Folklore 101: An Accessible Introduction to Folklore Studies

By Dr. Jeana Jorgensen

When's the last time you got to pick a folklorist's brain?

 

Did you know memes count as folklore?

 

Or that folklorists assign numbers to fairy tales to keep track of them all?

 

The field of folklore studies is over two centuries old, and it's full of amazing insights about human behavior, creativity, and community. Folklore studies is as interdisciplinary as it gets, squished somewhere between anthropology and linguistics and religious studies and comparative literature and more. It's all about the informal human interactions, the million tiny acts and stories and beliefs and arts that function as social glue even if they seem beneath notice. Do traditional holiday foods have a deeper meaning? Yep. Same with folk music, ballads, proverbs, jokes, urban legends, body art, and a ton more genres covered in this book.

 

Is the whole book as easy to read and irreverent as this description? Yep. This fun, accessible guide to the academic study of folklore packs in a college class's worth of material, from basic concepts and major folklore genres to special topics based on identity, fancy theories, and more.

 

If you've always wanted to take a folklore class, or you're a writer or artist using folklore in your work, or you're just generally interested in the topic, this is the book for you!

 

"This wonderfully insightful book introduces the reader to folklore with warmth and good humor. Students and others interested in folklore will love it!" - Libby Tucker, Distinguished Service Professor of English, Binghamton University and author of Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses

 

"Dr. Jeana Jorgensen knows her stuff and, just as importantly, knows how to communicate it. Folklore 101 is a treasure trove of knowledge, the kind it would take years of college courses to accumulate yourself. If you're curious about academic folklore, this clear, engaging book is where you want to start." – Dr. Sara Cleto, co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr. Jeana Jorgensen
• Release date: Oct 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201980184

Book preview

Basic Folklore Concepts

Tradition & Variation

I foreshadowed

this pretty heavily in the introduction: understanding tradition and variation is key to understanding what folklore is and how to study it. Heck, tradition is included in most definitions of folklore, including my current preferred definition: folklore is informally transmitted traditional culture. In this chapter, I’ll go deeper into what tradition is and what its counterpart variation is, as well as giving you some tools to observe these dynamics in the world around you.

(Not gonna lie, I kinda just want to tell you to read the Variation and Tradition section of chapter 1 of Lynne McNeill’s excellent book Folklore Rules but noooo, I had to go and decide to write my own book on folklore, I brought this on myself so now I have to do the work! But I will quote heavily from McNeill, so enjoy the fangirling!)

With tradition, there tends to be a misconception that the only things that count as traditional have to be, like, centuries old, super quaint, and definitely in the realm of antiques. Folklorist Barre Toelken, instead of using tradition and variation in his scholarship, wrote about conservatism and dynamism, and I think that switching over to conservatism for a second here helps demonstrate the sense in which we’re actually using tradition: something has to be stable, continuous, and have a thread of sameness about it. It doesn’t have to be millennia old or etched in stone to count as traditional, it just has to show some sort of continuity over time and space. You have to be able to identify a thread connecting past to present, whether that past was ten days ago or ten years ago or ten centuries ago.

As with so many facets of folklore, it really does make sense as a cohesive whole. This is what McNeill has to say about it:

Remember, identifying folklore is all about identifying how it travels; if it hasn’t traveled at all, then it’s simply not folklore. In fact, if it hasn’t been shared, it’s simply not ‘folk’ – remember, ‘folk’ implies ‘culture,’ which implies ‘group,’ not a single person. That’s why we so often call folklore ‘traditional’–it gets passed on from person to person, leaving multiple versions in its wake. (12)

How much do I love this quote? If it were shorter, I’d consider getting it tattooed on me somewhere. I love that it highlights the manner in which folklore is transmitted, essentially peer-to-peer if not face-to-face, and the ways in which it becomes tied up in group identity. Folklore is what people do in groups when they’re hanging out, regardless of whether they’re thinking of it explicitly in those terms (I pretty much never hear groups of people being like We’re gonna go do some Folklore now unless they’re going to listen to the new Taylor Swift album of that title).

I also love that the McNeill excerpt focuses on how folklore travels, leaving multiple versions in its wake. McNeill and I both studied under Alan Dundes, and he was famous for (among other things) his criterion for figuring out whether some fascinating new thing you just encountered is folklore or not. The phrase he used is multiple existence and variation, which is a slightly different riff on tradition and variation, as I’ll explain, using a real-world example, after talking about variation some.

