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98-527: The Paracelsian concept of elementals draws from several much older traditions in mythology and religion. Common threads can be found in folklore , animism , and anthropomorphism . Examples of creatures such as the Pygmy were taken from Greek mythology . The elements of earth, water, air, and fire, were classed as the fundamental building blocks of nature. This system prevailed in the Classical world and

196-463: A street culture outside the purview of adults. This is also ideal where it needs to be collected; as Iona and Peter Opie demonstrated in their pioneering book Children's Games in Street and Playground . Here the social group of children is studied on its own terms, not as a derivative of adult social groups. It is shown that the culture of children is quite distinctive; it is generally unnoticed by

294-530: A Gnome, In search of mischief still on Earth to roam. The light Coquettes in Sylphs aloft repair, And sport and flutter in the fields of Air. Fouqué's wildly popular 1811 novella Undine is one of the most influential literary examples. Another example is the DC Comics superhero team The Elementals, composed of the characters Gnome, Sylph, Salamander, and Undine. Blackwood introduces an elemental in

392-432: A binary: one individual or group who actively transmits information in some form to another individual or group. Each of these is a defined role in the folklore process. The tradition-bearer is the individual who actively passes along the knowledge of an artifact; this can be either a mother singing a lullaby to her baby, or an Irish dance troupe performing at a local festival. They are named individuals, usually well known in

490-408: A child's birthday party, including verbal lore ( Happy Birthday song ), material lore (presents and a birthday cake), special games ( Musical chairs ) and individual customs (making a wish as you blow out the candles). Each of these is a folklore artifact in its own right, potentially worthy of investigation and cultural analysis. Together they combine to build the custom of a birthday party celebration,

588-489: A community. Many objects of material folklore are challenging to classify, difficult to archive, and unwieldy to store. The assigned task of museums is to preserve and make use of these bulky artifacts of material culture. To this end, the concept of the living museum has developed, beginning in Scandinavia at the end of the 19th century. These open-air museums not only display the artifacts, but also teach visitors how

686-659: A compound of folk and lore , was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms , who contrived the term as a replacement for the contemporary terminology of "popular antiquities" or "popular literature". The second half of the word, lore , comes from Old English lār 'instruction'. It is the knowledge and traditions of a particular group frequently passed along by word of mouth. The concept of folk has varied over time. When Thoms first created this term, folk applied only to rural, frequently poor, and illiterate peasants. A more modern definition of folk

784-516: A problem to be solved, but as a tremendous opportunity. In the diversity of American folklife, we find a marketplace teeming with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for Americans". This diversity is celebrated annually at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and many other folklife fests around the country. There are numerous other definitions. According to William Bascom major article on

882-605: A scripted combination of multiple artifacts which have meaning within their social group. Folklorists divide customs into several different categories. A custom can be a seasonal celebration , such as Thanksgiving or New Year's . It can be a life cycle celebration for an individual, such as baptism, birthday or wedding. A custom can also mark a community festival or event; examples of this are Carnival in Cologne or Mardi Gras in New Orleans . This category also includes

980-509: A shift in purpose and meaning. There are many reasons for continuing to handmake objects for use, for example these skills may be needed to repair manufactured items, or a unique design might be required which is not (or cannot be) found in the stores. Many crafts are considered as simple home maintenance, such as cooking, sewing and carpentry. For many people, handicrafts have also become an enjoyable and satisfying hobby. Handmade objects are often regarded as prestigious, where extra time and thought

1078-426: A small sampling of objects and skills that are included in studies of material culture. Customary culture is remembered enactment, i.e. re-enactment. It is the patterns of expected behavior within a group, the "traditional and expected way of doing things" A custom can be a single gesture , such as thumbs down or a handshake . It can also be a complex interaction of multiple folk customs and artifacts as seen in

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1176-450: A social event during the winter months, or the gifting of a quilt to signify the importance of the event. Each of these—the traditional pattern chosen, the social event, and the gifting—occur within the broader context of the community. Even so, when considering context, the structure and characteristics of performance can be recognized, including an audience, a framing event, and the use of decorative figures and symbols, all of which go beyond

