Four Folklore Readings
(a Comparative Analyses)
Indiana University
Fall, 2011
Introduction
In this paper the aim is to compare and contrast the notion of “modernity” as the same is voiced differently in the four folklore readings selected for this purpose. The four readings are: Folktales and Society (Degh 1962/1989), All Silver and No Brass (Glassie’s 1975), In Search of Authenticity (Bendix 1997), and Voices of Modernity (Bauman and Briggs, 2003). We discuss them in line with the primary goal of the course, History of Folklore Study (F517), which is to contextualize folkloristic concepts (including genre, performance, beliefs, authenticity, worldview) within the major theoretical currents (social evolutionism, diffusionism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, formalism, performance theory, and postmodernism). In so doing, the aim is to explore the past and survey the present as to what theoretical currents influenced folklore scholarship during the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries to the present.
“Modernity” in Four (American) Folklore Readings
What initiated folklorists in the 19th century was the challenge of science and human condition, changes and the consequent nuances between the modern ways of living and doing things (Bronner 2007). Early ‘folklorists’ brought collections of traditional tales, songs, and crafts to the attention of the “modernizing” society for different purposes. In America such a collection of stories among the Ojibwa in Michigan Territory by Henry Schoolcraft, the Colonial agent (1828-1832), was mainly to peep into the dark cave of the minds of the natives (Bauman and Briggs, 2003:227) and to make pliable the dissidents than for ‘genuine’ folklore scholarship (can folkloristics be ‘genuine’ or ‘spurious’ also?) or for nationalistic allegiance as in the Grimm Brothers. However, the narrative of origin of “American” folklore study is less told, the genealogy of the field is less traced either into the collection of stories, songs, and beliefs by colonial agents in early 19th century (or before by missionaries, travelers) among the Native Indians or into the collection of dissident counter-hegemonic texts handed down by Native “tradition bearers,” or if the ‘(re)searcher’ is still at the crossroads.
“Modernity” in the History of Folklore Study
The point of departure for American Folklore Study, as it seems, has not been clearly marked yet, (un)like the Trail of Tears. In discussing “modernity” Bauman and Briggs (2003:255ff) draw attention rather towards Boas' anthropological and folkloric legacies among the Northern Native Indians and Eskimos, which is perhaps a starting point of an ethnographic field study among the Natives. The timeline for folkloric and anthropological studies by Boas (and his students) is, however, later than The Indians Removal Act of 1830 and the consequent Trail of Tears, in the South-east. If not “nationalism” in its modern sense of political movement, what is the place of the Seminole resistance (1835-1842), the Cherokee rebellion in the History of American Folklore Study since, in fact, “modernity” is spread across the globe not by diffusion, nor by the “folklore” of it, but by gunpowder and Danish butter?
For our purpose, let us suggest two nation-building theses: hence, one is based on acts of removal with its racial and stereotypical dehumanizing force to upsurge heteronomia (external rule) for colonial intent, and the other is based on democratic notions and institutions of freedom, equality and social justice leading into autonomia (self-government). The latter thesis relates to the Herderian thought of nationalism (in folklore “study’) as heralded by the Grimm Brothers and by Finish nationalists to reconstruct Kalevala as the nation’s heritage. In the former thesis, what is saddening is hearing Boas to reverberate Kantian “Perpetual Peace” (1991) to perpetuate hegemony (as if by an irony of fate) and suggest this: “when the narrow-minded local interests of cities and other small political units” had been overcome in the formation of nation-states, …the federation of nations is the next necessary step in the evolution of mankind” (Boas 1928/1962:97 in Bauman and Brigs, 2003:289, 290), and thus “provincialism” and “authenticity” of “tradition” diminish and “cosmopolitanism” and “modernity” flourish.
In the face of “modernity” we need the intellectual history of folklore scholarship, as Dan Ben-Amos states, “to expose past debates, failures, and wished-to-be-forgotten errors, and air them in print again” (1973:114). Folklore scholarship has been more than mere enterprising of collecting and classifying of tales, songs, and gathering of historical facts. That is why we “tediously and laboriously would unveil whatever our predecessors tried to conceal, peep into their drawers of correspondence,” as Ben-Amos justifies why we need an intellectual history for folklore scholarship, and also not to fall into the “chronic fallacy” of “listing facts that relate to each other only in calendric succession” (p 114), which leaves folklore a craft rather than a science.
