Understanding Folklore and Folk Groups

What is Folklore?

• Folklorists have spent time trying to define folklore since William Thoms coined the word in 1846.
  • Thoms used the pseudonym Ambrose Merton when he proposed the term.
  • Thoms revealed himself as the actual source of the term only once.
  • He proposed the definition as "a good Saxon compound" in favour of the current term popular antiquities

Ward Goodenough definition of culture

• "A society's culture is whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to act in a manner acceptable to its members".

Folklore & Folk Groups

• The "folk" level is the informal or unofficial level of cultural understanding.
• Cultural knowledge is shared, enacted, and propagated by regular, everyday people.
• "Folk group" refers to all people who share an unofficial culture together and are not a certain type of people
  • Folk groups can be small (just a few members) or large (hundreds of thousands of people).
• Folklorists study folklore genres, like customs, narratives, and beliefs.

Lore

• Lore is typically shared by word of mouth in folk culture.
• Each new audience gets a unique, contextually specific version of each folk story.
• Each new teller is equally the rightful "owner".
• Variation implies another important marker of folklore:
  • To identify something as folklore, it must be found in more than one place.
• Until folklore is passed along, writing in a secret journal is not folklore

Defining & Identifying Folklore

• Traditional simply means passed on, whether it is over many generations or over the course of a few days.
• Folk transmission is informal, and it is another identifier of folklore that it is passed on.
  • Folklorist Barre Toelken used the words "dynamic" and "conservative" to express the same idea.
    • Dynamic means variable, while conservative means traditional.

Folk-Lore Importance

• These words remind us of the importance of the term folk-lore: we need the folk (people sharing an informal culture).
• Without dynamic variation, and without the lore (the stories, beliefs, and customs), folk would not have anything to pass on traditionally
• "triviality barrier"

Explore the definition of folklore since its inception by William Thoms and the concept of folk groups. Understand how cultural knowledge is shared among everyday people within both small and large folk groups. Learn about folklore genres studied by folklorists.