1274-400: A swell in popular interest in folk traditions, these community celebrations are becoming more numerous throughout the western world. While ostensibly parading the diversity of their community, economic groups have discovered that these folk parades and festivals are good for business. All shades of people are out on the streets, eating, drinking and spending. This attracts support not only from

1372-572: A whole, even as it continues to be a point of discussion within the field itself. The term folkloristics , along with the alternative name folklore studies , became widely used in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. When the American Folklife Preservation Act (Public Law 94-201) was passed by the U.S. Congress in January 1976, to coincide with

1470-492: Is "not idle speculation… Decades of fieldwork have demonstrated conclusively that these groups do have their own folklore." In this modern understanding, folklore is a function of shared identity within any social group. This folklore can include jokes, sayings, and expected behavior in multiple variants, always transmitted in an informal manner. For the most part, it will be learned by observation, imitation, repetition, or correction by other group members. This informal knowledge

1568-528: Is a 17th-century French text by Abbé Nicolas-Pierre-Henri de Montfaucon de Villars (1635–1673). The titular "Comte de Gabalis" ("Count of Cabala") is an esotericist who explains the mysteries of the world to the author. It first appeared in Paris in 1670, anonymously, though the identity of the author came to be known. The original title as published by Claude Barbin was Le comte de Gabalis, ou entretiens sur les sciences secrètes , "The Count of Cabala, Or Dialogs on

1666-457: Is a distinct branch of folklore that deals with activities passed on by children to other children, away from the influence or supervision of an adult. Children's folklore contains artifacts from all the standard folklore genres of verbal, material, and customary lore; it is however the child-to-child conduit that distinguishes these artifacts. For childhood is a social group where children teach, learn and share their own traditions, flourishing in

1764-678: Is a social group that includes two or more people with common traits who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. "Folk is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family. " This expanded social definition of folk supports a broader view of the material, i.e., the lore, considered to be folklore artifacts . These now include all "things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)". Folklore are no longer considered to be limited to that which

1862-400: Is also transmitted within a group, remains a practical hygiene and health issue and does not rise to the level of a group-defining tradition. Tradition is initially remembered behavior; once it loses its practical purpose, there is no reason for further transmission unless it has been imbued with meaning beyond the initial practicality of the action. This meaning is at the core of folkloristics,

1960-485: Is as close as folklorists can come to observing the transmission and social function of this folk knowledge before the spread of literacy during the 19th century. As we have seen with the other genres, the original collections of children's lore and games in the 19th century was driven by a fear that the culture of childhood would die out. Early folklorists, among them Alice Gomme in Britain and William Wells Newell in

2058-404: Is enmeshed in a multitude of differing identities and their concomitant social groups. The first group that each of us is born into is the family, and each family has its own unique family folklore . As a child grows into an individual, its identities also increase to include age, language, ethnicity, occupation, etc. Each of these cohorts has its own folklore, and as one folklorist points out, this

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2156-541: Is found in an issue of the Journal of American Folklore , published in 1975, which is dedicated exclusively to articles on women's folklore, with approaches that had not come from a man's perspective. Other groups that were highlighted as part of this broadened understanding of the folk group were non-traditional families , occupational groups, and families that pursued the production of folk items over multiple generations. Folklorist Richard Dorson explained in 1976 that

2254-451: Is found in hex signs on Pennsylvania Dutch barns, tin man sculptures made by metalworkers, front yard Christmas displays, decorated school lockers, carved gun stocks, and tattoos. "Words such as naive, self-taught, and individualistic are used to describe these objects, and the exceptional rather than the representative creation is featured." This is in contrast to the understanding of folklore artifacts that are nurtured and passed along within

2352-491: Is his archetypal being for each of the four elements: The concept of elementals seems to have been conceived by Paracelsus in the 16th century, though he did not in fact use the term "elemental" or a German equivalent. He regarded them not so much as spirits but as beings between creatures and spirits, generally being invisible to mankind but having physical and commonly humanoid bodies, as well as eating, sleeping, and wearing clothes like humans. Paracelsus gave common names for

