The Practice of Folklore: Essays toward a Theory of Tradition

By Simon J. Bronner

Winner of the 2020 Chicago Folklore Prize

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020

Despite predictions that commercial mass culture would displace customs of the past, traditions firmly abound, often characterized as folklore. In The Practice of Folklore: Essays toward a Theory of Tradition, author Simon J. Bronner works with theories of cultural practice to explain the social and psychological need for tradition in everyday life.

Bronner proposes a distinctive “praxic” perspective that will answer the pressing philosophical as well as psychological question of why people enjoy repeating themselves. The significance of the keyword practice, he asserts, is the embodiment of a tension between repetition and variation in human behavior. Thinking with practice, particularly in a digital world, forces redefinitions of folklore and a reorientation toward interpreting everyday life. More than performance or enactment in social theory, practice connects localized culture with the vernacular idea that “this is the way we do things around here.” Practice refers to the way those things are analyzed as part of, rather than apart from, theory, thus inviting the study of studying. “The way we do things” invokes the social basis of “doing” in practice as cultural and instrumental.

Building on previous studies of tradition in relation to creativity, Bronner presents an overview of practice theory and the ways it might be used in folklore and folklife studies. Demonstrating the application of this theory in folkloristic studies, Bronner offers four provocative case studies of psychocultural meanings that arise from traditional frames of action and address issues of our times: referring to the boogieman; connecting “wild child” beliefs to school shootings; deciphering the offensive chants of sports fans; and explicating male bravado in bawdy singing. Turning his analysis to the analysts of tradition, Bronner uses practice theory to evaluate the agenda of folklorists in shaping perceptions of tradition-centered “folk societies” such as the Amish. He further unpacks the culturally based rationale of public folklore programming. He interprets the evolving idea of folk museums in a digital world and assesses how the folklorists' terms and actions affect how people think about tradition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Aug 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781496822642

Simon J. Bronner

Simon J. Bronner is Dean of the College of General Studies and distinguished professor of social sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He is author or editor of over forty books on folklore, ethnology, and cultural history, including The Practice of Folklore: Essays toward a Theory of Tradition and Campus Traditions: Folklore from the Old-Time College to the Modern Mega-University, both published by University Press of Mississippi.

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book sets practice as a keyword of inquiry into how people keep tradition in mind as they navigate modern everyday life. Modifying practice with folk draws attention to repeated, variable social actions that might be perceived, or constructed, as traditional. All people engage in folk practices in a range of behaviors but probably are not fully aware of them because they often seem second nature or ordinary. They are important to discern and analyze, I argue, because they are the kinds of connotative, expressive activity that define cultural experience and provide special frames in which to deal with conflicts, paradoxes, joys, and anxieties regarding people in response to their social, political, and material environments. I also use modifiers of vernacular, popular, and elite practices to represent different kinds of practical or instrumental uses of, and symbolically significant names for, expressive behavior. Referring to folk as a cultural learning process and folklore as traditional knowledge, I follow the tension between behavioral repetition and variation that often represents a negotiation between the independent individual and myriad identities formed from social and organizational connections, including the immediate family and the ruling state. When people practice—that is, familiarize and symbolize certain actions for stylized repetition—they often have in mind social and political outcomes from working in large modern societies noted for their individualism, which I seek to uncover and analyze. When practicing, they create a sense of belonging and purpose, often in concert, or in contest, with larger and smaller social, organizational units that declare their place in, and relationships to, the world.

For many scholars, the choice of practice as a keyword in the study of society and culture derives from Aristotle’s use of praxis as the deliberate action of a rational being and the association with practical from pragmatic philosophers such as George Herbert Mead and William James as instrumental, symbolic actions that have social and political consequences, not all of which are intended (Abrahams 1985; Bronner 1990). They are part of a scholarly legacy of linking the embodied expressiveness of doing to what people think. For example, to practice what you preach (ranking as one of the most popular proverbs in English along with practice makes perfect; see Mieder 1993, 46–47) is to put words into action with the implication that one’s behavior is tied to ethical intention. One would not want to be accused of being all talk (words) and no action and might be admonished that knowledge without practice is nothing. Seeking sources for apparently intentional actions as they affect others, people might dig deeper and ask what were you thinking? or what came over you? The answer to the question, including the feeling of frustrating inaction expressed in I’m stuck in place (a rut) or I am at a standstill, might not be satisfying and the observer might reply, I have an idea of what was really on your mind!

