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Applications of the term folk have
become problematic. On the face of it, the word has a simple definition--i.e.,
"the common people, especially those of rural areas." But, like all
class distinctions, "folk" carries with it the complications of
historical context and point of view. Such a designation formerly implied a high
degree of cultural insularity, but mass culture has since penetrated virtually
every social and geographic area of the industrial world. Romantic and often
patronizing views of folk life have further distorted popular perceptions. A
relative and subjective concept like "folk," while academically
useful, resists a consensus of interpretation. Anthropologists and folklorists
have classified as "folk
art" a broad range of materials, from the arts of the so-called
primitive or nonliterate peoples to those of the nonelite within literate
cultures, the latter variously known as folk, visionary, outsider, or naive. The
folk art rubric has also been extended to include all manner of traditional or
nostalgic artistic productions, even the self-consciously quaint.
For the purposes of this article, the
folk arts may be considered to encompass the traditional, typically anonymous
arts produced by members of a nonruling, relatively nonaffluent, often rural and
uneducated stratum of industrial society. As expressions of community life, the
folk arts are distinguished from the academic or self-conscious or cosmopolitan
expressions that constitute the fine arts and decorative arts of the elite. As
nonrepresentative of their respective societies as a whole, they are
distinguished from the arts of nonliterate cultures. They are also to be
differentiated from the so-called popular arts, which appeal to a mass audience
and typically depend upon the mass media for their dissemination.
While in popular usage the term folklore
refers almost exclusively to a single aspect of folk art, the oral literary
tradition, scholars use it to embrace all of the artistic genres of folk
culture. In the context of this article the terms folklore and folk art are
interchangeable. The first part of this discussion treats folklore as an
academic field, viewed from humanistic, anthropological, and psychological
perspectives. The functions of folklore and the role of the folk artist, as
interpreted from these viewpoints, are also examined. The remainder of the
article considers the origins, formal characteristics, and distribution of the
various genres of folk art: oral literature, music, dance, and the products of
material culture (i.e., the visual
arts).
(Ed.)
2 Folklore
as an academic discipline
No field of learning is perhaps more
misunderstood than folklore. The public, and many academics, do not know that
folklore is an intellectual subject with its own substantial, worldwide body of
scholarship. Part of the confusion lies in the use of the word folklore to
signify both the content and the study of traditional materials. Further
misunderstanding results from the varying senses of folklore in different
countries. In much of South America and in some European nations, folklore
generally applies to public performances of song, dance, and festival, and in
scholarly usage the term refers to the study of peasant culture. In the United
States, the word folklore often conjures up an image of folksingers or
old-timers spinning yarns of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed, who are largely
contrived. The German term Folklorismus and
the English term fakelore have been
coined to distinguish between the genuine and the synthetic.
Serious students of folklore by no means
agree on the boundaries of their discipline but they tend to follow one of three
prevailing perspectives.
The humanistic folklorist sees the
materials of folklore as "oral literature" and the folk as its
artistic performers. He emphasizes the creative role of the narrator or bard,
seeks information on his biography and personality, closely observes his
interaction with the audience, and analyzes his total repertoire much as a
literary critic assesses the achievement of the novelist, poet, or dramatist.
Usually the older exponents of this approach have entered folklore from
departments of modern language and literature or music or classics. A case in
point is Albert Lord,
professor of Slavic literature at Harvard University, whose folklore interests
developed from a concern with the south Slavic oral epic, still sung by bards in
Yugoslavia. Lord came to the conclusion that each epic singer constructed his
narrative song by improvising around a stock of fixed images, epithets, and
conventional expressions, which he alone kept firmly in mind. This
"oral-formulaic" theory Lord then applied to the Homeric epics, which
are now known only in their written forms but which he conjectured had been
orally composed in the same manner as the contemporary Slavic epic songs. The
interest in the human carrier of tradition, in his world-view and belief system,
his cultural inheritance and acculturative experiences, distinguishes this
species of folklorist. (see also humanism,
primitive culture, Ancient
Greek literature)
The anthropological folklorist examines
the materials of folklore using the hypotheses of the social sciences. He looks
for cultural norms and values and predictable laws of behaviour that form a
consistent pattern in the nonliterate society he has closely observed. Folklore
to him is an aesthetic product of this society, mirroring its values and
offering a projective screen that illuminates its fantasies. Hence the
folkloristic anthropologist frequently reports a one-to-one correlation between
the value system and the tale repertoire of a given culture, whereas the
humanistic folklorist promptly points out that the same tales are found in many
parts of the globe and so can scarcely be said to reflect the ethos of a
particular people, even when they have been strongly localized.
At different periods folklore and
anthropology have enjoyed an intimate relation in England and America. The
father of anthropology in England, E.B.
Tylor (1832-1917), drew heavily upon the materials of folklore in his two
great works, Primitive Culture (1871) and Researches
into the Early History of Mankind (1865), which in turn contributed to the
growth of a school of so-called anthropological folklorists. The leader of this
school, Andrew Lang
(1844-1912), a versatile man of letters, in many clever essays and books
elaborated a theory of "survivals" based on Tylor's hypothesis that
from the beliefs and customs held by peasants
and contemporary savages the folklorist could reconstruct the ideas of
prehistoric man. In the United States, Franz
Boas (1858-1942), the father of American anthropology, influenced many
doctoral students, later eminent in their own right, to pay attention to
folklore in their fieldwork. Boas himself considered that tribal traditions
preserved an ethnological record of older culture traits and should be consulted
in lieu of written documents. His disciple and successor as editor of the Journal
of American Folklore, Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), pointed out that the tribal
mythology depicted violations of taboos, such as the hero-trickster sleeping
with his mother-in-law, which would never be tolerated in real life. Another
student of Boas, Melville J.
Herskovits (1895-1963), broke with the Boasian concentration on North
American tribes to explore African cultures but retained the same emphasis on
folklore and inculcated this emphasis in his own students.
American folklore-minded anthropologists
all experienced difficulty in employing the term folklore within a culture
almost wholly oral and traditional and resorted to various substitutes. William
Bascom, a student of Herskovits, suggested the term verbal art to denote
the oral aesthetic traditions of tale, proverb, song, and riddle in the culture,
leaving out the supernatural-belief system and the plastic arts, which a
humanistic folklorist includes in his concept. Bascom also clarified the
functional uses of folklore in nonliterate societies, in accord with the
anthropologists' stress on the social mechanisms that enable a society to
perform its business. His book, Ifa
Divination (1969), demonstrates how Yoruba
diviners have recourse to the tribal repertoire of traditional narratives in
arriving at their analyses of individual problems. The beans they throw on the
Ifa board fall in a series of complex patterns that the diviners key to
folktales, whose contents are then applied to the particular situation in hand.
English and American anthropologists of the 1960s have in the main moved away
from the soft, folkloric parts of culture to the hard, sociological data of
kinship organization and political structures. (see also divination)
The psychological-psychoanalytic
folklorist views the materials of folklore neither aesthetically nor
functionally but behaviouristically. Myths, dreams, jokes, and fairy
tales are taken to express hidden layers of unconscious
wishes and fears. Sigmund Freud
drew extensively upon folk sources in such works as The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), and Totem
and Taboo (1913). In his view, and that of many writers on folklore
influenced by him, folklore texts are to be interpreted symbolically in terms of
sexual imagery and the Oedipus
complex. In "Jack and the Beanstalk," the stalk is construed as
a phallic symbol and Jack's chopping it down signifies a masturbation fantasy.
"Little Red Riding Hood" tells a tale of a young virgin, identified by
the red cap, a menstrual symbol, who wanders from the straight and narrow path,
to be devoured (seduced) by the wolf in disguise as the grandmother, an Oedipal
figure. In the modern college legend "The Hook," the torment suffered
by a coed is multilayered: she narrowly averts assault from an escaped lunatic,
one of whose arms has been replaced with a metal hook; the psychological
interpretation explains the hook as the phallus and the episode as the coed's
fear of the sexual act. When C.G.
Jung broke with his mentor Freud and substituted the symbolism of social
unconsciousness for the symbolism of sexual drives, he still retained his deep
interest in myths, dreams, and tales as psychoanalytic
media, and the Jung Institute in Zürich continues to offer courses on the
uses of folklore in psychology. (see also oneiromancy)
Such a work as The Trickster, edited by the American anthropologist Paul
Radin, with commentaries by the mythologist Károly Kerényi
and by Jung, offers within a single volume three psychoanalytical
interpretations of the Winnebago cycle of trickster tales. Kerényi,
although he was a collaborator of Jung, takes a Freudian position and sees the
trickster as a phallic figure, the spirit of disorder. Jung finds
unconsciousness as the chief and alarming characteristic of the trickster, whom
he considers the forerunner of the Saviour. Radin synthesizes both Freudian and
Jungian analyses in his conception of the trickster as evolving from a
psychically unaware individual to a socially developed being, reinterpreted by
each new generation as god, hero, or buffoon. The most committed Freudian
folklorist of the 1960s was Gershon Legman, who was Hungarian by birth but
resided in the United States and France. In The
Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968), Legman properly gives attention to the
most current folktale genre of modern society but looks beneath the seemingly
obvious motivations of dirty jokes to violate sexual and anal taboos and imputes
to them such latent impulses as male castration fears, female revulsion at the
sexual act, and homosexual drives.
The three perspectives of folklore are
not mutually exclusive. Anthropologists may at times employ an essentially
humanistic approach, as Daniel J. Crowley has done in his detailed ethnography
of the styles and repertoires of Bahamian narrators, I Could Talk Old-Story Good (1966). They also have shown sympathy
for the psychological-psychoanalytical node. A case in point is the study of Water-Witching,
U.S.A. (1959), by anthropologist Evon Vogt in collaboration with the
psychologist Ray Hyman, who explained the widespread phenomenon whereby
diviners, called dowsers, located underground water with a forked branch as an
anxiety-releasing mechanism for depressed farmers. Younger folklorists of the
1960s trained as humanists have shown an increasing orientation toward
social-science methods of model building and statistical techniques.
When scholars and other intellectuals
began to recognize early in the 19th century the presence in their midst of a
vast floating body of folk traditions and practices, they promptly began to
speculate on its origins. When in 1812-14 the German philologist Jacob Grimm
(1785-1863), together with his brother Wilhelm (1786-1859), published the first
volume of the Kinder und Hausmärchen (customarily
translated as Grimms'
Fairy Tales), thus initiating the science of folklore, he
connected his collecting of village tales to an elaborate mythological system of
origins, outlined in his Deutsche Mythologie. This influential work was first issued in 1835,
and its fourth edition was translated into English (3 volumes, 1883-88) under
the title Teutonic Mythology. A German
nationalist, Grimm postulated a highly developed religious pantheon of pre-Roman
times suppressed by the medieval church and surviving only in broken fragments
of peasant beliefs and stories. The Märchen,
or tales, were the detritus of the old myths. (see also Germanic
religion and mythology)
In the mid-19th century, following the
discovery of Sanskrit as the ancient classical language of India and the parent
of European tongues, a pan-Aryan theory of origins developed. In 1856 Max
Müller, a German-born scholar who went to London to translate from
the Sanskrit the Sacred Books of the East and
stayed on at Oxford University, published a long essay on "Comparative
Mythology," introducing the new theory. Through a process he called
"disease of language," Müller conjectured that myths arose from
forgetfulness of the original names of deities, transferring to them
metaphorical qualities suggested by the names. Thus Dyâus,
the sky deity of old India, would be thought of and narrated about as the sky,
or by association, heavens, clouds, storms, and winds. The Greek myths sprang
from the Indic--Zeus was the linguistic counterpart of Dyâus--and could be
explained on the same grounds. Although Müller applied his theory only to
the advanced Indo-European Aryan civilizations, he did point to similar
myth-making among primitive peoples. Some of his followers, notably George W.
Cox, carried the school of solar mythology to extreme limits and explained all
folk narratives, epics, and ballads as originating in early man's poetic
rendering of the conflict between the sun and the night. (see also Sanskrit
language, Indian literature,
Hinduism)
Tylor added a new conception of the
origins of folklore without challenging Müller's solar mythology but by
pushing the starting point back beyond the Aryans to prehistoric man. Looking at
the universe animistically, primitive man endowed the elements, the animals,
the plants, and the rocks with
personalities and souls. Such beliefs survived into modern civilization among
the unlettered lower classes and formed a crust of folklore. The strongest
challenge to Tylor's evolutionary theory of culture and
"devolutionary" theory of folklore (in the phrase of Alan Dundes)
first emerged in a hypothesis advanced by the German scholar Theodor
Benfey in his introduction to the Indian story collection Panchatantra(1859). Benfey claimed that India, the seat of an ancient high civilization
that had spread to Europe, was the home of the master tales subsequently found
in the Grimms' collection. Along with language and mythology, these wonder tales
had diffused from India to Europe in ancient times and again in historic times
along well-traveled trade routes. Benfey's arguments persuaded other
folklorists, notably Emmanuel Cosquin in France and William Alexander Clouston
in Scotland, who added to his evidence of story migration from India eastward.
In the past century, the primacy of ancient India as the fountain of world
folklore has gradually been whittled away by the claims of other dispersal
points, such as Egypt and Greece, and by the growing realization that no
sweeping generalization could account for folklore origins. According to the
Finnish folklorists, whose historical-geographical method attracted most
scholars in the first half of the 20th century, the life history of each complex
tale and ballad requires separate investigation. After exhaustively comparing
the traits of all the assembled variants of a given tale type, the Finns
(specifically Kaarle and Julius Krohn and Antti Aarne) believed they could
establish its original form and approximate place and period of genesis. The
subscribers to this theory accepted the premise that an anonymous composer had
created every substantial folklore item at one point in time, much as a novelist
produces a novel.
Various other origin theories have
gained attention. The school of Cambridge University anthropologists, theorizing
on the great comparative study by Sir James George Frazer, The
Golden Bough(1st
ed., 1890), converged on a central idea of myth-ritual origins of all folklore.
In their view, a mythic narrative accompanied and explained a sacrificial
fertility ritual among the heathens. In the course of time the myth becomes
separated from the rite and floats independently in oral tradition, to splinter
in turn into magic tales, popular ballads,
nursery rhymes, and other folklore genres. Psychological folklorists ascribe the
source of many folk narratives to dreams; the Hungarian Geza Roheim considers
that dreams, precipitated by full bladders, engendered the widespread flood
myth. Ballad scholars, such as Francis Gummere in Old
English Ballads (1894) and other works, attributed the composition of
ballads not to any single bard but to the joint efforts of a singing, dancing
throng.
Origins by social classes have also
formed the basis for widely held theories. One thesis, particularly identified
with the German Hans Naumann and his term gesunkenes
Kulturgut (literally, "downsinking cultural value"), contends that
folklore originates with the aristocratic upper class, whose court poetry,
mimes, bardic recitals, and pageants filter down in debased form to the
peasantry. Russian and east
European folklorists have sharply challenged this idea since the 1930s and
substituted their own concept that folklore arises from the people, the folk, in
expression of protest and outrage against the exploiting nobles and landowners.
Hence in Russia folk bards and storytellers are honoured along with novelists
and poets. In "A Theory for American Folklore" (1959), Richard M.
Dorson has argued for a distinction between Old World and New World folklore
origins. The folk traditions of North and South America combine the imported
lore of the conquerors, the aboriginal lore of Indian tribes, and the lore
arising since the colonizing period as a result of New World history and
geography.
The elusive materials of folklore are
best defined through the formal genres into which they fall. Genre definition
has its own pitfalls, since attempts at neat categories invariably slice off
related forms; however, folklorists do agree on certain broad kinds of
traditions. These may be divided into oral literature, custom and festival, and
material culture.
The genres of oral literature cover
spoken and sung expression. They may be further divided into the two large
groupings of folk narrative and folk song, and such other smaller genres as
proverbs, riddles, and beliefs or superstitions. Folk
narrative is an umbrella for a wide range of oral prose traditions. Among
them can be mentioned the myth, a
semisacred adventure of a god or demigod set in the remote past; the Märchen
or fairy tale (also wonder tale
or magic tale and sometimes just folktale
or tale), a pan-European popular fiction with aristocratic characters,
magical episodes, and a symmetrical structure; the legend, a believed report often told conversationally and
allusively; the saga, a personal,
family, or local chronicle of marvellous oral history; the romance, a lengthy, adventure-filled narration with realistic
characters; the noodle or numskull
tale, relating the comical stupidities of a foolish person or a village of
fools; the jest or joke, a short
humorous fiction, often obscene and usually climaxed with a punch line; the anecdote,
a brief traditional incident concerning a laughable action or saying of a
historical personality; the animal tale, characterized by talking animals with human traits; the cante-fable,
a story containing songs or rhymes; and still other forms. Folk song, too,
embraces myriad species. An important aspect of all folk songs is their
association of text with tune, requiring the folklorist to trace the melodic as
well as the textual history. A major division separates the ballad,
which embodies a narrative, and the lyric,
which expresses emotion, although, like Märchen
and legend, the two basic forms often coalesce. The ballad can be further
subdivided into the Child ballad, named
for Francis James Child, who assembled 305 basic types of the English and
Scottish traditional ballad (1882-98); the broadside
ballad, a later development of the 16th and 17th centuries when
balladmongers wrote up sensational events on broadsheets or broadsides and
hawked them in the streets; and European and
American ballads, which have evolved
from local events. Other folk song genres range from the Russian bylina,
or epic songs of a medieval hero, to the lullaby,
used to sing a child to sleep.
Still another category of oral
literature comprises folk speech, as
distinct from formal or standard speech, and various traditional kinds of
expressive utterances. Prominent among them are the proverb
or folk saying, embodying wisdom in pithy phrases; the riddle, an enigmatic question paired with a deceptive answer; the tongue
twister, a nonsense sentence difficult to pronounce because of its string of
assonances; the toast, a convivial
expression voiced as a drinking salutation; along with other forms involving a
special use of language. Beliefs or superstitions
are sometimes expressed as wise sayings, although they may also appear in tales
and in customs.
At the opposite pole from oral
literature in the spectrum of folklore lies material culture or folk life, terms
used to denote the physical objects produced in traditional ways. Material
culture thus embraces folk architecture, folk arts, and folk crafts. Under these
headings can be placed the construction of houses, the design and decoration of
buildings and utensils, and the performance of home industries, according to
traditional styles and methods. The shape of fences, the making of sorghum
molasses, and the sewing of quilts all fall under material culture.
Between oral and physical folklore there
is a large middle ground filled by custom, ritual, festival,
children's games (believed to be versions of adult rituals), folk drama, play
parties, rites of passage, folk dances, and equivalent genres involving action,
performance, and paraphernalia. To the verbal and tangible elements are added
group behavioral traits.
The functions of these three genres vary
for individuals and societies, but generally it may be said that material
culture fills economic and aesthetic functions, that oral literature fills
didactic, recreational, and educational functions, and that custom and festival
function to provide psychic reassurance against external dangers. Rites placate
gods and demons, tales and songs entertain and instruct, and home-baked bread on
a hand-carved table fills the stomach while pleasing the eye.
Oral literature, like written literature
but even more pronouncedly, satisfies the desires of mortals to transcend their
mundane world. In the myths the heroes visit the otherworld; in the legends
ordinary folk are taken to fairyland; and in the Märchen the youngest son or daughter of a peasant family makes
a royal marriage. Gold, treasure, and wealth are prominent in narrative
folklore. Jason and the Argonauts in Greek myth set out for the Golden Fleece;
in fairy tales a magic goose lays golden eggs; and in real life, treasure
seekers dig for the buried booty of pirates and outlaws. The Irish tradition of
"Seán Palmer's Voyage to America with the Fairies" (in Folktales of Ireland by Sean O'Sullivan), told as an actual
experience befalling Seán Palmer of County Kerry, combines the
traditional theme of fairies transporting mortals to distant cities with a wish
fulfillment fantasy. Seán believes the fairies take him by boat overnight
to the United States, where he visits relatives in New York and Boston and is
given money, new clothes, and tobacco. Many Irishmen have relatives in the U.S.
whom they consider rich and long to visit.
Another way in which folklore lifts man
above his narrow confines is in the breaking of powerful social taboos.
What man can never do in actuality without incurring severe punishment the
trickster in black American
narratives, for example, does with impunity, such as John the slave slapping the
face of his white mistress. Modern jokes with their heavy emphasis on
genital-anal humour similarly arouse merriment by flouting taboos.
Mythic narratives and explanatory
episodes in other kinds of folktales answer man's perennial questions: How did
the world begin? Who created man, the animals, and the plants? The book of
Genesis in the Bible gives two versions of a creation
myth with worldwide analogies. Myths of origin are always ethnocentric;
they explain the creation, by supernatural powers, of the people possessing the
myth, a chosen people. The hostile, formidable, mysterious universe assumes a
familiar outline through the personification of a creator and his adversary and
of associated deities and demons with their own spheres of influence. Tribal
peoples need their myths to safeguard their identity. An Ojibwa
Indian in northern Michigan asked a researcher on their first meeting, "Do
they have thunderstorms in South America?" On receiving an affirmative
answer the Ojibwa turned morose and taciturn and refused to speak further. He
had wished reassurance that thunderstorms existed only in the neighbourhood of
Lake Michigan, since the Ojibwa protective deities were thunder spirits. Later,
when mollified, he related a version of the creation myth, synthesized with the
flood myth. The culture hero-trickster figure, Winabijou, flees from the
underneath serpents, who send flood waters after him. He takes refuge atop a
pine tree and barely keeps his head above the water that covers the earth. Water
animals swim to him, and he sends them down to the bottom; the muskrat comes up
with mud in its paws, with which Winabijou makes a little island. Each day the
island gets bigger, and Winabijou sends the fox along the shore to circle it and
report back. Eventually the island grows to the size of the present earth.
"And you can see a fox trotting along the shore today," the narrator
concluded. "The shore gets bigger too. Sand multiplies. When I first came
here the beach on the cove was only half as big as it is now." The myth
satisfactorily accounts for his universe. (see also American
Indian literature)
Just as myths are generated to explain
the physical world and its inhabitants, so does folklore at large provide
support for the institutions and behaviour patterns of a culture. In nonliterate
societies the central events of human life--birth, attainment of manhood,
marriage, and death--are invested with elaborate ceremonials by which the social
organism marks the mortal's progress and final exit to the afterlife. In modern
society the quasi-religious character of these passage
rites, as Arnold van Gennep has termed them, can be observed in the
rituals of baptism, confirmation or graduation, weddings, and funerals, which
are sometimes secular, sometimes ecclesiastical, and sometimes a mixture of
both. In contrast to supernatural beings, who acquire anthropomorphic
personalities and walk the earth (like Winabijou, or Christ and St. Peter),
historical heroes acquire supernatural attributes and move heavenward. The
illustrious secular heroes and heroines--like Joan of Arc, Confucius, Peter the
Great, Julius Caesar, King Alfred, and George Washington--become national
symbols, consecrated with monuments, holidays, hagiographic literature, and folk
legends. They function in the national culture as standard-bearers of the values
and goals of the nation. The legend of young George Washington saying to his
father, "I cannot tell a lie, it was I who chopped down the cherry
tree," drives home the moral of the proverb ascribed to Benjamin Franklin
(but actually common in Europe in the 17th century and earlier), another culture
hero: "Honesty is the best policy."
A good deal of folklore, especially the
proverbs, fables, cautionary
tales, and confessional ballads, serves to instruct and remind members of
society of wise codes of conduct. The proverb and the fable may teach the same
lesson; "Pride goes before a fall" is illustrated in Aesop's fable of
the cat who praised the crow's singing voice, so that the crow up in the tree
started to sing and dropped the cheese from her mouth to the ground. Proverbs
may sometimes appear contradictory. "Look before you leap" is
challenged by "He who hesitates is lost," but each saying contains its
truth to be applied to a given situation. A whole ethic may be summarized in a
proverb, as is the Protestant ethic of hard work in the saying, "Early to
bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
Although proverbial expressions are
still frequently uttered in industrialized societies, they are used as mild
commentary and poetic cliché rather than, as in African societies, for
firm codes with the force of judicial precedent. The African novelist Chinua
Achebe writes in Things Fall Apart, "Among
the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the
palm-oil with which words are eaten." And his novels are sprinkled with
proverbs. Actual court cases among the Anang Ibibio of Nigeria
in which judges were swayed by proverbs have been recorded by the anthropologist
John Messenger. On one occasion the chief judge advised the plaintiff and his
witnesses, "If you visit the home of the toads, stoop," when they
refused to make their statements under oath and thereby forfeited their case.
The equivalent precept, still forceful in modern life, is "When in Rome do
as the Romans do." Among the Bambara-speaking people of Mali
in Africa, the griots, the celebrated epic bards, customarily "warm up"
before their recitations and during breaks in their lengthy performances by
singing proverbs in rapid sequence. This practice serves the function of gaining
the attention and respect of the audience, who think of proverb sayers as wise
men knowing how the society works; hence the listeners will be ready to credit
the historical tradition that follows.
Besides suggesting rules for conduct,
folklore also drives home the need for proper social behaviour by holding up to
scorn those who depart from socially accepted norms and by eulogizing those who
follow them. Jokes, the most popular form of oral literature in modern society,
ridicule stereotyped characters who display traits disparaged by the
Establishment. The stingy Scotsman, the miserly Jew, the ignorant Irishman, and
the stupid Polack are all caricatured in joke cycles whose implicit values laud
the qualities of liberality, generosity, intelligence, and cleanliness.
