Folklore

Flamenco proverbs (1559), Gemäldegalerie Berlin

The folklore, folklore or folklore (from the English folk, «people», and lore, «acquis», «knowledge» or «knowledge») is the expressive body of the culture shared by a particular group of people; encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture, or group. These include oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs, jokes, traditional music, and material culture, ranging from traditional building styles to handmade toys. Folklore also includes the traditions, forms, and rituals of celebrations such as Christmas and weddings, folk dances, and initiation rites.

Each of them, either in combination or individually, is considered a folklore element. As essential as the form, folklore also encompasses the transmission of these elements from one region to another or from one generation to another. Folklore is not something that can be obtained through a formal school curriculum or the study of fine arts; these traditions are passed down informally from one individual to another, either through verbal instruction or demonstration.

In 1960, UNESCO designated August 22 of each year as World Folklore Day in recognition of William Thoms, creator of the term folklore.

Overview

To fully understand folklore, it is helpful to clarify its components: the terms folk and lore. It is well documented that the term was coined in 1845 by the Englishman William Thoms. He created it to name what was then called "popular antiquities" or "popular literature." The second half of the compound word, lore, is easier to define, as its meaning has remained relatively stable over the past two centuries. Deriving from Old English lār, instruction, and with German and Dutch cognates, it is the knowledge and traditions of a particular group, often transmitted by word of mouth.

The concept of folk is somewhat more difficult to understand. When Thoms created this term, people only referred to rural peasants, often poor and illiterate. A more modern definition of folklore is a social group that includes two or more people with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. "Folklore is a flexible concept that can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family." This social definition of folklore supports a broader view of material, i.e. tradition, considered as elements of folklore. These now include all the "things people do with words (verbal knowledge), things they do with their hands (material knowledge), and things they do with their actions (customary knowledge)". Folklore is no longer confined to the chronologically old or obsolete. The folklorist studies the traditional elements of a social group and how they are transmitted.

Transmission is a vital part of the folkloric process. Without communicating these beliefs and customs within the group in space and time, they would become cultural fragments relegated to cultural archaeologists. Folklore is also a verb. These folkloric elements continue to be transmitted informally, usually anonymously and always in multiple variants. The folkloric group is not individualistic, but is based in the community and nurtures its knowledge in the community. "As new groups emerge, new folklore is created... surfers, bikers, computer programmers." In direct contrast to high culture, where any work by an artist is protected by copyright law, folklore it is a function of shared identity within the social group.

Once folkloric elements have been identified, the professional folklorist strives to understand the meaning of these beliefs, customs, and objects for the group. For these cultural units they would not be transmitted unless they had some continuing relevance within the group. However, that meaning can change and transform. Thus, the Halloween of the XXI century is not the eve of all the saints of the Middle Ages, and even gives rise to its own set of urban legends independent of the historical celebration. Orthodox Judaism's cleansing rituals were originally for public health in a land with little water; now these customs signify identification as an orthodox Jew. This can be compared to brushing teeth, also transmitted within a group, which is still a hygiene and health practice and does not rise to the level of a group-defining tradition, since tradition is initially a remembered behavior. Once it loses its practical purpose, there is no reason to continue passing it on unless it has been imbued with meaning beyond the initial practicality of the action. This meaning is at the center of folkloristics, the study of folklore. With an increasingly theoretical sophistication of the social sciences, it has become apparent that folklore is a natural and necessary component of any social group, actually surrounding us. It doesn't have to be old or outdated. It continues to be created, passed on, and in any group is used to differentiate between "us" and "them."

Origin and development of folklore studies

Folklore began to distinguish itself as an autonomous discipline during the period of romantic nationalism in Europe. A particular figure in this development was Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose writings in the 1770s presented oral traditions as organic, locally based processes. After the German states were invaded by Napoleonic France, Herder's approach was adopted by many of his compatriots who systematized recorded folk traditions and used them in their nation-building process. This process was enthusiastically embraced by smaller nations such as Finland, Estonia, and Hungary, which were seeking political independence from their dominant neighbors.