These examples of folklore that colloquially express the complexities of modern life suggest a study of purposeful, socially shared behavior that has been called praxeological. It relies on behavioral observation coupled with historical inquiry to identify connotative behaviors within social frames of action, discern the purposes to which they are put, locate the traditions to which they are connected, and analyze the resulting consequences and ideas. A praxeological inquiry frequently involves social psychological analysis to find cognitive sources of these traditions and decipher the processes as well as outcomes of human actions. More so than other forms of inquiry, praxeological questions of meaningful praxis in human lives lead to explanations of cultural expressions that loom large in social movements and political arenas. People might perceive folklore as playful or ephemeral but it is exactly this characteristic that makes it crucial to record in the situations in which such expressions are allowed to be risky, edgy, protrusive, and even oppositional. I certainly consider other kinds of evidence—literary, legal, and linguistic—but find that folklore brings out concerns of everyday life and cognitive processes especially well. It has frequently been overlooked in the academy precisely because of the masks it presents for its real purposes, the subaltern groups frequently associated with it, and its often earthy, even offensive content. Digging beneath the surface of quotidian expressions (or what the pragmatist philosophers described as symbolic gestures to underscore their embodiment), as I advocate with praxeological perspectives, uncovers what people from the cradle to the grave really have on their minds. Further, it leads to inquiry into tradition as a key to social process and the reproduction of culture, in addition to the rhetorical importance of recognizing, and naming tradition, as folklore and other terms. Indeed, the insistence on, and thinking with, folkloric behaviors that individuals practice, perceive, and construct as traditional are central to explicating the diverse ways lives are led and communities are formed.

In usage, practice often defines localized culture with the idea that this is the way we do things around here. On its flip side, it refers to the way those things are analyzed as part of, rather than apart from, theory, thus inviting the study of studying as praxis. The way we do things invokes the social basis of doing in practice as cultural and instrumental, that is, it has effects that participant-observers can analyze in the social reality of the abstracted, collective we around here or the field (environment). It is the kind of doing that communicates and creates; it is recognizable as a process toward an end. Practice as a term draws attention to the symbolic process of repeated actions to get at the meanings of expressive outcomes. In practice, the range and location of here and the identity of we are variable and raise an important question about boundaries and strategies of social action that participant-observers in the field, locations outside the self, strive to document and explain.

One boundary worth pondering is the difference of a cultural practice from, on the one hand, routine or habitual repetition, and on the other, the singular creative performance. Practice often draws attention to itself positively as stylized, regularized behavior that is variable, functional, purposeful (often being preparatory to events), reasoned, symbolic, framed, connotative, and expressive. It is distinguished from habit, which is often viewed negatively as invariable, problematic, and purposeless. Moreover, practice deviates from notions of performance or art because it mainly covers everyday life and the kinds of action that are not staged or organized, and often not artistic, although the actions of staging and organizing can indeed be analyzed as practice. A cognitively oriented, praxeological analysis of folkloric action and process is important because it provides a social psychological perspective on expressiveness of the ordinary rather than separating this cultural function, as the humanities are wont to do, in the work of a few lofty talents.

It is also significant historically because of modernization, which in favoring the growth of individualism and state authority influenced a cultural norm-breaking with local control and consequently repressed or opposed tradition, folklore, and community dominion. In this theory, agents of modernization designated, and demonized, folklore as inactive—anti-modern, antiquated, and irrational, or even barbaric. Nation-states have also been known in some infamous twentieth-century cases such as the Third Reich to appropriate and transmute folklore for racist, militaristic, and imperial purposes (Dow and Lixfeld 1994). Yet to meet sociopsychological needs served by tradition and community, people created stylized, ritualized frames in which tradition, and folklore could be freely expressed and localized, and subaltern or alternative identities could be formulated. Presumably, people could then return to their ordinary lives, but a tension occurred when instilling the values and practices of tradition in the everyday rather than separating, and marginalizing, them. Modernization, its advocates promised, brought an ease of life, coupled with capitalist-fueled progress, and, in the process privileged the discontinuity of novelty, a focus on individualism, and an embrace of accelerating change and a futuristic worldview. Attention to practice tests these assumptions and asks why people seek the repetition and continuity of tradition in their lives despite frequent modern pressures to abandon it. Or phrased in a practice frame of mind, how, when, what, where, how—and why—do individuals traditionalize?

Why should you care about this question about tradition? My answer is that ultimately it is about why people act, and enact, the way they do. And it entails often overlooked evidence of how people think about the world, their localities, and themselves. It addresses the philosophical discourse of free will up against social and organizational constraints on freedom, the desire for progress, creativity, and change set against the predictability of the status quo, and the ethical matter of prejudice as well as mobility as people seek comfort and familiarity through traditions in societies often perceived to be full of strangers and insecurity. The issue of authority associated with tradition in practice looms large in this issue. Put another way, praxeological scholars ask who or what do people answer to for determining their actions, particularly in a modern state with the rule of law? Tradition was once thought to act like a uniform code of the past dictating actions, but perhaps because of modernization or in spite of it, tradition has been observed as producing social or local autonomy and becoming more pluralistic in contrast to the dominant mass of society and culture. Once reviled by reformers calling for breaking the chains of the past, tradition has been central to a number of social movements, especially in emerging nations where expressions and communities of practice have been employed in the service of dissent. Instead of being socially inherited, tradition as it has been recast (and the intellectual and social construction of tradition, represented through the objectification of folklore, and institutionalization of folklore study, is certainly part of the praxeological query) appears mutable, emergent, and even individualized. These patterns raise potential paradoxes of tradition as the past acting in the present toward the future, representing the social by individual choice, and perhaps most significantly, as regulating everyday behavior that is not a function of following rules.

