Following Tradition
Folklore in the Discourse of American CultureBy Simon J. BronnerUtah State University Press
Copyright © 1998 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-239-6Contents
Illustrations..............................................................................xAcknowledgments............................................................................xiiiPrologue. The Past and Present in Tradition................................................11. The Problem of Tradition................................................................92. Folklore and Ideology during the Gilded Age.............................................733. The English Connection, from Cultural Survivals to Cultural Studies.....................1414. The Americanization of the Brothers Grimm...............................................1845. Martha Warren Beckwith and the Rise of Academic Authority...............................2376. Alfred Shoemaker and the Discovery of American Folklife.................................2667. Henry W. Shoemaker and the Fable of Public Folklore.....................................3138. Richard Dorson and the Great Debates....................................................3499. Displaying American Tradition in Folk Arts..............................................413Epilogue. The Future of Tradition..........................................................475Bibliographic Essay........................................................................483Notes......................................................................................503References.................................................................................518Index......................................................................................590
Chapter One
The Problem of Tradition
The central problem of tradition is explaining the ways that people rely on one another, with reference to precedent, for their wisdom, their expression, their identity. The problem may not be immediately evident from the mechanical sounding definition of tradition in most dictionaries as the "handing down" of lore from generation to generation, especially by oral means. In common usage, tradition can refer to an item dependent on this process, such as a story or custom, or to a precedent given the force of repeated practice, or to knowledge whose official source cannot be verified but is held widely, or to a concept—"a mode of thought or behavior"—characteristic of people generally. As one goes down the list, more authority is ascribed to tradition. The suggestion of reverence due tradition means that people "follow" it, willingly or not, and may define themselves through its presence.
An emotional or even spiritual connotation to tradition exists that may belie objective chronologies or social inventories. To claim tradition, after all, is to bring into play the force, and guilt, of countless generations of ancestors, and perhaps the gaze of present-day neighbors. To follow tradition may be construed as keeping the faith; to break it a risk of apostasy. Hence, a vibrant legacy of writing on tradition exists from the view of how religion draws its meaning from continuities of shared ritual and belief and how individual expressions of art and literature respond to socially inherited aesthetics, symbols, and themes. That is not to say that attempts at clinically objectifying tradition do not exist. Tradition can be calculatedly viewed as a biological specimen and given the look of a genealogical chart. It may be stolidly recorded as a series of motions and minutely analyzed frame by frame. Traditions can be alternative1y "collected" as empirical evidence of everyday practice or in the singular described as some conceptual, almost mystical whole, often outside the awareness of individuals. In both directions, scientific and humanistic, the problem of tradition questions the sources from which people draw the basis of actions and attitudes.
A problem with tradition, then, is its multiple meanings and conceptual softness. Given to emotional usage, tradition can appear imprecise, inconsistent, and infuriatingly elusive. At the same time, therein lies its significance, for it offers something essential in the human condition. Tradition is a term we all hear and use, even if it defies crisp definition. As a basic component of life in need of understanding, it seems to demand scholarship. Tradition, it is often assumed, is a source of basic learning, occurring even before formal education begins, and continuing through our lives. It is a font, therefore, for drawing a sense of the self from a social world. That font, that wisdom, has a sense of being part of a sequence of generations that many view as desirable for a sense of belonging. Thus being in a tradition suggests being a link in a social chain reaching well back in time.
The problem of tradition intensifies when value judgments intervene. Feelings about authority, about the virtue of the past, about the state of the present, shape the positive and negative value given tradition. Max Radin wryly remarked about tradition in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences that "in all its aspects it retains enough of its primary characteristics of vagueness, remoteness of source, and wide ramification to make it seem peculiarly strong to those who have recourse to it and peculiarly weak to those who mean to reject it" (1935, 67). When celebrated writer Lafcadio Hearn described in the early twentieth century how in Japan "every act of domestic life" was "regulated by ... tradition," he suggested to Americans that this structure provided an admirable social model. He emphasized "the law of duty"—"obedience absolute to ... tradition" (Hearn [1904] 1984, 287). Vehement argument can arise whether following tradition means unconsciously following a severe form of cultural authority or choosing from tradition that which one finds appropriate.
