurs, and popular attitudes toward candidates for public office and about political issues. The students loved the course and were astonished at their findings. At the University of Pennsylvania a professor of folklore and a professor of political science teamed up to teach “Politics and Folklore.”

Geography, in its phase called human or cultural geography, extends a friendly arm toward folklore. Estyn Evans at Queen’s University in Belfast and Fred Kniffen at Louisiana State University are geographers of distinction who have related their research to traditional crafts and industries and the regional distribution of traditional dwellings and implements. Before taking his doctorate in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania and joining the Folklore Institute at Indiana University, Henry Glassie studied at Baton Rouge with Kniffen, and combined his training in cultural geography and folklore to produce his original work on Pattern in the Material Culture of Eastern United States.

Intellectual connections exist even between folklore and the physical sciences. My colleague Dorothy Vitaliano, member of the United States Geological Survey and the wife of a geology professor, became interested some years ago in the core of geologic fact behind the legend of Atlantis. Eventually she coined “geomythology” as a term to describe the interrelations linking geology with mythology and folklore. Geomythology covers the body of legendary traditions enveloping, distorting, but sometimes recording with fair accuracy cataclysmic natural phenomena such as volcanoes, earthquakes, and typhoons. It also includes etiological folklore made up to account for land forms and other natural features which long antedate man. (Paul Bunyan made the Grand Canyon by dragging his peavy behind him when he walked across Colorado.) I published Dorothy,s article on “Geomythology” in the Journal of the Folklore Institute in 1968 and Indiana University Press will publish her book on the subject in which she substantiates geologic evidence for flood legends and concludes with a geomythological look at Atlantis.

These random examples may serve to show how folklore touches many, indeed most, academic subjects in the humanities and the social sciences. In the essays that follow I am writing not only for other folklorists but to part-time folklorists and nonfolklorists who share an interest in this endlessly fascinating field. For the past three decades I have taught, lectured, collected, studied, and administered in behalf of folklore, and along the way produced these and other writings. At times folklore has even interfered with my tennis. These pieces represent the kinds of questions asked by one folklorist and the ways in which he tries to deal with them.

For permission to reprint these articles and essays I wish to thank the following: American Folklore Society, Basic Books, Daedalus, Historical Society of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Mouton and Company, Otto Schwartz and Company, Rutgers University Press, and University of California Press.

Several of these essays have been reprinted in the following places. Chapter 2, “Is There a Folk in the City?,” was reprinted in The Urban Experience and Folk Tradition, edited by Américo Paredes and Ellen J. Stekert (Austin and London: published for the American Folklore Society by the University of Texas Press, 1971), pp. 21-52. After a second printing in 1964 of Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, containing my “Oral Styles of American Folk Narrators,” the M.I.T. Press issued a paperback edition in 1966, reprinted in 1968. Chapter 5, “Theories of Myth and the Folklorist,” was reprinted in Myth and Mythmaking, edited by Henry A. Murray (New York: George Braziller, i960), pp. 76-89, and in a Beacon paperback in 1968, reprinted in 1969. It was also reprinted in The Making of Myth, edited by Richard M. Ohmann (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), vol. I, pp. 38-50. Chapter 6, “Legends and Tall Tales” was also published in an edition of Our Living Traditions retitled American Folklore (Voice of America Forum Lectures, March, 1968), pp. 175-90. Chapter 11, “The Academic Future of Folklore,” is to be published in the Supplement of the Journal of American Folklore.

Everyone puzzles over the definition of folklore, but rather than go over this ground again, in the opening essay I have tried to identify the skills peculiar to the folklorist. A novel has been defined as what a novelist writes, so folklore may be defined as what a folklorist—a professional folklorist—studies.

One of the principal skills of the folklorist is fieldwork, and, in the second essay, “Is There a Folk in the City?” I have considered fieldwork in a new setting. Folklore has customarily been associated with the countryside and the folk have been equated with the peasantry or the rural population. Today folklorists are beginning to recognize that urban centers teem with cultural traditions of the kind they have recorded in isolated communities.

Folklore has its aesthetic dimension. Why do the tales and ballads and crafts continue to intrigue their audiences and consumers? The third and fourth essays examine the folk aesthetic from the point of view of the underlying form of tales and the individual styles of tale-tellers.

The categories or genres of folklore, so fluid and elusive, are always hard to pin down, and none more so than those tantalizing terms myth and legend. Essays five, six, and seven reinterpret the concepts of myth and legend through the eyes of the pragmatic folklorist.

Folklore and history seem ill-matched disciplines, but their wellwishers on each side are finding patches of common ground. The eighth and ninth essays look at two such patches: the oral historical traditions collected by the folklorist, which may serve the historian; and the history of ordinary people, neglected by elitist historians.

Folklorists constitute an international fraternity, speaking a common language regardless whether or not they know each others tongue. To pursue their comparative researches, they must correspond and meet and cooperate. In the tenth essay, “American Folklorists in Britain,” I review the successful efforts of four folklore-minded Yankees to make contact with their British colleagues and to pursue fieldwork on British soil.

The moral of this volume of recent writings (all but two have appeared since 1968), and of my philosophy of folklore studies, is spelled out in the final essay, “The Academic Future of Folklore.” In brief, folklore is a serious and sophisticated branch of learning particularly helpful in today’s tormented world and should be taught on every college campus.