Anecdotes of local characters similarly excoriate the slovenly, shiftless,
degenerate, gullible, and naïve. One favourite theme of anecdotes is the
lazy man, often identified with some local ne'er-do-well. Starving to death, the
lazy man is offered popcorn: "Is it shelled?" he asks, and prefers to
starve rather than do the labour of the shelling. Just as proverbs teach the
gospel of work, so do such anecdotal legends mock the idle and improvident.
Conversely, folklore also exalts individuals who exemplify the virtues
considered admirable in the culture. Saints' legends recount the miraculous
cures and rescues that the saint revered by the folk (who is not necessarily
canonized by the church) has effected for the faithful. Devout members of the Mormon
Church continue to relate experiences of succour given them in distress by one
of the three Nephites, who appears as a stranger in white garments to render
assistance and vanishes as mysteriously as he materializes. Heroes in ballad,
legend, and Märchen reflect the
dominant values of their societies and are rewarded by success. The champion of
heroic epics is an invincible warrior. The hero of Negro ballads is a
big-talking badman. The modern hero in the anecdotal legends of youthful
dissenters is the antihero who sells LSD pills or marijuana and outwits narcotic
agents, the police, and draft boards. All these heroes symbolize ideal types for
their social groups. Deviation from the ideal brands the nonconformist a coward,
an Uncle Tom, or an Establishment toady. In the form of folklore known to
17th-century American Puritans as the "remarkable providence," God
punished sinners, blasphemers, heretics, witches, marauding Indians, and critics
of the state with acts of supernatural vengeance, while rewarding his elect with
supernatural assistance during their wilderness trials. Puritan clergy collected
and published these providences as lessons and guideposts for their people. In
Socialist countries of the 20th century, the governments have taken a hand in
the process of regulating conformity by awarding prizes to folk poets and folk
narrators who attack bourgeois and capitalist villains and extol peasant and
Socialist heroes.
Generalizations about the functions of
folklore need to be qualified by considerations of culture area and social
milieu. One kind of distinction should be made between Old World and New World
folk traditions, since North and South America were colonized by Europeans, who
then transported African slaves to their overseas empires. Consequently, a given
country of the New World possesses several coexisting and interacting
traditions; the indigenous Indian; the colonizing Spanish, Portuguese, French,
or English; the African Negro; the 19th- and 20th-century European and Asian
immigrant; and the national and regional, shaped by new historical and
environmental factors. The continent of Australia also belongs with the New
World in this regard, its folklore being divided between the Aborigines and the
English settlers. In the colonized nations, each folk tradition serves to
reinforce the group identity of its members in a pluralistic culture.
Syncretism, or the fusion of different traditions, is a process especially
characteristic of New World folklore. The miraculous appearance of the Virgin of
Guadalupe to the Aztec Indian Juan Diego in 1531, who received from her a
painting of herself on his cape, brought together Spanish-Catholic and
pre-Conquest Indian strains. Mexican
Indians and mestizos identified the Virgin with an Aztec goddess Tonantzin,
pictured her as dark in hue, and celebrated her with costumed dances of pagan
origin but within the framework of Roman Catholic worship and beatification. The
ballad of "John Henry,"
relating the contest between a brawny Negro labourer and a new steam drill on a
railroad tunnel in West Virginia in the 1860s, is widely sung by both American
blacks and whites. John Henry dies "with his hammer in his hand," and
interpreters see him as a symbol of the unequal struggle of the black man
against the white, and of man against the machine. Immigration has brought large
numbers of Slavs to western Canada, Japanese to Brazil, Italians to Argentina,
Germans to Chile, and many peoples to the United States, whose folkways
partially survive the transoceanic crossing. The traditional lore physically
connected with the original homeland seems to vanish the most quickly; thus the
Irish belief in fairies does not survive, since the grassy circular "fairy
rings" inhabited by the fairies of the Old Country are not found in
America.
Another large distinction in the
functioning of folklore separates the so-called nonliterate societies lacking
written languages from the advanced civilizations engulfed in print. Reliance on
the oral tradition is obviously far greater in the nonliterate cultures. The
matter of recording history provides one example: instead of referring to
printed books containing a great many facts that no one person could or would
wish to keep in his head, the tribal groups depend upon reciters of historical
traditions, some of whom, like the whare
wananga of the New Zealand Maori, the sagamen of 11th-century Iceland, and
the griots of Mali, have a
professional status. These annals and genealogies bear little resemblance to
documented written histories and belong properly to the products of oral
literature, since they include magical and marvellous episodes of folktales and
legends. They do correspond in function to national histories in celebrating the
achievements and culture heroes of a chosen people. An ingenious study by two
teams of American anthropologists who collected traditions from two rival Indian
tribes in northern California revealed a similar patterning but contrasting
roles for the same characters and events. The enemy tribe was always guilty of
the provocative incident, fought dishonourably, and suffered defeat. (see also literacy)
Even in literate civilizations large
enclaves of largely oral, tradition-directed cultures persist. Narrators with
enormous repertoires have been located in the 20th century in the
Gaelic-speaking highlands and islands of western Scotland and western Ireland.
Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island related 375 tales to the collectors of
the Irish Folklore Commission, many of them long wonder tales taking all evening
or several evenings to complete. In modern urban, technological society, such
reciters find no audiences. Life has too many distractions and diversions and
sources of information. Nevertheless, story-telling continues among the highly
literate, in the form of joke-telling sessions, which may last an hour or two;
but the jocular narratives are relatively brief, snappy, and quickly climactic.
They serve as icebreakers to establish camaraderie in a group, although they may
also give offense to some members of a social gathering with differing political
or moral views. Ballad making originally made possible the dissemination of
sensational news in attractive form and receded with the advent of newspapers,
which emulated many of the same techniques of ballad makers in their handling of
lurid news items. (see also urbanization)
Oral and literary cultures are no longer
sharply divided. On the lower levels of society cheap printed sources--such as
chapbooks, broadsides, jestbooks, mass magazines, almanacs, and newspapers--feed
materials into and draw from oral streams of lore. In the electronic age,
according to Marshall McLuhan, the literate world is reverting to an oral-aural
community.
Folklorists at first identified their
subject with the rural peasantry. Russian festivals, old wives' remedies,
supernatural beliefs in demonic figures, and magic makers flourished in the
countryside. Cities were the centres of learning, industry, and wealth, and the
spoilers of tradition and folklife. This easy contrast is being revised as
folklore scholars turn their attention to the cities where ethnic neighbourhoods
and occupational workers form closely knit, tradition-bound societies. A team
project of Hungarian folklorists investigating Budapest reported many vigorous
manifestations of traditional behaviour, such as May Day celebrations, dancing
parties held by tradesmen, housewarming ceremonies, and occupational jokes. In a
detailed study of a Tokyo district, R.P. Dore reported on households that
maintain traditional festival practices and the ancient Shinto beliefs in
kami (deities) and fuda
(shrine amulets). But city life does of course affect traditional ways
brought in from the country. The ubiquitous Japanese-peasant conception of the Kappa, a dangerous boy-goblin with an inverted saucer on his head
containing magical water, is found in Tokyo in newspaper comic strips, on
decorative designs, or as a character in a novel by Akutagawa Ryunosuke.
In a series of ethnographic studies in Yucatán, the American
anthropologist Robert Redfield compared four communities, ranging from the
simple village to the complex town, and found that living rituals in the village
become desiccated superstitions in the town. (see also Japan)
Field research in the
steel-manufacturing cities of Gary
and East Chicago, Indiana, by
Indiana University folklorists has shown not only a decrease in the folklore
genres of the many ethnic groups living there but also an emergence of a new
city lore. The chief elements of this lore derive from the human side of the
all-encompassing steel industry, from fears and rumours about crime, and from
anecdotes and stereotypes about other racial and ethnic groups. This emerging
lore provides a sense of solidarity and rootedness in the impersonal, unlovely
city.
Folklore is at once remarkably stable
and remarkably shifting. These phenomena have intrigued folklorists, who explain
the apparent paradox through the mechanism of diffusion. A complex item of folk
tradition, whether an epic song, a house style, a folk drama, or a wonder tale,
once it has attained coherent form, may travel across continents and oceans and
endure through the centuries. The basic type retains its outline but external
features are continuously modified and adapted to new surroundings. Barriers of
language, religion, and culture offer no obstacles to the movements of folk
products. The most bitter of enemies share the same traditions. Supporters of
diffusion challenged the upholders of independent invention in the latter
decades of the 19th century and eventually won the day as depth field studies
proved clearly the wanderings and migrations of individual texts. The first
comparative study of a folktale, Marian Cox's Cinderella (1893), brought together 345 variants of the same
recognizable story plot. Even legends, seemingly so anchored in time and place
to specific historical events and personalities, were shown to migrate and
become attached to different localities and heroes. The legend of the Returning
Hero, sleeping in the fastnesses of the mountain with his warriors until his
people would summon him to their rescue, fastened on to Frederick Barbarossa,
King Arthur, and Thomas the Rhymer and is still told of modern figures. How did
folklore diffuse? Proponents of diffusion offered various explanations: sailors,
merchants, and travellers transported folk matter along the great historic trade
routes; Gypsies acted as peddlers of folklore; borders between peoples served as
bilingual zones through which songs, tales, and styles easily moved; imperial
powers planted the traditions of the mother country in distant places. All these
hypotheses have some merit; European tales found among North American Indians,
for instance, undoubtedly date back to the period of their first culture contact
with French and Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and traders. Yet Indian tales
did not lodge in the narrative repertoires of the European settlers. The flow
appears to go from literate to nonliterate cultures.
Acculturation
represents a somewhat different phenomenon of folklore movement. Here not the
lore but the folk move, bearing with them their ancestral heritage. What happens
to this heritage when peasants of India resettle in Africa, when Chinese move to
Malaysia, when European communities pour into the New World? The resulting
process of adjustment, adaptation, compromise, and assimilation is called
acculturation. But what takes place in this process is not so easily understood.
Parts of the Old Country tradition recede into "memory culture," to be
recalled on direct stimuli but otherwise lying dormant in the recollections of
the first generation. Other parts remain in vigorous use. Still other parts take
on New World coloration. Among Greek immigrants in the United States, for
instance, the telling of paramythia (or Märchen)
and the sighting of creatures like the vrykólakas,
a vampire demon, have virtually ended, but the belief in the power of the
evil eye and of the protective power of saints remains as strong as ever. As a
general principle, the beings of lower mythology do not transplant into an alien
environment, whereas the daily and seasonal rituals and associated beliefs can
be maintained within compactly settled groups. The rate of acculturation will
vary greatly between immigrant societies, depending upon what conservative
forces are at work. Such groups as the Pennsylvania German Amish and the Hasidim
in Brooklyn, N.Y., retain a high degree of their magical belief system, folk
arts, and ritual observances, because they have made strenuous efforts to wall
themselves in from the mainstream of American culture, an effort strengthened by
their independent churches. By contrast, Irish-Americans after a century in
their new homeland have lost most of their distinctive folklore and blended in
with the rest of the general Catholic and middle class population.
The mobility and technology of modern
man have noticeably affected the diffusion and acculturation of folklore. People
emigrate by airplane, communicate by telephone, and soak information from the
mass media. Yet old ways of thinking and believing show remarkable tenacity.
Many folk today discredit the landing of men on the moon as a publicity hoax
contrived by the United States government and the television networks. These are
the people who have seen flying saucers, been cured by faith healers, and
conversed with revenants. Folklore is as old, and as young, as man. (R.M.D./Ed.)
Under the influences of 19th-century
sentiments, the concept of "folk" was affected by a fondness for the
picturesque, by generous impulses toward aesthetic democracy, by the so-called
arts and crafts movement, by historicism and philosophical Idealism, by
nationalism and regionalism, and by an occasionally aggressive, wildly mystical
sort of ethnocentrism. Thus, folk art was defined, if only by the implications
of usage, sometimes as almost anything that could be considered quaint;
sometimes as all non-elite art, primitive and popular included; sometimes as
whatever seemed vaguely homemade; sometimes as the art of the common people, but
with the latter regarded as a ghostly entity existing outside of real class
structures; and sometimes as a traditional, characteristic art that preserved a
cultural heritage and somehow represented the collective soul of a nation or a
province. There are some more or less acceptable elements in such definitions.
What is missing is a flat enough acknowledgment that folk art is the
recognizable product of a nonruling, relatively unaffluent social class and that
references to it except in relation to the elite art of a ruling class are
meaningless.
Putting all these considerations
together, one arrives at what can serve as a core description. Unmistakable folk
art is the art of a class of peasants, herdsmen, seamen, artisans, and small
tradesmen living as a rule away from urban centres in societies that, while
literate and highly civilized, are not highly industrialized. Such societies
were to be found in Europe, particularly eastern Europe, until well into the
20th century, and they will still exist, of course, on other continents. Where
they no longer exist, the term folk may still be appropriate for the art of
social or ethnic minorities that have preserved earlier traits by living apart,
culturally and often physically. More doubtfully, the term may be extended to
certain traditional artistic productions--especially those associated with
carnivals, national holidays, religious processions, and the like--that are the
work of thoroughly unfolkish city people.
Although the folk kind of art is
invariably produced, according to the only definition that makes serviceable
sense, in a culture that also produces the elite kind for a ruling class, the
usual elite classification of the arts into the fine, or independent, and the
useful, or decorative or dependent, is pretty much ignored by folk visual
artists, who are typically willing to devote their creative imaginations to the
design or decoration of tools, toys, furniture, cottages, clothes, arms,
banners, musical instruments, and so on. The portrait of a Spanish patron saint
may appear in embroidery; narrative pictures belonging, according to the
European academic classification, to the elevated "history" category
are painted on Sicilian carts. Something of the same mixture of the so-called
high and low is typical of folk literature, music, and dancing: tragedy takes
ballad form and a noble war dance the form of a Highland fling.
In some ways the usual folk artist can
be called an amateur. He lacks professional training, he normally has a second,
more remunerative occupation, and he creates primarily for his own pleasure and
needs or at most for those of acquaintances in his own small locality. But in
other ways he is quite unlike an amateur artist in a nonfolkish social context.
He is apt to work strictly within the limits of a traditional formula, he often
remains anonymous, and often he is an artisan who carries over into his works of
art his everyday skill.
Amateur is not quite the word for a blacksmith who designs a fantastic shop sign
in wrought iron nor for a baker who turns out figurines.
Works of visual folk art are rarely
executed in anything except readily available, fairly inexpensive materials. A
sculptor is likely to work not in marble or bronze but, rather, in wood, iron,
clay, straw, ice, sugar, or whatever else is at hand; a painter may substitute
an old board for the elite artist's canvas or special paper. Perhaps because of
this situation and perhaps because of the already mentioned tendency to ignore
the separateness of fine art, the folkish creator displays little of the elite
(or, for different reasons, the primitive) concern to employ a specific technique
for a specific material--to respect what a French art historian has called the
vocation of each sort of artistic material. Folk wooden sculpture may be carved
in a manner suitable for granite; painting may be done in an approximation of
embroidery technique; pottery may bear incised patterns borrowed from metalwork
or basketry; and almost any material is apt to be disguised under bright
colours.
Encouraged by local patriotism, scholars
have divided folk art into mostly national and regional styles: English, French,
German, or Spanish folk music, Breton, Provençal, or Balkan costumes,
Pennsylvania Dutch decorations, Mexican processional figures, and so on. This
sort of classification is justified by the remarkable traditional and settled
nature of much of folk art. But it should not be allowed to obscure, as it
frequently does, the existence of other sorts of style, nor should it suggest
that these national and regional manners are without histories. There are
Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other religious folk styles; mountain,
valley, and seaboard styles; classical, romantic, realistic, fantastic, and
expressionistic styles; and naturalistic and abstract styles. There are period
styles; in fact, a sizable number of vaguely ahistorical-looking provincial folk
styles are arrested styles of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Although the folk, defined as a class,
live in nonprimitive societies, they are more or less isolated from the urban
centres in which cultural change may be relatively rapid; and in their
predominantly rural environments they are close to nature and to the basic
birth-to-death cycle of human existence. Hence folk art is strongly conservative
and preservative; in fact, it is often referred to as simply traditional art
(with the unfortunate implication that other kinds of art do not possess
traditions). It acts as a repository for proverbial wisdom, ancient
superstitions, sentimental themes, and religious beliefs that may have long
since ceased to be orthodox; it accompanies and celebrates what is repetitive in
the lives of individuals and of communities--baptisms, marriages, funerals,
anniversaries, sowings, reapings, and the daily routine of work. Often it
preserves customs the meanings
of which have been largely forgotten; the colouring of Easter eggs and the
decorating of Christmas trees are familiar examples. Often, too, the old
meanings are given an unexpected twist by a naïve or eccentric artist. But,
on the whole, folk art functions within its sphere, as does primitive art in an
entire society, on the side of continuity and social stability; and there is
some justification for 19th-century talk about the expression of a collective
"soul."
The "soul," however, is not so
much that of a nation, a race, or a province as that of a social and economic
class. The best folk art reflects the common sense, unpretentiousness, humour,
and peculiar slyness of humble people in contact with small, hard realities; and
not infrequently it reflects hostility toward the rich and powerful. In folk
depictions of the Nativity, a gift bearer may bring not frankincense and myrrh
but, instead, a jacket for the baby Jesus; in a harvest song, one may suddenly
be informed that "the gentlemen," not the corn, are about to be mowed.
Diffusionism, environmentalism, and
related theories have aroused polemicists in the field of folk art as well as
those in primitive art. But perhaps stronger feelings can be, or have been,
stirred among folk-art specialists by theories that attempt to answer the two
rather loaded questions of how folk art is created and, second, what the
difference is between a folk art and a folkcraft.
The first question has some of its roots
in the facts that the adjective folk may connote "communal" and that
folk art is often the work of unknown creators. Other, probably more important,
roots lie in the fact that, by the beginning of the 19th century, German
Romantic thinkers were committed to myths (at that time fairly harmless) about
the collective spirit, or virtue, of a nation or a race. The result was the
idea, set forth with varying degrees of explicitness, that folk art--in
particular, poems, melodies, and dances--was a communal creation. This idea was
eventually replaced by a theory of communal re-creation or communal growth in
situations in which the work of an individual poet, singer, or dancer is
preserved only in memories and is modified as it passes from locality to
locality and from generation to generation. In the meantime another largely
German idea, that of cultural sinking, was provoking argument. According to this
idea, folk art--visual art in particular--is derived, after a lapse of several
decades or even several centuries, from the elite art of a ruling class; thus a
Crucifixion carved by a 19th-century Breton peasant is explained as a
late-provincial imitation of the 17th-century Baroque of Paris and Versailles.
On all these matters the opinion of a majority of modern scholars is apt to be
conciliatory. Although collective improvisation is not impossible, the original
creator of a work of folk art is practically always a single artist. But it is
possible to grant that a good deal of communal re-creation occurs in literature,
music, and the dance and that in the folk visual arts the role of the individual
creator, subject as he is to the demands of tradition and function, is not as
decisive as it is in elite art. Again, it can be granted that folk art is often
a belated borrowing from elite. But this need not prevent recognition of the
fact that the folk as a class have their own traditional themes and forms. (see
also Romanticism)
The question about the difference
between a folk art and a folkcraft is partly philosophical (which is not a
reason for neglecting it) and partly quite practical, at least for museum
curators who must classify exhibits, for specialists interested in a proper
division of labour, and for modern educators or animators who want to continue
the 19th-century arts and crafts movement. It has been argued that, where an
artist creates, a craftsman merely fabricates; that, whereas the first is a
nonmaterialist who makes something for the sake of expression or of
disinterested contemplation, the second is a materialist who makes something for
a definite function; and that, whereas the first cannot know exactly what he is
going to produce, the second has an extremely precise foreknowledge accompanied
by a plan and a method of execution. On this argument many alleged works of folk
art can be dismissed as works of mere craft. But the argument is challengeable,
partly on the familiar ground that art is in the eye of the beholder.
Although folk art, as was pointed out
above, may borrow from elite and although it may also lend motifs to everybody
from classical musicians to modern dress designers, it has proved incapable of
surviving in the world of 20th-century industry and communications. Like
primitive art, it can live only in isolation. Unlike primitive, however, it has
demonstrated, particularly in the performing arts, an extraordinary ability to
transform itself into a special branch of popular art.
(R.McMu./Ed.)
Folk
literature, as mentioned in the introduction, may also
be called folklore. It is, in fact, the lore (traditional knowledge and beliefs)
of cultures having no written language, and is, by definition, transmitted by
word of mouth. It consists, as does written literature, of both prose and verse
narratives, poems and songs, myths, dramas, rituals, proverbs, riddles, and the
like. Nearly all known peoples, now or in the past, have produced it. (see also oral
literature)
Until about 4000 BC all literature was
oral; but beginning in the years between 4000 and 3000 BC writing developed both
in Egypt and in the Mesopotamian civilization at Sumer. From that time on there
are records not only of practical matters such as law and business but
increasingly of written literature. As the area in which the habitual use of
writing extended over Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean lands and
eventually over much of the whole world, a rapid growth in the composition of
written literature occurred, so that in certain parts of the world, literature
in writing has to a large extent become the normal form of expression for
storytellers and poets. (see also literacy)
Nevertheless, during all the centuries
in which the world has learned to use writing, there has existed, side by side
with the growing written record, a large and important activity carried on by
those actually unlettered, and those not much accustomed to reading and writing.
Of the origins of folk literature, as of
the origins of human language, there is no way of knowing. None of the
literature available today is primitive in any sense, and only the present-day
results can be observed of practices extending over many thousands of years.
Speculations therefore can only concern such human needs as may give rise to
oral literature, not to its ultimate origin.
Nor can any evolution in folk literature
or any overall developments be spoken of explicitly. Each group of people, no
matter how small or large, has handled its folk literature in its own way.
Depending as it does upon the transmission from person to person and being
subject to the skill or the lack of skill of those who pass it on and to the
many influences, physical or social, that consciously or unconsciously affect a
tradition, what may be observed is a history of continual change. An item of
folk literature sometimes shows relative stability and sometimes undergoes
drastic transformations. If these changes are looked at from a modern Western
point of view, ethnocentric judgments can be made as to whether they are on the
whole favourable or unfavourable. But it must be remembered that the folk
listening to or participating in its oral literature have completely different
standards from those of their interpreters.
Nevertheless, two directions in this
continually changing human movement may be observed. Occasionally a talented
singer or taleteller, or perhaps a group of them, may develop techniques that
result in an improvement over the course of time from any point of view and in
the actual development of a new literary form. On the other hand, many items of
folk literature, because of historic movements or overwhelming foreign
influences or the mere lack of skillful practitioners of the tradition, become
less and less important, and occasionally die out from the oral repertory. The
details of such changes have been of great interest to all students of folk
literature. (see also folk
music)
The beginnings of written literature in
Sumer and Egypt 5,000 or 6,000 years ago took place in a world that knew only
folk literature. During the millennia since then written literature has been
surrounded and sometimes all but overwhelmed by the humbler activity of the
unlettered. The emergence of the author and his carefully preserved manuscript
came about slowly and uncertainly, and only in a few places initially--the
literary authorship that flourished in the Athens of Pericles or the Jerusalem
of the Old Testament represented only a very small part of the world of their
time. Nearly everywhere else the oral storyteller or epic singer was dominant,
and all of what is called literary expression was carried in the memory of the
folk, and especially of gifted narrators.
All societies have produced some men and
women of great natural endowments--shamans, priests, rulers, and warriors--and
from these has come the greatest stimulus everywhere toward producing and
listening to myths, tales, and
songs. To these the common man has listened to such effect that sometimes he
himself has become a bard. And kings and councillors, still without benefit of
writing, have sat enthralled as he entertained them at their banquets.
This folk literature has affected the
later written word profoundly. The Homeric poems, undoubtedly oral in origin and
retaining many of the usual characteristics of folk literature, such as long
repetitions and formulistic expressions, have come so far in their development
that they move with ease within a uniform and difficult poetic form, have
constructed elaborate and fairly consistent plots and successfully carried them
through, and have preserved in definitive form a conception of the Olympic
pantheon with its gods and heroes, which became a part of ancient
Greek thinking. (see also Homeric Hymns)
Not everywhere has the oral literature
impinged so directly on the written as in the works of Homer,
which almost presents a transition from the preliterate to the literate world.
But many folktales have found their place in literature. The medieval romances, especially the Breton
lays, drew freely on these folk sources, sometimes directly. It is often
hard to decide whether a tale has been learned from folk sources or whether a
literary story has gone the other way and, having been heard from priest or
teacher or doctor, has entered oral tradition and has been treated like any
other folktale or folk song. The unlettered make no distinctions as to origins.
As the European Middle Ages lead into
the Renaissance the influence of folk literature on the work of writers
increases in importance, so that it is sometimes difficult to draw a sharp line
of distinction between them. In literary forms such as the fabliauxthere are many anecdotes that may have come ultimately from tales current
among unlettered storytellers, but these have usually been reworked by writers,
some of them belonging in the main stream of literature, like Boccaccio or
Chaucer. Only later, in the 16th and 17th centuries, in such works as those of
Straparola and Giambattista Basile, did writers go directly to folk literature
itself for much of their material. (see also Renaissance
art)
Since classical times composers of
written literature have borrowed tales and motifs from oral narratives, and
their folk origin has been forgotten. Examples abound in Homer and Beowulf. In their literary form these stories have often lived on
side by side with tellings and retellings by oral storytellers. Modern examples
of traditions so used are found in Ibsen's Peer
Gynt and Gerhart Hauptmann's The
Sunken Bell. Particularly frequent in all literature are proverbs, many of
them certainly of folk origin.
