A Companion to Folklore

Bendix, Regina; Hasan‐Rokem, Galit

doi:10.1002/9781118379936

Cited by 20 publications

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“…Green 1971Green , 1978Green , 1993Green , 2002. Workers' cultures were long perceived as a "degenerated form of peasant and craft cultures, that had emerged in the course of industrialization since most industrial workers were recruited from rural milieus" (Koch 2012). The early period of work-related studies, as a result, focused heavily on rural groups and occupations because of the folkloristic bias toward survivals (McCarl 1996(McCarl , 1997.…”

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“…The biggest shift in folkloristic research into work, however, occurred at the turn of the twenty-first century in response to the cultural and economic reorganizations resulting from globalization and the technology and service-oriented worker regimes that have arisen in post-Fordist labor ideologies. As Gertraud Koch (2012) argues, these moves toward political economies of work have aligned folklore with more sociological perspectives that emphasize organizational forms and the distribution of societal resources (cf. Boutang 2007;Sennett 2006).…”

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Market Forces and Marketplace Economics at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

Butvin¹,

Deutsch²

2019

The Folklorist in the Marketplace

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Folklore sells. Companies from Etsy to IKEA have capitalized on cultural associations with the idea of "folklore"-a term in marketing meant to evoke the traditional, the exotic, the esoteric, the local, and the handmade. Folklore sells small. It sells in the shops that specialize in the handmade, from one person to another. One can see folklore for sale in the popularity of the "buy local" and "Slow Food" movements, intent on keeping craft and food production locally based and preserving traditional networks. But folklore also sells big. It sells in the mass market from corporations with thousands of employees and is bought in big box stores or consumed through mass media. Television and film capitalize on references to fairy tales and myths, from wholesale remakes of well-known stories (think of the many iterations of "Snow White" [Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales no. 709 1 ]) to new formulations of the tropes of urban legends and wonder tales to the "Folkloric Charm" promised by a Behr Paints color swatch. And who buys and sells all of this folklore? Who are the actors in the folklore marketplace? The folk, of course. It is by now commonplace among folklorists that everyone has folklore, that people engage in the exchange and coproduction of unofficial, artistic cultural meaning (Ben-Amos 1971; Brunvand 1986). Economists have argued for just as long, however, that everyone engages in economics, which reflects how people navigate their decisions about resources and scarcity (American Economic Association 2017). This collection starts with the premise that folklore and the folk themselves are deeply and productively engaged in economics, and further, that the economic worlds in which we all live shape our cultures, our lives, and our identities. Put simply, the folk are in the marketplace. Economics has always been folklore's not-so-silent partner. Folklorists have a long history of pondering the economics of the folk and their relationship to the marketplace; recently, the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics was granted to the founders of behavioral economics, which takes into account the direct influence of culture and psychology on economic actions, suggesting the importance of folklore to economists. Yet folklore and economics as a subfield has largely remained unarticulated, in part because of the constructs and institutional histories of each field. At this moment, trade, technology, and geopolitics have led to a rapid increase in the global spread of cultural products, including media, knowledge, objects, and folkways. Accompanying that globalization have come fears, realized and not, of cultural appropriation, neocolonialism, and loss. Culture operates as a resource and a currency in the global marketplace. This movement of people and forms necessitates a new textual consideration of how folklore and economics interweave. Here, we hope to explore how the marketplace and folklore itself have always been integrally linked in ways both productive and subversive, in theory and on the ground, and wh...

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