The Study of Folklore in Urban Communities

What is Folklore? The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend gives twenty one different definitions by as many experts, and it is often difficult to realize that they are talking about the same thing.^[1] Here is a definition derived from the author’s study of urban folklore:

Folklore consists of the body of knowledge, skills, beliefs, arts, crafts, customary behaviors and modes of expression that are shared by the members of a community and that are learned by direct person-to-person contact.

Until recently, both scholars and the general public assumed that “folklore” was something found only in rural, illiterate communities. Since the late 1960s, however, folklorists have increasingly discovered rich mines of folklore in large cities.^[2] The author’s own experience of teaching folklore at an urban university for over ten years has demonstrated clearly that folklore, however defined, is as much a part of urban as of rural life.

My definition of “folklore” depends in turn upon the meaning of another crucial word: “community.” The root of the word—mun-–is paradoxical, related both to words denoting movement (mutate, permeate, migrate, remunerate, communicate) and to words denoting the building of fences or fortifications (immure, munitions). In the word community—an important element in the meaning of “folklore”—both root meanings come together in the author’s definition:

A community consists of a group of people who are actively involved with one another in one or more ways; they are tied together by shared knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs that often include a kind of defense against other groups.

Folklore in urban communities is not a static object of study, but rather an active, changing process anchored within each separate community but al so linking communities in unexpected ways.^[3]

How Does One Study Folklore? Urban folklore must be studied in terms of folk groups, and yet it is the individuals in the groups that are the carriers of folklore, and from whom a student of folklore must collect materials for study and analysis. The folklore carried by one individual is likely to exist at a number of levels: an individual is a member of a family, often belongs to several social groups, lives in a neighborhood and may belong to a particular ethnic group, has a particular occupation and shares in the general folk culture of the city, the region, and the nation. Individuals never see the distinctions between these levels; the folklore they carry is not perceived as “folklore,” nor as divided into categories; it simply forms the basic fabric of their life and behavior. The student of folklore, however, finds it useful, in focusing a research project, to sort materials into categories.^[4] It is very important, therefore, to have adequate methodological training and/or guidance in folklore research. For the person without access to formal academic training, there are a number of useful books available.^[5]

Folklore research, like many other aspects of neighborhood study, is based on fieldwork: the collection of source materials through one-on-one contact with living informants. The usual sort of “research,” book work in libraries, is the last stage of folklore research, while fieldwork is its basis and point of departure. Available guides to effective field research in folklore concentrate on people studying people by means of tape-recorded interviews used to collect items and bodies of folklore (thus relating closely to oral history as described in an earlier section of this Guide).^[6] Also important is the collecting and recording of visual images (on film or videotape, or in still photographs), and the collection of artifacts of folk culture.

Once folklore materials have been collected, however, two steps remain to make them accessible to others: archiving and interpretation. Archiving (the cataloging, indexing, storing, protecting and maintaining of folklore materials, and the provision of public access to them) is usually a matter for professional librarians or archivists.^[7] The interpretation of folklore (placing it in a context which illuminates its meaning) is a matter of the usual sort of “library research” involving books and journals. All of the general books referred to in this essay’s bibliography contain extensive references that can direct the folklore student to needed information. While local public libraries seldom have good collections even of general, much less of specialized folklore books and journals, they may well have very important resources for the study of the lore of folk groups in their own neighborhoods, such as collections of locally-published pamphlets, records of community events, neighborhood weeklies or irregular newsletters, and the like. Such materials are often not cataloged, and the folklore student must ask the library staff for help in locating such materials.

Equally useful are official archives. Local governments, social or other organizations, county historical societies, all may well have rich collections of materials of great interest to a folklorist; but it will often require initiative and persistence to determine their existence and gain access to them. State or regional folklore organizations like the Ohio Folklore Society and the professors who teach folklore at area colleges and universities are also important sources of information.^[8] Finally, there are a number of important folklore research libraries (the John G. White Department at the Cleveland Public Library, the Folklore Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, libraries at the Universities of California at Los Angeles, Chicago and Pennsylvania, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.) that can often provide valuable help in response to letters or telephone calls.^[9]

What Kinds of Folklore Exist in the City? Examples can best be given in terms of the different sorts of groups in which they flourish. The most basic grouping produces family folklore, which may include personal experience narratives (stories and anecdotes passed down in a family), food customs (including traditional recipes), holiday customs, beliefs and sometimes crafts.^[10]

The folklore of social groups varies according to the particular interest which brings the group together. Within a church congregation, the folklore may include ritual actions and holiday customs; within a sports club, anecdotes and jokes about players as well as skills and techniques relevant to the sport; and within a sewing circle, particular patterns and techniques. In urban cultures there is an incredible variety of different social groups, often overlapping in various ways. The quantity and variety of folklore shared by a social group will increase with the length of time it has existed, the frequency with which its members meet, the intensity of the members’ involvement in the group, and in some cases the uncommonness of the activity: the Cleveland Folklore Archive contains a study of the folklore of a group of people who chase steam trains!^[11]

Neighborhood folklore is very similar to that of social groups, though here it is not a particular interest or activity that holds the group together, but rather the fact of residence in a particular locality. In determining the quantity and variety of folklore to be expected in a neighborhood, the factor “uncommonness of activity” can be replaced by “degree of definition and/or isolation”: the more clearly set off a neighborhood is from other neighborhoods, either by physical isolation or by other factors such as organization around some central point, the more varied and extensive its folklore. The dominant type of folklore in neighborhoods is likely to consist of anecdotes and personal experience narratives.^[12]

In ethnic folklore, the community that carries it is generally much larger than the groups involved in social-group or neighborhood folklore. As far as the United States is concerned, ethnic folklore is usually linked closely with urban communities as a result of the patterns of immigration in the last century.^[13] While it is related to the still larger categories of national or language-based folklore, there is a considerable difference, for example, between German folklore still existing in the German Federal Republic and the folklore prevalent among the ethnic Germans resident in Cleveland.