Tradition can be explicitly invoked by authorities, but more often than not, it is unwritten and not codified. A major theorist of social practice, Pierre Bourdieu, addressed this matter with the concept of habitus defined as the way culture shapes repeated action in the present structured by individuals’ past position in their social structure. He could have, but did not, cite roots of theorizing social action of individuals who shape culture in the sociological conceptualization of the Folk by folklorist Joseph Jacobs, who in 1893 called for unpacking the modus operandi of tradition to reveal why individuals rely on, and initiate it, despite the forces of modernization. Concerned for customs that involve the simultaneous doing of some one thing by two or more persons, Jacobs wanted to know the role of the individual among the Folk (1893, 235). His folkloristic compatriot Edwin Sidney Hartland earlier had opened debate on whether tradition is a conservative or dynamic influence on society by contending in 1885 that Tradition is always being created anew, and that traditions of modern origin wherever found are as much within our province as ancient ones (1885, 1920). That view suggested that people are mindful of their embodied traditions, and are even creative or autotelic about them as a tool of not only shaping their daily and ceremonial conduct, but also of influencing the political order. Meanwhile, his colleague Charlotte Burne (1913), writing the first handbook of folklore studies, emphasized along these lines that folklorists give primary attention to the practice rather the form of tradition to document the profound changes and incipient traditions rising around them. She therefore distinguished between, on the one hand, tradition as a relict object and, on the other, a social force that could be harnessed to disrupt as well as stabilize a society.

The observation of repeated behavior that is deemed, or designed, to be folkloric raises the stakes in this inquiry to contemplating mind, for at issue is the way, and the why, of people thinking before, during, and after they act, in addition to the cognitive perception of their own culture in relation to others around them. To get at mind through the observation of behavior and the expressions accompanying it, practice theory more than performance and other action-centered perspectives incorporates psychological perspectives and my essays reflect this influence, particularly with concepts of projection, transference, framing, and sublimation (Bronner 1988; Bronner 2007; see also Briggs 2015; Carvalho-Neto 1972; Dundes 1980, 33–61; Dundes 1985, 3–46; Dundes 1991b; Mechling 1993).

Bourdieu additionally introduced economics into the equation of [(Habitus) (Capital)] + Field = Practice (1984, 101). Field, in this case, has a more social psychological definition than the folklorist’s naturalistic metaphor of field out there for an externalized location to document traditions in situ. For Bourdieu, the field is a social space where people interact and impose regularities and regulations that constrain choices from without (Bourdieu 1984; Lem 2013, 651). Capital, too, is more social psychologically defined. It is not simply monetary but includes symbolic or cultural capital that supports or undermines positions of domination. This consideration is especially evident in my studies of the Amish as a folk society that negotiates its symbolic capital with the digitally driven fast capitalism (in contrast to the slow capitalism of industrial or producer society) of the nonbelievers in an often uneasy symbiotic relationship. Much of the investigation of cultural practice aims to expose this and other kinds of relationships, often outside the awareness of participants, between the habitus provided by tradition and various intersecting circles of socioeconomic reality from the local (and national) to the global. But practice theory does not universalize such behavior; it seeks to identify the types of individuals and their communities who are more likely to engage in or symbolize tradition than others, and to explain the invocation and adaptation of strategies of expressive repetition or past practices in various situations more than others. It questions what others do and whether the self will follow suit, adapt, or resist their conduct within different contexts—or create anew, as Hartland stated, with the principles, if not the practices, of tradition in mind.

I have also tried to develop Aristotlean ideas of pheme and praxis to bear on symbolic analyses of the process of tradition as well as the outcomes in the forms of readable texts, images, and objects. In the twenty-first century, these analyses have been complicated by the intrusive and constantly modified ways that people communicate in what has been dubbed the digital era with the implication that it involves accelerating rates of change that paradoxically provides heightened social connection and alienation, and thereby imparts both increased pleasure and pain. Many of the essays address such contemporary paradoxes as openings for folkloric expression and creation of play and ritual frames. As I have previously emphasized folklife study on material practices, in this volume, I focus in my case studies on traditionalized verbal and social processes. In sum, my conversation in this book is mainly with folklorists about the practices they document and the analytical practices they employ. I also am talking to non-folklorists about the value of folklore as evidence to answer pressing questions of practice and custom in modern everyday life and advance philosophical thinking about human action and tradition.

To accomplish these goals, I have structured the book into three parts, which in the act of trichotomy is a folk practice representing wholeness, but more on that later (Bronner 2007a, 7–8; Dundes 1968). I devote the first section to practice theory applied to folkloristics and definitions informed, or forced by, that intellectual turn. I open with an inquiry based on the general tendency of American folklorists toward performance and European preference for a rhetoric of practice. I question whether this gulf can be bridged and evaluate what an integrated folkloristic conception of practice and performance would look like. Arguing for a shared goal of explaining tradition as a force on the choices that people make about their everyday and ceremonial conduct, I move in the second chapter to the significance of the hand to an embodied concept of tradition, using this analysis to form a new definition of folklore based upon traditional knowledge put into and drawn from practice. I propose that the concept underlying the definition can guide future work in explaining the way things are done around here, and there, and bridge divisions between folklore and folklife studies.

