Folklore Festivals Research Articles

CREATING A LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENT AS A FACTOR IN THE PRESERVATION OF FOLK TRADITIONS IN MODERN CONDITIONS

The article deals with the basic factors of the maintenance of the folk-lore tradition, which are selected in the conditions of modern city: creation of the linguistic environment; national cultural policy; folk-lore festivals and festivals of child's creation; scientific study of folk-lore material of regions. The concept of city is determined as a heat-sink cell that gives a shove to the new comprehensive study and maintenance of the folk traditions.

Defendiendo la (Agri)Cultura : Reterritorializing Culture in the Puerto Rican Décima

Defendiendo la (Agri)Cultura: Reterritorializing Culture in the Puerto Rican Décima Joan Gross (bio) Introduction Hispanic balladry is one of the most prevalent oral traditions in the Americas; one of the strongest examples of this is the Puerto Rican décima. People who sing these ballads today identify with a well-known type in Puerto Rican history call the jíbaro. The word jíbaro first appeared in print in 1814 according to Laguerre and Melón (1968) and referred to a peasant eking a living off the land in the high country, or center of the island. This paper explores the projection of Puerto Rican cultural identity in décima singing. In particular I show how particular themes evoke an idyllic bucolic past at the same time that formal constraints of the genre are rigidified. I discuss how both these trends relate back to the notion of defending a cultural identity in the wake of colonization and deterritorialization and how through singing décimas about country living, Puerto Rican culture is symbolically reterritorialized.1 For this research project 14 people were interviewed and recordings were made at nine different décima-singing events. This article focuses on 58 décima verses that were improvised for a contest outside of Comerío. The salient semantic clusters that emerged revolved around country life and singing décimas. All verses were transcribed and words related to these two themes were counted. The Rise of the Puerto Rican Décima The décima is a ten-line verse of eight syllable lines and a limited number of rhyme schemes which became popular in the literate culture of sixteenth century Spain, though several authors have suggested connections with the Andalusian zejel, mushawashah and kharja.2 Bernal del Castillo informs us that Spanish colonizers arrived in America singing octosyllabic coplas, another predecessor of the décima (cited in Canino 1986:26). The first Puerto Rican décima that we have evidence of today was written during the seventeenth century in honor of the governor, unjustly imprisoned by the colonial government (Jiménez de Baez 1964:69). Evidence for the popularity of the décima form in Puerto Rico grew throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries (Jiménez de Baez 1964:65–95). The décima became the dominant oral tradition in Puerto Rico, enjoying long-standing popularity similar to the corrido in Mexico. In 1918 J. Alden Mason stated that while “the popular octosyllabic copla . . . holds undisputed sway” in the rest of Latin America, in Puerto Rico it is successfully challenged by the décima (Mason 1918:290). The same sentiment is expressed in more recent works. In the conclusion of Canino’s El Cantar Folklorico de Puerto Rico, published in 1986, he talks about the décima as if, with a voracious appetite, it is gobbling up all the other traditional song forms on the island. He laments, “Today’s trovadores almost never compose coplas or brief song forms, they prefer to improvise décimas and when they do create a copla, they do it to serve as a glosa for a décima.” Further on he states, “Although romances are totally disappearing they left the themes and topics they used to deal with to the narrative décimas.”3 This statement is followed in the last paragraph of the book with the analysis that the popular traditions of today do not create new poetry, they only repeat the ancient oral traditions of the Spaniards: “Very seldom are we able to find” writes Canino “clearly Puerto Rican creations—except for décimas.” Décimas are found in numerous contexts. They are written to be read and published by both elite and folk poets, written to be sung by oneself or another, or orally composed while singing. Practically nobody makes a living from singing, so weekends are the time when most décima events take place. Contexts for singing décimas include radio and T.V. programs, restaurant-bars, certain market places, patron saint festivals, religious events, folklore festivals, life cycle celebrations, political meetings, events to advertise businesses, homages, and improvisation competitions. While the formal structure of décima lyrics harks back to...

Folklore and Oral Tradition

Whereas some of the cultural models for folklore are of a relatively constant nature, performing situation and variation are characteristically unstable features of oral tradition. There is no definition of folklore that would cover the whole discipline. Folklore in its oral and traditional form is in most cases transmitted orally and serves as shared tradition-based creations of a cultural community. I would not include public sector or applied folklore within this concept of oral tradition: the manifestations of applied folklore include folk festivals, various folk song and dance ensembles, or folklore festivals held all over the world. Applied folklore does not have the status of folklore proper. The Folklore Archive of the Finnish Literature Society has used an inventory or classification system based on the division of folklore into loosely defined genre groups. This system is particularly applicable to manuscript materials (older material in archives) and is still in use. It should be stressed that this system was created on the basis of Finnish folk material and therefore includes non-universal, national categories. But it was augmented as researchers in folk traditions turned their attention toward new materials and subject areas. The bulk of early collecting efforts was concentrated solely on ancient oral (folk) poetry in the Kalevala meter; gradually interests broadened to include Marchen (tales) as well, and the first half of the twentieth century saw the gradual inclusion of legends, rhymed folksongs, proverbs, and so forth. In time, the system covered the bulk of Finnish agrarian oral culture. For the sake of clarity, the following sketch of contents has been slightly simplified.