Folklore as a field of study developed further among European scholars of the 19th century who contrasted tradition with tradition. modernity. His focus was the oral folklore of rural peasant populations, who were considered remnants and survivors of the past that continued to exist in the lower strata of society. The Tales of Childhood and Home of The Brothers Grimm (first edition, 1812) is the best known but not the only collection of verbal folklore of the European peasantry of the time. This interest in tales, sayings and songs continued throughout the 19th century and aligned the nascent discipline of folkloristics with the literature and mythology. In turn, by the 20th century, the number and sophistication of folklore studies and folklorists had increased both in Europe as in North America. While European folklorists continued to focus on the oral folklore of the homogeneous peasant populations of their regions, American folklorists, led by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, chose to consider Native American cultures in their research, including the full range of their customs. and beliefs such as folklore. This distinction aligned American folkloristics with cultural anthropology and ethnology, using the same data collection techniques in their field research. This divided alliance of folkloristics between the humanities in Europe and the social sciences in America offers a wealth of theoretical insights and research tools for the field of folkloristics as a whole, though it remains a point of contention. within the field itself.

The term folkloristics, along with its synonym Folklore Studies, gained ground in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folk elements themselves. With the passage of the American Folklore Preservation Act (P.L. 94-201) in 1976, passed by the United States Congress, along with the Bicentennial Celebration in 1976, folklore in the United States came of age..

"...[Folclore] refers to the traditional expressive culture shared among the various groups in the United States: familiar, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; the expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as customs, beliefs, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, theatre, orally, these expressions of formality, craftsmanship, etc. »

In addition to the panoply of other laws designed to protect America's natural and cultural heritage, this law also marks a shift in national consciousness. It gives voice to a growing understanding that cultural diversity is a national strength and a resource worthy of protection. Paradoxically, it is a unifying characteristic, not something that separates the citizens of a country. «We no longer see cultural difference as a problem to be solved, but as a great opportunity. In the diversity of American folk life we find a teeming marketplace with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for Americans." This diversity is celebrated annually at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and many other folk festivals across the country..

Definition of folk

The folk of the XIX century, the social group identified in the original term folklore, was characterized by being rural, illiterate and poor. They were the peasants who lived in the countryside, in contrast to the urban population of the cities. Only towards the end of the century did the urban proletariat (along with Marxist theory) become included as folk alongside the rural poor. The common feature in this expanded definition of folk was their identification as an underclass of society.

Moving into the 20th century, along with new thinking in the social sciences, folklorists also revised and expanded their folklore group concept. In the 1960s it was understood that social groups, that is, folk groups, were everywhere around us; each individual is embedded in a multitude of different identities and their attendant social groups. The first group each of us is born into is the family, and each family has its own family folklore. As a child becomes an individual, her identity also increases to include age, language, ethnicity, occupation, etc. Each of these cohorts has its own folklore, and as one folklorist notes, this "is not idle speculation.... Decades of fieldwork have shown conclusively that these groups have their own folklore". In modern times, folklore is a function of shared identity within any social group.

This folklore can include jokes, sayings, and expected behaviors in multiple variants, always transmitted informally. For the most part it is learned through observation, imitation, repetition or correction by other members of the group. This informal knowledge is used to confirm and reinforce the identity of the group. It can be used both internally within the group to express its common identity, for example in an initiation ceremony for new members, or it can be used externally to differentiate the group from outsiders, such as a folk dance demonstration at a festival. community. It is important for folklorists that there are two opposing, but equally valid, ways of using this in the study of a group: you can start with an identified group to explore their folklore, or you can identify folklore elements and use them to identify the social group.

Starting in the 1960s XX century, a further expansion of the concept of folklore began to unfold in folklore. Individual researchers identified folk groups that had previously been overlooked and ignored. An important example of this is found in an issue of The Journal of American Folklore, published in 1975. This issue is devoted exclusively to articles on women's folklore, with approaches that did not come from the perspective of men. Other groups that stood out as part of this expanded understanding of the folklore group included non-traditional families, occupational groups, and families that pursued the production of folklore items through multiple generations.

Genres

Folk elements are commonly classified into three types: material, verbal, or customary. For the most part self-explanatory, these categories include physical objects (material folklore), common sayings, expressions, stories and songs (verbal folklore), and beliefs and ways of doing things (traditional folklore). There is also a fourth major subgenre defined for folklore and children's games (children's folklore), since the collection and interpretation of this theme is typical of schoolyards and neighborhood streets. Each of these genres and its subtypes is intended to organize and categorize folk elements; they provide a common vocabulary and consistent labeling for folklorists to communicate with each other.