In Finland a good example of the direct
use of folk literature in the construction of a literary epic is seen in the Kalevalacomposed by Elias Lönnrot in the 1830s, primarily by fusing epic songs
that he had recorded from Finnish singers. The Kalevala
itself is a national literary monument, but the songs Lönnrot heard are
a part of folk literature.
Writers and songmakers have always used
themes taken from oral legends and folk songs and in their turn have affected
the traditions themselves. In recent years the cinema has presented old
folktales to an appreciative public, and interest in folk songs especially has
been stimulated by the radio and television. Inevitably this oral literature has
become less truly oral, and much pseudofolk literature has been presented to the
public, habituated as it is to the usual literary conventions.
Within urbanized Western culture it is
clear that folk literature has been gradually displaced by books and newspapers,
radio, and television. Persons interested in hearing authentic oral tales,
traditions, or songs must make special efforts to discover them. There still
exist isolated groups that carry on such traditions--old people, recent
immigrant enclaves in cities, and other minority populations, rural or urban.
Children are also important for the carrying on of certain kinds of oral
traditions such as singing games, riddles, and dance songs. These go on from
generation to generation and are added to continually, always within an oral
tradition.
During the past few generations folk festivals
have flourished. These have become almost worldwide and of the greatest variety.
They are likely to revive older dances or bring in new ones from other
countries, but they also have some singing and occasionally taletelling. Usually
a genuine attempt is made to keep them within the authentic local tradition, and
they have been a stimulus to the preservation of a disappearing phase of modern
life.
If folk literature is actually dying
out, the process is very slow. It is now, as it has always been, the normal
literary expression for the unlettered of all continents.
The most obvious characteristic of folk
literature is the fact that it is oral. In spite of certain borderline cases it
normally stands in direct contrast with written literature. The latter exists in
manuscripts and books and may be preserved exactly as the author or authors left
it, even though this may have happened centuries or even millennia ago. Through
these manuscripts and books the thoughts and emotions and observations and even
the fine nuances of style can be experienced without regard to time or distance.
With oral literature this is not possible. It is concerned only with speaking
and singing and with listening, thus depending upon the existence of a living
culture to carry on a tradition. If any item of folk literature ceases to exist
within the memory of man it is completely lost.
The speaker or singer is carrying on a
tradition that he has learned from other speakers and he delivers it to a living
audience. It may well be that his listeners have heard this material many times
before and that it has a vigorous life in the community, and they will see to it
that he does not depart too far from the tradition as they know it. If
acceptable to the listeners, the story or song or proverb or riddle will be
repeated over and over again as long as it appeals to men and women, even
through the ages and over long geographical distances.
In some cultures nearly everyone can
carry on these traditions, but some men and women are much more skillful than
others and are listened to with greater pleasure. Whatever the nature of these
tradition bearers, the continued existence of an item of oral literature depends
upon memory. As it is passed on from one person to another it suffers changes
from forgetting or from conscious additions or substitutions; in any case, the
item changes continually.
The more skillful tradition bearers take
pride in the exactness with which they transmit a tale or song just as they have
heard it many years before, but they only deceive themselves, for every
performance differs from every other one. The whole material is fluid and
refuses to be stabilized in a definite form. The teller is likely to see places
where he can make great improvements, and he may well begin a new tradition that
will live as long as it appeals to other tellers. It thus happens that in nearly
all cultures certain people specialize in remembering and repeating what they
have heard. There are semiprofessional storytellers around whom large groups of
people assemble in bazaars or before cottage fires or in leisure hours after
labour. Some of these storytellers have prodigious memories and may with only
slight variations carry on to a new generation hundreds of tales and traditions
heard long ago.
Certain bards
and minstrels and songmakers
develop special techniques of singing or of telling epic or heroic tales to the
accompaniment of a harp or other musical instrument. In the course of time in
various places special poetic forms have been perfected and passed on from bard
to bard. Such must have been the way in which the remarkably skillful heroic
meters of the Greek epics were developed. (see also music,
history of, heroic poetry)
A different kind of oral tradition is
preserved by the ritual specialists: priests, shamans, and others who perform
religious ceremonies and healing rites. Frequently these rituals
must be remembered word for word and are not believed to be effective unless
they are correctly performed. The ideal of such priestly transmitters of oral
tradition is complete faithfulness to that which has been passed down to them.
Not least important of the many reasons
for the existence and perpetuation of folk literature is the need for release
from the boredom that comes on long sea voyages or in army camps or everywhere
on long winter evenings. Some folk literature is primarily didactic and tries to
convey to simple men the information they need to carry on their lives properly.
Among some peoples the relation of man and the higher powers is of especial
concern and gives rise to myths that try to clarify this relationship.
Cooperative labour or marching is helped by rhythmic songs, and many aspects of
social life give rise to various kinds of dance.
A great many of the special forms of
literature now in manuscripts and books are paralleled in traditional oral
literature, where history, drama, law, sermons, and exhortations of all kinds
are found, as well as analogues of novels, stories, and lyric poems.
Folk literature is but a part of what is
generally known as folklore: customs and beliefs, ritualistic behaviour, dances,
folk music, and other nonliterary manifestations. These are often considered a
part of the larger study of ethnology, but they are also the business of the
folklorist. (For further discussion of this point, see above Folklore
as an academic discipline .)
Of special importance is the relation of
all kinds of folk literature to mythology. The stories of Maui and his confreres
in the Pacific and of gods and heroes of African or American Indian groups have
behind them a long and perhaps complicated history. This is especially true of
the highly developed mythologies of India, and the Greek, Irish, and Germanic
pantheons. All are the results of an indefinitely long past, of growth and
outside influences, of religious cults and practices, and of the glorification
of heroes. But whatever the historical, psychological, or religious motivations,
the mythologies are a part of folk literature and, though traditional, have been
subject to continual changes at the hands of the taletellers, singers of
stories, or priestly conductors of cults. Eventually singers or storytellers of
philosophical tendencies have systematized their mythologies and have created
with fine imagination the figures of Zeus and his Olympic family and his
semidivine heroic descendants. Though the details of these changes are beyond
the scope of this article, stories of the gods and heroes and of supernatural
origins and changes on the earth have played an important role in all folk
literature. (see also Indian literature,
Germanic religion and mythology)
Since the tales, legends, and epic and
lyric songs discussed here are a part of the experience of a preliterate group
or at least of the essentially unlettered, they differ in many ways from
literary works addressed to a reading public. Long forgotten are the person or
persons originally responsible for the tradition that has resulted in examples
of folk literature. Only the tale or song remains to be repeated and often
changed by subsequent storytellers, singers, or bards. In the course of its
history it is listened to by generations of the unlettered, and its success and
its very survival depend on how well it satisfies their emotional needs and
intellectual interests.
Since in essence all folk literature is
oral and subject to its survival in the minds of men, it is full of devices to
aid memory. Perhaps most
common of all is mere repetition. Especially in folktales and epics
it is common to hear the same episode repeated with little or no verbal change.
As the hero encounters his successive adversaries the description changes only
enough to indicate the increasing terror of the enemy, always leading to a
climax and usually to the hero's success. These long repeated passages often
enable the teller of tales or the singer of an epic to extend his performance as
much as he desires. (see also repetition)
Aside from repetition of entire
episodes, folk literature of all kinds is filled with formulistic expressions.
It may be the beginning or the ending of a folktale--the "once upon a
time" or the "married and lived happily ever after" or sometimes
quite meaningless expressions--or standard epithets attached to certain persons
or places. These formulas are so characteristic of oral literature that an
abundance of such commonplaces seems to be a guarantee of authentic oral origins
even of a great epic.
These formulas are matters not only of
words but of structure. The storyteller or singer has at his disposal a large
variety of conventional motifs and episodes and may use them freely. How
appropriately they are made a part of his composition depends on his skill, but
his listeners are not likely to be very critical so long as he keeps them
interested. Indeed it is remarkable that in spite of this apparent freedom of
improvisation so many rather well-articulated plots have lived for centuries
retaining all their essential features. It is this combination of a basic
narrative type with a freedom of treatment within traditional limits that makes
it possible to identify hundreds of versions of the same tale or song as they
appear over long stretches of time and space.
Though much of narrative folk literature
is frankly fictional and filled with unrealistic events, the successful
storyteller or epic singer gives his story credibility by the use of realistic
details. Often these are merely homely touches linking the never-never land of
the tale or song to everyday life or emotions. For the unlettered listeners such
realistic details may allow a stretching of the imagination to embrace a larger
world. Heaven or hell it may be or kingly palaces where the peasant hero rules
with a splendour only known to those who have never seen a court. Often these
details are given only to ensure that willing suspension of disbelief
characteristic of all fiction, but sometimes a realistic touch, even in the
midst of weak motivation and violence, may give nobility to a mediocre tale or
song.
Repetition, formulas both in words and
in structure, realism enough to support the marvelous in tale or song, violent
actions and simple strong emotions--these qualities are generally found in all
folk literature. The varying demands of the listeners are all-important
influences. In some cultures this implies that actions should be well motivated
so that listeners may identify themselves with certain characters. But in
others, such as in many parts of India and in many preliterate cultures,
motivation is often weak or entirely lacking.
For lyric songs, proverbs, riddles, and
charms (and often legends), the relation of artist and audience is of little
importance.
In many particulars of form and
substance there will be found great variations in the ways folk literature is
manifested. The interests of people in one culture may differ profoundly from
those of people in another. One group may enjoy singing folk songs, another
listening to romantic folktales, and a neighbouring group may even be concerned
only with legends and traditions. This difference is often geographical, so that
the student of folk literature in the Pacific islands who may later investigate
a central African tribe will find a completely different emphasis in the two
areas. These differences may well depend upon the varieties of religious
concepts held by the group or its natural environment, whether islands or jungle
or cultivated farm lands, or its stability or mobility. These characteristics
are likely to become especially deep seated in groups that have been settled in
one place over a long period of history. Frequently they may correspond to
national frontiers, but more often they are aspects of the general culture of an
area and may well be quite independent of political or linguistic boundaries.
The Russian epic songs are found only in
Russia, but the wonder story such as Cinderella or Snow White is a part of the
folk literature of a good portion of the world. The Navaho
Indians of the southwestern United States place great emphasis on their
remarkable chants and lengthy folktales. Their neighbours throughout the Great
Plains tell many well-constructed unified stories but confine their rituals
largely to the dance. In Europe the Irish excel in storytelling, both of legends
and fictional tales, so that even today it has been possible to record a
prodigious number for their national archive. But in England and Wales the
folktale is little cultivated, preference having been given to legends and
ballads. As expected, there is a contrast between the abundance of oral saints'
legends in Spain and Italy and their rarity in Scandinavia. Finland, meeting
place of Eastern and Western tradition, shows an abundance of nearly every kind
of folklore. From eastern Europe to Central Asia the folk epic flourishes. (see
also Irish
literature)
Tales and origin legends have been
collected in great numbers from various parts of Oceania,
where there is a common mythological background extending over enormous
distances. Except for probable early contact by way of Indonesia, these
folktales seem to show little Eurasian influence. In many parts of South America
the merging of Iberian, Indian, and Negro materials seems almost complete.
The folk literature of the North American
Negroes is in a state of continual change, reflecting their history. Much
certainly goes back to Africa, usually by way of the West Indies, and much was
borrowed long ago. But the Negroes have themselves in a truly oral fashion
developed songs and stories, and particular music styles. Of very special
character is the folklore of modern Israel.
Jews coming from various lands to the East and the West have brought together
folk literature from all these countries. Assimilation of this is a long task,
and since divergent language backgrounds are unimportant for folktales, the
problem is to absorb the great variety of forms.
Taken the world over, folk literature is
found everywhere, though the emphasis differs from place to place.
Some kind of singing is almost universal
and it is probable that where there are no reports of it information is simply
missing. Folk song implies the use of music, and the musical tradition varies
greatly from one area to another. In some places the words of songs are of
little importance and seem to be used primarily as support for the music.
Frequently there are meaningless monosyllables and much repetition to accompany
the voice or the musical instrument.
In much of the world drums and rattles, beating time by hands or feet or the
stroking of a harp give a strong rhythmic effect to all folksinging. In others,
flutelike wind instruments or bowed fiddles of one kind or another affect the
nature of the folk-song texts. In many places these apparently meaningless folk
songs are of great importance, serving as excitement to war or love or as a part
of religious or secular ritual. Through them the group expresses its common
emotions or lightens the burden of communal labour. In certain preliterate
groups, and sometimes elsewhere, folk songs are used for magic
effects, to defeat enemies, to attract lovers, to invoke the favour of the
supernatural powers. Sometimes the magic effect of these songs is so greatly
valued that actual ownership of songs is maintained and their use carefully
guarded. They may come to the owner in a dream or as the result of fasting or
other austerities. (see also folk
music)
Even when folk songs are not used for
such practical purposes but only for the pleasure of singing or listening, the
greater part of the world uses them for the expression of ideas or emotions held
in common by the group. Only in societies used to the songs of composers or
poets does purely personal expression enter into the folk song. This is not
frequent, and songs of this type are hardly to be distinguished from some of the
simple lyrics of poets such as Robert Burns. Folk songs, essentially expressions
of commonly shared ideas or feelings, are often trivial but sometimes they may
be profoundly moving.
The lyric folk song in one form or
another is found almost everywhere, but this is not true of narrative
singing. Unless the reporting of the activities of preliterate cultures has been
very faulty, it would seem that the combination of song and story among these
peoples has been rare, in spite of a wealth of prose narrative. On the other
hand, in major Western and Asian civilizations the narrative song has been
important for a long time and has been cultivated by the most skillful singers.
In the course of time these songs of warfare, of adventure, or of domestic life
have formed local cycles, such as the bylinyof Russia or the heroic songs of Yugoslavia and Finland or the ballad
tradition of western Europe and elsewhere. Each of these cycles has its own
characteristics, with its distinctive metrical forms, and its formulas both of
events and expression. Any reader of the Homeric poems will be aware of their
essentially oral and musical nature, and all the early literary narratives of
Sumer and the Near East suggest a long previous development of narrative
singing.
A special tradition of tales told in
song has arisen in Europe since the Middle Ages and has been carried to wherever
Europeans have settled. These ballads, in characteristic local metrical forms
and frequently with archaic musical modes, are usually concerned with domestic
or warlike conflict, with disasters by land or sea, with crime and punishment,
with heroes and outlaws, and sometimes, though rarely, with humour. Despite a
folk culture fast being overwhelmed by the modern world, these ballads are still
being sung and enjoyed.
Belonging only remotely to oral
literature is folk drama. Dances, many of them elaborate, with masks portraying
animal or human characters, and sometimes containing speeches or songs, are to
be found in many parts of the preliterate world. Though the action and the
dramatic imitation is always the most prominent part of such performances, these
may be part of a ritual and involve speaking or chanting of sacred texts learned
and passed on by word of mouth. (see also folk
theatre)
The ancient Greek mysteries, as well as
secret societies even down to the present, have retained this method of
transmitting dramatically their traditions and their teachings and commentary.
Some dramatic rituals indeed were not secret but part of a public cult. Thus in
ancient Greece the feast of Dionysus led eventually to classical Greek drama,
and in the Middle Ages the
dramatic celebrations of the Christian Church developed into the medieval folk
dramas and at long last into the literary drama of the Renaissance and later.
The medieval mummers' plays and their
modern survivals, the Passion plays, the Mexican reenactment of historic scenes
such as "The Moors and the Christians," and the modern pageants--all
these are based on written texts, however crude, and are beyond the scope of
this treatment (see RITES AND
CEREMONIES and LITERATURE, THE
ART OF: e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Drama ).
Fables, whether of the well-known Aesop
cycle, with animals acting
according to their real natures, or those from India, where animals simply act
as men and women, are literary in origin. But they have had an important
influence on folk literature. In addition to appearing in written collections, a
number of these are told by storytellers in many parts of the world. Such fables
as "The Ant and the Grasshopper," with appropriate morals, have been
frequently recorded along with oral tales and have undoubtedly served as models
for new animal stories. Sometimes these new tales have eventually received
literary treatment, as in the medieval "Reynard
the Fox," and then been carried back around the world by
storytellers. In such narratives the borderline between folk literature and
other literary expression is impossible to draw.
The oral fictional tale, from whatever
ultimate origin, is practically universal both in time and place. Certain
peoples tell very simple stories and others tales of great complexity, but the
basic pattern of taleteller and his audience is found everywhere and as far back
as can be learned. Differing from legend or tradition, which is usually
believed, the oral fictional tale gives the storyteller absolute freedom as to
credibility so long as he stays within the limits of local taboos and tells
tales that please.
A folktale travels with great ease from
one storyteller to another. Since a particular story is characterized by its
basic pattern and by narrative motifs rather than by its verbal form, it passes
language boundaries without difficulty. The spread of a folktale is determined
rather by large culture areas, such as North American Indian, Eurasian, Central
and South African, Oceanic, or South American. And with recent increasing human
mobility many tales, especially of Eurasian origin, have disregarded even these
culture boundaries and have gone with new settlers to other continents.
In many preliterate cultures folktales
are hardly to be distinguished from myths, since, especially in tales of
tricksters and heroes, they presuppose a background of belief about tribal
origins and the relation of men and gods. Conscious fictions, however, enter
even into such stories. Animals abound here whether in their natural form or
anthropomorphized so that they seem sometimes men and sometimes beasts.
Adventure stories, exaggerations, marvels of all kinds such as other world
journeys, and narratives of marriage or sexual adventure, usually between human
beings and animals, are common. Much rarer, contrary to the views of earlier
students, are explanatory stories. Tales of this description are especially
characteristic of Africa, Oceania, and the South American Indians.
In much of the world, especially Europe
and Asia, the folktale deals with a greater variety of incidents than just
described. In the course of time folktale scholars have given most attention to
this area and have classified these stories so that the vast collections of them
in manuscripts or books can be referred to with exactness.
All readers of such collections as those
of Grimm will easily recall examples of tales of speaking animals. These may be
old Aesop fables or parts of the medieval Reynard epic, but most of them are
based on some ancient oral tradition. Such animal stories are especially
numerous in eastern Europe. But better known perhaps are the ordinary folktales
that deal with human beings and their adventures. For these tales, usually laid
in a highly imaginative time and place--a never-never land--and filled with
unrealistic and often supernatural creatures, there exists no good English word,
so that usually scholars use the German term Märchen.
Here belong "The Dragon Slayer," "The Danced-Out Shoes,"
the "Swan-Maiden" tales, "Cupid and Psyche," "Snow
White," "Cinderella," "Faithful John," "Hansel and
Gretel," and their like. Here also belong certain stories with religious or
romantic motivation and tales of robbers and thieves--"Peter at the Gate of
Heaven," "The Clever Peasant Daughter," "Rhampsinitus."
(see also fairy
tale)
A major division of this classification
of tales deals with jests and anecdotes. Examples are the many stories of
numskulls, of clever rascals, and tall tales filled with exaggerations or lies.
Finally come formula tales like "The House that Jack Built."
Among jokes and anecdotes a number are
risqué or actually obscene. The indexes of the classification have
included only those occurring in the published regional surveys. These surveys,
and the books and manuscripts on which they have been based, have been subject
to severe editing in order to avoid social or even legal offense. Some of the
older anthropologists thought to avoid the eyes of the nonscholar by writing
such tales in Latin, but a newer generation is much less squeamish. Folk stories
now appear in print covering the gamut of the erotic--tales of seduction,
realistic descriptions of normal or abnormal sexual activity, and scatological
stories of great indecency. (see also obscenity)
This index of tale types fits the region
for which it was planned and is constantly being improved and expanded, but it
was never designed to cover the world. The Eurasian types are usually
recognizable in any part of the globe and for them this type index is valuable.
But for use with stories on a worldwide basis something less formal is needed, a
classification of the possible or likely narrative motifs, minute or extended,
and wherever found. Such a motif index has in fact proved useful outside of the
Eurasian area, wherever comparative studies are undertaken, for parallels or
analogues in simple motifs occur even in far distant places, often presenting
extremely puzzling problems.
By use of such indexes and from the
labours of many scholars, much material for examination of the folktale is
available. These studies have been pursued since the 18th century, though until
about 1900 most of them were premature attempts to answer the general question
of where folktales come from. Eventually it became clear that no satisfactory
solution is available, but that every tale has its own history and can be
studied only with laborious attention to detail.
In contrast to a literary story, with
its standard text and author living in a definite time and place, the folktale
is anonymous. Its originators have long been forgotten and it exists in many
versions, all equally valid. Instead of being fixed like a literary document, it
is in continual flux. But with hundreds of versions of a particular tale
available for study it is possible to establish certain norms of plot structure
and to point with some assurance to the varieties of subtypes that give clues to
its life history. Such an analytical study of these hundreds of versions usually
results in some hypothesis about the original form of the plot and the passage
the tale has taken through time and space. In this way some 30 or 40 of the more
complicated stories have been studied.
These geographical and historical
investigations depend on the fact that the plot of the tale is complex enough to
admit of really analytical study. For simpler stories and anecdotes scholars
have had to be content with less exact methods, usually resulting in nothing
more than accounts of their distribution and the known facts of their history.
Most of the attention of students of
folktales during the 20th century has been given to historical questions and to
preparing the apparatus for studying them--collecting, with ever improved
techniques, arranging and archiving materials from manuscripts or books, and
indexing types and motifs, so as to make collections even in remote or difficult
idioms available to the serious investigator. But the folktale also has given
rise to studies that are not strictly historical. (see also literary criticism)
The attempts during the 19th century to
find hidden meanings in tales were generally based upon the theory that they
were broken-down myths and had lost their original meanings through linguistic
misunderstanding. The result was that this "original meaning" was
always found to be some conflict between weather or seasonal phenomena (winter:
summer; clouds: sunshine; etc.). This type of interpretation has now generally
gone out of fashion and has given place sometimes to explanations based upon
ancient rituals or to some variety of psychoanalytic treatment. Though both of
these possible sources of folk literature merit examination, the resultant
interpretations have usually been merely astonishing to those acquainted with
the actual history of the tales studied.
A much more fruitful approach to an
investigation of folktales has been the studies of the tellers of stories and
their audiences. From these has come an appreciation of the way in which folk
literature is carried on in a tradition. A great deal more may be expected from
such investigations, usually based on an intimate knowledge of the living lore
of a single people.
Structural studies, especially of the
folktale, have been engaging the attention of more and more scholars. Though
particular plots may occur over large parts of the world, the form and literary
style of the narrative is likely to be traditional within certain historical or
geographic limits. The direction and strategy of these studies of structure are
still unclear, but progress is being made.
Generally folktales are considered both
by tellers and listeners as purely fictional. The line, however, between belief
and unbelief is vague and varies from culture to culture and even from person to
person, and even in the most sophisticated societies legends
of strange things from the past or present continue being told and are usually
believed.
Stories about marvelous creatures are
worldwide. Often these are merely mentioned or described and the belief in their
existence is taken for granted. Frequently, however, there are circumstantial
accounts of meetings with them, which result in adventures pleasant or
distressing. With such creatures it is sometimes hard to tell whether we are
dealing with a fictional story such as that of the dragon
slayer of the typical European fairy tale or with a legend actually believed,
such as that of St. George and the dragon. Though the folk in all parts of the
world handle these stories with varying degrees of belief, there exists
everywhere a remarkable resemblance among these supernatural creatures. The
dragon, for example, in something of its characteristic serpent or crocodile
form, is of great importance in China as well as in Europe and is represented in
both places as a guardian of great treasure. Hardly less well known is the
unicorn, and various combinations of man and beast such as the centaur and the
minotaur, or the combinations of man and dog, have been a part of the legends of
the Old World and occasionally of the New. Giant birds carrying men off in the
claws, the phoenix reviving from its own ashes, flying horses carrying men
through the air, sirens, mermaids and mermen, and unbelievable creatures
resembling these appear in traditions all over the world. There are treasure
animals of all kinds, not only the goose that lays the golden egg but the cow
that furnishes treasure from its ear. The horse may warn the hero of danger or
may determine which of two roads he should take. Important building sites are
said to have been determined by the actions of a wise animal. Speaking animals,
of course, figure prominently in all folk literature and even in such literary
forms as the fable. Animals may speak to each other on Christmas Eve, or they
may have governments and elect kings or celebrate weddings. These are only a few
of the traditions current with a large part of mankind.
The relation between the animal and the
human is very close in all folk literature. In the preliterate cultures of the
American Indians, the Pacific Islanders, or the Central Africans, the culture
heroes who are responsible for the good and the bad in the life of the tribe may
upon one occasion appear as animals and upon another as men. Such was true of
the ancient gods of Egypt or Greece. The question whether Coyote
of the American Indian tribes is an animal or a man apparently makes no
difference to those who tell stories about him.
Aside from these semidivine creatures,
now animal or bird or man as they wish, supernatural and ill-defined creatures,
much more difficult to visualize, are also common. Fairies
or their counterparts appear in the legends of a good part of the world. It is
hard to define them, for in one place they will appear in full human size, in
another as little creatures inhabiting mounds or caves or living under the roots
of trees. In some countries they are benevolent creatures, helpful to men and
women. They reward human services but punish misdeeds. They marry or consort
with human beings. In some traditions they are malevolent creatures, and
meetings with them always bring disaster or bad luck. Almost every country has
produced its own variety of helpful and harmful creatures. Stories of the
activity of witches and devils, or water spirits and the supernatural guardians
of mountains or trees vary in details from land to land, but many of the
incidents related about them are easily transferred from one to another. Stories
of visits to quite other supernatural realms, fairyland, for example, may be
told in all their details in Russia or Greece. Giants
are usually considered to be ogres of one kind or another but they may also be
considered the most stupid of all beings and may be the subjects of hundreds of
numskull anecdotes. Underground creatures like the dwarfs
in "Snow White" are usually helpful and kindly, but other underground
creatures bring only disaster.