The middle section, apropos of cognitive perceptions of narrative, is the largest. It covers in more depth several practices and practitioners of tradition. I have chosen studies of expressive practices of cheering, chanting, euphemizing, storying, and singing affected by distinctive social frames in which the regularities and regulations assigned to tradition can be analyzed. I look at practices that are foundational in some way: the boogieman as an early childhood influence on people’s thinking about danger; sport as a highly conspicuous gendered, and often racialized, festive setting; school shootings as the violence considered especially horrific and unfathomable in America; and the sailor figure in story and song as arousing masculine sexual images. My selection is also based on those studies that flow into one another as a set, particularly on the theme of situated, variable practices that raise psychological questions about cultural responses to anxiety and perceived tensions between tradition and modernization.

I open with an examination of children being told about the boogieman, one of the first experiences that many people remember, not pleasantly, in regard to folklore. It is the parental admonishment to stay in bed or else the boogieman, or some other name for a frightening figure who lurks nearby, will abduct or harm them. Previous studies have applied functional analysis to assert that despite the negative feelings the practice arouses, children when they become parents reprise the scene to prevent their worst fear, losing their kids. Yet I find that invoking the boogieman continues past infancy, and it is not always the parents who do so. And I also notice judging from contemporary reports that the real horror implied in the rhetoric and ritual of framing the boogieman is of sexual molestation. A question I raise is whether this symbolism is a result of anxieties of the present or else was a meaning that was there all along but one that parents, and scholars, denied or overlooked. As a formative experience with folk process, I ask whether the belief and embodied action set the foundation for later cognition, and repetition, of fantasy.

Moving to ritualized speech, usually in young adulthood, I then discuss the stylized chanting of who’s your daddy? heard frequently in masculine sports venues. Sometimes discounted as rowdy fan behavior in the playful arena atmosphere, the practice along with others merits serious analysis accounting for its edgy history of racialized and gendered usage. Showing further the relevance of praxeological study of folklore to issues of the day, I follow with a study not only ripped from the headlines but one that views the headlines as cultural practice because of the way the reporting of the news reflects traditional beliefs apparent in narratives surrounding a disturbing wave of school shootings. My thesis is that reporters were psychologically responding to public anxieties in an open society about neurodiversity by placing blame for violence on a social menace, a kind of boogieman figure, identified as the young male Aspie.

The final essay in the section on practices and practitioners uses historical evidence more than the others to interpret the meanings of an oft-repeated bawdy, intentionally offensive sailor song usually sung by non-sailors. Often viewed as the best known ribald folk song in America, Barnacle Bill has a core narrative of male sexual bravado that compensates for psychological feelings of inadequacy displayed with mates in selective situations. Showing the connection of text with context, and structure with process, I examine the structure of the song as a dialogue between a man and woman, which in practice acts in a play frame to openly question gender roles and relationships as part of the coming-of-age experience, not just as a reflection of culture, but as an intentional distortion of it. The dialogue shifts depending on the gender of the singers, and I account particularly for feminist versions that have arisen since the late twentieth century. No mere frivolity, the repetition of this familiar song, which invites participation from a gathered gendered group, and its risqué fantasy, is another example of using folklore to deal with unsettling conflicts and paradoxes in life.

I transition in the third and concluding section to the application, and implications, of traditional knowledge in economy, government, and education. I begin with the Amish, probably the best known folk community in America, and maybe the world, who have defied expectations so far of their ultimate demise at the hands of modernity. Yet in the twenty-first century there is a new challenge to their faith as well as cultural sustainability. Living near their settlements in central Pennsylvania, I have had opportunities to talk to self-described plain folk who struggle with being both part of and yet apart from the world they know as that of the dominant, ethically questionable English. The crisis for them now is the threat of the farming economy collapsing in the wake of fast capitalism, suburban sprawl, and the growth of consumer society. The old agrarian, producer economy not only provided self-sufficiency but with its ethos of closeness to nature and integration of family labor was at the heart of the religious system of belief. I ask whether their adoption of cultural practices represented by farmers’ markets in an era of online and superstore grocery shopping is a compromise with, or capitulation to, the English system. I also inquire about the intervention of folklorists who have drawn attention to the Amish to ostensibly help support their way of life, but have also contributed to touristic pressure and commercial development that has been problematic for the Amish. I explain how the Amish families who have turned to farmers’ markets in the region are changing themselves as well as folkloristic attitudes with their unprecedented involvement in retail commercial settings.

Continuing discussion of folkloristic practices, I offer observations from my time in residence in the Netherlands during the national campaign led by public officials declaring the Year of Folklore. The experience forced me to think about American ways of doing things that were brought into relief because of the contrast with Dutch concerns for racial tolerance, nationalism, and multiculturalism. These issues have become global concerns in an era of heightened migrant and refugee movements, and appear especially intense in Europe as countries debate closing their borders to immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. I supplement the lessons from the Dutch with my time in a re-emerging independent state—Latvia—and its distinctive nationalistic practices of festival and education devoted to folklore. I seek to uncover the strategies and sociopolitical consequences, intended and unintended, that derive from adapting folk practices for public consumption. The third essay in this section questions whether folklorists can revitalize or change a formerly primary location for their work—the open-air or folk museum. Once focused on rural life as relict, and attracting support for its preservationist effort, folk museums appear less relevant in a digital age seemingly breaking with the preindustrial past, or for that matter reconstructions of traditions related to place. Building on some innovative engagements of living traditions in technological, urban, and industrial settings, I suggest rethinking the folk museum as a mobile site, a revitalizing contemporary practice, and an intellectual concept.