That being said, each artifact is unique; indeed, one of the characteristics of all folklore items is their variation within genres and types. This is in direct contrast to manufactured goods, where the goal of production is to create identical products, and variations are considered errors. However, it is precisely this necessary variation that makes the identification and classification of defining characteristics challenging. And while this classification is essential to the subject area of folkloristics, it remains only labeling, and adds little to the understanding of the development and traditional meaning of the items themselves.

Necessary as they are, genre classifications are misleading in their oversimplification of subject area. Folkloric elements are never autonomous, they do not remain isolated, but are particular in the self-representation of a community. Different genres are often combined to mark an event. Thus, a birthday celebration may include a song or formula to greet the birthday child (verbal), the presentation of cake and gifts (material), as well as like customs to honor the individual, like sitting at the head of the table and blowing out the candles with a wish. There may also be special games at birthday parties that are not usually played at other times. Adding to the complexity of interpretation, a seven-year-old's birthday party will not be identical to the same six-year-old's birthday party, even if it follows the same model. For each artifact, it embodies a unique variant of a representation in a determined time and space. The task of the folklorist is to identify within this excess of variables the constants and expressed meaning that shine through all the variations: honoring the individual within the circle of family and friends, gifting to express value to the group, and of course, the food and drink of the celebration as signifiers of the event.

Oral tradition

	The Lost Child Interpreted by Gregoria Escolar (Cogeces del Monte, Valladolid) Pastor Interpreted by Victoriano Martínez (Villabraz, León) Prayer for bed Interpreted by Emilia, Lucia and Marciana (El Payo, Salamanca) Parda wolf + Dialogue of the master and the shepherd Interpreted by Celestino Martín (Toro, Zamora) Wedding galas Interpreted by Victorina Pérez (Villambrán de Cea, Palencia)
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The formal definition of oral tradition is words, both written and oral, which are "spoken, sung, and sound forms of traditional expression that display repetitive patterns." Here repetitive patterns are crucial. Oral tradition is not just any conversation, but words and phrases that conform to a traditional configuration recognized by both the speaker and the audience. For narrative types, by definition, they have a consistent structure and follow an existing pattern in their narrative form. As a simple example, the sentence "An elephant walks into a bar..." instantly flags the following text as a joke. It may be one you've already heard, but it may be one the speaker has just made up in the current context. This is folklore in action. Another example is the children's song Old MacDonald Had a Farm, where each performance is different in the animals named, their order, and their sounds. Songs like this are used to express cultural values (farms are important, farmers are old and weathered) and to teach children about different domestic animals.

Oral folklore was the original folklore, the elements defined by William Thoms as the oldest oral cultural traditions of the rural population. In his 1846 appeal for help in documenting antiquities, Thoms appealed to scholars across the European continent to collect examples from oral tradition. By the early 20th century, these collections had grown to include examples from around the world and spanning several centuries. A system for organizing and categorizing them became necessary. Antti Aarne published an early classification system for folktales in 1910. It was later extended by Stith Thompson to the Aarne-Thompson classification system and it remains the standard classification system for short stories. European popular and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified oral examples increased, similarities were noted in samples that had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups, and times, giving rise to the Historic-Geographic Method, a methodology that dominated folkloristics in the first half. XX century.

When William Thoms first published his call to document the oral tradition of rural populations, it was believed that these folkloric elements would become extinct as the population became literate. In the last two centuries, this belief has been proven wrong; folklorists continue to collect information, both written and oral, from all social groups. Some variants may have been collected in published collections, but much of it continues to be passed down orally, and indeed continues to be generated in new forms and variants at an alarming rate.

The following is a small sample of types and examples of verbal traditions.

Material Culture

Veleta with horse and sulky figure, Smithsonian Museum of American Art

The genre of material culture includes all items that can be touched, held, lived, or eaten. They are tangible objects, with a physical presence intended to be used permanently or only at the next meal. Most of these folk elements are individual objects that have been created by hand for a specific purpose. However, folkloric items can also be mass-produced, such as Christmas decorations. These objects are still considered folklore due to their long (pre-industrial) history and customary use. All of these material objects "existed before and continue alongside mechanized industry...[They] are passed down through the generations and are subject to the same forces of conservative tradition and individual variation" found in all popular elements. Of interest to folklorists are their physical form, their method of manufacture or construction, their pattern of use, as well as the acquisition of raw materials. The meaning to those who make and use these objects is important. The main significance of these studies is the complex balance between continuity and change in both its design and decoration.