2450-559: Is intended to organize and categorize the folklore artifacts; they provide common vocabulary and consistent labeling for folklorists to communicate with each other. That said, each artifact is unique; in fact, one of the characteristics of all folklore artifacts is their variation within genres and types. This is in direct contrast to manufactured goods, where the goal in production is to create identical products, and any variations are considered mistakes. It is, however, just this required variation that makes identification and classification of

2548-525: Is not just any conversation, but words and phrases conforming to a traditional configuration recognized by both the speaker and the audience. For narrative types , by definition, they have a consistent structure and follow an existing model in their narrative form. As just one simple example, in English, the phrase "An elephant walks into a bar…" instantaneously flags the following text as a joke . It might be one you have already heard, but it might be one that

2646-416: Is not something one can typically gain from a formal school curriculum or study in the fine arts . Instead, these traditions are passed along informally from one individual to another, either through verbal instruction or demonstration. The academic study of folklore is called folklore studies or folkloristics, and it can be explored at the undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. levels. The word folklore ,

2744-411: Is old or obsolete. These folk artifacts continue to be passed along informally, as a rule anonymously, and always in multiple variants. The folk group is not individualistic; it is community-based and nurtures its lore in community. "As new groups emerge, new folklore is created… surfers, motorcyclists, computer programmers ". In direct contrast to high culture , where any single work of a named artist

2842-434: Is protected by copyright law , folklore is a function of shared identity within a common social group. Having identified folk artifacts, the professional folklorist strives to understand the significance of these beliefs, customs, and objects for the group, since these cultural units would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within the group. That meaning can, however, shift and morph; for example,

2940-578: Is spent in their creation and their uniqueness is valued. For the folklorist, these hand-crafted objects embody multifaceted relationships in the lives of the craftspeople and the users, a concept that has been lost with mass-produced items that have no connection to an individual craftsperson. Many traditional crafts, such as ironworking and glass-making, have been elevated to the fine or applied arts and taught in art schools; or they have been repurposed as folk art , characterized as objects whose decorative form supersedes their utilitarian needs. Folk art

3038-403: Is still transmitted orally and, indeed, continues to be generated in new forms and variants at an alarming rate. Below is listed a small sampling of types and examples of verbal lore. The genre of material culture includes all artifacts that can be touched, held, lived in, or eaten. They are tangible objects with a physical or mental presence, either intended for permanent use or to be used at

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3136-406: Is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people , culture or subculture . This includes oral traditions such as tales , myths , legends , proverbs , poems , jokes , and other oral traditions. This also includes material culture , such as traditional building styles common to the group. Folklore also encompasses customary lore, taking actions for folk beliefs, and

3234-669: Is the complex balance of continuity over change in both their design and their decoration. In Europe, prior to the Industrial Revolution , everything was made by hand. While some folklorists of the 19th century wanted to secure the oral traditions of the rural folk before the populace became literate, other folklorists sought to identify hand-crafted objects before their production processes were lost to industrial manufacturing. Just as verbal lore continues to be actively created and transmitted in today's culture, so these handicrafts can still be found all around us, with possibly

3332-540: Is used in discussions of material lore. Both formulations offer different perspectives on the same folkloric understanding, specifically that folklore artifacts need to remain embedded in their cultural environment if we are to gain insight into their meaning for the community. The concept of cultural (folklore) performance is shared with ethnography and anthropology among other social sciences. The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner identified four universal characteristics of cultural performance: playfulness, framing ,

3430-428: Is used to confirm and reinforce the identity of the group. It can be used both internally within the group to express their common identity, for example in an initiation ceremony for new members. It can also be used externally to differentiate the group from outsiders, like a folk dance demonstration at a community festival. Significant to folklorists here is that there are two opposing but equally valid ways to use this in

3528-842: The Bicentennial Celebration , folkloristics in the United States came of age. "…[Folklife] means the traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction or institutional direction." Added to

3626-619: The Halloween celebration of the 21st century is not the All Hallows' Eve of the Middle Ages and even gives rise to its own set of urban legends independent of the historical celebration; the cleansing rituals of Orthodox Judaism were originally good public health in a land with little water, but now these customs signify for some people identification as an Orthodox Jew. By comparison, a common action such as tooth brushing , which

