What is Folklore?
The term “Folklore” encapsulates materials, relations, knowledges, behaviors, and beliefs expressed creatively in daily life. Folklore helps us connect with our histories, communities, and ourselves; it is a communicative, artistic way we share our values with each other everyday.
"In its widest sense folklore embraces all values that are disseminated and perpetuated in a social group by means of active tradition, no matter whether it is oral tradition of abstract cultural values or factual tradition of concrete objects. Folklore is therefore concerned not only with the various forms of folk literature, such as songs, tales, proverbs, riddles, charms, and place names, and with the various types of abstractions, such as superstitions, manners and customs, popular medicine, popular botany and zoology, but also with the several forms of applied folk art exemplified in traditional architecture, traditional items of equipment, tools, and utensils, traditional costumes, and all forms of traditional ornamentation, whether personal or domestic, for these concrete possessions of the folk acquire their distinctive characteristics by means of active tradition and are often handed on intact for many generations."
"
Definition of folklore from first issue of Western Folklore, then, California Folklore Quarterly, from 1942.
While you might have the impression that folklore is part of the past, it is all around us today as alive and dynamic as ever.
Folkloric expressions, whether knock knock jokes, memes, what you bring to a potluck, the costume you make for a convention, or trying your hand making a cigar box guitar, are all informed by traditional knowledge you carry with you into the present.
As early founders of the Western States Folklore Society put it, “folklore is not produced by the simple act of creation of a story, song, or saying. It is produced rather by a complex, collective process in which many minds and mouths must collaborate” (“A Platform” 4).
Someone probably showed you a meme before you decided to make your own, right? Or maybe you learned to quilt because a friend got involved with a local guild. Death practices, religious holidays, music mash-ups, dance halls, “house rules” for board games, fake news - these subjects all come to form through a collective, person-to-person process that informs the creative expression.
Folklorists study all these aspects and more, typically focusing on a particular community brought together by their relationships or a shared interest. The study of folklore blurs lines across academic and public sectors, and folklorists themselves hold positions in an incredibly wide range of careers - from shaping public policy, to producing music festivals, to facilitating grants for local artists, to guiding tourists on ghost tours, to editing journals. In any case, folklorists are guided by their appreciation for the creativity in everyday life that shapes our communities and connection with one another.