Great Article on FOLKLORE

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¨The Basics:

CULTURE: Everything that human beings (and possibly some other species) do that isn’t motivated solely by natural instinct. Sleeping is natural, not cultural, but sleeping using a pillow is cultural. Eating acorns to stave off starvation is natural; eating acorn bread is cultural. Laughing is natural; laughing at a knock-knock joke is cultural. Culture includes tool-making and -using, creative and artistic expression, language development and use, and formulation of beliefs and values. Culture is also a word used to describe groups of individuals who share common cultural traits but who differ in some way(s) from members of other such groups.

TRADITION: Meaningful cultural behavior (or lore) that exhibits continuity in time— often over several generations—and continuity in space (or among the folk, because by “space” we mean the people within a folk group). The adjective traditional is sometimes used synonymously with the adjective folk. For example, we can call “Sleeping Beauty” a traditional narrative or a folk narrative and mean pretty much the same thing.

NARRATIVE: A story of any kind, almost always involving both plot (a sequence of causally and/or logically linked events) and characters (who both enact and react to the plot). Stories usually involve conflict, rising action, a climax, and a resolution of some kind. Different cultures have a differing “sense of story” telling them what is and isn’t appropriately narrative.

ORALITY: A quality of anything that is spoken, chanted, recited, sung, or read aloud rather than written down or read quietly. Most folk or traditional narrative is oral in nature, or was once upon a time. See literature, below, for a consideration of the differences between oral and written literature.

PERFORMANCE: An essential artistic dimension of anything oral, performance refers either to an individual rendition of a traditional narrative (or song, or dance, or drama), which may well also constitute a unique variant of the work being performed. Performance also refers more broadly to all those aesthetic features of such a rendition that cannot be fixed in print. These performative features include tone of voice, dynamics, pacing, interaction with an audience, kinesthetic gestures, and costume. For instance, a folklorist might analyze the performative dimensions of a performance of

“Little Red Riding Hood,” taking note of the storyteller’s adoption of distinct voices and gestures for the different characters, noting the young audience’s gasps of fear at the appropriate moments, and the total length of the telling compared to other performances of the same narrative.

VARIANT: Any version of a folk/traditional narrative that bears a striking resemblance to another version of the same narrative. Variants may result from monogenesis (multiple tellers imitating and/or modifying one initial, original version of a story) or from polygenesis (different tellers independently arriving at the same basic tale type). 

Folklore and its Component Terms:
FOLKLORE: First coined in 1846 by William John Thoms, a British antiquarian. Folklore can be divided into its two component words, folk and lore. Folklore is thus all the lore shared by a particular folk.

THE FOLK, a.k.a. A FOLK GROUP: Any two or more people who share at least one significant cultural thing in common. The things that a folk group shares in common are often traditions, which help to create a shared identity for the group and its members and which also help the group endure over time. Everyone belongs to at least a few folk groups; most people belong to many. Some folk groups are very broad and diverse (all Americans, or even all students at the same school), while some are very exclusive and specific (two best friends). The more cultural factors a folk group shares, the more traditions they are likely to share as well: while we can generalize to a certain extent about Irish Catholics, Irish Catholics who live in the same town, work the same fields, and worship at the same church are far more likely to share lore than, say, a Catholic business executive living in Dublin and a Catholic peat farmer in a small rural village.

THE LORE, a.k.a. TRADITIONAL CULTURE: Lore is traditional behavior or material shared by members of a folk group. Lore includes but is not limited to all of the following:
Traditional narratives (epics, magic tales, legends, jokes, folk drama) Traditional costumes (professional clothing, sports uniforms, hairstyles) Traditional beliefs (religions, superstitions, ethical values)
Traditional non-narrative speech (slang, jargon, nicknames)
Traditional material culture (architecture, folk art of all kinds) Traditional calendar customs (holidays, festivals, birthday parties) Traditional music and dance (folksongs, folk dances)
The most important thing to remember is that lore is traditional—it has continuity over time and through space. If a hairstyle is in fashion for only a short while, it isn’t

traditional. Tradition lasts and has meaning for a particular group of people over the long haul.¨