3724-616: The Historic–Geographic Method , a methodology that dominated folkloristics in the first half of the 20th century. When William Thoms first published his appeal to document the verbal lore of the rural populations, it was believed these folk artifacts would die out as the population became literate. Over the past two centuries, this belief has proven to be wrong; folklorists continue to collect verbal lore in both written and spoken form from all social groups. Some variants might have been captured in published collections, but much of it

3822-566: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival celebrated each summer on the Mall in Washington, DC. A fourth category includes customs related to folk beliefs . Walking under a ladder is just one of many symbols considered unlucky . Occupational groups tend to have a rich history of customs related to their life and work, so the traditions of sailors or lumberjacks . The area of ecclesiastical folklore , which includes modes of worship not sanctioned by

3920-682: The 17th century, elemental spirits after the Paracelsian concept appeared in works by John Dryden and in the Comte de Gabalis . Alexander Pope cited Comte de Gabalis as his source for elemental lore in his 1712 poem The Rape of the Lock . The Sprites of fiery Termagants in Flame Mount up, and take a Salamander's name. Soft yielding minds to Water glide away, And sip, with Nymphs, their elemental Tea. The graver Prude sinks downward to

4018-500: The American Folklore Society brought the behavioral approach into open debate among folklorists. In 1972 Richard Dorson called out the "young Turks" for their movement toward a behavioral approach to folklore. This approach "shifted the conceptualization of folklore as an extractable item or 'text' to an emphasis on folklore as a kind of human behavior and communication. Conceptualizing folklore as behavior redefined

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4116-561: The History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society and concerned with the connections of folklore with history, as well as the history of folklore studies. Lacking context, folklore artifacts would be uninspiring objects without any life of their own. It is only through performance that the artifacts come alive as an active and meaningful component of a social group; the intergroup communication arises in

4214-522: The Lock (1714), and in German, it is a likely source for Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué 's Undine . In recent times it has been considered by some to have been intended as a satire of occult philosophy, though in its time it was taken seriously by many readers. Many later authors have also taken it to be a serious source, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton and prominent occult writers Éliphas Lévi , Helena Blavatsky and M. P. Hall . This article about

4312-670: The Other Spirits , Paracelsus identified mythological beings as belonging to one of the four elements. Part of the Philosophia Magna, this book was first printed in 1566 after Paracelsus' death. He wrote the book to "describe the creatures that are outside the cognizance of the light of nature, how they are to be understood, what marvellous works God has created". He states that there is more bliss in describing these "divine objects" than in describing fencing, court etiquette, cavalry, and other worldly pursuits. The following

4410-462: The Paracelsian "undine") are said to be rare, while female salamanders are rarely seen. The Rosicrucians claimed to be able to see such elemental spirits. To be admitted to their society, it was previously necessary for the eyes to be purged with the Panacea or "Universal Medicine," a legendary alchemical substance with miraculous curative powers. As well, glass globes would be prepared with one of

4508-745: The Paracelsian concept, elementals are conceived more as supernatural humanoid beings which are much like human beings except for lacking souls. This is quite the opposite from the Jain conception which rather than positing soulless elementals is positing that physical objects have some type of soul and that what are commonly considered inanimate objects have this particular type of soul. In contemporary times there are those who study and practice rituals to invoke elementals. These include Wiccans, and followers of nature-based religions. Elementals became popular characters in Romantic literature after Paracelsus. Even by

4606-537: The Second World War, folklorists began to articulate a more holistic approach toward their subject matter. In tandem with the growing sophistication in the social sciences , attention was no longer limited to the isolated artifact, but extended to include the artifact embedded in an active cultural environment. One early proponent was Alan Dundes with his essay "Texture, Text and Context", first published 1964. A public presentation in 1967 by Dan Ben-Amos at

4704-710: The Secret Sciences". The book was widely read in France and abroad, and is a source for many of the "marvelous beings" that populate later European literature. French readers include Charles Baudelaire and Anatole France – it was the main source for his At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque (1892). In English literature, it influenced Alexander Pope , who borrowed from it to create the sylphs in The Rape of