The widespread belief in the return of
the dead has resulted in many stories of encounters with ghosts
or of actual resurrection. These stories differ greatly in various parts of the
world and are much influenced by the current religious ideas. It is likely that
in the whole world of traditional literature the belief in ghosts has survived
longest.
Traditions of historic characters have a
tendency to repeat themselves from land to land and although they are told as
facts may form as definite patterns as any fictional folktale. Such stories as
Joseph and Potiphar's wife or the exposure and ultimate return of the hero
appear in many places. The expected return of King Arthur from Avalon or of
Barbarossa from his cavern are only two examples of a widespread motif of this
kind.
It is difficult and perhaps impossible
to distinguish the explanatory legend from the myth. Tales explaining the
origins of customs or of the shape or nature of various animals and plants, of
such distant objects as the stars, or even of the world itself often ascribe
such origins to the action of some ancient animal or to some magic
transformation. These are often connected with stories of the gods or demigods
and may even be a part of the religious beliefs of those who tell them.
Generally, legends and traditions of
this kind are simple in their form and contain only a single motif or at most
two or three. The problem of proper classification for the purpose of studying
these has proved very difficult, for while the materials of these legends and
traditions show many interesting parallels and resemblances, they vary greatly
from place to place. The relation of these stories to actual history, to
mythology, and to the fictional folktale is of much interest to students of folk
literature.
Three of the shorter forms of folk
literature--proverbs, riddles, and charms--are not confined to oral expression
but have appeared in written literature for a very long time. The proverb
that expresses in terse form a statement embodying observations about the nature
of life or about wise or unwise conduct may be so much an oral tradition as to
serve in some preliterate societies as a sanction for decisions and may even be
employed as lawyers employ court precedents. In literature it dominates certain
books of the Old Testament and is found even earlier in the writings from Sumer.
There has been a continual give and take between oral and written proverbs so
that the history of each item demands a special investigation.
While the proverb makes a clear and
distinct statement, the purpose of the riddle
is usually to deceive the listener about its meaning. A description is given and
then the answer is demanded as to what has been meant. Among examples in
literature are the riddle of the sphinx in Sophocles and the Anglo-Saxon
riddles, based on earlier Latin forms. In oral literature the riddle may be part
of a contest of wits. But even if the answer is known, the listeners enjoy
hearing them over and over. In Western culture the riddle is especially
cultivated by children.
Charms, whether for producing magic
effects or for divining the future, also exist in folk literature as well as in
the well-known Anglo-Saxon written form. The study of these extends over all
parts of the world and back to the earliest records.
As a part of their play activities
children not only play old games but repeat counting-out
rhymes and retain play-party songs that have long ceased to be a part of
adult activity in Western culture. Although the knowledge of those matters is
available to children in their books, in actual practice it is passed on by word
of mouth or by imitation, and the tradition may spread from school to school
over a continent with great rapidity (see LITERATURE,
THE ART OF: e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Children's literature ).
As abundant as folk literature is and
has been, its investigation has been seriously undertaken only within the past
two or three centuries. The principal difficulty has been the assembling of
material on which to base such studies. Its very oral nature makes it impossible
for one man to be acquainted at first hand with more than an extremely small
part of this activity. It is only when some sort of written record has been made
of the oral material that any general studies are possible.
For the still unlettered peoples, the
reports of ethnologists and anthropologists, as a part of their general studies
of the cultures of widely distributed groups, have often given good accounts of
folk literature and have frequently furnished texts of material they heard.
Though these reports are extremely uneven and often fragmentary, they do give a
sampling of the literary expression of many and diverse parts of the earth.
When attention is shifted to the ancient
world before the use of writing, scholars are almost entirely dependent on
analogies from the unlettered groups just mentioned. It will never be known what
tales were told or what songs were sung by the builders of the Egyptian Pyramids
or the temples in Sumer, but it seems fair to assume that even then these
peoples were not silent. Of course it must be remembered that they did
eventually develop a written literature, so that the analogy with modern
unlettered peoples may not be completely valid.
For folk literature since the
development of writing, scholars are dependent on several things. There may be
specific references in literary documents to the existence of particular tales
or songs and often to their manner of production. The Old Testament is a good
source for these, and both the Odyssey and
Beowulf contain good pictures of the
performances of folk minstrels and bards.
Many collections of folktales and
legends, of lyric and heroic songs, and of riddles and proverbs have been
recovered directly from popular tradition within the past three or four
centuries. When the collection of this material began it was nearly always
rewritten in the prevailing literary fashion. Excellent examples of such
rewritten tales will be found in the collections of Giambattista Basile
(1634-36), Charles Perrault (1697), and various German writers such as Johann
Karl August Musäus and Clemens Brentano in the 18th and early 19th
centuries. The Brothers Grimm
with their Kinder
und Hausmärchen (1812-15)
have as their ideal the exact recording of tales as heard from oral tellers,
though it is clear that many stories in their famous work are not folk
literature at all. In the same way, collections of folk songs and ballads were
severely edited well into the 19th century.
Partly as a result of the Romantic
movement in literature and partly of the interest in primitivism and the common
folk, the recording of all sorts of songs and oral tales since about 1800 has
been phenomenal. More and more the attempt has grown to recover material as it
actually exists. Many thousands of volumes are to be found in great libraries
that give a good sampling of folk literature in all parts of the world. The last
century has also seen the development of large regional or national archives,
many of them containing hundreds of thousands of items available for study. All
of these books and manuscripts have become increasingly valuable as the
techniques of collecting have progressed from casual longhand notes and
rewritings through various stages to mechanical recording on discs and tapes.
With mechanical recording it has been
possible to assemble properly attested folk literary material from all parts of
the world. This improved collecting has proceeded at an impressive pace and
makes possible comparative studies of all kinds, based on the oral record.
As for the folk literature of peoples
predominantly unlettered, these greatly expanded bases for study have brought
out not only the characteristics found everywhere but have pointed up the
differences found from place to place. Generalizations formerly accepted have to
be reviewed in the light of these differences. With increased collecting, for
example, do the likenesses or unlikenesses of American Indian tales and legends
become more manifest? Does folk literature in a certain part of the world follow
culture areas or language boundaries or some other principle? Such problems can
now be investigated with the assurance that modern collectors have made every
effort to record the oral tradition as it actually exists.
Much the same may be said of the
20th-century folk literature that exists among literate people side by side with
written works. The collecting has improved both in quantity and quality. And not
only have libraries been receiving new books of folk literature collections from
interested persons everywhere but these collectors are better trained and
equipped. The greatest improvement, however, in the study of folk literature
transcribed in writing has been the development of folklore archives, of which a
large part are concerned with various kinds of oral literature. These are
growing rapidly, are scattered over much of the world, and are becoming well
indexed and accessible.
(S.T./Ed.)
Typically, folk
music, like folk literature, lives in oral tradition; it is learned
through hearing rather than reading. It is functional in the sense that it is
associated with other activities. Primarily rural in origin, it exists in
cultures in which there is also an urban, technically more sophisticated musical
tradition. Folk music is understood by broad segments of the population, while
cultivated or classical music is essentially the art of a small social,
economic, or intellectual elite. On the other hand, that widely accepted type of
music usually called "popular" depends mainly on the mass
media--records, radio, and television--for dissemination, while folk music
typically is disseminated within families and restricted social networks. But
the introduction of songs from folklore into the mass media blurs the
distinction, and folk music in earlier times may be discussed separately from
that of the period after World War II. Moreover, while folk music as defined
above exists in all cultures in which there is also a cultivated musical
tradition, such as Japan, China, Indonesia, India, and the Middle East, the
usefulness of the concept varies from culture to culture. It is most convenient
as a designation of a type of music of Europe and the Americas.
Perhaps the most important
characteristic of a folk song
is its dependence on acceptance by a community--that is, by a village, nation,
or family--and its tendency to change as it is passed from one individual to
another and performed. This process of cultural exchange is known as
"communal recreation."
A piece of folk music is the property of
the entire community. But contrary to beliefs promulgated in the 19th century,
folk songs are normally
created not by groups of people but by individuals. When it is first composed,
each song is the work of one composer, though it is recreated constantly by the
performers who learn and sing it. The composer may create new songs by drawing
together lines, phrases, and musical motifs from extant songs, possibly combined
with entirely new ones and with standard opening or closing formulas. In
European folk music, a small number of tune types account for most of the
repertoire. English folk music, for example, is believed to consist largely of
about 40 "tune families," each of which descends from a single song.
And the majority of English folk songs are members of only seven such tune
families.
There is frequent interchange of tunes
between neighbouring countries. A few tune types are found throughout the
European culture area. Each country, however, tends to have a repertory of its
own, with stylistic features as well as tunes that are not shared with
neighbours. Textual types (such as ballad stories) are more widely distributed
than tune types.
The 20th century has seen the decline of
folk tradition in many areas, particularly those that became heavily urbanized
and industrialized. From the Middle Ages until the 19th century, folk music
probably had been distributed evenly throughout Europe and the Americas. After
1950, folk music was found most readily in areas that were not heavily
industrialized, such as the isolated mountainous regions of North America or of
Italy and in the countries of eastern and southern Europe. In the Americas, folk
music of European origin became mixed with elements of non-Western music,
especially African and (in Latin America) American Indian.
Much folk music can be said to be
"functional" in that it is not primarily entertainment or of aesthetic
interest but an accompaniment to other activities, particularly ritual, work,
and dance. In a traditional folk society, music is a necessity in almost all
rituals and festivals. The words of folk song can serve as chronicle, newspaper,
and agent of enculturation. In modern industrial nations, folk music is
perpetuated by ethnic, occupational, or religious minorities, among whom it is
thought to promote self-esteem, self-preservation, and social solidarity. Such
functions of folk music have been used by organizations advocating social
change, such as the U.S. civil rights and trade unionism movements.
Folk music is usually transmitted by
word of mouth, or oral tradition. This means that a folk song can change as a
result of the creativity of those who perform it or of their particular musical
style or of their faulty memory. As it is handed down from generation to
generation a folk song develops additional forms, called variants, which may
differ markedly from each other. For example, a song with four musical lines (e.g.,
ABCD) may lose two of these lines and take on the form ABAB.
In turn, two new lines may be substituted for the initial two, giving it a
form EFAB. Folk tunes also change when
they cross ethnic or cultural boundaries. A German variant, for example, may
exhibit characteristics of German folk music, while its variant in
Czechoslovakia, although recognizably related, will assume the stylistic traits
of Czech folk music. The degree to which songs change varies from culture to
culture. In some, presumably those that value consistency and object to change,
such as western Europe, songs change little and slowly. In others, such as
Afro-American cultures, the opposite tendency is found. (see also improvisation, musical
variation)
In spite of its dependence on oral
tradition, folk music tends to be closely related to music in written tradition.
Many folk songs originate in written form. For many centuries, popular and
classical composers have adapted folk music, and in turn, influenced the oral
tradition. A modern analogue of written tradition, recording, substantially
influenced the oral tradition, as folk singers could hear various arrangements
of folk music in private and commercial recordings. Thus, the transmission of
folk music has not been an isolated process but one intertwined with other kinds
of musical transmission.
The composition of folk music differs
little from that of popular and classical music, except that most folk songs are
composed without notation. The relationships among the sections of folk songs
and their scales and rhythms are also found in the other music of the same
culture. Systematic improvisation as a method of composition is found only
occasionally, as in the epic songs of eastern Europe. It is often difficult to
ascertain whether the same composer created both words and music in a folk song,
but, in many, they are known to come from different sources.
Among the most important genres of folk
music are ballads, generally short narrative songs with repeated lines, epics
(longer narratives in heroic style), work songs, love and other lyrical songs,
songs of a ceremonial nature accompanying the life cycle of man or the annual
agricultural cycle, songs accompanying games, and lullabies. These genres are
distinguished usually in their texts, but in some cultures, also in their music.
Instrumental folk music is most frequently an accompaniment to dance.
The typical melodic form of European
folk music is strophic, that is, a stanza consisting of from two to eight lines
(but most typically, four lines) is repeated several times in the song between
successive stanzas of the text. The relationship among the lines of the repeated
stanzas varies. For example, in English folk music, four lines with different
content are common (ABCD), but forms
whose endings revert to materials presented at the beginning are also common (e.g.,
ABBA, AABA, ABCA, ABAB). Similar forms are found in eastern Europe, where
the use of a melodic line at successively higher or lower levels is also
important. Thus, in Hungarian folk music, the form AA5A5A or AAA4A4
(the numbers indicating intervals of transposition) is common. In Czech folk
music, AA5BA is a
common form. Despite the variety of arrangement of the musical lines of a song,
the textual and musical lines nearly always coincide. In western European folk
music, these lines are almost always of equal length; eastern European folk
music frequently departs from this principle.
Among the exceptions to the strophic
form are children's songs and ditties and epic songs. The former tend to be
simple: they use limited scales and rhythms and small melodic range, and they
may consist of only one musical line repeated many times. They appear to form an
archaic stratum of European music and tend to be similar in musical content
throughout the continent.
Epic folk singing is limited to a small
number of folk traditions: Balkan, Finnish, and Russian, as well as non-European
cultures. The tendency to repeat and vary a musical line many times is also
found in epic singing, which is to some extent improvised.
The influence of popular music on folk
music, which became very strong in the 19th and 20th centuries, has tended to
limit and to standardize forms. The variety of melodic forms is greater, for
example, in older English, Anglo-American, German, and Czech folk music than in
later music.
Most folk music is monophonic (that is,
with only one melodic line), but polyphonic folk music, with several melodic
lines, is found in some parts of the world. The accompaniment of melody by
instruments is widespread as well, though all cultures have many songs that may
be sung without it. The accompaniment of folk music in western Europe appears to
have changed over the last thousand years. Originally, very simple, perhaps
dronelike material was performed by string instruments such as harps, zithers,
and psalteries. Later, simple harmonic sequences developed that were closely
related to the practices of 18th-century classical music and involved a larger
variety of instruments, including guitars, banjos, and string ensembles. The
popular folk music of the modern cities embodies still more complex harmonic
idioms.
Polyphonic
vocal folk music is far more common in eastern and southern Europe than in
western Europe. Styles vary from the simple two-voiced structures using
dronelike techniques and parallel singing of the same tune at different pitch
levels in Italy and the Balkans to the more sophisticated choral songs in three
or four voices, found in Russia and Ukraine. Rounds are found throughout Europe.
Heterophony--the simultaneous performance of variations of the same tune by two
singers or by a singer and his accompanying instruments--is important among the
southern Slavic peoples. Parallel singing is perhaps the most common type of
folk polyphony: parallel thirds--that is, singing the same tune at an interval
of a third--are found in Spain, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and
Slovakia, and farther east; parallel fourths and fifths are sung in the Slavic
countries. Instrumental folk polyphony is geographically more widespread than
vocal. Bagpipes, for example, which use the drone principle, are ubiquitous in
Europe. Scandinavian vocal music is largely monophonic, but complex styles of
instrumental polyphony were developed in the repertoires of various types of
fiddles, such as the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle.
It must be borne in mind that certain
cultures, such as the British, the Hungarian, and the Cheremis, or Mari people
of Russia, while having very little polyphonic folk music, have developed highly
complex repertoires of monophonic folk song. Polyphony should not be considered
an indication of an advanced state of art.
In folk music, rhythm and metre largely
depend on the metre of the poetry. Thus, in western Europe, where poetry
is organized in metric feet, there is a tendency toward even isometric structure
based on one type of metre--typically, 4[Over]4, 3[Over]4, or 6[Over]8, although
5[Over]4 also appears. In eastern Europe, generally, the number of syllables per
line is the main organizing factor, regardless of the number of stressed
syllables. Accordingly, the number of notes but not the number of measures is
important, and repeated but complex metric units (e.g.,
7[Over]8, 11[Over]8, 13[Over]8, etc.) appear, particularly in Hungarian,
Bulgarian, and Romanian songs.
Rhythmic structure is closely related to
singing style. Singers in the older, ornamented styles frequently depart from
rigid metric presentation for melismata (i.e.,
a single syllable sung to a series of notes) and other expressive effects.
Generally speaking, instrumental music is more rigorously metric than vocal.
Nonmetric material, some of it consisting of long, melismatic passages, is also
found in vocal and instrumental music in parts of Europe influenced by Middle
Eastern music, such as the Balkan and Iberian peninsulas.
Generally speaking, the scales of
European folk music fit into the diatonic tone system of European art music. On
the whole, the scales of folk music in Asian high cultures are closely related
to those consisting of two, three, or four tones, typically using major seconds
and minor thirds. These scales are normally used in single-line songs, such as
children's ditties, game songs, and lullabies, and they resemble the world's
simplest music, that of certain tribal cultures. Among the most important scale
types in Europe is the pentatonic, usually consisting of minor thirds and major
seconds; it is found throughout the continent but especially in songs and song
types not strongly influenced by the art music and popular music of the cities.
Diatonic modes are the third important group. The modes most frequently used are
Ionian (or major), Dorian, and Mixolydian, but Aeolian. Phrygian, and Lydian are
found as well. The Ionian mode is most common in western and central Europe;
others are found in eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and England (as well as in
English-derived music around the world).
Scales with a predominance of small
intervals close to minor seconds are found in the areas once influenced by
Middle Eastern music.
Folk music instruments vary in type,
design, and origin. They can be divided into roughly four classes.
Among the simplest instruments are those
that European folk cultures share with many tribal cultures throughout the
world. Among them are the following: rattles; flutes, with and without finger
holes; the bull-roarer; leaf, grass, and bone whistles; and long wooden
trumpets, such as the Swiss alpenhorn. These instruments tend to be associated
with children's games, signalling practices and remnants of pre-Christian
ritual. They evidently became distributed throughout the world many centuries
ago.
A second group consists of instruments
that were taken to Europe or the Americas from non-European cultures and often
changed. Among them are bagpipes, the folk oboes of the Balkan countries, the
banjo, the xylophone, and folk fiddles such as the Bulgarian one-stringed gusla.
Another group consists of the
instruments developed in the European folk cultures themselves from simple
materials. A characteristic example is the Dolle,
a type of fiddle used in northwestern Germany, made from a wooden shoe. A
more sophisticated one is the bowed lyre, once widespread in northern Europe but
later confined mainly to Finland.
The fourth group that is of great
importance comprises instruments taken from urban musical culture and from the
traditions of classical and popular music and sometimes changed substantially.
Prominent among these are violin, bass viol, clarinet, and guitar. In a number
of cases instruments used in art music during the Middle Ages and later, but
eventually abandoned, continued to be used in folk music into the 20th century.
Examples include the violins
with sympathetic strings found in Scandinavia (related to the viola d'amore) and
the hurdy-gurdy, still played
in France, and related to the medieval organistrum.
The manner of both vocal and
instrumental performance of folk music may vary greatly. In general, they differ
considerably from Western art music. The sometimes strange, harsh, and tense
voice in folk song is no more or less natural--or intentional--than the vocal
style of formally trained singers. The manner of singing and the tone colour of
instrumental music are among the most important characteristics of folk music.
They are less subject to change over a period of time and less subject to
influence than other characteristics of music such as scale, rhythm, and
harmony.
Speaking very broadly, European folk
music is sung in one of two styles, named parlando-rubato
and tempo giusto after studies of
east European folk music by the eminent Hungarian composer Béla
Bartók. The first style, parlando-rubatois probably older. Stressing the words, it departs frequently from
metric and rhythmic patterns and is often highly ornamented. The second style, tempo
giusto, follows metric patterns more precisely and maintains an even tempo.
Both styles are found in many parts of Europe and in European-derived folk
music. Using other criteria, the contemporary U.S. folk specialist, Alan Lomax,
found three main singing styles in Europe and the Americas. The
"Eurasian," found mainly in southern Europe and in parts of Britain,
is tense, ornamented, and essentially associated with solo singing. The
"Old European," found in central Europe and parts of eastern Europe,
is more relaxed. Produced with full voice, it is often associated with group
singing in which the voices blend well. The "modern European," found
mainly in western European singing of more recent materials, is something of a
compromise between the other two styles.
Before the 20th century members of a
community probably tended to sing very much in the same style. In the 20th
century--probably because of the influence of popular music, radio, and
records--folk singers began to develop intensely personalized repertories and
ways of performing, as may be seen in the work of popular folk singers.
In the Americas, the influence of
African performance practices on Afro-American,
as well as other folk music, has been important. Among these are the imaginative
use of vocal tone colours, antiphonal and responsorial techniques, and complex
rhythmic patterns.
The relationship of folk music to art
music became a topic of interest in the late 18th century when Western
intellectuals began to glorify folk and peasant life. Folk music came to be
venerated as a spontaneous creation of peoples unencumbered by artistic
self-consciousness and aesthetic theories and as an embodiment of the common
experience of inhabitants of the locale. These traits make folk music a
fructifying source for art music, particularly when it is intended to express a
particular nation or ethnic group. Another theory is that folk music is not
created by the folk but is popular music and art music that has "trickled
down" to the folk and undergone various transformations (usually
debasements) through oral tradition.
A viewpoint intermediate between these
two positions has been widely held since 1950. Folk music is seen neither as
merely debased art music nor as an essential component of art music. Rather, it
is seen to have a symbiotic relationship to other music in the larger society of
which the folk community forms a part. In Europe and the Americas the
give-and-take between folk music and art music is well documented. Many folk
songs collected in oral tradition have been traced to literary sources, often of
considerable antiquity. Folk music has been consciously incorporated into
European art music compositions throughout history, especially during periods of
"renewal" such as the Renaissance, the late 18th century, and
throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Folk music is closely related to popular
music in several ways. Societies possessing popular
music also have a folk music tradition--or remnants thereof. The partial
duplication of repertories and style indicates such cross-fertilization that a
given song may sometimes be called either "folk" or
"popular." With reference to music, the terms folk and popular are two
points on a musical continuum, rather than discrete bodies of music. From a
sociological viewpoint, however, folk and popular music have less in common.
Unlike folk music, popular music is primarily produced by professionals for
consumption by an urban, nonparticipating mass audience. The vital criteria of
folk music (i.e., oral tradition,
communal recreation, etc.,) are not operative.
Folk and popular music tended to merge
in the 20th century. As folk societies came increasingly within the purview of
modern urban society, oral tradition was supplemented or supplanted by the radio
and phonograph record. Some folk music thus transmitted maintains stylistic
authenticity, but some assumes the characteristics of popular music. Much of
what is called folk music in English-speaking countries is a subcategory within
popular music. It is the product of urban professionals who appropriate
authentic folk music styles for concert and recorded performances.
There has been some interaction between
folk music and rock music, as the generic designation "folk-rock"
indicates. Folk-rock arose in North America in the 1960s. In its texts, it is
modern urban folk song, with topical subject matter, often on social and moral
issues. Musically, however, it has the characteristics of rock in its
electrified string band and percussion accompaniment. Other current music that
mixes folk and popular elements includes: African high life, American jazz,
rhythm and blues, country-western music, and many Latin American forms, such as
the tango and bossa nova. (see also folk
rock music)
Relationships between church music and
folk music must also be noted. Some church music derives from the application of
religious texts to secular folk tunes. This practice may be seen, for example,
in the hymns of the Protestant
Reformation and in the revival hymns of 19th century American camp meetings,
which were called "folk hymns" because of their origins and
associations with folk-like groups.
There are many types of folk
dance, some widespread throughout Europe, others peculiar to nations and
regions, each with its typical musical style. Certain musical forms appear most
typically in the folk dance music of various parts of Europe. Most prominent is
a form type in which each line is repeated once, with a minor variation, usually
at the end--e.g., A1A2B1B2C1C2.
Vocal dance music also exists, and in northern Europe even narrative ballads
were used for dancing.
Knowledge of the history and development
of folk music is largely conjectural. Musical notations of folk songs and
descriptions of folk music culture are occasionally encountered in historical
records. Such records, however, show not so much the history of folk music as
the history of ideas held by the literate classes about folk music. It is
assumed that throughout history literate society has possessed a musical culture
different from that of their unlettered contemporaries. Their reaction to folk
music frequently was one of indifference and, occasionally, derision and
hostility. In medieval Europe, under the expansion of Christianity,
attempts were made to suppress folk music because of its association with
heathen rites and customs. Uncultivated singing styles were denigrated; Thomas
Aquinas expressed a common sentiment when he likened artless singers to
beasts. Some aspects of European folk music, however, became assimilated into
medieval Christian liturgical music, and vice versa.
During the late 15th and 16th centuries,
the literate urban classes responded more favourably to folk music than they had
in the medieval period. The humanistic attitudes of the Renaissance, such as the
elevation of nature and antiquity, encouraged the acceptance of folk music as a
genre of rustic antique song. Some music in Renaissance manuscripts is presumed
to be folk song by virtue of its musical simplicity and the rural and archaic
evocations of its texts. It may, of course, have incurred stylization and
change. Renaissance composers made extensive use of folk and popular music.
Typical genres include polyphonic folk song settings and folk song quodlibets,
or combinations of familiar songs. Folk tunes were often used as structural and
motivic raw material for motets and masses, and Protestant Reformation music
borrowed from folk music.