Regina Bendix (1997) rightly argues folklore has long served as a vehicle in the search for the authentic, satisfying a longing for an escape from “modernity” (1997:7). That is, one function of folklore not very vividly seen to a non-folklorist or a folklorist indifferent to an emancipatory function of folklore prompting change (or reform in a less radical term) “affirmatively in revolutions and negatively in counterrevolutions. Another political function of folklore is serving nationalism as a modern political movement based on folklore and folk culture as native cultural (re)discovery, the purpose folklore has served since the Romantic era, in the move away from monarchic rule to democratic institutions (p8), the move from heteronomia to autonomia (Gauchet, 1999). In Bendix’s view, the “ideal folk” has been the “pure,” metaphorically speaking, unspoiled by “modernity” and free from every evils of it (p7), i.e., authentic.
By the same token, Linda Degh’s Hungarian Szeklers (Degh 1962) carried their cultural (traditional) baggage with them everywhere they were displaced to as victims of “modernity” until they were perverted by cosmopolitanism and urbanized. The “natural provincialism of human community” that Boas sought to peacefully move to a rather “rational cosmopolitanism that he deemed necessary for freedom, democracy, peace, and the full development of each individual” (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 256) is, in that case, another “disenchantment of the world”. And the search for authenticity is thus strayed caught up in the cobweb of modernity. In Boas’ progressive political thought “modernity” (or “modern world”) could be redefined as a world without xenophobia, imperialism, racism and colonialism (ibid), which proved to be a disillusionment of humanity.
In those four readings, still more arguably, “modernity” and its contrastive mode of thinking and living, i.e., “tradition” in its new meaning is particularly important part of nation-building project in some societies, energized by nationalism and communication in the modern sense. Thus, “tradition” becomes an ideology, a program of action, a goal, a justifying base, a bonding cause as in miming among the Flanagans which “leaps over art and performance to purpose,” namely, “to bring unity among them” (Glassie, 122).
“Modernity” and Literacy vs. “Authenticity”
Glassie explains W.B. Yeats’s search for authenticity, survival of “the ould customary thing…to set country people, their beliefs and arts, on the page, ‘unoffended or defended by any argument’” (Glassie, 1975:53). To conceptualize nationalism in its real romantic sense, to sharpen his s/word, the poet went into the countryside “to mystify his being” and demystify his poetry, and in so doing, to clarify his thinking on radical nationalism. The purpose was aesthetic as it was political. Glassie says, Yeats felt his early poems “too florid, too Victorian” and went into the countryside as the “aesthetic of the country people was purer, more primal” (ibid) and that would “lead him to an artistic wellspring where [Yeats] could drink to transcend the complicated materialism [i.e., “modernity”] of the nineteenth century arts,” since the “country people knew the tricks of the lock on one of the doors opening into the spiritual world” (ibid). Glassie himself seems into that unended quest towards authenticity entangled; into the search for the way out of the cobweb humanity was caught up in “modernity”.
Unlike in Hungary or in Ireland, like here in USA, but in Africa we may not think of “tradition-bearer” writing and reading, the two badges of “modernity”, not nonexistent but a rarity. There “tradition” supersedes “modernity” and is more “genuine” than “spurious”! It is against this dependence on literate culture to preserve “tradition” in print that Linda Degh refers to Malinowski’s cautious words about “a new method of treating the science of folklore, as it cannot be independent of ritual, or sociology, that folktales, legends, myths must be lifted from flat existence on paper and (re)placed within the three-dimensional reality of full life (Linda, 1969:54).
This view of relocating text back into its social matrix is contrasted in Glassie’s notion of “survival” of Irish tradition that he reiterates Yeats as saying, no expect theory nor explanation but “to set country people, their beliefs, and arts, on the page” (Glassie, p53). We are told that Malinowski collected the narrative materials of the Melanesian Aborigines and, Linda stresses, his statements are of great importance for the nature of collective phenomenon as he believes the mere test of a folktale is lifeless; it can be truly observed only in performance. Against the tradition of situational micro-analysis of transmission of texts, Linda’s recommendation is the description and analysis of the life and artistry of individual performers who partake in the interpretation (p56).