In Europe, before the Industrial Revolution, everything was done by hand. While some folklorists of the 19th century wanted to secure the oral traditions of the rural population before the population became literate, other folklorists they sought to identify handcrafted objects before their production processes were lost to industrial manufacturing. Just as verbal tradition continues to be actively created and transmitted in today's culture, these crafts, possibly with a change in purpose and meaning, can still be found all around us. Because there are many reasons to continue making objects by hand for use. It could mean that these skills are needed to repair manufactured items. Or perhaps you want a unique design that is not (or cannot be) found in stores. Many crafts are considered simple household maintenance, such as cooking, sewing, and carpentry. Crafting has also become an enjoyable and satisfying hobby for many. Last but not least, handmade objects have acquired the shine of prestige, where more time and thought are invested in their creation and their uniqueness is valued. For the folklorist, these handcrafted objects embody relationships multifaceted in the lives of artisans and users, wholly lacking in mass-produced items with no connection to an individual artisan.

Many traditional crafts have been elevated to fine or applied arts and taught in art schools, such as blacksmithing and glass-making. Or they are put to new use as folk art, characterized as objects in those whose decorative form outweighs their utilitarian needs. Folk art is found in hex signs on Pennsylvania Dutch barns, tin sculptures made by metalworkers, Christmas decorations outside a home, decorated school lockers, carved firearms, and tattoos. "Words like naive, self-taught, and individualistic are used to describe these objects, presenting the exceptional rather than the representative creation." This is in contrast to our understanding of folkloric elements that are cultivated and passed down in the community.

Many objects of material folklore, large and small, are difficult to classify, difficult to file, and difficult to store. How do we preserve these elements of material culture and how do we use them? This is the task assigned to museums. The concept of the open-air museum has been developed for this purpose, beginning in Scandinavia at the end of the XIX century. These museums are there to teach, not just to exhibit. The actors show how the objects were used, recreating the daily lives of people from all segments of society. To do this, these museums rely heavily on the material objects of a pre-industrial society. Many locations even double the processing of objects, thus creating new objects from an earlier historical period. These living history museums are found all over the world as part of a thriving heritage industry.

This list represents only a small sample of the objects and abilities that are included in material culture studies.

Customs

Customary culture is remembered as an enactment, that is, as a re-enactment. They are the expected patterns of behavior within a group, the "traditional and expected way of doing things". A custom can be a single gesture, such as a handshake or a thumbs-down. It can also be a complex interplay of multiple customs and folklore elements such as those seen at a child's birthday party, including verbal tradition (Happy Birthday song), material tradition (gifts and a birthday cake), games (musical chairs) and individual customs (make a wish by blowing out the candles). Each of these is a folklore item in its own right, potentially worthy of cultural investigation and analysis. Together they combine to create the custom of celebrating a birthday party, a combination of multiple elements that have meaning within your social group.

Santa giving gifts to children, a common folk practice associated with Christmas in Western nations

Customs are divided into several different categories by folklorists. A custom can be a seasonal celebration, such as Thanksgiving or New Year's. It can be a celebration of an individual's life cycle, such as a baptism, birthday, or wedding. A custom can also mark a festival or community event; Examples of this are Carnival in Cologne or Mardi Gras in New Orleans. A fourth category includes customs related to popular beliefs. Walking under a ladder is just one of many symbols that are considered unlucky. Professional groups tend to have a rich history of customs related to their life and work, such as the traditions of sailors or woodcutters. The area of ecclesiastical folklore, which includes modes of worship not sanctioned by the established church, tends to to be so large and complex that it is generally treated as a specialized area of folk customs; Considerable expertise in standard church rituals is required in order to adequately interpret popular customs and beliefs that originate from official church practice.

Trapajón de La Vijanera, in Silió, Spain

Customary folklore is, by definition, folklore in action; it is always a representation, be it a single gesture or a complex of written customs. Participating in the custom, either as an interpreter or as an audience, means the recognition of that social group. Some customary behaviors are meant to be performed and understood only within one's own group. Other customs are specifically designed to represent a social group to outsiders, those who do not belong to this group. The St. Patrick's Day parade in New York and elsewhere is just one example of an ethnic group flaunting its separateness (differential behavior) and encouraging others to show their alliance with this colorful ethnic group.