Social Canons Inherited from the Past: Women Players of Folk Music Instruments in Croatia

As documented in mainstream ethnographic texts and fieldwork records, and evidenced at folklore festivals, women in Croatia do not play folk music instruments. If someone mentions some exception, it is usually explained as the very latest practice, as an example of transformation of tradition into the contemporary. Therefore, this paper will describe a number of exceptions from the past, covering a range of historical periods, social contexts of music-making, music fields and genres, and types of instruments played by women. The reasons for woman players being either confirmed or kept silent by a particular discourse will be analyzed, as well as broader social footholds which supported (and/or restricted) their presence in public practice. They have appeared as a family member, a Croatian Woman, an emancipated woman, a custodian (savior and reviver) of local tradition, a member of "the fairer gender", a jocular replacement, a shameless female, and as a mannish woman.

Repulsion to Ritual

Folklore festivals and other presentations of folk music for tourists are frequently interpreted as pale representations of “real” folk music at best, and commercial corruptions at worst. The author at least has been guilty of such interpretations. In this article, he interprets folklore festivals in southern Poland as highly meaningful calendric rituals necessary for the survival of certain ways of life. Folklore festivals replace, sometimes quite deliberately, more commonly recognised calendric rituals formerly enacted to preserve agricultural livelihood. One thing preserved and protected by the folklore festival ritual is the concept of “authentic folk music.” Once the protective ritual is performed, the participants are free to go and engage in other “non-authentic” music activities. The author shows how these notions of authenticity and preservation are negotiated by performers, festival promoters, local musical folklorists, and tourists. Rather than being repulsed by the inevitable changes in “back-region” performance practices for stylised “front-region” staged performances, he views them as meaningful responses to changing social, economic and cultural conditions.

HVOR GÅR CHOLOS HEN, NÅR DE GÅR UD? Folklore og identitet blandt storbymigranter i Peru

Karsten Pærregaard: Where do Cholos go
 when They Leave? Folklore and Identity
 among Urban Migrants in Peru
 An important term in the description of
 Peru’s ethnic groups is cholo, a category
 indicating urban migrants trying to distance
 themselves from their Andean past and
 obtain recognition as citizens in the country’s
 major cities. Conventionally, cholo has been
 considered a transitional status for Peru’s
 indigenous population which wants to cast
 off its Indian identity and become westemized.
 This article argues against such a notion
 and suggests that cholofication is a
 permanent identity for the majority of Peru’s
 rural and urban population. The article draws
 on material gathered among migrants whose
 origins are in a village in the Southern
 highland and analyzes how the migrants use
 folklore festivals and parades to change the
 negative image the surrounding society
 holds of them as cholos. The article concludes
 that only when all those regarded as
 cholos recognize their status as such and
 replace the negative import of the term with a
 more positive content, will a new identity be
 visible and cholo lose its former meaning in
 social and theoretical discourse.

Leaders and Followers: Cultural Pattern and Political Symbolism in Yugoslavia

Political leadership is often symbolized through processions, which share a common model for enacting a leader-to-followers relationship in rural Slavonia. The temporal/spatial precedence of leaders and their accompaniment by followers is a pervasive cultural pattern for enacting asymmetric or hierarchic relationships. This pattern is shared by religious processions, weddings, funerals, and secular parades of all sorts, and the everyday hospitality of hosts towards guests. It also informs the shape of verbal action and interchange in the structure of village-style singing. Normal conversational usage casts all these activities in the same terms: vodit' (to lead) and pratit' (to follow). Symbolizing the political leadership of Marshal Tito through this same model evokes a broad cultural nexus of historically-validated activities in village life. By enacting this processual symbol for heirarchy, participants create both the relationship and its meaning while they also enhance the legitimacy of the leader. The leading role of Marshal Tito pervades Yugoslav political discourse, but it is most spectacularly enacted in public processions. A myriad of secular events include some symbolization of Tito's leadership: from state holidays and party rallies to harvest and calendrical festivities, sports tournaments, and folklore festivals. Parades most often open these events, and some symbol of Tito nearly always heads the procession.

International Director of Theatre, Dance and Folklore Festivals

International Director of Theatre, Dance and Folklore Festivals

International Directory of Theatre, Dance and Folklore Festivals: A Project of the International Theatre Institute of the U.S.

International Directory of Theatre, Dance and Folklore Festivals: A Project of the International Theatre Institute of the U.S.