4802-603: The United States, felt a need to capture the unstructured and unsupervised street life and activities of children before it was lost. This fear proved to be unfounded. In a comparison of any modern school playground during recess and the painting of "Children's Games" by Pieter Breugel the Elder we can see that the activity level is similar, and many of the games from the 1560 painting are recognizable and comparable to modern variations still played today. These same artifacts of childlore, in innumerable variations, also continue to serve

4900-413: The artifacts and turn them into something else; so Old McDonald's farm is transformed from animal noises to the scatological version of animal poop. This childlore is characterized by "its lack of dependence on literary and fixed form. Children…operate among themselves in a world of informal and oral communication, unimpeded by the necessity of maintaining and transmitting information by written means". This

4998-423: The business community, but also from federal and state organizations for these local street parties. Paradoxically, in parading diversity within the community, these events have come to authenticate true community, where business interests ally with the varied (folk) social groups to promote the interests of the community as a whole. This is just a small sampling of types and examples of customary lore. Childlore

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5096-428: The classes: "In like manner they distribute these into more orders, so as some are fiery, some watery, some aerial, some terrestrial." Agrippa did however give an extensive list of various mythological beings of this type, although without clarifying which belongs to which elemental class. Like Paracelsus, he did not use the term "elemental spirit" per se . A 1670 French satire of occult philosophy, Comte de Gabalis ,

5194-440: The closest to humans in his conception because they move through air like we do, while in fire they burn, in water they drown, and in earth, they get stuck. Paracelsus states that each one stays healthy in its particular " chaos ," as he terms it, but dies in the others. Paracelsus conceived human beings to be composed of three parts, an elemental body, a sidereal spirit, and an immortal divine soul. Elementals lacked this last part,

5292-508: The community as knowledgeable in their traditional lore. They are not the anonymous "folk", the nameless mass without of history or individuality. The audience of this performance is the other half in the transmission process; they listen, watch, and remember. Few of them will become active tradition-bearers; many more will be passive tradition-bearers who maintain a memory of this specific traditional artifact, in both its presentation and its content. Comte de Gabalis Comte de Gabalis

5390-457: The complexity of the interpretation, the birthday party for a seven-year-old will not be identical to the birthday party for that same child as a six-year-old, even though they follow the same model. For each artifact embodies a single variant of a performance in a given time and space. The task of the folklorist becomes to identify within this surfeit of variables the constants and the expressed meaning that shimmer through all variations: honoring of

5488-472: The continent is a single example of an ethnic group parading their separateness (differential behavior ), and encouraging Americans of all stripes to show alliance to this colorful ethnic group. These festivals and parades, with a target audience of people who do not belong to the social group, intersect with the interests and mission of public folklorists , who are engaged in the documentation, preservation, and presentation of traditional forms of folklife. With

5586-609: The custom, either as performer or audience, signifies acknowledgment of that social group. Some customary behavior is intended to be performed and understood only within the group itself, so the handkerchief code sometimes used in the gay community or the initiation rituals of the Freemasons. Other customs are designed specifically to represent a social group to outsiders, those who do not belong to this group. The St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York and in other communities across

5684-456: The defining features a challenge. While this classification is essential for the subject area of folkloristics, it remains just labeling and adds little to an understanding of the traditional development and meaning of the artifacts themselves. Necessary as they are, genre classifications are misleading in their oversimplification of the subject area. Folklore artifacts are never self-contained, they do not stand in isolation but are particulars in

5782-527: The developmental function of this childlore, the artifacts themselves have been in play for centuries. Below is listed just a small sampling of types and examples of childlore and games. A case has been made for considering folk history as a distinct sub-category of folklore, an idea that has received attention from such folklorists as Richard Dorson. This field of study is represented in The Folklore Historian , an annual journal sponsored by

5880-456: The elemental types, as well as correct names, which he seems to have considered somewhat more proper, " recht namen ". He also referred to them by purely German terms which are roughly equivalent to "water people," "mountain people," and so on, using all the different forms interchangeably. His fundamental classification scheme on the first page of Tractatus II of the Book on Nymphs is based on where