I close the book with what could be called a meta-study about the practices of folklorists when they identify, name, and shape traditions. The essay takes its cue from my earlier book American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History, which had as its endpoint the centennial of the American Folklore Society in 1987. The centennial marked what I called the era of communication, which examined the mediating role that folklorists had previously restricted to face-to-face oral transmission. My historiography then did not account for the digital computer revolution and what that did to, and for, tradition—and social connection. I reflect on the period of folkloristic work after the centennial and what it bodes for the future. I use quantitative data from meetings of the American Folklore Society in North America and Society for International Ethnology and Folklore in Europe in addition to big data from Google to assess whether the digital age is an extension of the era of communication or suggests something new in cultural practices and their study. I find themes of instantaneity and simultaneity that affect the removal of place, if not time, from cultural equations, and I propose that they are at the basis of a converging hyper age that affects ways that teachers and students think about why people do what they do.

The concluding essay on folkloristic practices, as well as the ones on the Amish and boogieman beliefs, have not been published previously. I originally delivered the former at the Francis Lee Utley Memorial Lecture to the American Folklore Society in 2014, and I am grateful to the Fellows of the American Folklore Society, particularly its incoming president, Erika Brady, for their sponsorship. The writing of the Amish essay owes to the invitation of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College to deliver the Donald F. Durnbaugh Memorial Lecture in 2017. I thank Donald Kraybill, Jeff Bach, Steve Nolt, and Edsel Burdge at the Center for sharing their wisdom with me on Amish society and culture. I also owe Willow Mullins of Washington University in St. Louis and Joshua R. Brown of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, who encouraged my writing on the economics of Amish folklife.

The consideration of childhood in a praxeological perspective on folklore in human development is obviously important to thinking about how tradition works as a social psychological force. The boogieman essay grew out of earlier studies on children’s folklore in Explaining Traditions (2011) but was intended to bring out the significance of parental and peer involvement in the acquisition of traditional knowledge. Apropos of the broadening of my education in the folklore and social psychology of childhood, I first presented it in a panel at the American Folklore Society meeting honoring the late psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith of the University of Pennsylvania. He is another scholarly figure whose lessons constantly stick with me. I cannot say for sure that he would have agreed with my interpretation, but I know from our conversations that he would have been intrigued. I am grateful to Fernando Orejuela of Indiana University for organizing the session and the opportunity to gain feedback from the audience. Thanks also are due fellow panelists Lisa Gabbert of Utah State University and Elizabeth Tucker of Binghamton University for the research they presented, even though at the time I did not know how closely related their work was. I greatly appreciate the help of founding director of the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language at the University of Sheffield, John Widdowson, who literally wrote the book on the folklore of frightening figures in childhood and was open to alternative explanations of the boogieman.

The Barnacle Bill essay was a keynote address to the International Ballad Commission meeting in the Netherlands in 2010. Who’s That Knocking on My Door appeared as a longer work and in addition to condensing it to focus on singing practices, I added new material on Bill’s journeys in folk and popular culture. I am grateful to the following scholars for providing texts and supplementary material: Martine de Bruin and the late Louis Grijp of the Meertens Institute in the Netherlands; the late Bill Nicolaisen of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland; Daniel Wojcik at the University of Oregon; Ronald L. Baker at Indiana State University; Angus Gillespie at Rutgers University; Jonathan Lighter at the University of Tennessee; Warren Fahey of the Australian Folklore Unit; Graham McDonald at the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia; and Alexa Hagerty of the University of California, Berkeley, Folklore Archive.

I revised all the previously published pieces that appear in this volume, and I am beholden to publishers for permission to alter them. They are: Practice Theory in Folklore and Folklife Studies, the journal published by Taylor & Francis, Folklore, edited by Jessica Hemming; The Proverbial and Psychological Meanings of ‘Who’s Your Daddy?,’ the journal published by the University of Vermont, Proverbium, edited by Wolfgang Mieder; The Shooter Has Asperger’s, the journal published by the Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society, Children’s Folklore Review, then-edited by Elizabeth Tucker; The Year of Folklore, the journal published by Centrum voor Studie en Documentatie, Volkskunde, then-edited by Albert van der Zeijden; Folk Museums Redux, the book published by Rowman and Littlefield, Folklife and Museums: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, edited by C. Kurt Dewhurst, Patricia Hall, and Charlie Seemann.