The facts of immigration and of residence as a subgroup within a much larger and diverse culture have a strong effect on the nature of urban ethnic folklore. One result is selection: of the types of folklore prevalent in the mother country, only a few still survive in the American community: food customs, some crafts, dances, holiday customs, costumes. Another result is that folk traditions change their form and function: for example, costumes that are part of a living tradition in the mother country become, in an American city, ethnic display—wearing an element of native-country costume is a way of identifying oneself to others, of saying “I’m Lithuanian,” or “I’m a Danube Swabian.” Finally, new traditions will develop: personal experience narrative that relates to the events of immigration form a new genre receiving a good deal of attention.

A variety of folklore that can derive from communities as small as social groups, and as large as nations, is occupational folklore. Until recently, most studies in this area were of non-urban occupations: lumberjack lore, the folklore of the sea and sailors, railroading lore, cowboy folklore. But every urban occupation also has its own group folklore. The Cleveland Folklore Archive documents the folklore of police dispatchers, public health centers, and hospitals. There is even a variety of folklore that passes from person to person, often via the copying machine, in the business world.^[14]

Children’s folklore is “occupational” in the sense that it is closely tied to schools, but in some senses it is also the folklore of a social group.^[15] Children’s folklore is just as prevalent in urban as in rural communities, and is one of the more delightful areas of folklore to study.

As one moves from smaller to larger community groups, the problems of defining the boundaries of communities increases. There is city folklore, the lore shared by a whole urban area (in Cleveland, for example, the sense of an East-West split in the city, and attitudes toward such suburbs as Parma and Beachwood), regional folklore (an urban example is the traditional hostility between San Francisco and Oakland in California), and national folklore. The specifically urban manifestations of national folklore lie in urban legends, in jokes, and in graffiti.^[16]

Why Should One Study the Folklore in Neighborhoods? In any particular neighborhood, one will find not simply “neighborhood folklore” as defined above, but the folklore of urban communities at all levels, from family to nation, existing in a dynamic and constantly changing pattern. The functional mix of its folklore comprises one at the main factors defining a neighborhood and allowing one to distinguish it from other neighborhoods.

One cannot, in fact, know a neighborhood without knowing its folklore. Precisely because members of a community are often unconscious of the nature, extent, and influence of the folklore they share, it has a profound effect upon their behavior as member of a community. Folklore is the concealed skeleton on which all other aspects of a neighborhood’s social life grow and take shape. To study the sociology, the politics, the history, the demography of a neighborhood without also studying its folklore, is to remain like the blind man studying the elephant: all too likely to be misled by surface phenomena.

Bibliography

Abrahams, Roger, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: Aldine Press, 1970.

Abrahams, Roger D., Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969.

Beatie, Bruce A., “De profundis: graffiti as communication,” The Gamut, No. 5. Winter, 1982, pages 59-66.

Brunvand, Jan Harold, Folklore: A Study and Research Guide. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976.

Brunvand, Jan Harold, The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction. New York: Norton, 1978.

Cutting-Baker, Holly, et. al., eds., Family Folklore. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1976.

Danielson, ed., Studies in Folklore and Ethnicity. a special issue of Western Folklore, Volume 36, January 1977.

Dorson, Richard M., American Folklore. University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Dorson, Richard M., Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States. University of Chicago Press, 1964.

Dorson, Richard M., “Is there a folk in the city?,” in The Urban Experience and Folk Tradition. ed. A. Paredes and E. J. Stekert. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971, pages 21-64.

Dundes, Alan and Prager, Carl, Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975.

Georges, Robert A. and Jones, Michael Owen, People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Goldstein, Kenneth S., A Guide for Field Workers in Folklore. Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1964.

Ives, Edward D., The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and Oral History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980.

Jensen, William Hugh, “The esoteric-exoteric factor in folklore.” in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965, pages 43-51.

Leach, Marie and Fried, Jerome, eds., The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1949.

Legman, Gershon, Rationale of the Dirty Joke, 2 vols. New York: Grove Press, 1968. and New York: Bell, 1975.

Lindahl, Carl et. al., A Basic Guide to Fieldwork for Beginning Folklore Students: Techniques of Selection, Collection, Analysis, and Presentation. Bloomington, Ind.: Folklore Publications Group, 1979.

Moore, Willard Burgess, Molokan Oral Tradition: Legends and Memories of an Ethnic Sect. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Opie, Iona and Peter, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Toelken, J. Barre, The Dynamics of Folklore. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.