Folk music seems to have receded
somewhat from the consciousness of the literate classes during the Baroque
period. Folk song material in the music manuscripts and prints of the period is
scarce, and there is less folk influence in cultivated music, with the notable
exception of stylized dance-music forms.
During the late 18th century folk music
again became important to art music, especially among the Viennese classicists.
They incorporated folk tunes and the general style of folk music into their
instrumental music. The growth of national historical consciousness and the
idealization of the rural milieu led to the collection, preservation, and study
of folk song in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Folk song came to be
considered a "national treasure" and of considerable artistic merit
vis-à-vis cultivated poetry and song. National and regional folk song
collections were published. Revitalization of folk music became a means of
promoting nationalistic
sentiment and a conservative ideology. Governmental encouragement of folk music
became common after the early 19th century.
The search for origins and processes of
development that motivated much 19th and early 20th century intellectual
activity was reflected in folk music scholarship. Among the influences on
research in folk music in the 19th century were anthropological concepts of
cultural processes and the theory of evolution. Many scholars believed folk
music to be a repository of archaisms--a legacy from which the prehistory of
music, language, literature, and other cultural traits could be adduced. While
later scholars concede that some traits of folk music may be centuries or even
millennia old, they are less inclined to speculate on the age of archaic
elements of folk music or to offer historical reconstructions other than tracing
variants of individual songs or types of songs.
Scholars who specialize in folk music
usually have training in ethnomusicology,
a discipline concerned with elucidating music in a cross-cultural perspective.
Research in the words of folk song remains the province primarily of folklorists
and students of language and literature. Folk music theories are concerned
mainly with how folk genres and styles and individual folk songs originated, and
how, if, and why they change when diffused. Theories of folk music have been
beclouded by the difficulties in recognizing, isolating, and defining a
phenomenon as elusive and complex as folk music.
Since the last decade of the 19th
century, folk music has been collected and preserved by mechanical recordings.
The application of print and recording technology to folk music has promoted
wide interest, making possible the revival of folk music where traditional folk
life and folklore are moribund. Folk songs are frequently a part of public
school music curricula; various clubs, organizations, and societies focussing in
one way or another on folk music, often in conjunction with folk dance, have
arisen; festivals of folk music and dance are an annual event in many
communities throughout the world; conservatories of music have been established
for the training of folk musicians, particularly in the Socialist nations; radio
stations devote substantial portions of their programming time to the
broadcasting of folk or folklike music--again, particularly in Socialist
nations.
The literature on folk music is sparse
in theoretical works, in historical studies, and in materials integrating and
comparing the various styles of folk music in Western culture. There is a great
deal of literature showing the relationship between folk music and cultivated
music. Most plentiful, however, are collections of music and texts, particularly
of individual countries or regions, and even of individual singers. These
collections are useful for scholarly comparisons of melodies; they give an
imperfect picture of performance practice, however, because Western notation
cannot give a detailed description of all aspects of music. After World War II,
the availability of commercial records did much to fill this gap, and archives
of field recordings were developed at many institutions throughout the world. In
the U.S., those of the Library of Congress and Indiana University are most
important; national archives exist in most European countries, and particularly
in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Scandinavia. Such archives provide
ample research material for an enormous diversity of projects. Research has
usually dealt with "authentic" (i.e.,
older) material not heavily influenced by urban popular music and the mass
media. Popular folk music has not been studied widely. Several organizations for
the study of folk music exist, particularly the International Folk Music Council
and the Society for Ethnomusicology. (
B.N.)
Although the term folk
dance is most commonly applied to the gay, recreational dances of various
nationalities, its precise meaning is the subject of much debate among scholars
and has not been fully resolved.
Furthermore, scholars and dancers differ
in what they admit under the label of "folk dance." One may see folk
dance as the traditional dances of a country that evolve spontaneously from the
everyday activities and experiences of its people. Another may define it as
embracing only dances with magical and economic functions, or as comprising all
nonprofessional dances.
The discussions dwell upon the confusion
between such terms and concepts as "folk dance," "primitive
dance," "ethnic dance," and "stage dance" and on the
distinction between folk dance and modern recreational forms of ballroom
dancing.
Remnants of primitive dance persist in
Africa, Oceania, and South America, among peoples who have retained some degree
of their traditional religion and ways of life. Such dance throws light on the
origins of dance of the Western world. In its retention of its original
functions, primitive dance is distinct from the dances of more developed
cultures, which may fluctuate between ritualistic and recreational purposes.
The term ethnic
dance seems flexible. Some authorities see no difference between the
terms ethnic dance and folk dance. The eminent American dancer Ted
Shawn, however, would have ethnic dance subsume folk dance as a
subspecies. He considers pure, authentic and traditional racial, national, and
folk dance to be "ethnic"; he calls the theatrical handling of them
"ethnologic," and he refers to the free use of these sources of
creative raw material as "ethnological." Although these distinctions
are not hard and fast, they reflect the trend of much ethnic dance toward
professionalization. In still another view, folk dance is the dance from which
the art dance of a nation inevitably grows, both in technique and in spirit.
This concept is particularly applicable to such nations and regions as Japan,
India, and Andalusia, where art forms of the dance were a natural outgrowth of
the traditional dances.
Purists are disturbed by a trend toward
the deliberate "staging" of folk dances, and especially by their
increasing professionalization: they might call the adaptations folkloric.
Professional dance and secular folk dance have been distinguished as one might
separate art from craft, even when the scenarios and choreography of modern
dance and ballet adopt materials from folk dance or the larger field of folk
culture. Most scholars, however, exclude from folk dance the dances of the
commercial theatre, television, and film. Though they generally consider jazz
dancing an American folk style, they would exclude formal choreographies in jazz
style.
These selected points of view indicate
the fluctuating boundaries of folk dance, especially in reference to its
functions. Although patterns and movement styles are significant, the function
and locale of folk dances have greatest weight in distinguishing them from
primitive and theatrical manifestations. Frequently the dances of rural peoples
reveal their ritual origins on certain occasions, though they also serve
recreational purposes. The origins may be very ancient. Generally, but not
always, dances favoured in urban centres have secular purposes and may be of
recent, perhaps consciously creative, origin. As in the case of folk song, the
origin need not be anonymous, though usually it has been lost in the passage of
time. Folk dances have grown out of creative inspiration, and they continue to
sprout from the imaginations of individuals and groups, people of all classes
who sense the traditions and the aspirations of their environment.
Many folk dances best reveal their
ancient functions when performed in their native habitat. Outside this context,
in a school gymnasium or on a stage, they lose their aura, but on the village
green the British Morris dances
and the Abbots Bromley Horn dance speak of renewed May Day vegetation and of
Paleolithic elk worship. Again, some dances serve various functions. The Spanish
Aragonese jota is best known as a rural entertainment for men and women, but it
may enliven funerals or appear on American stages.
The above British examples reflect the
transition from pagan to Christian religions and, in more recent times, the
change from the attitudes of village and agriculture to those of town and
industry and the consequent changes in social relations. As the English scholar Douglas
Kennedy pointed out, when primitive religion weakens, some of the mystery
and the magic departs from the dances that express it. The dancer becomes less a
medicine maker than a performing artist as ritual changes imperceptibly into art. In short,
man's social adjustment to the environment, for purposes of survival, created
both the original dance rituals and their subsequent functional or formal
changes. Vestigial animal dances echo ancient animistic rites. The Ainu tribes
of northern Japan still mime bear and fox hunts, portraying the animals very
realistically. In West Africa, an antelope hunt in dance has ritualistic
overtones, while monkey mimes are for entertainment alone.
The Balkans and Central America
represent a far-reaching example of adjustment and change. These far-removed
parts of the world share ecological circumstances, notably a basically
agricultural civilization. Geographically, both narrow into bottlenecks
connecting two continents; both combine high and rocky mountain ranges with
agricultural lowlands and uplands; both bulge into peninsulas rich in culture.
Both have submerged their ancient religious customs to innovations, those of
Roman Catholicism and, in the Balkans,
of Islam as well. Yet both have maintained their ancient native customs
with such compromises as those to the events of the Christian calendar,
Christian names, or Islamic styles. Recently both areas have been
receptive to the influx of 19th-century secular European dance forms and have
transmuted these importations to suit the native styles. (see also Central America)
In both areas three dance types show
varying degrees of modernization. One type, which takes the form of combat,
remains highly ritualistic, albeit with a mixture of pagan and Christian
elements. A second, agricultural in function, involves more of the community
than the combative type and fluctuates between celebrations of sowing and
harvest and of social festivities. The third type, derived from central and
western Europe, is completely secular and social.
Male combat
dances of the Balkans echo ancient pre-Christian rites for initiation
into brotherhoods, the heralding of spring and of animal fecundity, and healing.
Fierce battles ensue at the seasonal rituals of the Macedonians, of the
Slovenes, and of the Romanians. Animal maskers and buffoons enact resurrection
dramas. Along the coasts of Croatia and Dalmatia the battling factions have,
under Christian influence, been renamed Moors and Christians or Moors and Turks.
These battle dances have related forms and styles in other European countries,
from Spain to Great Britain. They also have relatives in Central America, where
early Spanish missionaries introduced Moors and Christians to replace the
earlier ritual combats of the Indian populations.
Rural celebrations of planting and of
harvests feature communal round dances, such as the kolo of the eastern Balkan
region, the horo of Bulgaria, the hora
of Romania, and a variety of Greek chain dances. The celebrations include
vestiges of ancient vegetation festivals, impersonations of fertility deities,
and "rain magic." The same rounds, however, appeared also at weddings
and other secular or semisecular gatherings. Such rounds survive in the
mountains of Mexico as mitotes.
Although they concluded most Aztec and Mayan ceremonies, they have become
scarce since the Spanish Conquest. They are still performed to procure rain and
an abundant harvest. (see also agriculture)
Rural and urban gatherings include the
social square dances and couple dances for men and women. Within the last
century the Bohemian polka, the Austrian waltz, the Polish mazurka, and the
Hungarian czardas have appeared in the northern Balkans. In Central America
similar social and courtship dances have become increasingly popular. Each
region has a version of the dances known as jarabe
or huapango. The jarabe tapatío
of Jalisco, better known as the Mexican hat dance, combines steps from many
European nations. All regional dances use polka
or waltz steps and European
music. With their lively and showy styles, these couple dances are suited to
stage performances and occur as such.
In other parts of the world, folk
dancers are shifting from a man-deity and man-nature purpose to a man-man or
male-female attitude. This is noticeable not only in adaptations of former
dances of supplication but also in dances miming agricultural and other
occupations, as the Polish sowing of rye and oats, the Hungarian haymaking, the
Swedish flax reaping, the clothes washing of Denmark, and the spinning mime of
Spain. Some of these occupational dances derive from enactments by medieval
guilds or from the mime in medieval branles. They survive as entertainment in
adult couple dances and in children's games, often in settings remote from their
origin.
In the course of centuries, changes in
the beliefs and in the methods of producing the essentials of life have produced
numerous adjustments such as the adaptation of the calendar from a basis in
agricultural ecology to a basis in Christian festivals and the resultant shifts
in the organization of dance groups.
Notwithstanding the trend toward
sociable and theatrical objectives, many folk dances celebrate original
festivals. In Europe and Europeanized America, however, they show many
adjustments to the Christian feasts. In the Balkans, Austria, and other
countries the long series of dances for renewed vegetation and life now
celebrate Epiphany (Twelfth Night), Carnival, Easter, Pentecost, Corpus Christi,
and St. John's Day (June 24). As noted previously, the midwinter dances
emphasize male combat and animal impersonations, whereas the springtime dances
dwell on new vegetation, in southerly climates on first fruits. Two festivals
are particularly spectacular--Carnival and Pentecost.
Carnival
festivals of Europe and the Americas precede Lent, filling the three days before
Ash Wednesday. In Austria they perpetuate many pagan dances, particularly in
Innsbruck and Imst, with the masked and ghostly phantoms and witches and noisy
processions with songs, bull-roarers, drums, and whips. In Spanish and Latin
American villages the unruly characters enact a more orderly "combat of
winter and summer," in the guise of the ancient Moors and Christians, with
the obvious victory of summer. Devils and deaths (diablos
y muertes) are also on the loose in the role of buffoons. Morality
plays are relics of medieval ideology, with speeches in the local
vernacular and decorous steppings of Sin, Death, the Devil, Pastorcitas
(shepherdesses in white communion dress), and masked animals from the Garden of
Eden or bears or tigers.
Urban carnivals bring out animal
maskers, deaths, and devils, without ritual connotations in, for instance,
Munich. The famous carnivals of Rio
de Janeiro and New Orleans
draw huge crowds of tourists to observe the masking, competitive parades of
floats, and street and ballroom dancing. In the Brazilian medley the street and
ballroom dances show interesting contrasts: the samba in the streets is
ecstatic, improvisatory, and disorderly, whereas the samba of the ballrooms is
more sedate and has set steps. Such urban carnivals have lost sight of the
original ritual purpose.
On the other hand the observances of Pentecost,
the springtime feast that falls 50 days after the Christian Easter, fit the
dances into a framework that meaningfully combines Christian and pre-Christian,
New and Old Testament, forms. The Jewish Shavuot festival follows by the same
period the Passover, which often coincides with Easter. The Pentecost, known
also as Whitsunday, has since AD 200 commemorated the descent of the Holy Spirit
on the Apostles, and the Shavuot, originally a feast of thanksgiving for first
fruits, has been associated by rabbis with the giving of the Law at Sinai. Both
express the joyous resurgence of animal and spiritual powers and of new
vegetation.
In the southerly climates the festival
may already celebrate the first fruits. Everywhere Jewish celebrants bring
offerings of fruits and flowers to the temple, with chanting and prayers. In
Haifa, Israel, white-clad youths and maidens dance and sing. In the Balkans
girls dance for Pentecost, and the community winds in snakelike kolos. In
England the community circles around a tree, then around the church, or it holds
a maypole dance. In some villages, such as Bampton-on-the-Bush and those of the
Cotswolds region, "Morris men" dressed in clean white caper and leap
in a procession or in double files, waving white kerchiefs or green branches.
The dancers may have the company of clowns, a Jack-in-the-Green clad in
greenery. In some English villages and in British-inspired American locations,
such dances take place on May Day rather than Pentecost. (see also United Kingdom)
Agricultural festivals, especially
harvests, may adjust their dates not only to the local climate but to the
particular year's weather. The Iroquois
Indians of New York State and Ontario adjust their calendar to the ripening of
the crops of berries, beans, and corn. They may hold their thanksgiving rounds
for green corn between the third week of August and the middle of September. The
square dances of the American
farmers were held on the occasion of husking bees--before combines took over the
work--whenever the corn was ready. Farmers continue their square
dances, or "country
dances," in barns or in grange halls at odd times or even weekly.
Their urban imitators perpetuate these dances assiduously when square-dance and
folk-dance societies, often mingling the traditional American dances with those
of immigrant peoples, meet in national halls or centres, school or college
gymnasiums, or other locations. The gatherings of these enthusiasts and
analogous groups on both sides of the Atlantic are legion.
Certain secular or semisecular
celebrations adhere to a definite date. Such political holidays as the French
Independence Day (July 14) and the Mexican national holiday (May 5) and
Independence Day (September 16) feature regional dances outdoors and at indoor
balls. The Guelaguetza at Cerro Fortín, Oaxaca, formerly a ritual
festival, now combines religious and regional dances for the general public on
July 16. Such festivals attract vast numbers of dance teams, native visitors,
and tourists.
Although attendance at such public
fiestas is haphazard, the participants in many dance gatherings observe closely
knit organization and definite rules for the individual's place in the community
and in the communal dances. The men in European combat dances belong to a sworn
brotherhood of ancient origin. The male and female members of a Mexican votive
society, the Concheros, have
an intertribal hierarchy paralleling that of the forces of the conquistador Cortés,
headed by a capitán general. In
second rank are the officials of each local group, first and second captains,
sergeants, standard bearers, each with specific duties, followed by the common
rank of soldados and, finally, such
attendant characters as Cortés' interpreter-mistress Malinche, the devil,
sorcerers, and mythological figures. At present they do not regulate their
rituals according to the calendar, though their ancestors probably did. (see
also role)
Although such societies cut across
family ties, other organizations are based on descent, especially among American
Indians. Iroquois and Pueblo Indians
group their clans into two moieties, or halves, of the entire social scheme,
matriarchal and patriarchal respectively. In their ceremonies and social events
the Iroquois stress the interaction of moieties, with the alternation of
moieties in the dance file. However, the New Mexican Pueblos usually feature
separate dances for the two moieties and even assign festivals of the two
seasons to the summer and winter moieties.
These same tribal groups also observe
strict regulations according to sex. Iroquois women manage the summer rites for
agriculture; the men manage fall and winter ceremonies for animals and cures.
Among the Iroquois as well as the Pueblo, men and women hold esoteric dances
separately, or men occupy one-half of the dance line and women follow in the
second half. In less sacred dances and always in social rounds men and women
alternate. Observers report similar customs not only among the natives of the
New World but also in the Old, as in Serbia and Great Britain. Men perform the
traditional Morris and sword dances, but the sexes mingle in country dances,
reels, and quadrilles. The solos in Scottish sword dances are traditionally male
performances, but, as a nonauthentic deviation, girls may now execute the tricky
steps of the dances.
The traditions of age grades are also
becoming diluted. From Greece to New Mexico, almost universally, the older,
experienced men and women are the leaders, while the children bring up the rear
of dance lines as apprentices. Warrior societies of Great Plains tribes of the
United States once observed strict gradations of dance rituals according to age.
But these societies are all but extinct, and public war dances admit all ages of
males, with females in the background. With the dissemination of folk dances
into the schools, children are learning adult routines. However, in remote
villages of Europe youngsters have their special dances, and adolescents may
enter the adult circles modestly.
Generally the individual is submerged in
the larger society and must fit into the dance group harmoniously. Some peoples,
the Pueblo Indians for example, uphold strict standards of restraint, and within
the natural variations of greater or less energy, a member of a dance group
should not show off. However, other peoples such as the Iroquois appreciate
improvisatory clownery or virtuoso display by talented males. In the Balkans the
male leader of a dance line may engage in acrobatics--crouches, leaps, or
pivots--while the rest of the group adheres to the traditional steps. In the
Basque provinces of Spain, in the Ukraine, and in Poland male experts have the
opportunity to display high kicks or spectacular leaps. The improvisations of
these privileged experts have often led to the introduction of permanent new
elements into the dances.
Function, sex, and age all have an
effect on a dancer's style of movement. Other psychological factors of group and
individual temperament and mood have, for untold centuries, determined the
quality and the type of steps and gestures. The climate and topography may have
had an effect on the development of regional styles.
According to Douglas
Kennedy, the ideal of English folk dancers is to hold the body in a
straight line from head to toes, creating a vertical equilibrium that makes the
dancer light on his feet. This uplifted carriage allows him to reach out and
form the contact essential for a unified dance ensemble. This ideal would apply
to many folk dance types of Europe, the United States, and Canada, and to some
Asiatic round dances, but it does not fit the more dramatic dances of the
British Isles nor myriad dances in other parts of the world. Even within
England, Kennedy points out the frequently bent-up position and the power of
male sword dancers.
In Spain the erect ease of Aragonese
line dances contrasts with the swaybacked incisiveness of Andalusian flamenco
dances. In Yugoslavia the eastern villages have acquired the vibrations of
Turkish dancers, and gypsies use more undulating movements than the Serbs about
them. In Asia such hill tribes as India's Todas circle with simple steps and an
erect posture, whereas demon dancers of the Pariah caste stamp and leap, and the
practitioners of the ancient Natya style
combine elaborate, symbolic hand gestures with body sways and stamps. (see also Indian
dance)
Although India's caste system has
produced extreme contrasts, differences in occupation and social class have
everywhere affected the spirit and quality of movement. During the late Middle
Ages and Renaissance the courtiers who borrowed such rural dances as the branle
and the bourrée watered down their rustic vigour. In 19th-century
colonial California the descendants of upper class Spaniards performed the
polkas, mazurkas, and waltzes with an elegance that contrasted with the rowdy
renderings by the gold miners.
In modern square dancing the difference
between male and female styles is negligible, but in most folk dances the women
move more gently than the men, with smaller steps, lower leaps, and less raising
of the knees or feet. The women dancers have a more sinuous, alluring style in
southern Spain; they spin gently in the Austrian and Bavarian Schuhplattler
and the Caucasian lezginka, while
the men jump, clap, and shout. Among American Indian tribes the women have a
more subdued style and often special, tiny steps except in couple dances that
have been adapted from the mainstream of Western social dancing.
The setting affects the movement style.
Joan Lawson suggests differences due to the natural environment--a theory that
will need more investigation. She maintains that in rich agricultural plains or
river valleys, such as the Danubian Plains and parts of France, and Denmark,
movements are accented downward as if the body were being drawn toward the soil.
Dancers perform in large groups, using the same step, closely linked together by
fingers, hands, elbows, or shoulders. By contrast, in mountainous areas there is
a good deal of leaping and individual display, especially among the males.
Regional variations include preferences
for mime or for abstract movements. India's folk dancers and, half a world away,
those of Scandinavia favour mimetic gestures,
respectively graceful and comic. Serbia's peasants are interested in purely
decorative steps and Ireland's experts are fond of tricky solo steps or complex
group patterns that are in no way imitative of outside phenomena. In general,
the mime of folk dancers is stylized, having lost the realism of the primitive
animal impersonators and of actors in folk dramas. (see also mime
and pantomime)
Opportunities for mimetic dancing are
drastically reduced when the hands are required for other formal patterns of the
dances. Most folk dancers use their hands and arms for contact in circles,
lines, or couples; they wave kerchiefs, as along South America's Pacific coast;
they swing soft balls in complex patterns, as in the poi dance of the New Zealand Maoris; the women swirl full skirts, as
in Spain and Mexico; or everyone lets the arms hang loose or places hands on
hips, thus emphasizing foot and ground patterns.
In India, dance-dramas based on the life
of the god Krishna (Krsna) are enacted in Manipur by young women who use
simplified gestures descended from the large, complex system of hand gestures
known as mudras. The basic
gestural symbols derive from the wrist position, the position of the palm, and
the poses of the fingers. Each gesture has its prescribed musical accompaniment.
A trembling leaf, for example, is symbolized by the alapallava,
a rotation of the wrist accompanied by a folding and unfolding of the
fingers. In Hawaii, a few older women can execute hula
gestures clearly descended from the mudras, but younger dancers have diluted the
tradition by introducing purely decorative gesture.
In Scandinavian
countries male and female imitators of occupations likewise stylize their
harvest motions. The youths who portray rough-and-tumble fights, as in the
Swedish oxen dance, duel good-naturedly, pull each other's hair, and pretend to
box one another's ears. In this last gesture, as in the German Watschenplattler,
the aggressor merely pretends to touch his opponent, who claps his hands to
simulate the blow.
Slavic men and some other skilled
performers use steps recalling former animal mime, as the goatlike caper or
cabriole, the pawing horse-step or pas-de-cheval, the side-kicking, cowlike
rue-de-vache, and the feline pas-de-chat leap. But folk dancers of many
nationalities exploit the imageless mazurka or variants of the polka, waltz, and
twostep, all in appropriate rhythms. The walking, running, sliding, skipping, or
jumping movements are so universal in folk dance that they cannot, by
themselves, be considered mimetic.
On the one hand, line dancers of a
single region may develop intricate variations of a basic step. Lawson
identifies 15 ways of performing the basic kolo step, a step-to-the-side and
close. The variants include gliding, swinging of the free leg, crossing,
jumping. On the other hand, a widely disseminated step may appear in many forms
in different regions. The triple-time waltz is step-together-step in Austria,
with pivots at specific times. As the Mexican atole
step it is forward-back-forward; in the Venezuelan joropo every first beat
is heavily accented. As a ballroom dance it reveals diverse patterns: as a
propelling step in Spanish and New Mexican quadrilles, a light-footed waltz may
balance from side to side, progress forward or backward, or go round and round.
The type of step depends also on the
purpose of the dance, whether a solemn processional or an exhibition of skill in
leaps or crouches; on the sex or age of the various participants; and on the
type of ground plan.
Simple circling leaves the dancer's
attention free for elaborate steps, whereas complex ground plans take the mind
away from stepping and necessitate the simplest kind of progression by walking
or running. Throughout the world the erstwhile ritual dances may involve a
simple run, as in the Iroquois corn and bean dances and the serpentine stomp
that spread from the ancient Aztecs to Indian agriculturalists of the U.S. Choreographies
may combine complexities of step, of rhythm, and of ground plan, like the
"game animal dances" along the Rio Grande, but as a rule they
emphasize one or another factor.
The Balkan
chain dances feature intricate steps and rhythms, but simple formation of closed
or open circles. During closed rounds the men and women remain within the same
spot as they inch along counterclockwise. Likewise, participants in French
branles circle on location, usually clockwise--the typical direction of
northwest Europe. In chain dances the circle is not closed. A leader guides the
line, linked by hands or a prop, in meanders and spirals perhaps across open
fields. On reversal a tail man will guide the meanders. Such serpentines, of
ancient origin, are favourites in the Near East; throughout Europe, especially
as the French farandole and the Catalan sardana; in North America, in both
native and Europeanized dances; and in such parts of Asia as Manipur. They
predominate among agricultural peoples, for they originated in chthonic
symbolism.