Yeats’s desire for “survival” of “tradition” “on the page” (Glassie, p53) had many implications with the spread of print and literacy before him. Literacy being one modernizing squad, Bauman and Briggs (2003: p203ff) clearly show us how the image of the folk diminished by citing a number of texts from John Aubery to the Grimm Brothers and later. Contrary to the fact, in the process of scientisizing tradition, the Grimms linked texts explicitly related to the vanishing folk now to another imagined community, a notional one, and even transnational one, as their work was translated into more than seventy languages (p223). Still when they were unhappy about the violence of “modernity” against “tradition” but they helplessly succumbed to “literacy” by confessing that when they reviewed the riches of German folk poetry they discovered nothing of it had been kept alive and even the memory of it was lost (p205).
Similarly, before the Grimms, John Aubery showed that by “modernity” and literacy women lost their traditional social status as tradition-bearers and socializing authorities, which is another discursive realization of Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world.” That is to say, the silencing of women was realized as Liberty of Conscience and Liberty of inquisition came—i.e., freeing of belief and knowledge from the traditional authority of custom—with the power of “the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder” (pp75, 76). . Also to Joann Herder, modernity is a threat to language, depriving it of social, political and affective force, since language is intrinsically social (p197). Hence, modernity distances the more provincial, more traditional “native” world as it links and unlinks in the realm of humanity as more cosmopolitan, more modern it becomes. Now, to survive, the being persists against both the irresistible power of “modernity” and the becoming (conforming) self. When in 1831 the French political thinker and historian, Alexis de Tocqueville asked why the Native Indian tribe Choctaw were living their homeland, the only thing the removed native said was, “to be free”—if “to be free” is humanly possible without “home”.
“Modernity”/“Tradition”: acquiescence/resistance
Somewhere “tradition” is in conflict; somewhere else it is in acquiescence. In Hungary, among the Kakasd Szeklers Linda Degh did her collections of tradition among peasants, as she says, unspoiled by literary culture or urban-industrial imports in 1960s (p289). After two decades she went back to Hungary (in 1981) to see how it accommodates the old and the new life style but to her surprise the “tradition” and the “tradition-bearers” did not belong to one social matrix. Now that “modernity” overhauled “tradition” the cultural-ideological atmosphere of the community and their way of life has far changed. As she now explored anew whether traditional forms of folklore could persist or change along with the new network of social relationship evidently “tradition” could not flourish under the new system of work as they did under the old. Generally, by Linda’s ‘research-with-in-research,’ for the Kaskad the idea of relativism that, like vernacularization, foregrounds the provincial, the local, the dispersed (Bauman and Briggs, p15) is now weak to negotiate between the “provincial” and the “cosmopolitan” in the urban. “Authenticity” was forgone!
In the four readings discussed here, one would rightly argue, “modernity” changes the context for “tradition” and in effect the autochthonous life style changes. The central, but opposite, function of both “tradition” and “modernity” is the legitimating of a state of affairs in a society. The binary opposition between the two began with the Enlightenment and still remains a challenge. An attempt to tackle the challenge of the binaries invited the concept of “invidious comparison” that either a humane “tradition” is opposed to an inhumane “modernity” or the liberating “modernity” is opposed to an oppressive “tradition” whereby man became free and the ever existing heteronomia (lack of self-determination) was replaced by autonomia (self-government) (Gauchet 1999).
Moreover, “modernity” is an external criterion about the society’s living style, thinking and acting. Traditionalism, on the other hand, is about the authenticating (Bendix 1999) and “Us-ness” of culture as an internal criterion of validation of life style, world-views and beliefs. As this is a double jeopardy in itself for the field, I don’t think that is what anthropology is for in essence nor what an anthropologist does, i.e., not squashing authenticity as the essence of humanity into a larger bogus whole when the part not authentic, not itself! For the indigenous, “development” means to become “more like ‘Themselves’ not “more like ‘Us’”. Since the adoption of Western cultural form is thus ‘rationalized’ more as international (cosmopolitan) than just Western and it has come to be difficult to decide for the natives what aspects of one’s culture are essential, authentic to preserve (Bendix 1997); Rhum 1996:328) as the standard is ideal, typical and not descriptive, creating a certain collective insecurity against the rest of the world.
Seeing oneself as seen by others as “underdeveloped” means for societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, to see the western world as far developed and economically secure because of “modernity” while most of those underdeveloped nations are still caught up in nationalist movements for independence, ironically enough in the post-colonial era. Though they were keen to preserve and (re)create “tradition,” they were working under the influence of the western world modernalizing agents, and nationalism and modernalization have thus been inseparable vis-à-vis “westernalization” (cosmopolitanism). In most cases “nation-building” and “modernalization” are twin aspects of a single social project. Set in such a conundrum rendered by “modernity,” the possibility of “authenticity” has been taken up by great philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre, which Jacob Golomb (1995) two years before Bendix published his In Search for Authenticity exploring the literature and writings of those philosophers in his analysis of their ethics and the quest for the authenticity, particularly in the post-modern skepticism.