I do want to note that tradition, while folklorists are super drawn to it, is not inherently a force for good. Some customs that are traditional harm people, and some scholarly conceptions of tradition can be used to keep marginalized people stuck on the margins. As my colleague Rachel González-Martin notes: Tradition is a racialized tool. The academic concept of tradition is an organizational device that undervalues racialized communities in our contemporary Western, White society, where Whiteness is synonymous with ‘unmarked’ and tradition is part of a validation of a community’s capacity to historicize its existence in place and time (36). In other words, when white/USAmerican (to use González-Martin’s term) scholars wield the term tradition it can almost be a way of putting other groups down, saying oh, isn’t that quaint and charming. But González-Martin also identifies why tradition is so powerful: Tradition is a set of practices that hold both literal and symbolic values (36). When we tune in to what a society deems traditional, we’re seeing what the people in that society have decided to delineate, with a big neon arrow, as these things hold value to us. And that is pretty darn useful to us as students of culture.

Next, we tackle variation (or as Barre Toelken calls it, dynamism). Variation can occur at any level of folklore: in the phrasing if it’s a verbal genre, in the plot if it’s a narrative genre, switching out characters for one another in narrative genres, and so on. Basically, variation means that things aren’t set in stone when folklore is on the table, which is quite different from when you’re discussing other realms of culture. McNeill writes about this too, but you might imagine folkloric variation as being like a game of telephone, where the original message warps into bizarre variants by the time it makes its way around the circle. However, in folklore, there is no original, or if there once was, it’s been lost to the sands of time, so it’s practically useless to even think in those terms, unless you have a time machine I guess.

In contrast, other modes of culture have really different relationships to variation. Elite culture in the Western world – fancy things for upper-class people – might include stuff like operas, ballets, and classical music, where those creative texts stay essentially the same but are reinterpreted anew by performers. There’s not supposed to be a lot of variation except in the artistic execution, and straying from the source texts without warning is frowned upon. The audience, incidentally, is also a small sector of society: rich, upper-class people, and those that have been married or socialized into those ranks. Pop culture and mass media, on the other hand, are intended for pretty much everyone: newspapers, TV shows, movies, novels, graphic novels, and so on. Their intended audience is quite wide, but their level of variation is still on the small side. Once you’ve printed a newspaper, the articles might be reprinted but there’s no reason to change up the phrasing unless a correction needs to be issued. Once a film is cut and released, it will be shown exactly the same way in every movie theater and on every streaming service (unless a special director’s cut edition comes out too). The gatekeeping is similarly high in elite culture and mass culture: small numbers of (ostensibly talented) people produce and perform the texts for consumption.

Cultural material travels between these modes, too. Certain ballet and theater texts are based on folklore (King Lear is based on a near-incestuous Cinderella variant), while folklore sometimes parodies the fine arts. Fanfiction is a giant arena in its own right, with pop culture characters being narrated in highly democratized, folkloric ways. Many fairy tales started in the realm of folklore and oral tradition only to be snapped up by Disney and brought into the realm of pop culture as films, toys, costumes, and storybook spin-offs. But while you can’t really copyright folklore because it always exists in multiple versions, Disney has done, er, interesting things with copyright law, and as a result, certain fairy-tale images are off the table for anyone not employed by them.

The arrival of the internet, of course, has changed some of this. Where you used to need big money and a crew to make a movie, now you can film something on a smartphone and broadcast it on YouTube. Anyone can host a podcast these days. So the types of gatekeeping in production and transmission have definitely shifted. Still, it remains a pretty drastic difference between intentionally making a podcast or YouTube video – of which only one version exists at a time, unless you are constantly going back and re-editing your stuff, ugh, why – and telling a joke that is retold in slightly different ways every time and is 100% accessible to anyone who speaks that language.

Thus, folklore is inherently democratic in ways that other forms of culture just…aren’t. This doesn’t mean that folklore is inherently good, though. As the chapters on jokes and legends reveal, folklore isn’t just rainbows and unicorns, it’s also dead babies and nasty stereotypes and slut shaming. So, just like my little rant in the introduction about how labeling something folklore doesn’t have any bearing on its truth value or lack thereof, here’s a mini rant about how labeling something folklore does mean that it’s democratically transmitted, as in, it’s accessible to most anyone in that folk group, but we can’t get sucked into a democratic = good association. Sometimes folklore promotes stereotypes that should die in a fire, which is one reason I discarded the idea of using a joke in this chapter to illustrate variation, because the joke managed to be both transphobic and misogynist but it also kinda critiques misogyny depending on the version you’re working with (multiple existence and variation at work!) and…I decided it wasn’t worth it.