I want to acknowledge wonderful colleagues and students for their dialogues on practice theory and the subjects of my research. Jay Mechling, Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby, and Maribel Alvarez composed the first panel on practice theory at the 2009 American Folklore Society annual meeting out of which grew my opening chapter. At later meetings, I benefited from thoughtful comments by Henry Glassie, Daniel Wojcik, and Jon Kay on my presentations in relation to the arts of aging. I also appreciate Henry Glassie’s continuation of the conversation on the state of the field when he was visiting scholar at Penn State Harrisburg, where I was teaching. William Hansen, also of Indiana University, was kindly willing to expand my understanding of classical philosophy and mythology. And for truly broadening my interdisciplinary horizons, I owe historian Gary S. Cross at Penn State for many lunchtime seminars that, dare I say it, became a tradition between us. I want to exonerate these wonderful colleagues from mistakes I made, while appreciating their generosity of time and expertise. In that same spirit, I recognize the engagement of praxeological perspectives, particularly with the weaving of psychology and ethnology, at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, Linda-May Ballard and attendees at a memorable Society for Folklife Studies meeting in Melrose, Scotland, and Marcel Vellinga and the late Paul Oliver of the International Vernacular Architecture Unit at Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, England, and Haya Bar-Itzhak, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Eli Yassif, and other attendees at a conference on community and culture at Haifa University in Israel. Across the Pacific, I had the good fortune after my Fulbright year at Osaka University to return for conferences and lectures in Japan to expand comparative analyses of folklore. I am indebted to Hideyo Konagaya, Kazuko Miyashita, Yuichi Morioka, Eri Sekiguchi, Eriko Tanaka, and Keiko Wells for their many kindnesses when I was in Japan. I also cherished the opportunity to lecture and interact with faculty and students at Hong Kong University and at Beijing Normal University; thanks to Tim Grünewald, Kendall Johnson, and Selina Lai-Henderson for a memorable stay in Hong Kong and Ju Xi and Fang Xiao for the opportunity in Beijing. Back at Penn State, Chinese folklore scholars on campus contributed immensely to my global awareness; I send praise to Lei Cai of Wuhan University, Wenhong Luo of the Yunnan Nationalities Museum, and Anna Wei Marshall, Rosemary Yee, and Suping Chen.

I completed the book while serving as the Maxwell C. Weiner Visiting Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Missouri University of Science and Technology, and I am grateful to colleagues Kate Drowne, Patrick Huber, and Gerald Cohen for their warm reception. In addition, I am obliged to Cathy Baker, Ronald Baker, Anthony Buccitelli, Michael Owen Jones, Barbro Klein, Elliott Oring, Juwen Zhang, and Rosemary Zumwalt for their thoughtful comments and clear thinking over the years about traditionalizing practices. Most of all, I was blessed at Penn State and elsewhere with terrific students, too many to list here, who enthusiastically challenged, tested, and pondered with me many of the ideas on these pages in heady seminars on folklore and folklife. Now they are professors, museum directors and curators, writers, and editors, fieldworkers, and public programmers who thankfully continue to build on what we started.

Anyone reading my definitional essay should recognize that I could not have completed it without discussing its contents with hakham Dan Ben-Amos at the University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful for the time and wisdom he gave me in revisiting events and ideas of the 1960s. Similarly, I could not have written the essay on who’s your daddy? without the good counsel of master paremiologist Wolfgang Mieder of the University of Vermont. I planted the seed of the project at a panel he chaired in 2013 titled Talking Folklore: New Studies of Old Sayings at the Western States Folklore Society annual meeting in San Diego. Continuing the conversation started there with Gary Alan Fine, Patricia Turner, Alison Dundes Renteln, and Charles Clay Doyle helped the essay blossom. When we meet, the inspiration of the late Alan Dundes inevitably arises, and I would be remiss if I did not mention his lifelong influence. Another voice who keeps advising me even after he has passed on is Bill Nicolaisen, and I am happy to have had the chance to honor him and learn from his colleagues and students at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2017, including Thomas McKean, Nicolas Le Bigre, and Ian Russell.

The Shooter Has Asperger’s came out of a panel on Children’s Folklore in the 21st Century: Folklorists of Childhood Respond to the Newtown Tragedy, chaired by Elizabeth Tucker, who has been a constant source of wisdom and encouragement since we first met in the 1970s. I am grateful to her and to Trevor Blank of the Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society for fostering this research. I owe many children and their parents willing to talk about purported Asperger’s characteristics, and I especially benefited over the years from conversations about the autism spectrum with folklorist Patricia Turner and my wife Sally Jo Bronner, who managed a support group. I also appreciate correspondence with June Factor and June McKinty in Australia, Keiko Wells in Japan, and Bill Ellis in the United States about a global view of American school shootings and wild-child narratives. And hardly a paper is written at my desk for which I do not owe some intellectual debt to Jay Mechling, who always graciously provides keen insights for me to consider.

Moving on to the essays in the section on implications and applications, I appreciate the hospitality and collegiality during my visiting professorship at Leiden University during the year of folklore in the Netherlands. I want to recognize the lasting relationships that emerged from the experience with Hester Dibbits, Margolein Efting Dijkstra, Johanna Kardux, Peter Jan Margry, Herman Roodenburg, Edward van Voolen, and Albert van der Zeijden. I also benefited from heady experiences with faculty and students in folkloristics at the University of Tartu, Estonia, marked by stimulating exchanges with Ülo Valk, Ergo-Hart Västrick, Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, Anastasiya Astapova, and Jonathan Roper. Also contributing to my thinking were lectures at the University of Helsinki and University of Turku, Finland. I owe thanks particularly to Pekka Hakamies, Jukka Vahlo, Lotte Tarkka, Frog, and Pertti Anttonen. At the Latvian Academy of Culture, I am grateful to the rector, Rūta Muktupāvela, for her invitation, all the participants in the international research conference titled Culture Crossroads, and Agnese Treimane for her support during my residence, which included a memorable trip to the Latvian Open-Air Ethnographic Museum and the Archives of Latvian Folklore. My time with them added to my thoughts that went into the revision of my essay on folk museums. I owe an intellectual debt to C. Kurt Dewhurst, Patricia Hall, and Charlie Seemann for urging me to write the essay and to Howard Marshall for initiating the dialogue on American folk museums back in the 1970s. My essay started as a short postscript for a volume on folk museums they edited, and it kept growing as they corresponded with me. The museological project also benefited from extended discussions in a readings course with curator and doctoral student Susan Asbury, who contributed an essay of her own to their volume.

