Constituting Folklore: A Case for Critical Folklore Studies

Abstract

This article argues for the development of a critical folklore studies through an interweaving of folklore and rhetorical theory. Following paths set by Roger Abrahams, Kenneth Burke, and Antonio Gramsci decades ago, and drawing upon more recent contributions by Ernesto Laclau and rhetorical critics, it considers folklore as a constitutive rhetoric, the act of which establishes a "folk"-and their adversaries-as a political category. Identifying three articulations of critical folklore studies, it calls upon folklorists to intervene against (rather than strictly analyze) oppressive power formations through the production of overt criticism and related counterhegemonic practices. In her contribution to the special issue of the Journal of American Folklore, "Common Ground: Keywords for the Study of Expressive Culture," Dorothy Noyes suggests for folklorists a remarkable task. "We must still deal with that problem," she writes, "of how an 'imagined community' can be worth dying for; unhappily, we must also understand how it can be worth killing for" (1995:466). More than a decade later, and with the global stage no less fraught with confrontation, her call remains strikingly relevant. If folklore-its performance, exhibition, and analysis-faces a crisis today, it may lie not simply in questions of its academic survival but in its critical contribution to the politics of interpretation and in addressing issues of conflict and power. And while many folklorists have urged our community in the recent past to move toward a deeper examination of the communicative maneuvers by which folklore informs political identities and hegemonic and hierarchical social orders, we have not done so by drawing a significantly closer relationship with a related field of research that has long addressed these concerns: rhetorical studies. This article will pursue such a collaboration in order to take seriously Noyes's lament, and Giovanna P. Del Negro and Harris M. Berger's exhortation to "embark upon a critical inquiry into the ways in which everydayness, expressivity, and practice itself are constructed by us and by the people and texts we study" (2004:22). Forty years ago, Roger Abrahams (1968a, 1968b) first presented an argument for an alliance between folklore and rhetorical studies. He renewed this position in his latest book, Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices, which analyzes and makes a case

Living Folklore: Unlimited Creativity

“…At present, folklore is no longer considered to refer to tribal or national identity, regardless of certain political interests, and is used to strengthen a group's particular power [33]. Zhang [34] states that what is important to note at this time is how folklore forms group identity in the modern world, especially in the era of globalization.…”

Around 1948: The “Gentle Revolution” and Art History

“…49 Folk art is today the object of interest of the critical folklore studies which analyze its "ability to decisively contribute to the critique of power and the dominating or oppressive habituses" and the rhetoric of folklore which contributes to the constitution of social order. 50 It must be remembered that the concept of "primitivism," related to folklore, was connected to an ideological construct that justified imperial conquest, 51 implying a different approach to time and history. Thus, a critical history of folklore has been written by those who do not trust the progeny of Livy.…”

RPG Mythos

“…The traditional folk narrative, at least in the generationally transmitted form that characterizes its structure in oral societies, no longer carries the same ability to tell every group about its own history and will instead more commonly communicate the history of someone else. While there remain stories that are passed down within culturally insular communities, not infrequently in larger print societies (Barthes, 2012(Barthes, [1957; Gencarella, 2009), this narrative form has in many ways been overwritten by the stories of the out-group. As Barthes (2012Barthes ( [1957) and others (Brunvand, 2000;MacDonald, 1999;Reynolds, 1992) demonstrate, the traditional narrative styles that persist in print societies today tend to be of more diverse cultural provenance (often constructed more through capitalist enterprise than organic cultural development) and represent a broad array of moral and practical images and meanings.…”