The Challenge of American Folklore to the Humanities

Simon Bronner

doi:10.3390/h7010017

Abstract

American Folklore consists of traditional knowledge and cultural practices engaged by inhabitants of the United States below Canada and above Mexico. American folklorists were influenced by nineteenth-century European humanistic scholarship that identified in traditional stories, songs, and speech among lower class peasants an artistic quality and claim to cultural nationalism. The United States, however, appeared to lack a peasant class and shared racial and ethnic stock associated in European perceptions with the production of folklore. The United States was a relatively young nation, compared to the ancient legacies of European kingdoms, and geographically the country’s boundaries had moved since its inception to include an assortment of landscapes and peoples. Popularly, folklore in the United States is rhetorically used to refer to the veracity, and significance, of cultural knowledge in an uncertain, rapidly changing, individualistic society. It frequently refers to the expressions of this knowledge in story, song, speech, custom, and craft as meaningful for what it conveys and enacts about tradition in a future-oriented country. The essay provides the argument that folklore studies in the United States challenge Euro-centered humanistic legacies by emphasizing patterns associated with the American experience that are (1) democratic, (2) vernacular, and (3) incipient.

Highlights

Introduction and ThesisIn 1889, an international cast of folklorists including many from the United States descended uponLondon for the second International Folk-Lore Congress, institutionalizing the term describing the broad subject area of traditional knowledge and practices as “folklore” (Cocchiara 1971, pp. 77–94).The Americans faced a problem having their stories and songs accepted by their European colleagues as bona fide folklore worthy of aesthetic appreciation and scholarly analysis
The Americans did not boast a corpus of marvelous tales comparable to the Grimms’ Märchen, poetic work measuring up to the grand epics and sagas celebrated in Scandinavia, or ancient myths in the classical tradition of the Greeks and Romans
Folklorists challenged the ancient foundation of the humanities by noting how American traditions observed as they were practiced reflected a forward-looking, inventive nation

Summary

Introduction and Thesis

In 1889, an international cast of folklorists including many from the United States descended upon. American historian Daniel Boorstin has claimed that the United States began as a “modern culture which skipped the aristocratic phase.” He wrote that “we have been without that deep bifurcation into high and low, which was the starting point of the national cultures of Western Europe” that set the tone for humanistic study In the United States, emerging scholars often searched for ideas in the vernacular experience of the everyman and woman on the move They brought various traditions with them from the Old World and hybridized them with other sources to create a distinctive New World mix. Folklorists challenged the ancient foundation of the humanities by noting how American traditions observed as they were practiced reflected a forward-looking, inventive nation

The Social Grounding and Organization of American Folklore

Folklore as a Reflection of Native and Indigenous Cultures

Folklore as a Sign of Transplantation and Adaptation from the Old World

Folklore as Processes in Everyday Life