A specialized form of meander is called
the hey in England. Two lines of dancers weave past each other in opposite
directions. In a circular formation this is known as the square dance "Paul
Jones" or, if the participants are attached by ribbons to a central pole,
as a maypole dance. Here the two opposing groups are or should be male and
female. The most elaborate form akin to the hey is the kolattam,
a stick dance of South India. In the pinnal
kolattam the dancers weave in and out, at the same time striking
short sticks in precise patterns. (The intricacies were diagrammed by Hildegard
L. Spreen: see Bibliography.) (see also United Kingdom)
Dances in two parallel lines have a more
limited distribution. As in the case of rounds, the performers may start
shoulder-to-shoulder or aligned in the same direction. The lines may cross over
or circulate in opposite directions, or pairs of dancers can cross directly or
diagonally. Morris dancers use a large vocabulary of interlacings, which
resemble those of the American "Virginia Reel"; respectively, the
participants are men only and men-and-women. Multiple parallel lines of men and
women are customary in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific; Cambodian girls
display elegant poses; Balinese men carrying spears mass together in the baris
dance; and while executing the warlike gestures of the peruperu,
Maori men remain in one spot.
As noted previously, ritual principles
often dictate that in more sacred dances the sexes be separated, whereas in more
secular dances they usually alternate or are aligned face-to-face. In modern
folk dances, couples circulate within circular formations, as in Moravian rounds
and American square dances, or in the extremely elaborate Irish reels of eight
couples. In ballroom dances couples generally ignore any geometric designs, and
individuals ignore the rest of the group.
In the "possession rite" of
Ghana's Akhan society, circle dances by devotees, frenzy dances, and circling by
everyone alternate with prayers, chants, offerings, and speeches. A similar
structure is evident in the possession dances of Brazil and Trinidad and of the
Christian Holiness services in the U.S.
In the course of history the general
trend, during secularization, has been toward increasing complexity, from round
or double file to quadrilles, and then from cohesion to a breakup into couples
and solos. This disintegration is distinct from the individualism that may be
present in primitive dances, for there the soloist had a mimetically compulsive,
even priestly, function and was the focus of group activity. Concurrent with the
elaboration of patterns, the symbolism
has been disintegrating. The vegetation symbols of meanders and arches have been
lost, but the designs remain. Face-to-face formations and couple arrangements
retain meaning as courtship actions, and despite the loss of the modern folk
dancer's relation to, or attempt to act upon, the physical environment, the
social contacts between dancers remain.
The type of ground plan affects the
contacts between not only the dancers but also the dancers and the spectators.
Square dances offer the maximum possibilities of intermingling within a
formation, but they exclude spectators. Chain dances lack the give-and-take, but
they may wind about or through the spectators, who may enter at any time.
Contact, whatever form it may take, is essential to folk dance.
The evolutionary process in the
relations between the dance and other arts is very similar to the development of
the dance itself. From the nearly total integration of dance and life in
primitive ritual to modern rock-and-roll, many factors--the passage of
centuries, the change from animism to Christianity, the shift from hunting,
agriculture, and handicraft to industrialization, the trend from country to
city, from sanctuary to village green to stage--have exerted a profound
influence on the totality of dance experience.
In the esoteric dance rituals of
Australia, in the mythological dance enactments of India and Indonesia, in
Nigeria and such of its distant New World derivatives as the vodun, dance is
immersed in the larger drama of the rite. The symbolism of the movement patterns
is locked into the symbolism of song texts, the traditional music, and the
meaning of masks and costumes, not to speak of the setting in a sacred grove.
Here and there the decorative invocations to animistic spirits have survived,
mysteriously, in the masked animal ghosts of the Austrian Alps, as well as in
the "game animal dances" of New Mexico's Tewa Indians. Perhaps these
vestiges are not really folk dances. Perhaps folk dances--that is, dances of the
people--do not require the integration of all of the arts for gatherings or
programs.
In general, the musical accompaniment to
folk dances has persevered fairly well. In village and urban hall the devotees
use the tunes intended for particular routines, though these tunes may be played
on modern instruments. Morris dancers usually preserve the traditional order of
a suite--Laudnum Bunches, Bean Setting, Rigs o'Marlow, Shepherd's Hey, Constant
Billy. In the execution of isolated kolos, ländler, or country dances,
natives and imitators fit the steps to traditional tunes, to live music, piano,
or recordings, which may feature old-time clarinets, tabours, drums, and even
band arrangements or accordions. (see also music, history of)
The coordination of tempo and rhythm
between dance and music is rarely problematic. It is easy to follow the slow and
the fast tempo of a set like the Norwegian gangar and springar, or
the acceleration of an Israeli hora. It is easy to follow the metres of the
polka, of the waltz with its accent on the first beat, or of the mazurka with
its accent on the second, although the melody may have independent rhythms. It
takes more skill to follow some of the Bavarian tunes that shift their metres,
and it takes an expert to follow the unusual metres of Greek and Serbian dances,
especially when the phrases of the tunes overlap the phrases of steps.
It takes practice also to provide
self-accompaniment in rhythm or melody. Rarely do folk dancers provide their
entire self-accompaniment, as do the Mexican viejitos who play small stringed jaranas, or Hawaiian hula dancers
who chant and shake rattles. Frequently, the dancers add percussive effects to
the accompaniment by special musicians. They stamp on the ground, on the floor,
or on a resonant platform with bare feet, boots, or high-heeled shoes, sometimes
in complex counter-rhythms. Hungarian men click spurs; Russians click the heels
of their boots as they leap. Austrian and Bavarian Schuhplattler
males swat various parts of the anatomy in set rhythms. Sword dancers click
swords: stick dancers click sticks in Spain,
Portugal, England, Mexico, Brazil, and India. Andalusians punctuate their
incisive foot rhythms with crisp sounds of finger castanets; Greek males click
spoons in their zabakelos; and
American Indians sometimes shake rattles. In such secular dances as the Cuban
rhumba or Argentinian carnavalito, accompanists
use rattles. Sound makers may be attached to the costume, as the bell pads of Morris
dancers or the ankle bells of India's nautch dancers. In many parts of
the world exuberant dancers dispense with instruments and clap or shout at
specified times or whenever the spirit moves them. They may also sing to various
instruments or without instrumental accompaniment.
Self-accompaniment by song is
significant for several reasons. First, it is probably one of the most ancient
forms of accompaniment because of the independence from any instruments. Second,
it is aesthetically pleasing. Finally, the songs have texts of historical,
sociological, or ecological importance. Such singing may be in unison, with
women's voices an octave higher than the men's; it may employ harmonies
characteristic of the region, with intervals of a third or a fourth, and it may
involve antiphony between a
leader and the dance group or two groups of dancers. Such antiphony occurs in
widely separated parts of the world, frequently in connection with serpentine
chain dances as in Manipur and in America's Southeastern woodlands. Frequently
the responses use nonsense syllables, and they may involve gestural responses,
as in the Cherokee "stomp dance" and its predecessor, the ancient
Aztec serpent dance.
The song texts are varied. The most
frequent topics are courtship, as in the "Llorona" of Mexico's
Tehuantepec, or sheer joy, as in the German "Freut euch des Lebens."
In the Faeroe Islands the topics are narratives from legends, which are mimed by
the round dancers. Sometimes the topic refers to agriculture, as in the French
Canadian children's round, "Avoine" ("good grain").
The previous remarks mentioned the
sound-producing items of costumes, as boots and bells. Visually effective items
worn by dancers include kerchiefs and female full skirts, which permit numerous
manipulations. Other visual effects are the designs of regional dress in the
various countries, from the flouncy flamenco skirts to the white trousers of
sword dancers. In the United States square
dancers sometimes affect full skirts for women and plaid shirts for men.
(see also country dance)
The revived interest in national folk
dances is generally dissociated from tradition, unless a folk dance group has a
leader with folkloric knowledge. Folk dancing inspires the weekly gatherings of
groups in civic centres, colleges, and other centres, even the entire schedules
of summer folk-dance camps. Congresses sponsored by the Folk Dance Federation of
California produced a uniform repertoire for groups throughout North America.
In addition, new immigrants introduced occasional new dances. Most of these
groups dance for the sheer pleasure of dance, and more expert ensembles stage
programs and enter contests, both in the New and Old World. But although such
revivals and the consequent preservation of traditions were heartening and
brought about good fellowship, healthful exercise, and, avowedly, international
understanding, such dancing had no connection with the aboriginal purposes of
folk dancing, which continued only in villages or on Indian reservations.
The modern style of costuming is an
extreme departure from the masks for spirit impersonators and the symbolic
designs painted or woven on all costumes
of the ritual dances. Such paraphernalia survived in some dances that straddle
ritualism and folk dance, as the animal and corn dances of the Pueblo
Indians. But the trend was increasingly toward contemporary dress. Even
the Iroquois ritualists usually wore ordinary clothes. Members of folk dance
clubs rarely wore traditional costumes at their informal gatherings, although
these clothes were customary for staged programs.
As a contrasting trend, professional
folkloric troupes exaggerated costume effects, doubled the volume of skirts,
added spangles, and increased the instrumental volume and the tempo. Frequently
the directors composed scenarios, as in the reconstructions of Aztec rituals by
the Ballet Folklórico de México.
Their spectacles have a great audience appeal, compensating in part for the
nonkinetic and the prosaic in modern folk dancing.
The folk arts are by and large
expressive of traditions that are deeply rooted in the life-styles and in the
social organizations of peoples and cultures throughout the world. But as those
styles and organizations change over time, in response to environmental,
economic, technological, and other factors, so do the concomitant artistic
expressions evolve in terms of function, form, and mode of existence. But change
has been brought about, too, by the creativity of individuals and of cohesive
groups.
Professional dancers found folk
materials a rich source of inspiration that they used in several ways. Authentic
dances were intensified for the stage by such companies as the Philippine
Bayanihan troupe and the Ceylon National Dancers. The sophisticated dance-dramas
of India's Uday Shankar, who performed widely in the West, often contained folk
dances. His work with the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in Radha
and Krishna showed, too, the rich potentialities for East-West
collaboration. A folk atmosphere can be evoked without using folk materials,
notable in La Malinche by José
Limón. Finally, seemingly incompatible styles were fused: Mary Wigman was
among the first to blend the rather stark idiom of modern dance with the ornate
and exotic styles of the Orient. (see also Indian dance)
Although the origins of many traditional
dances are lost in a nebulous past, the observed emergence of new forms may give
clues to the age-old processes of change. Inspired individuals may have molded
the patterns of the ancient round-dance figures much as numerous leaders of
dance in the 20th century have invented variations on the steps or devised steps
and patterns to fit new rhythms, passing on their innovations by teaching or
imitation. Again, creators have developed entire new dance structures from
traditional materials, as the choreographers of modern Israeli dances have done
most skillfully.
Another inevitable process is that of
crystallization. For various reasons--sanctity, nostalgia, or whatever--groups
tend to maintain routines through time. But not forever. If a dance does not die
of old age, of having totally outworn its function and of having a form or
spirit out of tune with a new age, it will continue to gain new life from
improvised variations on basic steps or ground plans or from conscious
elaborations of its forms by professional directors of ethnic dance groups and
programs. Such kinds of creativity, individual and group, contribute to that
constant cycle of orderly change within traditional parameters which accounts
for the rich variety of the dances of the people. (G.P.K./
Ed.)
In the broadest sense, folk art refers
to the art of the people, as distinguished from the elite or professional
product that constitutes the mainstream of art in highly developed societies.
The term in this comprehensive context combines some quite disparate categories
of art; therefore, as a workable field of art-historical study, folk art is
generally treated separately from certain other kinds of peoples' arts, notably
the primitive (defined as the work of prehistorical and preliterate peoples).
Historically, the terms folk and popular have been used interchangeably in the
art field, the former being specific in English and German (Volkskunst),
the latter in the Romance languages (populaire,
popolare); the term folk, however, has increasingly been adopted in the
various languages, both Western and Oriental, to designate the category under
discussion here. Currently, the term popular
art is widely used to denote items commercially or mass produced to meet
popular taste, a process distinguished from the manner of the folk artist, who
typically creates by hand (or with limited mechanical facilities) within a
prescribed tradition objects designed for use by himself or his own
circumscribed group. The distinction between folk and popular art is not
absolute, however: some widely collected folk art, such as the chalkwares
(painted plaster ornamental figures) common in America and the popular prints
turned out for wide distribution, may be seen as the genesis of popular art; and
the products and motifs long established in folk art have provided a natural
source for the popular field.
Although the definition of folk art is
not yet firm, it may be considered as the art created among groups that exist
within the framework of a developed society but, for geographic or cultural
reasons, are largely separated from the cosmopolitan artistic developments of
their time and that produce distinctive styles and objects for local needs and
tastes. The output of such art represents a unique complex of primitive impulses
and traditional practices subjected both to sophisticated influences and to
highly local developments; aside from aesthetic considerations, the study of
folk art is particularly revealing in regard to the relationship between art and
culture.
As industry, commerce, and
transportation begin to offer all people free access to the latest ideas, and
products, a true folk art tends to disappear; the integrity and tradition that
formed its inherent character decline, and the heritage of home-produced
products is undervalued for the very qualities that made it distinctive.
Subsequent revivals, extensively sponsored by organizations, craft groups,
governments, or commercial enterprises, are no longer the same thing. (see also modernization)
The recognition of folk art as a special
category came about during the late 19th century and was at first limited to the
so-called peasant art of Europe, the "art of the land." The new
intellectual climate of the time, with a romantic value attached to the simple
life and the "folk soul" and the increasing spread of democratic or
nationalistic ideas, brought the art of the common people into focus. It was
recognized that their simple tools, utensils, and crafts had aesthetic aspects.
Prior to industrialization, such folk art was widespread throughout Europe,
exhibiting almost everywhere local styles created by people who had no access to
the products of the wealthy and who were engaged largely in agricultural,
pastoral, or maritime pursuits. As sophistication advanced, localism began to
break down along major routes, but the folk arts continued on the periphery,
particularly in geographically isolated regions, where they had an opportunity
not only to survive but also to elaborate.
Having only limited contact with the
outside world, the inhabitants preserved their traditions, art forms, and
methods of workmanship over a long period and, at the same time, had to rely on
their own invention to create new styles and products at need. These outstanding
regional arts provide a well-defined core of material in the field of folk art.
As the early colonists emigrated to
remote parts of the world, they, too, were isolated from the cultural
developments of the homeland and forced to rely on their own skills for most of
their products. The arts they took with them were transformed, and new arts
emerged under the stimulus of a different environment and through contact with
native cultures; the notable folk arts of the Americas were one result.
In time, it was recognized that the
great Oriental civilizations, like those of Europe, also had two distinct forms
of art--the elitist and the folk. As Oriental folk-art scholarship developed,
the subject gained international footing.
While most scholars agree that a folk
type of art has occurred at some time in many parts of the world (and may yet
appear in newly developing countries), there are various areas in which such art
has so far been ignored or has not been studied as a separate category. For
instance, with the notable exception of Roman folk art, the folk distinction is
not usually applied to the art of ancient civilizations nor to Islamic or
Western medieval art. The summary provided here is, therefore, necessarily
concentrated on the more studied areas: European folk art of the 17th-19th
century, colonial and postcolonial folk arts, and the folk art of certain major
Eastern countries. In addition to the major folk regions, this article will deal
with the categories, styles, content, and motifs of folk art.
The extensive studies of European and
American folk art over the past century have revealed certain patterns of
folk-art development. Though these patterns are subject to revision as the field
expands or is refined, they provide a basis on which cultural variations and
less widespread or random occurrences may be considered.
Typically, the people who created the
art were immediately concerned with producing the necessities of life; as a
result, the art is often described as predominantly functional or utilitarian,
in spite of the fact that there are important categories that are definitely not
utilitarian, such as the widespread miniatures created simply for pleasure. It
is true, however, that much artistic effort was absorbed in meeting everyday
requirements. In the folk group, in which occupations were often seasonal or
dependent on weather and where people had to provide their own amusements, the
creation of useful objects became also a leisure-time activity on which
creativity was lavished; a shuttle might be transformed with carving or a chest
with painted designs, and even the corset stay came to be an art form. For this
reason, folk art is best studied (as is primitive art) with the entire handmade
product included and attention devoted to its cultural as well as its aesthetic
significance. It differs from the study of sophisticated art, in which there is
a long-standing distinction between fine and applied arts and a tendency to
exclude, or at least segregate, the utilitarian from more strictly aesthetic
forms. (see also leisure)
Folk art was not created for museums.
Certainly, some was designed to endure, such as documents, family portraits, and
gravestones; occasional types were made purely for display, such as the
"show towel" of the Pennsylvania Germans and the sampler (a piece of
needlework with letters or verses embroidered on it as an example of skill); and
certain household treasures were preserved for generations. In general, however,
there was an indifference to permanence, so long as the function was served; and
much of the art was expected to be either consumed or discarded after a
celebrative appearance. There is a substantial percentage of intentionally
ephemeral folk art--the marriage bowl broken after the ceremony, paper objects
burned at funerals, festival breads, carnival figures, graffiti, snowmen;
temporary symbolic designs were drawn on the threshold on feast days in India,
for example, and were formed of flower petals for religious processions in
Italy. Folk-art collections, thus dependent at least in part upon the accidents
of survival, must be supplemented by photographic and written documentation in
order for a representative view of the whole art to be obtained.
The element of retention (prolonged
survivals of tradition) is considered fundamental in folk art, as it is in
folklore. In an isolated situation, the sophisticated ideas that penetrate are
generally belated and simplified, and there is a natural trend toward
conservatism. Both local and ancient traditions maintain a strong hold.
Serviceable forms and familiar motifs are likely to persist, and changes are
gradual in comparison to the sudden innovations possible in sophisticated art.
Yet a constant individuality and
ingenuity affect the familiar mode, and an art uninhibited by arbitrary
aesthetic rules takes many fresh directions. Thus, the fluctuating combination
of retained and inventive elements is of significant interest.
The most easily distinguished
characteristics of folk art as a whole relate to materials and techniques. Most
commonly used were the natural substances that came readily to hand; thus,
various materials that have little or no place in sophisticated art, such as
straw, may figure importantly in folk art. Sophisticated media, such as oil
painting, might be adopted if they could be manipulated, and manufactured
products--notably paper, which was cheap and versatile--might be used where
available. The unique forms evolved in these sophisticated media illustrate the
way in which folk art draws upon the general culture in a limited way, while
developing along original lines of its own.
Tools were usually few and often
multipurpose: delicate Polish cut-paper designs were often executed with clumsy
sheep shears; and in woodwork, chip carving (with ax or hatchet) and notch
carving (V-shaped cuts with a knife) were widely used.
Some arts were well within the compass
of folk technology; textiles often rival the sophisticated handmade product in
workmanship (differences being a matter of styles and themes). In many crafts,
however, the folk artists evolved simpler methods of their own. Cut tin, in
silhouette shapes or decorated by hand painting or pricking (marking out a
design with small punctures), for example, is a common folk medium, whereas
full-round bronze sculpture was not likely to be attempted. Again, the French
Canadians used wood for "cathedrals" that were carpentered adaptations
of their European stone prototypes. (see also metalwork)
Large-scale figures often reveal special
devices that were invented to overcome technical deficiencies; some are crudely
assembled from parts; many maintain a simple overall shape with details merely
incised; feet might be represented by pegs inserted into bored holes. In
pictorial representation, the difficulties of three-dimensional modelling, while
readily solved by some groups, frequently resulted in a preference for outline
and flat shapes; for the easier, profile view; and for the evolution of such
forms as the silhouette and the shadow picture, made by outlining and filling in
the shadow of a head cast onto the wall or paper. The limitations forced a
mutation in forms.
Folk art is by no means restricted to
characteristic regional groups or rural arts. It occurs, for example, among
minority groups bent on preserving their ethnic or religious traditions and
their typical products. There are various folk manifestations within an urban
environment, particularly in connection with the celebrative arts, which have a
strong traditional hold; for example, at Christmastime in Warsaw, the people
carry about the city models they have made of their cathedral. Covered with
salvaged coloured foil, the models incorporate a Nativity scene and are lighted
by candles or, more recently, by small bulbs and batteries. (see also Poland)
While many folk artists are known by
name and many specialized in a particular art form, the skills were mainly
available to all (with a distinction between the crafts of men and women), and
most of the people were productive. The originality that delights the collector
was not emphasized by the people themselves, who were concerned with producing
the best examples they could of the desired object decorated with the
appropriate and traditional image. Without consideration of the group involved
and of the circumstances of folk culture in general, the art can scarcely be
interpreted.
Only a part of folk art falls into the
recognized sophisticated categories of visual art, and even that part has its
own adaptations.
In architecture
the focus is naturally on the basic dwelling and on a simple public or religious
building. One of the oldest and most remarkable dwelling forms survives in the trulloof Puglia, in Italy. A circular dry-stone structure with a tall conical
roof, it is often decorated with symbolic designs splashed in white; for
multiple rooms, the basic construction is simply repeated. The whitewashed stone
architecture of the Greek islands, combining basic cubic forms with a variety of
free shapes and inventive projections of balconies, overhangs, and exterior
stairways, has been extensively studied and acclaimed by modern architects--as
have the wooden churches of eastern Europe, with their delicate, needlelike
wooden spires, and the wooden-stave churches of Scandinavia. Other unique forms
are the Alpine house, with its steep, wide-eaved roof designed for snow; the
cave dwellings of Spain, some with several rooms and a constructed exterior
front; the adobe house; and the log cabin. A characteristic design may evolve
for such outbuildings as the granary (notably the hórreos
of Galicia), the dovecote, the straw shepherd's hut, or the barn. In
community building, the walled agricultural villages with radial pathways to
surrounding fields, the fishing villages which are oriented to a harbour, and
the American stockade cluster as well as the village common exemplify the close
relationship of folk design to folk activities. (see also Míkonos)
The idea of a picture to be hung on the
wall is by no means universal in folk art. It occurs in Europe, notably as the
ex-voto, or votive offering,
hung in churches and chapels, and in America, where portraits and local scenes
were executed in oil, pastel, or watercolour. More typically, the painted
depictions that occur in folk art are incorporated into other objects; for
example, the American clock faces bearing local landscapes. A feature of some
folk art is the "picture" displayed like a painted one but executed in
such nonpaint media as fern, cork, shells, or embroidery. Oil paints and
prepared canvasses are sophisticated materials and, though sometimes available,
were often replaced by house paint or chalk and by silk, linen, or cotton
fabric. Painting on velvet and underglass painting emerged as specific folk
types. The amount of decorative painting on a particular object is often very
extensive; among German and
German-American groups, for example, every inch of a chest, bed, or chair
surface might be covered. Walls or beams were commonly decorated with geometric
and floral motifs and occasionally with scenes, though the available space did
not encourage anything approximating the sophisticated mural. Painting on
exterior walls was a feature in some areas, including parts of North Africa and
India as well as Europe. Stencil painting, widely used for furniture and walls,
illustrates the folk capacity for achieving varied effects within technical
limitations.
In America the technique was applied to
"theorem painting" (painting on velvet through a stencil, usually done
with a dauber or pad and with some attempt at shading).
Some form of figural sculpture and a
quantity of incised or relief decoration applied to a variety of objects appear
to be almost universal among societies. Work in wood was particularly
widespread, though stone, a more difficult material, was also used, especially
for gravestones and religious sculpture. Papier-mâché,
with its quick and bold effects, was widely adopted both in the East and West
for carnival and votive figures and for a multitude of toys. The folk artist was
often at his best in making small things, delighting in toys, small-scale
representations of daily activities, and such oddities as ships carved inside
bottles. Miniature sculptures were often skillfully executed in elaborate groups
displaying a cohesive harmony; in Russia,
for example, an entire herd of cattle was mounted on a jointed trellis designed
to provide a scissorlike movement to the whole. Some figural types were created
to be set up in groups, as were the European crèche figures (making up
the Nativity or manger scene), toy soldiers, and Chinese miniature wedding
processions. The creation of useful objects in an overall sculptured shape, both
in pottery and wood, is also typical. In southern Europe or in Mexico, a bottle,
flask, or candlestick might take human, fish, or other forms; a Moravian
beehive, for example, might be a sculptured head.
The wood block (also used for stamping
textiles) was the natural folk medium for making prints. Usually simply cut and
sometimes crudely coloured or stencilled, they served to illustrate popular
subjects, with more interest often in the idea than in the depiction itself.
Small prints of various saints were widely produced in Europe. Comic themes were
popular, such as the "topsy-turvy world" and "man reversed"
(e.g., "the fish catches the
man") and stock characters. Block printing
was also used to produce games, announcements for travelling shows, and forms
for certificates. The English broadsheets and the Mexican
calaveras (literally
"skulls," a category of prints, sometimes made from lead cuts) offer
outstanding examples of the cheap printed sheets that combined a verbal message
(verses, proverbs, polemics, pious themes) with illustration. The 19th-century
trade cards (notice for a shop or service) are sometimes included in folk art,
but doubtfully so; they were often machine printed. In fact, it is difficult to
segregate the print of truly folk character from the voluminous field of either
"popular" or commercial printing.
In the folk field, the minor arts can
hardly be called minor, for such universal necessities as pottery, textiles,
costume, and furniture and more unusual forms such as weather vanes and
scarecrows provided the most frequent opportunities for creative expression and
often absorbed the aesthetic impetus that, in the sophisticated world, was
associated more with the fine arts.
Both pottery and textiles range from the
everyday to elaborately decorated forms that are often symbolic or highly
pictorial; even common examples are typically ornamented with design in a simple
slip (a mixture of clay and water) or a woven band.