In America, abundant examples serve to highlight both attitudes toward the authority of tradition and images of ambivalence toward it in mass media. Communal groups such as the Amish, among whom "tradition" presumably carries authority and preserves social harmony, are represented in media from tourist presentations to mass-market movies such as Witness (1985) and are typically portrayed as odd, a conspicuous "other" in American culture. Especially warning of the dangers of authority in tradition, the movie Dead Poets Society, a box-office smash of 1989, opened with students at an exclusive preparatory school carrying a lead banner of "Tradition." It announced a theme of the limitations of tradition placed on a creative individual by family and school. The movie would have its audiences believing that the severity of this tradition forced the suicide of the artistic boy wanting to define an identity for himself. Encouraged by an unconventional teacher, the boy is shown blissfully performing Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer's Night Dream of man free in nature. He could also have invoked the resounding reminder of the authority of tradition in Henry V: "Will you mock an ancient tradition [begun] upon an honorable respect ...?" (V, I, 70).
The Oxford English Dictionary impartially notes the value placed upon practices or collective wisdom deemed worthy of "tradition." In the sense of practice, narrative, or wisdom passed through the generations, tradition can be found in print well back to the Middle Ages, but the more recent call of "traditionalism" rings harder with the air of harsh authority from the past. Putting together his widely known vocabulary of culture and society, Raymond Williams suggested that the "time-honored" process of inheritance from an older generation implies respect for elders and a certain duty to carry on the process. But he warned that persistence through time is not necessarily a mark of honor if it is enforced irrationally. From his progressive viewpoint, he thought of the labels of traditionalist and traditionalism as authoritarian enforcement, and therefore negative (R. Williams 1983, 318–20). Amitai Etzioni, another prominent scholar concerned with the charge of authority implicit in traditionalism, drew a contrast between modernity, associated with an emphasis on universal individual rights, and the unfortunately negative view of traditionalism that he thought conjures up the rigidity of the Middle Ages. In fashioning what he called a communitarian movement for the future, he hoped to recover the legitimacy of order and the claim of appropriate social virtues from traditionalism (Etzioni 1996, xvii).
Associated with precedent, continuity, and convention, tradition is commonly put forward to direct future action. Whether one wants the future to break with or continue the pattern of tradition dictates judgments of tradition as negative or positive. Especially common in the modernist literature of culture are statements emphasizing tradition as a guide or choice. Many contemporary writers take the tone that in the modern push toward novelty, choosing tradition, a social connection hearkening back to a past, is a threatened freedom allowed humans. Barry McDonald offered an example in a study of musicians: "I see tradition as founded upon personal choice. In the Archibalds' case, this translates as the conscious decision to engage in a certain sort of historical relationship, involving a network of people and a shared musical activity and repertoire" (B. McDonald 1997, 58). Hence, folk musicians, folk artists, and folk tradition bearers may appear to be touted as exemplars of free will in a mass society that applies pressure to conform to change. There is noticeable irony here in the invocation of tradition, a social connection to the past, as a sign of individualism. In political usage, as discussed later in this chapter, tradition may variously refer to individual autonomy and social authority. It can suggest a so-called conservative virtue in stability through continuity, and deference to previous authority, while supposedly liberal views may credit tradition for encouraging a constant reshaping to form new, or "progressive," directions.
Culture is often confused with tradition, but the related terms can mean different things, and perceptions of them have gone through historical shifts. Most persistently, tradition, especially when referred to in the plural, has carried the connotation of practices of a society, while culture has been considered an encompassing idea of the society. There is an implication that one can grasp traditions, participate in them, invoke them, more easily than the abstraction of culture. Tradition connotes a social connection and historical precedent that underlie a cultural presence. Tradition frequently means continuity of a practice through time with which people are familiar, a way of doing things, while culture often suggests an unconsciously experienced existence, a way of thinking about things. Henry Glassie summarized culture, for example, as "intellectual, rational, and abstract; it cannot be material, but material can be cultural ..." (Glassie 1968,2). Culture in the past was a reference to place, often to a language group bounded in space, whereas traditions were more variably social, possibly referring to family, age, and gender. In humanities, traditions can be more broadly defined than culture, as in the widely used singular use of the capitalized Western Tradition and its supposed opposite Eastern Tradition, which suggests "pattern" as a synonym for tradition. Culture now can be heard as easily applied to all kinds of associations as well as bounded groups, but often there still is a view that traditions define a culture, rather than the other way around. In European-American intellectual history, "the science of tradition," seeking to objectify and organize tradition, has been associated for better or for worse with folklore.
