CHAPTER 1

What Is Folklore?

So, you're in a folklore class. Good for you—whatevereducational requirement this course is fulfilling for you, I guaranteeyou've picked the best possible way to fulfill it. Perhaps you're in anIntro to Folklore course, or maybe you're in a special-topics course:something like Folklore and Literature, Folklore and Film, Folkloreand the Internet, or Children's Folklore. No matter what course itis (and hey—maybe you're not taking a folklore class at all. Maybeyou're not even a student, in which case, doubly good for you forreading this book when you don't have to!), you're going to haveto start at the beginning. Unlike in other fields, when it comes tofolklore studies, the beginning can sometimes be the most confusingplace to start.

What is folklore? You'd think this would be an easy question toanswer. "Folklore" doesn't seem like a very complicated idea, doesit? I mean, it's not a rare or unfamiliar word—we use it fairly oftenin daily life. So if someone asked you what folklore is, you couldprobably give them an answer, right? Well ... maybe not. Give it atry and see how it goes. Lots of people answer this question by givinga few examples of stuff they think is folklore. They'll say somethinglike, "Oh, you know, folklore is old stories and songs fromyour parents and grandparents" or "Folklore is stuff like superstitionsand old wives' tales" or "It's like unicorns and sea shanties andquilting—stuff like that."

As you will learn shortly, while these common perceptionsof folklore aren't 100 percent wrong, they're certainly not 100percent right, either. One of the first things that students of folklorediscover is that the word folklore encompasses far more thanthey ever thought it did. It brings together the expected folktales,myths, and legends, and yet also includes jump-rope rhymes,pranks, jokes, graffiti, songs, emoticons, gestures ... basicallya ton of stuff that often leads to the popular first-year-folklore-studentmistake of "I get it now—folklore is everything!" This,sadly, is not true. You'll see by the end of this book that whilefolklore can likely be connected to almost everything, everythingis not, in fact, folklore.

Folklorists have spent a fairly ridiculous amount of time tryingto succinctly define folklore ever since the word was coined in18461 by a guy named William Thoms. Thoms, interestingly, useda pseudonym (he chose Ambrose Merton, for some reason) whenhe proposed the term and revealed himself as the actual source ofthe term only once he'd determined that people were generallyon board with it. He proposed it as "a good Saxon compound" infavor of the then current term popular antiquities. People generallyaccepted it, and voila!—a whole field of study was born.

You might be wondering at this point why it has been so hardfor folklorists to define this basic Saxon compound. Well, you try toexplain what a creation myth, a jump-rope rhyme, a Fourth of JulyBBQ, and some bathroom graffiti have in common, and you'll findit's not a terribly easy task, either. Rest assured, though: the field offolklore studies does have a few basic rules that can help to simplifythings. In the next few sections, we're going to uncover these basicconcepts from within the murky depths of academia and put themto work to answer the question at hand: "What is folklore?"

FOLK AND LORE

To start with, we've got a compound word here—folk-lore—andany decent definition will have to account for both parts. We'llstart with "folk." In order to begin to understand what "folk"means, we first need to back up a bit and understand what "culture"is. Why, you ask? Because I said so. Bear with me—it will becomeclear in a moment.

As it turns out, in terms of difficulty of definition, "culture"is frustratingly right up there with "folklore." A common use ofthe word culture is to think of someone as being "cultured," as in"enlightened" or "refined"—snooty people attending the opera infur coats and such—but folklorists (and anthropologists) use theterm a bit differently. There have been whole books written on thedefinition of culture, but since this guide is meant to be short andstraightforward, I'm just going to give you one of the most usefulones, created by an anthropologist named Ward Goodenough (andyes, you can insert a pun about it being a "good enough" definitionhere). He tells us: "A society's culture is whatever it is one hasto know or believe in order to act in a manner acceptable to itsmembers."

This definition tells us several things right off the bat. First,that culture is something that a society, or a group of people, possesses.Second, that culture isn't really a tangible object, but moreof a body of knowledge. "Acting in a manner that's acceptable" toa group of people encompasses a ton of information: you have toknow official things, like on which side of the road to drive, whatcurrency you use to pay for stuff, where you can and cannot benaked—all the things that would get you arrested if you did themwrong. But there's a more subtle or informal level to "acceptable"behavior, too—stuff that may not get you arrested if you do itwrong, but that may earn you some weird looks and cause peopleto cross the street to get away from you.

For example, if you just openly picked your nose while yourboss was talking to you, or if you greeted your date's parents by passionatelykissing them, or if you sat down at a table in McDonald'sand tried to flag down a server to come and take your order—theseare all things that our informal culture tells us are incorrect ways toact. There's no official big book about how or how not to do thesethings; we learn the right way to do them simply by observation,by spending time in our society, and often these expectations are soingrained in us that we don't notice them until we go somewherewhere people do them differently.

There's no official regulation or documentation of how (and hownot) to greet strangers—we learn it by observation and experience.Fast-food restaurants don't print manuals about how and where toorder—we learn it informally, by watching our friends or parentsgo through the line ahead of us when we're kids. It's interesting tonote...