Folk costume is justly included in many
general works on costume, but it differs significantly from the sophisticated in
several respects: in a localism so extreme that even a particular town or valley
may have its own prized style and every region is distinctive; in the complete
differentiation of the festival costume from ordinary clothing;
and in a prolongation of style that is little affected either by changes of
fashion or by individual taste. The motifs which are typical of festival
costumes, such as the twin, cone-shaped buttons symbolizing fertility in
Sardinia, are too deep-rooted in the tradition of the area to be discarded.
Furniture
tends toward basic, repeated shapes, which may be left purely functional but are
often extensively carved or painted. The Alsatian chair, for instance, has an
upright-board back, carved with a pierced, silhouetted, bilateral design; some
hundreds of variations of this simple design have been recorded within the area.
Certain occupational forms emerged, according to need, such as the milking
stool, the cobbler's bench, and the rocking bench, or "mammy settle."
In metalwork,
the materials used to produce tools and other essentials were also turned by the
craftsmen into such art forms as toleware (painted tin or tinned iron), incised
copper or silver, pewter toys, and lead figurines. European wrought-iron grave
crosses and shop signs are distinguished by intricate scrollwork and inventive
linear depictions. Delicate bone carving is very widespread, appearing on such
objects as implements, game pieces (such as chessmen), figures (notably
crucifixes), and ornaments. An art peculiar to North America is the whalebone
carving (scrimshaw) made by
sailors while at sea.
The theatrical arts are spectacularly
represented by puppetry,
ranging from toy theatres,
finger puppets, and the ubiquitous Punch and Judy shows to the famous puppet
theatres of Sicily and Indonesia. Among the appurtenances of travelling shows
and miracle plays, dating from the earlier phase of European folk art, was the
hobbyhorse, which had a counterpart in festival performances in India. Musical
instruments offer a profusion of types, often preserving ancient features
of construction, principles of sound, and decoration: the heavy ratchets and
rattles of the Alpine festivals; the shaggy bagpipes of the Abruzzi mountains;
fiddles such as the rudimentary gusle of
Yugoslavia, with its typical horsehead or horseman scroll, and the more
complicated Norwegian Hardangerfele, with
underlying sympathetic strings; and innumerable ornamented flutes, harps, horns,
and dulcimers. The simple, painted clay whistle or flute is widespread, often in
mimetic bird shape.
Any attempt to analyze folk art in terms
of the established, sophisticated categories, though revealing in comparison,
fails to take into account a substantial bulk of the art. Many characteristic
products not subject to sophisticated aesthetic treatment have become specific
fields of study and collection because of the ingenuity expended upon
them--mangles (laundry beaters), molds, decorated eggs, weather vanes, decoys,
powder horns, trade signs, scarecrows, and figureheads, to name a few. There are
also significant objects categorized according to function; for example, animal
gear represented by the woven harness of donkeys in Spain,
carved and painted ox yokes and sheep collars, brass-studded and tasselled
headpieces, and ornaments supposedly endowed with protective powers. Other
widespread types are decorated vehicles such as gypsy and circus wagons, boats
bearing symbolic motifs, and toys and miniatures in countless media.
While some of the art is executed in a
recognized sophisticated medium like wood carving, many other materials, such as
hide, horn, straw, bamboo, and palm leaf, are characteristic in certain regions
or for certain objects. In fact, there is scarcely an available material that is
not utilized somewhere in folk art, from the hickory-nut doll to the
commemorative picture made of human hair, and materials are often combined. This
free-wheeling employment of any sort of material rivals the fertile adaptations
of "found objects" in 20th-century sophisticated art--as many other
modern "innovations" have a long-standing precedent in the spontaneous
art of the folk. Collage, and assemblage
are an old story in this field; embroidered pictures had faces painted in
watercolour, and festival figures were made of anything that came to hand.
Weather charms in southern Germany
were often collages of--among other things--saints' pictures, amulets, and
seeds. There is also a great deal of kinetic art: manipulated masks; jointed
dolls, figures, and toys; whirligigs (spinning toys); pinwheels spun by wind or
candle heat; and balance figures set in motion by a touch. Folk festivals, with
their impromptu processions, costumed personages, antics, and props, offer
almost a prototype of the 20th-century "happening."
Although the folk artist had his own
criteria of function and craftsmanship, design in the theoretical sense was not
a part of his training; rather, it was the natural result either of his
continued use of established patterns or of instinctive methods of organization.
In special instances there was deliberate imitation of well-known works of art,
as in the American portraits of George Washington and folk versions of famous
Virgins and Buddhas.
Any particular folk art will necessarily
share the style of its general cultural area; Chinese folk art is Chinese as
well as folk. Thus, analysis of the style and recognition of its folk origin is
dependent upon knowledge of the "high art" with which it interacts, as
well as of the folk situation that sets it apart. When a folk piece is compared
with an adjacent sophisticated one produced at the same time, the differences
become apparent, whether in the nature of the object as a whole or in its
material, execution, content, or style. Stylistically, the time lag is
significant; for example, the Baroque curve survived in simple country churches,
and elaborate floral ornament in furniture decoration, long after sophisticated
European art had become neoclassical.
One of the commonly accepted notions of
folk style is that it is naïve; it is thought to be childlike and fresh,
despite the fact that some of its 19th-century critics condemned its
"meaningless repetitions" and its "degenerate" forms.
Repetitiveness is to be expected in the production of objects needed by all; but
the artists saw only a few neighbouring examples, and to the practiced eye their
art reveals many variations. Folk art is often associated with bright colour and
an appealing charm, qualities sufficiently present to account for a wide
popularity but counterbalanced by the sombreness and seriousness of many pieces,
notably in religious art. In fact, few commonly accepted notions of folk style
apply to the entire field. Execution may be free or meticulous. Representations
of figures may be highly literal (even to the inclusion of actual hair and
clothing), almost abstractly simplified, or monstrously exaggerated and
distorted, as in, for example, the boldly painted papier-mâché
carnival figures of Europe or the fantastic animal figures of the Far East.
The focus on utilitarian production
leaves its mark in two opposite ways: often there is a strong decorative
orientation, with a wealth of surface ornament lavished on objects that maintain
a prescribed shape; on the other hand, certain categories of folk production,
such as simple tools, and the work of certain groups are characterized by a
functionalism so complete as to seem in tune with modern sophisticated design.
Technical limitations and the demand for a quantity of certain necessary objects
are conducive to simplification; the reverse may be true of such an object as
the bridal bedspread, for which custom dictates extreme elaboration.
The particularly long retention of
traditional forms and patterns generally results in increasingly stylized
versions of themes; in crewel embroidery, for example, the representation of
landscape elements is commonly reduced to a tree and hills, the hills typically
shown as three simple, rounded humps; in American portrait painting, the bust or
figure is conventionalized in a simple frontal form, repeated over and over
again and sometimes painted in advance of a sitting, leaving only the features
to be filled in. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the adoption of
materials not used in sophisticated art, the forcing of a limited technology
toward artistic expression, and the adaptation of rather remotely perceived
sophisticated ideas to the folk artists' concept of the realities of life result
in some highly original stylistic solutions. (see also crewel work, portraiture)
Whereas sophisticated art often reaches
out for the esoteric and the unusual, the content of folk art is closely related
to immediate human concerns. The major events of life were universally
celebrated on the folk level in ways that demanded of art special costumes,
implements, vessels, and auspicious gifts. For the newborn there might be
amulets and decorated birth certificates. The period of courtship occasioned a
love token, often a beautifully carved feminine implement such as a shuttle or
needle case; traditional in England was a double spoon symbolizing union and
plenty, whereas in Czechoslovakia
it was often a painted egg or carved stick. In many regions elaborate wedding
chests were carved or painted for the bride. The bridal bedspread or bed
curtain, like the wedding
costume, was ornate and highly symbolic,
with such motifs as Adam and Eve, the tree of life, and mating birds considered
appropriate. Both weddings and funerals required processional equipment,
standards, and special vehicles. In some places there were gifts for the dead,
which in China took the form of paper models burned at funerals. There were
memorials such as grave sculpture, pictures, and documents. (see also funerary art)
Specific memorial motifs crystallized in
two American forms: the "mourning picture," executed in embroidery or
watercolour, often depicting grieving figures draped around a tombstone under
weeping willows, and the gravestone carved with a winged death's-head or, later,
with the urn-and-willow motif.
The prevailing religion puts its stamp
on the consciousness of every group, providing common elements in areas that
share the same religion, even though the groups are not in contact. Catholicism
in the West (and, similarly, Buddhism in the East) provided rich visual
conceptions and evocative images that spilled over into folk art. Crucifixes,
Virgins, and saints were required as images for village churches and wayside
shrines; they were set up over gateways and tombs, in arches, and in homes and
were used as motifs on countless objects, where they were often freely combined
with secular decoration. Religious observance demanded many objects decorated
with Christian symbols--baptismal scoops, altar cloths, pilgrimage bottles,
lavabos (holy-water vessels). There is even a special category of "nuns'
work," including small devotional objects, many in collage, as well as
vestments and church textiles. A particular German sculptural type is the Palmesel,
a half-size figure of Christ on the donkey, which is drawn through the
streets on its wheeled base on Palm Sunday. (see also Roman
Catholicism)
An outstanding category of Catholic folk
art is the crèche, made up of figurines displayed at Christmas in homes
or churches to reenact the birth of Christ. The main characters of the event
(holy family, Magi, shepherds, and angels) were supplemented by hundreds of
lively figures drawn from peasant or village life and shown pursuing their daily
activities or bearing gifts to the Christ child similar to those enumerated in
folk carols.
The Protestant and Jewish faiths made
fewer demands on the visual arts, but the popularity of Biblical themes is
apparent. A favorite motif for the American weather vane was the angel Gabriel
blowing his trumpet, often executed in a style that survives from the puffing
zephyrs of classical art. The noteworthy Jewish folk art of Poland was largely
lost during World War II, though records of the unique folk synagogues have been
preserved by the Institute of Polish Architecture. The Jewish folk-art
collection in the Musée Alsacien, Strasbourg, France, includes such
specific religious objects as pointers (carved sticks used to guide the reading
of sacred texts) and candelabra. (see also Judaism)
Since antiquity, some form of votive art
has occurred in connection with religion. In India,
outdoor shrines may be surrounded by a veritable crowd of papier-mâché
figures set on the ground as offerings. Catholic churches and chapels throughout
the world are hung with countless small ex-votos, usually cutouts of stamped tin
or silver in the shape of an afflicted part of the body--an arm, a leg, or an
eye--or of the heart or other symbol. In Canadian Jesuit missions, ex-votos were
even made of wampum. In Seville small ivory carvings of religious figures were
left in the cathedral by soldiers going to war. Clay plaques made from molds,
common in the Mediterranean area, show an inheritance from Greek times, when
small clay molds of the head of Athena were stamped out in quantity as votive
objects. The most significant art, however, occurs in the painted ex-voto, which
provides a major type and some of the best examples of folk painting. In
sophisticated art, paintings of standard religious themes were often donated to
churches in fulfillment of a vow. In folk art, this votive urge found expression
in small narrative paintings (only occasionally large, as in Mexico) depicting
an accident, illness, or other disaster from which the victim was saved by the
intervention of a saint or the Madonna. (see also votive
offering)
The recognized religion, however, is
only a part of folk belief, which is impregnated with concepts from earlier
times. The decorated Easter egg,
for example, is an evolution of the egg as an ancient symbol of renewed life,
and the fat, laughing figure of the Japanese Hotei (god of luck) is both a deity
and a ubiquitous folk charm. There are many survivals from local pagan cults,
particularly of motifs associated with life, fertility, and protection; in
Calabria an animal stake may be carved with the head of the blank-eyed
mother-goddess, expected to protect the tethered beast, and similar elemental
forms were preserved in Czechoslovakia. Lying at the root of human experience,
such themes were never completely abandoned by the folk and may appear in
curious juxtaposition with Christian themes or secular uses: a Sardinian clay
bowl, for example, contains a modelled wedding group with the priest standing
before an altar on which a small, nude hermaphroditic deity is seated, and the
Christian loaves of bread appear along with pagan phallic and fertility symbols.
(see also Easter)
A major folk category is festival art,
which owes its genesis and much of its content to ancient seasonal celebrations.
Since antiquity, the solar manifestations of the summer and winter solstices
and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes have been bound up with the idea of sowing
and reaping, death and rebirth, year's end and year's opening; at such times it
was traditionally believed that supernatural forces were in control and should
be propitiated. Re-enactment of the roles of malign spirits called for the
production of grotesque masks and demonic costumes and also of clamorous
noisemakers (bells, horns, rattles, and the like) to drive them away. Harvest
figures invoked or celebrated a good crop yield. Special foods in symbolic
shapes were prepared and consumed. Varying according to the culture, many other
appurtenances were created--decorated trees and poles, lanterns, banners,
processional vehicles, sculptured figures and dolls, household and shrine
adornments--all bearing their motifs of life symbolism.
While the magical significance of the
primordial festivals may have been largely forgotten and the events reduced to
horseplay and merrymaking, the customs and the art objects associated with them
persisted. In Europe, masqueraders continued to impersonate such
"characters" as death, the devil, the goat, the old man, and the
mischief-maker; their masks were often makeshift and ephemeral, but many carved
of wood and decorated with other materials are preserved and highly prized. Such
personifications were also painted on banners or created by assemblage and
carried about, as were the Mexican skeletal death figures.
Oriental festivals often featured plant
and animal motifs. In China the dragon of the New Year was a great paper
creation made to undulate by the dancing steps of the bearers underneath. In the
Japanese boys' festival, painted paper carp were flown from poles as symbols of
strength and virility. In Indonesia,
towering decorative constructions of vegetables and fruits were borne about to
celebrate the harvest.
The assimilation of ancient seasonal
celebrations--the winter solstice and the Roman Saturnalia with Christmas, for
example--has been extensively studied in European folklore. In folk art, it
occasioned an intermingling of pagan and Christian elements, enriched by many
inventions created in an exuberant festival atmosphere and readily incorporating
local and current themes. The celebrative instinct found expression also in many
purely local festivals commemorating a local saint, historical event, or an
episode in folk life, such as the setting out of the fishing boats or the onset
of rains. In Japan alone, there were hundreds of such festivals.
The traditional survivals that play so
significant a part in folk art stem from other sources as well. Certain motifs
diffused from the earliest cultures provided a repertory of stylized symbols to
meet decorative demands; for example, the rosette (a disk divided variously into
petallike segments), the rayed disk and the swastika (both associated with sun
symbolism), the tree of life, the chimera and other fantastic beasts, and such
human-animal combinations as the siren or mermaid. The extent to which such
motifs retain their meaning or may become simply an appropriate decoration for a
certain type of object (as the mermaid is for boats) is problematical, but there
is undoubtedly a high symbolic content in the art.
Some aspects of classical mythology
fed into folk art, partly by way of later European sophisticated art, and many
medieval themes remained popular; the Saracen of the Crusades is a figure that
still appears as a Sicilian puppet and as a revolving target in tilting games.
Early Renaissance conceptions of paradise and landscapes with stylized trees and
towered towns oddly recur in 19th-century folk painting, sometimes imparting an
esoteric flavour to a local scene. In fact, the body of tradition retained in
folk art may be seen as growing or shifting from one century or one place to
another. A folk version of the horse-and-rider motif, in typical profile view,
served with only a slight change of uniform for both the Napoleonic and the
American Revolutionary soldier. (see also Renaissance art)
Although themes may fall into disuse,
they do not become obsolete so readily as in sophisticated art. Yet, folk art is
not merely a repository for tradition; new themes constantly evolve from old
ones or out of new circumstances. In the wine-producing area around Alsace,
Bacchus astride a barrel became the common motif for carved bungs (the stopper
of a cask), thus utilizing the classical Bacchus for a specific local commodity.
In America, the Indian was widely adopted for weather vanes, trade figures, and
other objects. Similar use was made of the personification of Liberty and the
emblematic eagle.
All decorative design draws heavily on
geometric and plant and animal motifs. In the folk use of this material there is
often such concentration on one or two motifs that they become strongly
identified with the regional style, as the tulip is in Pennsylvania German art;
there is also a tendency to attach a particular motif to a particular object,
for which it is used repeatedly. The prevalence of animal themes reflects the
importance of animals in folk life.
Aside from their frequent appearance as
realistic depictions, miniatures, and design elements, some animals also have
strong symbolic aspects: the snake, the horse, and the cock, for example, occur
with varying significance in many parts of the world.
Representational and narrative art other
than the religious is often devoted to local subjects: the family portrait, the
individual farm or church, or a typical activity. In Switzerland a favourite
theme was the Alpengang, depicting the
transferral of the cattle to high pastures in the spring. Folk artists also drew
upon legend, popular romance, history, and the more famous literary and visual
art themes that reached them from the sophisticated world. In Sicily
the deeds of Roland (Orlando), derived from the poetic accounts by Torquato
Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto, were repeatedly painted and enacted in puppet shows.
From history, the patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi was as popular in Italian folk art
as George Washington was in American; and the Prince of Wales was a favourite
figure for pub signs in England.
Account must also be taken of the folk
capacity for satire. The
anticlerical humour of Italy has a folk manifestation in caricatures of impious
monks and nuns. The Russians evolved stock figurines of the snobbish officer,
the vain woman, the greedy merchant, the pretty girl riding on a rooster. The
early prints of London and Paris had their lampoons, and Mexico had its effigies
of personages who did not meet popular approval. Out of the slow exolutions
typical of a strongly traditional art, there emerges an astute view of the human
situation.
The major recognized folk regions in
most cases have been prolific in such crafts as textiles, pottery, and carving
and in the production of implements and utensils; they also often have localized
costumes. This common art output forms a broad basis underlying the more
distinctive arts peculiar to particular areas. The material is so voluminous
that most attempts at general survey are admittedly samplings.
General summaries are commonly organized
by nation, a convenient expedient, because major collections are centred in
great national museums and because folk art is often studied and promoted as
part of the national heritage. However, the national summary divides some groups
that are homogeneous, such as the Basque region in Spain and France; and it
combines, under Italy, for example, such diverse arts as the Alpine and
Sicilian.
Any effort to group regions for
comparative study will most logically be based on such factors as the
traditional retained sources, the prevailing religion, the nature of the related
sophisticated culture, and the environmental conditions that affect materials
and activities.
Viewed in terms of these four factors,
the European folk arts of the Mediterranean area obviously have much in common.
First, there was a direct transmission from ancient Near Eastern and Greek
civilization, accentuated by Greek colonization in the West and followed by
Roman domination. These sources, plus the local cults that occurred everywhere,
may be traced even in recent art in the continuance of a rich pottery tradition
from Greek times onward and in the preservation of many motifs. Second, the
religion, chiefly Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox, demanded extensive imagery.
Third, in the sophisticated cultures throughout the historical period, art of
all kinds was a major activity, developing high skills that penetrated to some
extent even to the more isolated folk. Finally, contact was facilitated by
active trade along an extensive coastline, and varied materials were available;
yet the area industrialized very slowly, so that the folk arts could continue to
thrive in some localities even to the present.
Thus, it is not surprising that the arts
of this region are outstanding in quantity and variety. The level of skill is
apparent, sometimes in bold and facile styles, sometimes in meticulous
craftsmanship. Many folk artists were capable of expert full-round sculpture,
realistic painting, fine metalwork, and other difficult techniques. The motifs
are varied and freely intermingled.
Among the long-surviving regional arts
are those of Epirus in Greece, where an important folk centre has been
established at Metsovon; the islands--the Aegean with its stone architecture,
Sicily with its spectacular carved and painted carts, puppets, and pottery, and
Sardinia, noted for gold ornaments, textiles, and costumes still in use; and
Puglia, Calabria, and the Abruzzi region in Italy, the latter having fine lace,
silver filigree (openwork), and weaving.
Southern France
is affiliated with this area, as is evidenced by the style of the fine ex-votos
and Nativity figures of Provence. So is the Iberian Peninsula, though in that
region there are also special factors. The Moorish influence was felt
particularly in Andalusia--as in the use of ivory as a material and in the
arabesque tracery (ornate, interlaced openwork) of the ironwork--and the
Atlantic coastline provided other connections. The Portuguese use of cork was
distinctive. Galicia and the Basque
region, each with a population of distinct linguistic background, developed in
prolonged isolation, the results of which are clearly visible in their
exceptional arts: the architecture presents unique features, and the Basques are
unusual in their lack of pottery, though they developed remarkable dance
costumes. The difficulty of communications preserved a strong folk character not
only in Galicia and the Basque region but throughout the peninsula. The painted
and glazed tiles (azulejos), the
textiles (notable in Salamanca), and carved furniture are among the products
notably Iberian in character. Traditional survivals were strong in the
northeast, with much religious art, including prints, centred in Catalonia.
Another possible grouping is the Slavic
area in eastern Europe and Russia. There the influences from the ancient Near
East and Greece penetrated less far in early times but were transmitted (and
transmuted) by way of the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Church. Much folk art
in the area was strongly affected by the Byzantine style. (see also Byzantine art)
Among the transmitted elements were the
themes and styles associated with icons, which were commonly hung--at wells, for
example--until the mid-18th century, when their production was discouraged in
Russia and thus dwindled. Two centuries of Mongol rule introduced other
traditions stemming from the East and marked by the so-called animal style.
Finally, in modern times, these countries have mostly had Communist
governments, whose policy includes promotion of the folk arts, organization of
artists into cooperatives, and even the introduction of crafts from one area
into another. Although this has been a stimulus to the study of folk art, it
tends to blur the distinction between the strictly folk and the revived or
commercialized product. Even earlier, Russian folk art was subject to extraneous
influences in a way not typical elsewhere: in the 17th century, craftsmen were
requisitioned from many parts of Russia to supply products for the national
economy or to work on palaces, and they were also assembled around monasteries
for prescribed output.
The Russian products probably best known
elsewhere are toys--intricate
constructions of wood or vivid earthenware miniatures. Some of the Vyatka toys
are thought to be survivals of idols made for homes, representing the
innumerable local deities that preceded Christianity. Other notable arts include
ceramic tiles, wooden and ceramic figurines, and bone carving in the Siberian
tradition.
In eastern Europe, where national
boundaries have been particularly confused and the population comprises various
minorities, studies of the art may follow ethnic lines. The geography provides a
number of distinct regions, which are as varied as coastal Dalmatia,
Transdanubia, and the isolated Tatras mountains. With a heavily forested
landscape, the work in wood was outstanding. It appeared in church architecture,
architectural sculpture, vessels and implements, and in such special forms as
the sculptured grave-post; even a corn bin might be covered with rosettes. The
area was rich in festival arts, with a strong retention from pre-Christian
traditions and magic rites. In Czechoslovakia there were special wedding
effigies and candlesticks. Among many ancient motifs, such as vase-and-tree,
sun, and heart, the cock appeared as a protective symbol that might be set on
roof ridges or carved on cheese molds. Some of the art is strikingly primitive.
One of the complications arising in the
study of eastern European arts is the fact that the countries involved are
culturally borderline, having an affinity with Catholic Europe in the West
(exemplified by the ex-votos in the brilliant Czechoslovakian
glass painting) and with the Byzantine Empire in the East. The arts bracketed as
Polish, including some of the finest decorative art in paper, once extended far
to the east and yet are northern European.
The situation in northern Europe was
very different from that in the south, and not merely in climate. The tradition
involved a different mythology, and the society lacked the sophisticated centres
that had crystallized early in Greece and Italy. The Roman influences that
reached northern Europe had far to travel; consequently, the transmitted motifs
were fewer, and emphasis might be placed on technical execution rather than on
variety. This can be seen in the prevalent and superb use of two motifs, the
acanthus and the vine-and-tendril. It can also be seen in the animal style from
the East, which penetrated and persisted, for example, in some fine
architectural carving, with the tendency typical of this style toward flat and
pierced rather than full-round rendering. Finally, although religious art was by
no means lacking, the Reformation,
which in itself was a popular movement, curbed the use of extensive Catholic
imagery as well as the demand for religious objects.
The festival arts drew heavily on
northern pagan themes, and the impulse that gave rise to pre-Lenten carnivals of
the south was likely to find expression rather in municipal and occupational
processions with comic giant figures drawn through the streets.
Some parts of the far north demonstrate
that density of population is a factor in folk art; where farms are many miles
apart with few opportunities for community contact, the art forms may tend to be
few or even nonexistent. Even so, there may be one or two special crafts, such
as the bone and horn carving of Lapland. Also, where materials are scarce, as in
Iceland, variety of product depends on imports likely to be allocated to the
sophisticated, not the folk. In more densely populated France, Germany, and The
Netherlands, on the other hand, it is clear that peasant arts existed everywhere
in the earlier periods but that the early establishment of trade routes and
urban centres pushed the folk arts into special categories or into the
peripheral areas.
Among the Scandinavian regions, Norway
is noted for the rose painting of Hallingdal and Telemark Fylke, the needlework
of Hardanger, and the pictorial weaving of Gudbrandsdalen. Sweden,
among varied arts, had a unique type of built-in furniture and wall hangings
that were either painted or woven with biblical and Icelandic motifs. Finland
had a specific linear ornament called "dark drawing," made by bending
a strip of wood until the ends meet, and metal ornaments of prehistoric origin
in Karelia. Distinctive folk-art regions in Denmark
include the Hedebo (now Hedeboryde) area, with its linen embroidery; the Fyn
archipelago, with its colourful floral painting; and Jutland and Slesvig, with
notable cabinetmaking. In the Baltic area there were many survivals of ancient
motifs (swastikas, rayed disks, snakes, horse heads) used on varied products,
including the remarkable crosses and roofed poles, often with symbolic
wrought-iron finials (crowning ornaments).
