Community Life and Celebration

The usual connotations surrounding the word folklore, which was coined in England by William Thoms in 1846, involve oral traditions. In the United States, when the Festival of American Folklife (now the Smithsonian Folklife Festival) was first presented on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1967, and when the American Folklife Center was created by an act of Congress in1976, the term folklife was recognized as one that embraced not only oral traditions but also material culture and all the community customs, traditions, and events that make up daily life. Folklore and folklife remain somewhat confusing and elusive terms. But the distinguishing characteristic of all folklife expressions is to be found in their origin within, and connection to, a particular group or community.

In general, folklore begins at home, because for most of us the immediate family constitutes our first folk group and a good deal of knowledge is conveyed within it. All the folklife expressions heretofore discussed (song and music, stories, jokes, games, dance, foodways, and material culture) can be part of family folklore, which is, of course, deeply affected by ethnicity, religion, region, and socioeconomic status. Family folklore, as a special category of experience, is often invisible to its practitioners because it consists largely of the customary practices of daily life, which are sometimes referred to by all of us offhandedly as “just the way we do things.”

Family folklife includes such things as the nicknames given to children, the ways birthdays and holidays are celebrated, the planting and cultivation of a garden, practices governing the serving and eating of meals and assigning and carrying out of household chores, the arrangement of photographs in an album and the uses to which the album is put at family gatherings, and the family reunion itself, in all its agony and ecstasy. Although families may consist of mother, father, and one or more children, along with an extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and miscellaneous in-laws, recent folklore studies have also examined nontraditional family groups, such as single-parent households and gay and lesbian couples. There are parallel traditions to be found in all of these family units.

The folkloric concept of “foodways” comprises all the many traditional activities surrounding the production, procurement, sale, purchase, preparation, and consumption of food. Each food-related activity is itself a rich nexus for folklife study. Foodways often overlap with, for example, religious traditions — such as religious dietary restrictions, the symbolic connotations of particular items of food, or church suppers — and with occupational culture (the work of cowboys, farmers, hunters, fishermen, vintners, and shopkeepers), as well as with festivals and other ritualized events. American Folklife Center field project collections include documentation of wine-making in California’s Santa Clara Valley, ramp dinners and ginseng harvesting in West Virginia, cranberry culture in New Jersey, and oyster roasts in north Florida.

As individual family members venture out into the world, they form relationships with other people and groups who possess traditional knowledge: children in their school, sport, and social organizations; adults in their places of work, worship, and social interaction. Each purposeful and regular gathering has the possibility, to a greater or lesser degree, of developing shared traditions and, thus, becoming a folk group. Therefore, each family member may potentially become a member of, and in part derive his or her identity from, a number of different social, religious, ethnic, regional, and occupational groups and relationships.

Children may be considered as one folk group, and the complex of children’s folklore and games may be approached for study in a number of ways. Play patterns are an integral part of human culture and are universal. Through play, children acquire physical and mental dexterity, as well as social skills. Games may involve ancient customs and beliefs and rituals pertaining to colors, numbers, and words. Songs and games such as “Red Rover,” “Duck, Duck, Goose,” and “London Bridge” have been known and played for generations, folklore passed from one child to another.

For many adults, religious belief and participation in the work of a church or religious organization are of central importance to defining identity. For some, the religious life permeates everything they do and gives meaning to a range of places and activities beyond the confines of their place of worship and the hours of devotional services. Folklorists are interested in religious customs as they are lived and experienced in everyday life, for it is religion that gives cultural significance to a multitude of objects and activities in all societies.

For many of us, the world of work occupies as much of our time as the world of family, and some of us spend more waking hours at the office, studio, or factory than we do at home. Like the home, these work places, with their opportunities for sustained social interaction, create traditions that are shared and passed on to new generations of workers. Initial folkloric interest in work grew out of the Industrial Revolution and the desire to study earlier ways of life and modes of economic production. In the United States, students were particularly attracted to the resource-based trades that established regional and national identities linked to raw materials, such as mining, fishing, building construction, ranching, and logging. Such a list informed the Folklife Center’s Italian-Americans in the West Project, for example, with its examination of occupation in five western states. Center studies of occupation and culture have also been conducted in Paterson, New Jersey, north Florida, and southern West Virginia. Likewise, occupation was a large consideration in many of the collections made during the 1930s New Deal projects. Documentation of farmers, factory workers, fishermen, waitresses, shopkeepers, and many others formed a historical record of everyday work during the Great Depression.

One American Folklife Center project focused attention on grassroots community traditions nationwide. As part of the celebration of the Bicentennial of the Library of Congress in 2000, Librarian James H. Billington suggested a project that came to be known as Local Legacies. The Library invited U.S. senators and representatives to identify “signature” traditions and activities from their states and districts; document them in photographs, sound recordings, and written reports; and send a portion of that documentation to the American Folklife Center for inclusion in the Archive of Folk Culture. The resulting collection, Billington suggested, would provide a snapshot of traditional cultural life in America at the end of the twentieth century.

The American Folklife Center contacted folklorists in every state to solicit their help and participation. Congressional enthusiasm and response far exceeded expectations, with about 90 percent of the Senate and over 70 percent of the House of Representatives nominating projects in their home districts. Festivals, historic sites, civic activities, occupational culture, environmental projects, and artists and craftsmen were nominated and documented. Box after box of materials arrived at the center, with documentation of community barbecues, parades, trail rides, and folk music festivals. The Local Legacies Project Collection consists of more than eight hundred projects that illustrate and showcase community culture in America.

Thus does the work of building the Folk Archive proceed, this “national project with many workers.” Across the United States, a panoply of events and activities bears witness to the endless capacity of the American people to celebrate themselves in creative, ingenious, and fanciful ways. These are the folklife expressions that Americans have themselves designated and documented as their “local legacies” to the future.