As I was preparing this book, I learned of the passing of eminent folklorist Roger D. Abrahams (1933–2017). Our paths intersected on many occasions with conferences and committees on the state of the humanities, history of folkloristics, ethnic and racial lore, occupational studies, folk music, and applied and public heritage. But it was the great opportunity to interact with him daily when he was a scholar in residence at Penn State Harrisburg that was especially stirring, not the least because it was during the time he was finishing his Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices (2005), which is especially important, I contend, in the discourse on cultural practice. He was instrumental in shaping the way we do things around here.

PART I

Theories and Definitions

1

PRACTICE THEORY IN FOLKLORE AND FOLKLIFE STUDIES

Interviewed for an oral history of ethnological research, senior folklorist Barbro Klein reflected that in her long scholarly experience working in Europe and North America a theoretical gulf exists bigger than the Atlantic Ocean (Klein 2009). American folklorists, she noted, became associated with performance and European scholars, skeptical of the centering of study with the dramaturgical metaphor, thought they had already incorporated concerns for the artistic performance of lore, or what they demeaned as a descriptive methodology, into their more inclusive approach to cultural practices that covered material and social life (Klein 2009, 10). In this essay, I expand upon Klein’s identification of performance and practice as keywords of American and European orientations, respectively, and contend that they actually share a concern for basing folklore as a type of social action. Arising at a similar juncture in the twentieth century in response to social upheaval, they also indicate differences in explanation or generalization with performance often representing singularity (and emergence) of an event and practice signifying the aggregate (and precedence) of folk behavior. My evaluation of their trajectories into the twenty-first century suggests the more expansive explanatory potential of practice theory in folklore and folklife studies. To demonstrate this view, I compare and historically contextualize humanistic approaches gathered under the headings of practice and performance and relate them to ethnological method and theory.

The differentiation of European ethnological scholarship from American folkloristic work with reference to practice and performance has been previously noted by Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg (2007) in their reframing of Dutch cultural studies with reference to the influence of American methodologies. From their perch in the Netherlands looking west on the Atlantic and east to the continent, the two ethnologists summarized that European scholars are oriented to practice as a concept in the comprehensive or holistic understanding of culture, rather than the microcosm of the social situation or scene. Separating modern European ethnological studies from the evolutionary, peasant studies of the past, Margry and Roodenburg declared that "European ethnology studies the familiar, the everyday practices that upon closer inspection often turn out to be less familiar, less evident, than people are inclined to think (Margy and Roodenburg 2007, 3; emphasis added). They avowed that in contrast to the American ethnography of performance as a stylistic phenomenon, European scholars usually seek a functional rationale and cognitive (or unconscious) source for embodied repeated behavior as practice. Margry and Roodenburg advised that the ethnological scholar’s explanatory task in a practice-oriented endeavor is to infer cultural categories that both shape our everyday practices and are shaped within these practices (Margry and Roodenburg 2007, 3). Trying to reconcile the American perspective on the singularity of a situated performance with the European concern for comparable practice, they generously concluded that performance is not opposed to everyday practices but leaves latitude for the unexpected, for the generation of new practices and meanings (Margry and Roodenburg, 2007, 5). Within my experience in China and Japan, I note similar conflicts between scholars arguing for a focus on shared social practices, especially religious, usually in the context of village and community life, and historicoliterary analysis of verbal art oriented toward outstanding tellers and singers (Deming and Lihui 2015; Hendry 1998; see Lee and Nadeau 2014 for bringing a practice orientation related to folkloric expressions in everyday life" to Asian American folklore studies).

In light of this discourse in Europe and Asia, a question arises as to the real or imagined differences between practice and performance in folklore and folklife studies (Bronner 2006a; Dundes 2005, 388–89; Mechling 2006; Oring 2006). After all, are not these keywords both signals of action, context, or process that call for analysis of the motivations for, and functions, of the enactment of folklore? One might further ask if the insistence on either performance and practice as keywords are matters of continental style (or institutional training) rather than the sharp intellectual differences observed by Klein. I take up these questions in this essay and answer that the understanding of practice is indeed distinctive. Offsetting the limitations of performance as a disciplinary basis, practice theory addresses the explanation of tradition in social and political action, the location of cognitive sources of expressive behavior, and the recognition of generalizable cultural patterns.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND OF EUROPEAN PRACTICE

Before launching into my exposition, I need to deal with potential objections to this broad intellectual comparison of European and American work for the purpose of charting future directions in global folkloristic work. Readers may protest that the various European regional and national histories of folklore work are too diverse to fit under the umbrella of a practice orientation or that the attention to cultural practice, if a keyword, is more method than theory. On the other hand, American folklorists may contend that performance theory is hardly unified and has assuredly taken different trajectories since arising in the 1960s.