In the heart of Europe, two areas
demonstrate special factors involved in the formation of folk culture: the
Rhineland, where wine production provided a number of special objects and
motifs; and the Alpine regions, which, though extending into several countries,
share a pattern of living dictated by the mountain territory. The latter region,
which includes several well-defined areas--such as the Appenzell in Switzerland,
the Tirol in Austria, and the Alto Adige in the south Tirol, now a part of
Italy--is rich in festival arts, ceremonial foods, and implements associated
with dairying (even musical cowbells).
In France, The Netherlands, and Germany,
the proximity of folk groups to sophisticated culture made its mark in the
variety of products, high skills, and lavish decoration of such objects as
furniture. Invention was devoted to new figural types, such as the hod carrier
common to lower Germany and
Austria; and events such as the Napoleonic Wars made a rather quick impact, as
with the soldier motif and the appearance of handwritten and ornamented
documents relating to military service. The mechanical genius that made the
Germanic peoples leaders in the field of sophisticated automata found folk
expression in innumerable animated toys, clocks, chimes, figures, and other
gadgets. While the folk art associated with Paris itself is not to be ignored,
the more easily analyzed French groups are outlying, as in Brittany, with its
many-figured outdoor calvaries (representations of the crucifixion) and other
enduring forms.
The tendency to separate British
from other European folk arts is an oversimplification, for a number of forms
are shared with northern Europe; for example, the famous horse brasses (circular
harness ornaments often retaining ancient protective motifs), giant processional
figures such as the Salisbury dragon, and the May tree, a celebrative decoration
in pole form. England is a small country that industrialized rapidly, a factor
that tends to shorten the folk-art period. Some arts that required expanding
technical skills, however, could develop as folk forms: for example, the printed
arts (such as the broadside, or sheet printed on one or on both sides and
folded) and the hand-propelled roundabout (later the mechanized carousel), which
became increasingly elaborate. Tunbridge woodwork, of glued coloured strips, is
merely one example of local invention. Among the well-known categories of folk
art are the inn signs (both hanging and "effigy" signs), wroughtiron
work, and tombstones. Hebridean textiles and Highland plaids and sporrans (the
pouch worn in front of the kilt) are also familiar products. Both Scotland and
Ireland have interesting grave crosses bearing ancient symbols. Ireland,
however, serves as a reminder that the creative urge of a folk group may not
focus primarily on the visual arts; Irish folk art does not compare with the
contribution to oral lore in that area. (The same may be said of the black folk
minority in the United States, whose musical contribution was spectacular but
whose visual art traditions were largely cut off.)
The colonization of the Americas in the
17th and 18th centuries, stemming largely from Europe at a time when European
folk art was flourishing, resulted in a second general area of major folk-art
development. This art can be divided into that of the United
States (loosely called American folk art); Canadian folk art, which has
much in common with that of the United States, with its scrimshaw, ship carving,
and western pioneer art, but which also has products of its own (for example,
French-Canadian wood carving in Quebec); and Latin-American folk art, which has
quite a different character.
For the first century and a half, the
art of the eastern seaboard of the United States may be described as
predominantly folk. Although there were European imports and works produced by
sophisticated American artists, they were generally a pallid reflection of the
art then developing in Europe, and they made little impact on a people bent on
making a home in a new world. The so-called Yankee ingenuity produced a wealth
of material, sometimes reminiscent of European prototypes but often new. There
were, for example, dozens of handmade lighting devices and many specialized
contrivances such as the trammel, for raising and lowering pots in the
fireplace, and the corn planter. Fresh decorative styles, special forms, and new
motifs contributed to an art that, either in evolution or invention, was
typically American.
American folk painting is outstanding.
Although there was once a tendency to view as sophisticated the artists who
closely followed European styles and as folk those who worked in the rapidly
emerging American manner, many of the latter have become individually known
creators of a valuable body of work and have taken their place in the history of
American art, some no longer viewed as belonging in the folk category. The more
typical folk product comprised thousands of portraits and scenes by anonymous or
local craftsman-artists or itinerant painters, who provided a vivid, if often
crude, extensive record of America's ancestors and their surroundings.
As America advanced, a pattern of
regional differentiation appeared, just as in Europe. In general, geographical
isolation was overcome rather quickly, one exception being the sparse
settlements of the Appalachian Mountains, where Scots-Irish descendants
maintained a handicraft tradition. People of varying origins, however, had
brought to the "melting pot" of America their different art
traditions. While they were often content with preserving a few objects and
customs, some groups chose to maintain a separate identity, set apart by
religion or national origin, and among them some fresh regional arts developed.
The strict religious beliefs of the Shakers
in New England and New York state, with their emphasis on simplicity, gave rise
to clean, functional lines in furniture and architecture and to some
psychologically interesting "spirit drawings" executed under the
influence of religious visions. The Pennsylvania
Germans (popularly called Dutch) not only had a distinctive religion but
clung tenaciously to the language and traditions of their native Pfalz
(Palatinate, now in the state of Rhineland-Pfalz and in Bavaria), which in art
included such crafts as fine painted furniture and such motifs as the tulip,
heart, and vine. Thriving in the flourishing countryside of their new home, they
produced a notable body of art: fraktur (embellished documents), painted wedding
chests, decorated ceramics (including elaborate pieces created for special
occasions), unique barns with exterior painted symbols ("hex signs"),
pictorial embroidery, weaving, and other forms. (see also Fraktur script)
The American settlers who moved westward
were again thrust into a folk situation comparable to that of their forebears,
and a pioneer art developed. Saddlery
was one of its important crafts; the covered wagon was its distinctive vehicle;
and the board structures of mining towns and the sod houses of the plains were
solutions to the problem of immediate housing. The flatboat and keelboat of the
Mississippi River arose from specific navigational requirements.
The southwest, including part of
California, is an area apart, producing art distinct from what is often called
"western Americana." There the architecture was influenced by the
Spanish mission and adobe styles, and a Catholic religious art was encouraged
among the natives, resulting in the carved or painted imagery of saints (bultos
and santos) with a strong native flavour overlying the Spanish
derivation. These arts are more allied with the Latin American (as may be seen
in the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe).
The different character of
Latin-American folk art may be ascribed in part to the modification of a
primitive culture resulting from contact with an advanced one. The settlers on
the eastern seaboard of North America moved in on a primitive Indian population
whose arts were relatively limited and who were rapidly pushed back or
disoriented; the folk art of that area was thus essentially the product of the
white settlers. In Latin America, however, where there were some highly
developed pre-Columbian cultures as well as tribal arts, intermingling was
freer; this was partly because the missionary program--which included the
teaching of crafts and Catholic symbols to the native population and the use of
native craftsmen for church construction and for the production of religious
objects--accepted an infusion of native techniques and styles. Thus, Indian
crafts and motifs had a better chance of survival, and a greater degree of
syncretism could occur. Furthermore, the colonizers, predominantly Spanish and
Portuguese, brought with them the wealth of Mediterranean tradition and the
varied imagery and forms of their home regions.
Under circumstances as favourable as
these, a virtual explosion of folk art can occur, as it did, notably, in Mexico.
Because Mexico seems to have a peculiar receptivity to art impulses regardless
of source, the area is distinguished by a folk imagination that can create a
towering, multifigured, ceramic candlestick, elaborate figures and models of
straw, and fantastic fireworks. Craft motifs are handled with great spontaneity,
and the festival arts are remarkable, with such original creations as the Judas
figures, the skeletal musicians associated with the Day of the Dead (día
de los difuntos), and the skulls (calaveras)
that appear both as confections and as a theme in popular prints. The religious
arts are also outstanding, with many ex-voto paintings (retablos)
and Nativity figures in varied materials. Art that combines features of the
Mediterranean and native Indian traditions occurs also in other Latin-American
countries, as in the Portuguese-oriented areas of Brazil and in Argentina, which
developed some arts related to the life of the cowboy of the pampas (gaucho). In
some regions of Latin America, however, the indigenous Indian culture long
remained unaffected and little influenced by the European colonies.
In the Caribbean and coastal areas there
is evidence of African-Indian-European interaction: saints are painted with
African physiognomy, and African decorative motifs appear on crosses, votive
sculptures (the milagre of
northeastern Brazil, for example), and such objects as laundry beaters and
peanut pounders in Surinam.
During the 16th-19th centuries, European
exploration, trade, and culture expanded into many parts of the world.
Colonization elsewhere, however, was not so conducive to folk evolution as in
the Americas, where many settlers emigrated early, bearing folk traditions with
them and expecting to make a life with their own skills. Because in many places
the Europeans maintained a sophisticated enclave closely tied to the homeland,
the native arts were preserved intact, inhibited, or exploited. This was fairly
typical in Africa and the primitive Pacific areas, where settled colonization
took hold only in the late 19th century. In South Africa, where it occurred
earlier, only the Dutch (who built farmhouses of Dutch character) tended even to
take their families with them.
In many parts of the world there have
been tribal arts, some of which have nonprimitive aspects. These are sometimes
bracketed with the primitive in a general category of ethnic art and are
sometimes considered as folk art. But although they may have folklike crafts and
links with the outside world, they differ from true folk cultures in that they
constitute homogeneous societies with traditions that are specifically ethnic
rather than shared with a broad area of sophisticated culture. Such tribal folk
art occurs in the Saharan Berber and Siberian areas, among the Ainu people of
Japan, and in various parts of Asia.
The Eastern art recognized as truly folk
has been studied, as in the West, chiefly in the areas where it exists as the
local or provincial art within a great culture. The Oriental traditions were
often relatively uninterrupted, and effects from industrialization were late;
while all folk dating is problematical and much of the art has perished, it is
likely that some folk art in the East has a history extending back to ancient
times. In Japan, however, it is usually understood as beginning in the Edo
period (17th century). Interest in folk art is particularly strong in India and
Japan, where there are art scholars familiar with the Western folk concept but
dedicated to the preservation of their Eastern traditions. Indian folk art was
discovered in an emotional climate reminiscent of the European discovery of the
folk soul; Ananda Coomaraswamy, a leader in the movement, called folk art the
"main road," as distinguished from the sophisticated
"bypaths." Both in India and Japan, there were sophisticated artists
who deliberately identified themselves as "folk."
In India, where all of the crafts are
distinguished by variety, skill, and a strong component of strictly Indian
tradition, the folk distinction is not always clear-cut. It is most apparent in
such objects as toys (for example, the mother-and-child figure probably related
to fertility concepts), masks, works in papier-mâché (votive and
animal figures, for example, and dancing dolls balanced on wire), the symbolic
motifs painted on the houses of the poor, and other works of art related to
local custom or primitive belief. Particularly in southern India, small
religious and other sculptures were created in quantity in an unmistakably folk
manner; there are also some distinctive tribal arts, notably those of Assam. Pakistan
has some highly regional arts: for example, the fine house carving and the
ceremonial fans of Swat, the silver ornaments of Gilgit, and the
tombstones and matrimonial objects produced in the arid regions of Baluchistan.
Pottery and toys are probably the most
widespread kinds of Japanese folk art; but there are also innumerable typical
objects--lanterns, fans, umbrellas, nested boxes, and kites--exhibiting skillful
use of bamboo and paper, as well as wood, lacquer, and other materials. There
are thousands of wayside images, as well as sculptures for shrines and graves,
in a folk style characterized by shallow carving on a simple, coarse-stone
shape. An outstanding type of folk painting flourished in the Otsu
region from the 17th to the 19th century. Clearly distinct from the
sophisticated ukiyo-e painting, it was executed by farmers and artisans and
depicted folk as well as Buddhist deities, popular animal motifs such as the
cock-and-hen, and popular characters and genre scenes, often satirical. There
are also votive pictures, some portraying the horse and traceable to the ancient
horse sacrifice. One of the late-surviving folk regions in modern Japan is on
Sado island, where small cylindrical stone images are thrown into the sea to
invoke pregnancy. (see also Japanese
art)
Chinese folk art must have been as
extensive as any in the world, as evidenced by the descriptions of Western
travellers and the souvenirs they collected and by various cultural and craft
studies; but the problem of collating and analyzing the material as a folk
category is forbidding. Every Chinese region has its own styles, and the entire
art output is enormous. The art associated with weddings, funerals, and
festivals is extravagant, even among the poor. In the country where paper
was invented in antiquity, papermaking is a common skill, and the art of paper
cutting is learned from childhood. Paper is used for the banner-like shop signs
that give a special character to Chinese streets and for many complicated models
and festival objects. (see also Chinese
art)
In its effect on folk culture, the
spread of Buddhism in the Far East has some parallels with the spread of
Christianity in the West. In Indonesia, for example, where Buddhism penetrated
an area whose local traditions were strong enough to survive and intermingle
with the new concepts, there is much temple art of a folk character. Among the
abundant ephemeral folk arts of Bali
are the vegetal offerings and the beautifully stylized symbolic objects woven of
palm leaf. Indonesian shadow puppets and printed textiles are world famous. (Ma.Ha.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. AARNE, The Types of the Folktale, 2nd rev., trans. and enl. by S. THOMPSON
(1961), the standard index and reference work for the most widely distributed
European folk narratives; F.J. CHILD (ed.), The
English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vol. (1882-98), the classic
assemblage of 305 ballad types, with variant texts and learned headnotes; W.A.
CLOUSTON, Popular Tales and Fictions, 2
vol. (1887), an early discussion of the wandering and migrations of folktales
between India and Europe; M.R. COX, Cinderella
(1893), the first comparative study of an international folktale, bringing
together 345 variants, and contributing to the thesis of diffusion rather than
independent invention of complex tales; L. DEGH, Folktales and Society (1969), a depth field study of storytelling
behaviour in a Hungarian peasant community, with biographical portraits of
leading folk narrators; R.M. DORSON, American
Folklore (1959), an historical presentation of various folk traditions in
the U.S., The British Folklorists: A
History, and (ed.), Peasant Customs
and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists, 2 vol. (both
1968), a history of the concept of folklore as it emerged in England with the
16th-century interest in antiquities and came to fruition among Victorian
private scholars in the late 19th century--the volumes of selections present
illustrative writings of the folklorists discussed in the history, and
"Folktales of the World" (1963- ), a series of authoritative volumes
each of which is prepared by an eminent folktale scholar from the country
represented; A.B. FRIEDMAN, The Ballad
Revival (1961), interest in the ballad in England by antiquaries, poets, and
the public treated in terms of literary history; JACOB GRIMM, Teutonic
Mythology, trans. by J.S. STALLYBRASS, 4 vol. (1883-88), the encyclopaedic
and influential work in which Grimm expounded his theory of the degeneration of
an ancient high pantheon of Germanic deities into the extant fairy tales and
witch beliefs of the contemporary peasantry; F.R.S. RAGLAN, The
Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama (1956), a highly controversial
explanation of all mythic narratives as following a uniform pattern derived from
ancient sacrificial fertility rituals; Y.M. SOKOLOV, Russian Folklore, trans. by C.R. SMITH, (1950), a history of Russian
folklore research given from the Soviet viewpoint regarding folklore as an
expression of the class struggle; S. THOMPSON, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, rev. ed., 6 vol. (1955-58), the
major reference work in comparative folklore; J. VANSINA, Oral Tradition (1961), presentation of an historical methodology for
the African historian enabling him to use oral historical chronicles and
genealogies as legitimate source materials; D.K. WILGUS, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (1959), a judicious
appraisal of the recent schools of interpretation in ballad and folk-song
studies.
MAMIE HARMON, GIUSEPPE COCCHIARA, and
ALESSANDRO MARABOTTINI MARABOTTI, "Folk Art," in the Encyclopedia
of World Art, vol. 5, col. 452-483 (1961), present a broad, book-length
theoretical survey focussed on visual art. A comprehensive work focussed on
literature is MARIA LEACH (ed.), Funk and
Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (1949). BRUNO
NETTL, Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents (1956), offers
much general theory in the course of treating his specific subject.
The best general treatment of the
borderline between folk literature and sophisticated literature is H.M. and N.
CHADWICK, The Growth of Literature, 3
vol. (1932-40). S. THOMPSON, The Folktale (1946),
gives an introduction and extensive bibliography for the field of oral narrative
literature. For myths of all parts of the world, see Mythology
of all Races, 13 vol. (1916-32), valuable information, though some of the
bibliographies are out of date. The
Journal of Folktale Studies (3/yr.), and FF
Communications (irreg.), are of primary importance. They include articles in
English, French, and German. FF
Communications is undoubtedly the leading series for all aspects of
folklore. A good recent series of folktale collections in English is
"Folktales of the World" ed. by R.M. DORSON. Important also is the
much larger series in German, "Märchen der Weltliteratur." For
the folktales of the ancient world good introductions are W.M.F. PETRIE (ed.), Egyptian
Tales Translated from the Papyri, 2 vol. (1899); and S.N. KRAMER, Sumerian
Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the 3d Millennium
B.C., rev. ed. (1961). The standard Renaissance collection is The
Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, ed. and trans. from the Italian of
BENEDETTO CROCE by N.M. PENZER, 2 vol. (1932). The commentaries on these tales
are especially valuable. The new translation of Grimm's folktales, German
Folk Tales by F.P. MAGOUN and A.H. KRAPPE (1960), is convenient for English
readers. For folktales of the North American Indians, the American Negroes, and
the peoples of Oceania and Israel, the following works are standard: W.
MATTHEWS, Navaho Legends (1897); S. THOMPSON (ed.), Tales of the North American Indians (1929, reprinted 1966), an
anthology with exhaustive comparative notes, valid until about 1926; M. JACOBS, The
Content and Style of an Oral Literature: Clackamas Chinook Myths and Tales (1959),
tales of a vanishing North Pacific tribe; W.A. LESSA, Tales
from Ulithi Atoll: A Comparative Study in Oceanic Folklore (1961); K.
LUOMALA, Voices on the Wind: Polynesian
Myths and Chants (1955); R.M. DORSON, American
Negro Folktales (1967); and D. NOY and D. BEN-AMOS (eds.), Folktales
of Israel (1963). Types and classifications of folktales and legends are:
A.A. AARNE, The Types of the Folktale, 2nd rev., trans. and enl. by S. THOMPSON
(1961), a standard list of tales of old world provenance; S. THOMPSON, Motif-Index
of Folk Literature, rev. ed., 6 vol. (1955-58); and R.T. CHRISTIANSEN, The Migratory Legends (1958), a classification of European legends.
A good example of a survey of tales of a particular country is S. O'SUILLEABHAIN
and R.T. CHRISTIANSEN, Types of the Irish
Folktale (1963). A general introduction to folk song is G. HERZOG,
"Song: Folksong, and the Music of Folksong," in Funk
and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, vol. 2, pp. 1032-1050
(1949-50). A comprehensive introduction and listing of all the classical fables
is in B.E. PERRY, Babrius; and Phaedrus (1965). The proverb, the riddle, and the charm
are treated in A. TAYLOR, The Proverb (1962),
English Riddles from Oral Tradition (1951);
and W.R. BASCOM, Ifa Divination:
Communication Between Gods and Men in W. Africa (1969). Important also is
the work of L. DEGH, Folktales and Society
(1969), a study of a Hungarian storyteller; A. DUNDES, The
Study of Folklore (1965); V.A. PROPP, Morphology
of the Folktale (1958); and T.A. SEBEOK, Myth:
A Symposium (1965), a collection of theoretical treatments of mythology. An
outstanding discussion of narrative folk song is A.B. LORD, The
Singer of Tales (1960). A model historical and geographical study is W.E.
ROBERTS, The Tale of the Kind and the
Unkind Girls (1958).
Among the scholarly periodicals devoted
primarily to folk music, the most important are the International Folk Music Council Yearbook (1969- ), formerly the International
Folk Music Council Journal; Ethnomusicology (1953- ); and the Journal
of American Folklore (1888- ). General works on folk music of Europe and the
Americas are BRUNO NETTL, Folk and
Traditional Music of the Western Continents (1965); WERNER DANCKERT, Das
europäische Volkslied (1939); the lengthy and subdivided article on the
folk music of many countries in Grove's
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed. (1955); and GEORGE HERZOG,
"Song," in Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (1950).
An important survey of the world's folk music in its relationship to certain
characteristics of cultures is ALAN LOMAX, Folk Song Style and Culture (1968). WALTER WIORA, Europäischer
Volksgesang (1952), provides an anthology of formal and melodic types in
folk music; Europäische Volksmusik
und abendländische Tonkunst (1957) explores the relationships between
folk and classical music throughout European history. BELA BARTOK, Hungarian
Folk Music (1931), is a classic study of one folk music style. A.B. LORD, The
Singer of Tales (1960), deals with the epic traditions of eastern Europe.
C.J. SHARP (comp.), English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, 2 vol. (1932), is
the pioneer collection of Anglo-American song; the total tune repertory of the
most important traditional ballads in England and North America is published in
B.H. BRONSON, The Traditional Tunes of the
Child Ballads, 4 vol. (1959-70). The best general survey of Anglo-American
folk song is R.D. ABRAHAMS and G. FOSS, Anglo-American
Folksong Style (1968). The history of folk music research is treated in D.K.
WILGUS, Anglo-American Folksong
Scholarship Since 1898 (1959). The modern urban folk song movement has given
rise to a series of popular folk music periodicals, most of them ephemeral;
notable American examples include Broadside
(1962- ), and Sing Out! (1950- ).
V. ALFORD and R. GALLOP, The
Traditional Dance (1935), authoritative, popular account of Europe's ancient
ritual dances; C.M. BARBEAU (comp.), Roundelays:
Folk Dances and Games Collected in Canada and New Zealand (1958), children's
mimed rounds from French Canada, with descriptions, music, and bilingual texts;
E. BURCHENAL, Folk-Dances from Old
Homelands (1922), descriptions of European folk dances, for use in schools;
N. CHILKOVSKY, American Bandstand Dances
in Labanotation (1959), notations of jazz dances, for reconstruction by
experts in the Laban system of notation; L.K. CZARNOWSKI, Dances of Early California Days (1950), splendid historical account,
with descriptions and music, for use in schools; A.S. DUGGAN et
al., The Folk Dance Library, 5 vol. (1948), descriptions of dances from
European and North American nations, with diagrams, music, and historical
background, for school use; D.N. KENNEDY, England's
Dances (1949), survey and interpretation of British ritual and folk dances;
G.P. KURATH, Iroquois Music and Dance, U.S.
Bureau of American Ethnology Bull. 187 (1964), and Music
and Dance of the Tewa Pueblos (1970), analysis of dances and music, with
many notation scores, interpretations, and background notes, not for
reconstruction; LA MERI, Spanish Dancing (1948),
skilled presentation of Spanish folk dances, with regional distinctions and some
analysis of movement routines; J. LAWSON, European Folk Dance (1953), analysis of regional European steps and
rhythms, with examples, useful facts, and questionable hypotheses; L. LEKIS, Folk
Dances of Latin America (1958), exhaustive, annotated bibliography, with
reliable comments on meanings and forms; M. MAYO, American
Square Dance, rev. ed. (1948), a practical book for folk dance groups, with
careful instructions and some music; C.J. SHARP (ed.), The
Country Dance Book, 6 pt. (1909-22), exhaustive treatise on British folk
dances by a scholarly pioneer, with diagrams and music; H.L. SPREEN, Folk-Dances
of South India (1945), unusual, exotic material for schools, with movement
descriptions, music, and bilingual texts; MARIA LEACH (ed.), Dictionary
of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, vol. 1 (1949), definitions and scholarly
interpretations.
H.T. BOSSERT, Ornamente der Volkskunst (1949; Eng. trans., Folk Art of Europe, trans. by SYBIL MOHOLY NAGY, 1953, reprinted
1964), selection by the author from his Volkskunst
im Europa (1926), a major compilation of folk designs, largely from
textiles; D.P. BRANCH, Folk Architecture
of the East Mediterranean (1966), includes Greek islands, central and
southern Italy, with photos and diagrams; R.F. BUSSABARGER and B.D. ROBINS, The
Everyday Art of India (1968), with glossary; ALFONSO CASO and D.F. RUBIN et
al., Arte popular de México (1963), a special issue of Artes de México, authoritative for crafts; E.O. CHRISTENSEN, The
Index of American Design (1950), selections from a Federal Art Project study
covering pre-1700-c. 1900; H.J. HANSEN
(ed.), Europas Volkskunst und die europäisch
beeinflusste Volkskunst Amerikas (1967; Eng. trans., European Folk Art in Europe and the Americas, 1968), country by
country, chiefly European, with over 600 illustrations; M. HARMON et
al., "Folk Art," Encyclopedia
of World Art, vol. 5, col. 451-506 (1961), a worldwide sampling of the arts,
with extensive bibliography to c. 1960;
STELLA KRAMRISCH, Unknown India (1968),
an exhibition catalog of ritual and tribal folk art; FRANCES LICHTEN, Folk Art of Rural Pennsylvania (1946), German-American motifs and
products; JEAN LIPMAN, American Primitive
Painting (1942), pioneering study of folk painters; P.S. LORD and D.J.
FOLEY, The Folk Arts and Crafts of New
England (1965), over 500 illustrations of crafts; HUGO MUNSTERBERG, The
Folk Arts of Japan (1958), includes the modern folk-art movement and living
folk arts; BERNARD RUDOFSKY, Architecture
Without Architects (1969), on primitive and vernacular styles all over the
world; R.T. WILCOX, Folk and Festival
Costume of the World (1965), over 150 regions, 111 plates, and bibliography.
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