So, the go-to example for this chapter, to show tradition and variation as well as the related concept of multiple existence and variation, is going to be Biden memes instead. Really, though, you could find any highly formulaic joke – knock-knock jokes or Why did the chicken cross the road? – and see what I’m talking about, that folklore simultaneously stays the same and is different or made anew in each telling.

Memes exemplify folklore well for a variety of reasons, though they may not be the first thing people think of when they think of folklore. First, the tradition element of memes is not very old, which can throw people off if their mental definition of folklore includes the tag of quaint old stuff (again, totally unnecessary to define folklore that way). Additionally, it’s not uncommon for people to think of technology and folklore as being diametrically opposed to one another; where one flourishes, the other doesn’t yet exist, or perhaps is defeated. This, too, is overly simplistic. While evolving technology may directly impact folk technologies such as spinning, weaving, knitting, and quilting, leading those forms of folklore to shapeshift or become more specialized or rare, folklore is always more about the informal nature of its transmission than about the involvement of technology in its landscape.

Memes, or image macros, count as folklore because they are informally transmitted traditional culture. Anyone with a device connected to the internet can make and transmit them, hence fulfilling the informally transmitted part of the folklore definition. And what makes them traditional is that they build upon one another, upon shared understandings of the world, drawing together both internet and face-to-face ways that people communicate and make meaning. Other types of folklore also thrive on the internet, such as chain letters (which existed in the analog world prior to the digital world), superstitions, and storytelling. My colleagues engaged in the study of internet folklore analyze everything from Slender Man to anti-vaccine online groups to sick humor around sports scandals (check out my colleague Trevor Blank for this last one in particular).

Take a category of memes, and one can demonstrate the existence of both tradition and variation. The same picture of Morpheus from the film The Matrix has become the traditional backdrop for a meme starting with the words What if I told you… and then the remainder of the phrase is what varies, providing endless riffs on whatever the maker wishes to comment on in the meme.

Further, using the idea of multiple existence and variation backs up the interpretation of memes as being folklore. Many memes come in cycles, or groupings of similar topics or social commentaries on the same event. If I came across a single meme using an image that no one else had ever used before, that commented on a topic that no other meme was about, I am seeing the existence of a singular text, not multiple existence. I’d probably assume that meme was someone’s attempt to start a trend, and it didn’t resonate with other people, so it didn’t take off. One of the main ways of thinking about tradition, as noted above in McNeill’s work, is that it’s shared and passed on, between and among groups. If there’s no passed-on-ness to an item on the internet, it’s probably not of interest to folklorists.

So if you ever encounter something you think is cool, and you’re wondering if it’s folklore, aim to document multiple existence and variation. Can you find more than one example of the thing? And then, do the examples show some differences among them? When I lecture on fairy tales, one of the classic examples is a beloved tale like Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood: there are hundreds or more versions of these tales circulating (multiple existence), and they often have tons of little differences from one another, like where in the Grimms’ Cinderella she’s given magic dresses to go to the ball by the birds who live in the tree growing from her mother’s grave, whereas in Perrault’s Cinderella the fairy godmother gives her everything (variation).

The last time I actively decided to document some folklore for research purposes, I played the multiple existence + variation game in my head with the Biden memes that arose during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Days after the election, I noticed the memes popping up on Twitter and Facebook, showing (former) Vice President Biden booby-trapping the White House in true Home Alone style in order to make incoming President Trump’s stay short and miserable. I immediately verified multiple existence and variation because there were dozens and then hundreds of these memes (multiple existence), and they all tackled different facets of Biden’s tricksy plans (variation). They were all clearly showing more or less the same thing, Biden playing tricks on Trump (tradition), while riffing on lots of different potential scenarios, from Biden changing the TV language to Spanish to Biden putting shrimp shells in the curtain rods (variation).

As I collected these memes, having established through multiple existence and variation that they weren’t just an isolated phenomenon of little interest to folklorists, I also began to look for common themes and potential meanings and functions. I gave a few lectures on the subject, to my college students and to colleagues, in order to feel out my interpretations. I teamed up with my friend Linda Lee to coauthor a book chapter on the topic, where we advanced the rather specific hypothesis that Biden acts as a boundary-crossing trickster in these memes to relay not only humor but also political discontent. It was a fun project to work on…and it was possible because, from the very beginning, I was attuned to tradition and