In the face of “modernity” the way to (re)create and preserve native cultural practices is revival and revision of ancestral rituals, festivals and performances, which can be of an entertainment function for Western world tourists but of a didactic function for the native performers and their audience. Though nationalism preaches and defends cultural diversity and tolerance among cultures (multi-culturalism) as Ernst Gellner states it (1983:125 in Rhum, p333), it imposes homogeneity both inside and between political units (pluralism). Hence once structural and political integration has been successfully achieved, that is, when the “narrow-mindedness” of the provincial individual is overcome, in Boas’ words, then some degree of cultural pluralism can be tolerated. For the natives, their practices and structures are right, though, because they are “traditional” and handed down in the same way, authentic, which is by the indigenous theories of the world, symbolizes the “cultural identity” of the peoples.
I believe the case of the Flanagans and the mumming squad living in the Lower End of the Parish, in Fermanagh, Ireland, would justifiably show how “modernity” and “tradition” live side by side like the people (mummers) who Glassie tells us, because they lived near one another and know who is who, he would not mention town-land names “for people's town-lands are their addresses” (Glassie, 1975: xviii). Glassie asserts that, though social scientists (and social sciences) habitually study people as conditioned animals, passive carriers of a closed, inert abstraction, i. e, culture, but “the ideas of real people are developed in a quirky and open, continuous dialectic of the shared and the personal” (p. vi). For humankind to continue to exist, change is inevitable. Those ideas, “modern” and/or “traditional”), make the host of conversations that reveal, as the author tells us, individual styles and cultural data which are our text and also display “the variability without which culture could not change and a person could not exist happily” (ibid).
In Glassie’s view, scholars of the end of the nineteenth century were “carried into confrontation with grand panoply of foreign arts and cultures” byway of succumbing to modern episteme, which brought in the concept of relativism, that is, “all traditions could produce equally valid artworks (Glassie, p76). Thus, by cultural relativism, the Bambara mask owned by a pre-modern man can be put on a par with the modern Michelangelo’s portrait bust. Thus modernity is at least democratic that all cultures are equal, by a modernist precept, i.e., relativism, which, among anthropologists, is but interior malaise though accepted by historians, art historians, and literary critics. After political and structural arrangements (pluralism) have been made possible, it is at least faire to wage cultural relativism or multiculturalism.
In the Beginning
In the four readings in this paper, though "tradition" and "modernity" are widely used as polar opposites in theory of social change, the relations between the “traditional” and the “modern” do not just involve displacement, conflict, or exclusiveness, but submission, acquiescence, loss of authenticity and the unended quest of it. But “modernity” does not necessarily weaken tradition, as in Bauman and Briggs’s case, but rather both “tradition”/“language” and “modernity” form the bases of ideologies and movements in which the polar opposites are converted into aspirations and, once again, “traditional” forms may supply support for, and as well against change. The end is the starting point!
References
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Books
Bauman and Brigs. (2003). Voices of Modernity.
Henry Glassie. (1975). All Silver and No Brass.
Linda Degh (1962). Folktales and Society.
Regina Benedix. (1997). In Search Of Authenticity.
Journals
Dan Ben-Amos.(1973). "A History of Folklore Studies: Why Do We Need It?" in Journal of the Folklore Institute, Vol. 10, No. 1/2, Special Issue: American Folklore Historiography
Dan Ben-Amos.(1973). "A History of Folklore Studies: Why Do We Need It?" in Journal of the Folklore Institute, Vol. 10, No. 1/2, Special Issue: American Folklore Historiography
John W. Roberts. (2008). “Grand Theory, Nationalism, and American Folklore” in Journal of Folklore Research, Volume 45, Number 1, January-April 2008, pp. 45-54
Volume 45, Number 1, January-April
Joseph R. Gusfield. (1967). “Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change” in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 72, No. 4 pp. 351-362. The University of Chicago Press
Marcel Gauchet’s. (1999).The Disenchantment of the World.
Michael R. Rhum. (1996). 'Modernity' and 'Tradition' in 'Thailand' in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 pp. 325-355
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By Walleligne Mekonnen
Arts IV, HSIU
Nov. 17, 1969
(STRUGGLE)