Folklore and the Study of Tradition
You will not find "tradition science" or "traditionology" in an American university catalogue." be sure, courses in history, literature, art, music, religion, and philosophy, among others, will undoubtedly make reference to tradition. Frequently encountered interdisciplinary combinations of American studies, cultural studies, and ethnic studies use it, but 1 have yet to find "tradition studies" as a separate program. As close as you will come to the "science of tradition" is the study of folklore, where you will find professionals calling themselves "folklorists." As early as 1899, Englishman Edwin Sidney Hartland clarified, indeed encouraged, the professional pursuit of folklore as first the "study of tradition" and then the "science of tradition." (Hartland 1894–1896, [1899] 1968; G. Bennett 1994). Even as methods and theories changed drastically from the Victorians to modern-day Americans, the flag of tradition continued to be waved over the territory of folklore. During the 1970s, updates of "folkloristics" were frequently defined as "scientific in the study of human traditions" (Ketner 1973, 1976; Georges and Jones 1995). If not always called a science, folklore studies is usually represented today as a "discipline" forming a bridge between humanities and social science, and American institutions such as Indiana University, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania offer the Ph.D. in it.
Folklore courses are most commonly found in English and anthropology departments and interdisciplinary programs. You can find folklore courses at over five hundred colleges in America, of which around eighty have some kind of folklore program (Baker 1986a). Reference to the study of "tradition" is a hallmark of these programs. Indiana University's Folklore Institute calls its newsletter "Traditions" and describes the academic study of folklore as "focusing on recurrent traditional aspects of life." The brochure for graduate study in folklore at the University of Oregon advertises: "Students study the extent to which tradition continues to enrich and express the dynamics of human behavior throughout the world." The University of Pennsylvania explains the subject matter of its folklore and folklife department as "traditional arts and aspects of life." UCLA's program in folklore and mythology "examines the ways in which human traditions both reflect and contribute to continuity and consistency in thought and life." Harvard's program in folklore and mythology "takes up the world of tradition in its many forms."
The link of folklore and its emphasis on tradition to other disciplines affects many programs throughout the United States. The catalogue listing for the folklore program at the University of California at Berkeley explains: "Since it is a study of the humanist expression which is handed down by tradition rather than by writing, it is related to all departments that deal with literature, art, music. Since folklore also deals with the entire traditional culture of mankind as manifested in customs and beliefs, it has close affiliations with anthropology, design, history, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology." Folklore's primary connection with "tradition" and "traditional" is distinctive when compared to the general orientations of "the past" with history, "society" with sociology, or "culture" with anthropology. Indeed, the study of tradition through folklore may be in social sciences or humanities, and sometimes in behavioral sciences (see Nicolaisen 1983; Bronner 1984b; Zumwalt 1988; W. Wilson 1996; Bauman 1996; Mullen 1996).
When twenty-one authorities were asked during the late 1940s to define folklore for Funk and Wagnalls's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (1949), fifteen referred to "tradition" or "traditional" to explain the subject. Stith Thompson, arguably the dean of folklorists at that time, was especially direct in his usage of tradition: "The common idea present in all folklore is that of tradition, something handed down from one person to another and preserved either by memory or practice rather than written record" (403). Another leading light, Archer Taylor, similarly offered: "Folklore consists of materials that are handed on traditionally from generation to generation without a reliable ascription to an inventor or author" (402–3). While they construed tradition as a learning process of primarily oral transmission, others referred to it as a body of material familiar to a people. MacEdward Leach referred to traditions as "the accumulated knowledge of a homogeneous people" (401), and John Mish delineated this body as "fairy tales, myths, and legends, superstitions, festival rites, traditional games, folk songs, popular sayings, arts, crafts, folk dances, and the like" (401). Folklore had the appeal of giving form to the abstraction of tradition. As literature allowed for a range of forms, so folklore was varied in its content but had a conceptual unity under the tent of tradition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Following Traditionby Simon J. Bronner Copyright © 1998 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission of Utah State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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