On the case to be made for a European keyword for folkloristic approaches, the title of Europe has been used as a geographical heading to cluster various national legacies in historiographical surveys (Clements 2006; Cocchiara 1971; Dorson 1973). There is also a historical sense in which folklore collection beginning in Europe has been linked by a relation, in folkloristic chronicler Guiuseppe Cocchiara’s words, to a whole movement of studies that brought Europe to the discovery of itself (Cocchiara 1971, 8). This intellectual movement, raging particularly in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, is linked to the European Enlightenment and the comparative folklore enterprise by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, William John Thoms, Alexander Afanasyev, Oskar Kolberg, Julius and Kaarle Krohn, and Giambattista Vico, among others, which arose out of an age negotiating between the progressive rationality of science and the earthy appeal of intangible grassroots heritage (Bronner 2006b). While these early figures expressed a nationalistic agenda with their collections, they are credited with contributing philosophically to a science of folklore based on comparisons of their collected material across the continent in which they worked, suggesting diffusion into a continental European culture (Cocchiara 1971, 8–9).

In the twentieth century, Sigurd Erixon advocated for a field of European ethnology to enhance the comparative narrative and song enterprise and a consideration of social and material practices diffused across Europe. He established the journal Ethnologia Europaea in 1967 to break down the barriers between the different national schools within the continent (Bendix and Löfgren 2008, 5). This attempt at unity was a formidable challenge, especially with divisions remaining from national designations of the Finnish School (historic-geographic methodology), German kulturkreislehre (cultural circle school), and English Great Team of Folklorists (known for evolutionary approaches) (Bronner 1984; Dorson 1968; Hautala 1969). A sign of interest in transnational traditions, as well as coalescing European intellectual schools of thought, was evident in the effort to create an atlas of European folk culture from the 1950s through the 1970s (Rogan 2008, 67–68; Wildhaber 1972, 495). S. F. Sanderson (1971), for example, used his presidential address to the Folklore Society in England to connect the British Isles to continental European culture. According to Sanderson, the project would bring us [British folklorists] into closer and more fruitful collaboration with many of our fellow specialists in other European countries, with enrichment both to our own and to their learning and knowledge (Sanderson 1971, 90). Although not fulfilled, the project did point to work, particularly in folklife studies with its social and material cultural emphasis, that crossed borders and set the stage for later transnational studies on the extent and limits of European culture defined at its grassroots (Cuisenier 1990; Evans 1972; Vellinga 2003).

Lord Raglan, who gained renown and raised controversy for his thesis of a universal pattern in historical hero myths (1936), anticipated the postwar push to claim living traditions of everyday life as the European folklorist’s main concern when he, in a self-deprecatory presidential address to the Folklore Society, called his earlier obsession with moribund superstitions, along with that of the evolutionary British folklorists, to be a somewhat gloomy and barren proceeding, little calculated to attract those who are interested in the present as well as the past (1946, 98). He called instead for breaking new ground by documenting all aspects of folk life, using that term in its widest sense, in the hope of enabling us to find out how and why changes in custom and fashion come about, and thereby developing a real science of folklore (1946, 105). Eschewing the evolutionist attention to folklore as meaningless survivals held by the uneducated of primitive societies, he envisioned a grand homegrown project to record the manners and customs, that is, the material as well as social practices, "of people in different walks of life and different parts of the country as they are today …" (1946, 100; emphasis added). Influenced, on the one hand, as a former British soldier by the tumultuous movements of people during the war, often raising awareness of different emergent traditions as they related to social identities in stressful situations, and, on the other hand, by the significance of folklore in the bottom-up sociological approach of the French Annales school that gained prominence after the establishment of a journal with that name in 1929, Raglan, who was born into a noble line (born Fitzroy Richard Somerset in 1885, he inherited the title of 4th Baron Raglan after his father’s death in 1921 and returned to his ancestral home in Monmouthshire) and was active in community affairs, was drawn to the enterprise not just of documenting the full round of ordinary activities in a locality, but also particularly to the goal of uncovering the psychological sources (mentalité) and social significance of tradition in unstable times (see Burguiere 1982; Hunt 1986; James 1964; Willis 1978). The science of folklore he promoted was to explain, in his words, how things happen and how social changes come about (1946, 100).

In his survey of the anthropologies of Europe, Thomas K. Schippers has identified the era ushered in by Raglan of 1950 to 1980 as a transformative time after an earlier period, extending from 1920 to 1945, that was concerned primarily with studying exclusively European and mainly national rural societies (Schippers 1995, 235). The concern in the earlier period was for gathering of empirical data identifying regional and ethnic cultural divisions, and a way to bundle together craft, architectural, oral, and social activities in societies generally tied to the land, for the purposes of mapping and functional or contextual analysis. After the Second World War, according to Schippers,