These festivals and parades, with a target audience of outsiders, intersect with the interests and mission of public folklorists, who are dedicated to documenting, preserving, and presenting traditional ways of life. folkloric. With a growing popular interest in folk traditions, these community celebrations are becoming more numerous throughout the Western world. While these show off the diversity of their community, economic groups have discovered that these parades and folk festivals are good for business. All types of people are out on the streets, eating, drinking and spending. This draws support not only from the business community, but also from state and regional organizations, for these local street parties. Paradoxically, by showcasing the diversity within the community, these events have come to authenticate true community, where interests of businesses ally with various social (popular) groups to promote the interests of the community as a whole.

This list is just a small sample of the types and examples of customs.

Childhood and games

Children's Games of Pieter Brueghel the Old (1560)

Children's folklore is a distinct branch of folklore that deals with activities transmitted by children to other children, away from adult influence or supervision. Children's folklore contains elements of all the standard folklore genres of the oral, material and customary tradition; however, it is the transmission from child to child that distinguishes these elements. Childhood is a social group where children teach, learn and share their own traditions, flourishing in a street culture outside the realm of adults. It is therefore interesting that it is documented, as Iona and Peter Opie demonstrated in their book Children's Games in Street and Playground. The social group of children is studied on its own terms, not as a derivation of adult social groups. The boys' culture is shown to be quite distinctive; it generally goes unnoticed by the adult world, and very little affected by it.

Of particular interest to folklorists is the mode of transmission of these elements; this tradition circulates exclusively within an informal network of children or a folkloric group. It does not include the elements that adults teach children. However, children can take what they are taught and teach it to other children, turning it into children's folklore. Or they can take the elements and turn them into something else. This children's tradition is characterized by "its lack of dependence on literary and fixed form." Children live in a world of informal, oral communication, unimpeded by the need to maintain and transmit information by written means. This is the closest folklorists can get to looking at the transmission and social function of this folk knowledge before of the spread of literacy during the 19th century.

The original collections of children's games and traditions in the 19th century were driven by fears that the culture of childhood became extinct. Early folklorists, including Alice Gomme in Britain and William Wells Newell in the United States, felt the need to capture the unstructured, unsupervised lives and activities of street children before they were lost. This fear turned out to be unfounded. In a comparison of any modern school playground with Pieter Brueghel the Elder's Children's Games, we can see that the level of activity is similar, and many of the games in the painting from 1560 are recognizable and comparable to the modern variations that are still played today.

These same folk elements, in countless variations, also continue to serve the same function of learning and practicing the skills necessary for growth. Therefore, practicing rhythms and rhymes promotes the development of balance and coordination in babies and children, such as the Peter Piper rhyme. Songs and chants, accessing a different part of the brain, are used to memorize series (Alphabet Song). They also provide the necessary rhythm for complex physical rhythms and movements, whether it's clapping, jumping ropes, or dribbling with the ball. Additionally, many physical games are used to develop players' strength, coordination, and stamina. For some team games, negotiations over the rules can take longer than the game itself, as social skills are tested. Even now that the neuroscience behind the developmental function of this children's folklore is being discovered, elements in itself have been in play for centuries.

Listed below is just a small sample of types and examples of children's folk games and items.

Folk Story

Strong arguments have been made for considering folk history as a distinct subcategory of folklore, which has received the attention of folklorists such as Richard Dorson and the publication of The Folklore Historian magazine, sponsored by the History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. The study of folk history has developed especially in Ireland, where the Handbook of Irish Folklore (the standard book used by all Irish Folklore Commission field workers) recognized "historical tradition" as a separate category, traditionally known as seanchas. Henry Glassie, in his classic study Passing the Time in Ballymenone, made a pioneering contribution. Guy Beiner has presented, more than nobody, in-depth studies of Irish folk history. Beiner has identified a number of characteristic genres of what he has termed "storytelling," such as short stories (divided into short stories and mini-stories), songs and ballads (especially rebel songs), poems, rhymes, toasts, prophecies, proverbs and sayings, place names and a variety of commemorative ritual practices. These are often recited by specially dedicated storytellers (seanchaithe) and by popular historians (staireolaithe). Beiner has since adopted the term vernacular historiography to push the boundaries of " the artificial divisions between oral and literary cultures that lie at the core of conceptualizations of oral tradition".