5978-748: The elementals live, and he gives the following names: Of the names he used, gnomus , undina , and sylph are all thought to have appeared first in Paracelsus' works, though undina is a fairly obvious Latin derivative from the word unda meaning "wave." In De Meteoris he referred to the elementals collectively as Sagani . He noted that undines are similar to humans in size, while sylphs are rougher, coarser, longer, and stronger. Gnomes are short, while salamanders are long, narrow, and lean. The elementals are said to be able to move through their own elements as human beings move through air. Gnomes, for example, can move through rocks, walls, and soil. Sylphs are

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6076-410: The established church tends to be so large and complex that it is usually treated as a specialized area of folk customs; it requires considerable expertise in standard church ritual in order to adequately interpret folk customs and beliefs that originated in official church practice. Customary folklore is always a performance, be it a single gesture or a complex of scripted customs, and participating in

6174-434: The extensive array of other legislation designed to protect the natural and cultural heritage of the United States, this law also marks a shift in national awareness. It gives voice to a growing understanding that cultural diversity is a national strength and a resource worthy of protection. Paradoxically, it is a unifying feature, not something that separates the citizens of a country. "We no longer view cultural difference as

6272-496: The first classification system for folktales in 1910. This was later expanded into the Aarne–Thompson classification system by Stith Thompson and remains the standard classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified oral artifacts grew, similarities were noted in items that had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups, and epochs, giving rise to

6370-402: The forms and rituals of celebrations such as Christmas , weddings, folk dances , and initiation rites . Each one of these, either singly or in combination, is considered a folklore artifact or traditional cultural expression . Just as essential as the form, folklore also encompasses the transmission of these artifacts from one region to another or from one generation to the next. Folklore

6468-446: The four elements and for one month exposed to beams of sunlight. With these steps the initiated would see innumerable beings immediately. These beings, known as elementals, were said to be longer lived than man but ceased to exist upon death. However, if the elemental were to wed a mortal, they would become immortal. This exception seemed to work in reverse when it came to immortals, though, for if an elemental were to wed an immortal being,

6566-411: The generations and subject to the same forces of conservative tradition and individual variation" that are found in all folk artifacts. Folklorists are interested in the physical form, the method of manufacture or construction, the pattern of use, as well as the procurement of the raw materials. The meaning to those who both make and use these objects is important. Of primary significance in these studies

6664-402: The immortal soul. However, by marriage with a human being, the elemental and its offspring could gain a soul. In his influential De Occulta Philosophia , published in 1531–33, several decades before the publication of Paracelsus' Philosophia Magna , Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa also wrote of four classes of spirits corresponding to the four elements. However, he did not give special names for

6762-632: The immortal would gain the mortality of the elemental. One of the conditions of joining the Rosicrucians however, was a vow of chastity in hopes of marrying an elemental. In Jainism , there is a superficially similar concept within its general cosmology , the ekendriya jiva , "one-sensed beings" with bodies ( kaya ) that are composed of a single element, albeit with a 5-element system (earth, water, air, fire, and plant), but these beings are actual physical objects and phenomena such as rocks, rain, fires and so on which are endowed with souls ( jiva ). In

6860-404: The individual within the circle of family and friends, gifting to express their value and worth to the group, and of course, the festival food and drink as signifiers of the event. The formal definition of verbal lore is words, both written and oral, that are "spoken, sung, voiced forms of traditional utterance that show repetitive patterns." Crucial here are the repetitive patterns. Verbal lore

6958-417: The items were used, with actors reenacting the everyday lives of people from all segments of society, relying heavily on the material artifacts of a pre-industrial society. Many locations even duplicate the processing of the objects, thus creating new objects of an earlier historic time period. Living museums are now found throughout the world as part of a thriving heritage industry . This list represents just

7056-431: The job of folklorists..." Folklore became a verb, an action, something that people do, not just something that they have. It is in the performance and the active context that folklore artifacts get transmitted in informal, direct communication, either verbally or in demonstration. Performance includes all the different modes and manners in which this transmission occurs. Transmission is a communicative process requiring

7154-408: The language of a folklore performance. Material culture requires some moulding to turn it into a performance. Should we consider the performance of the creation of the artifact, as in a quilting party, or the performance of the recipients who use the quilt to cover their marriage bed? Here the language of context works better to describe the quilting of patterns copied from the grandmother, quilting as

7252-478: The most part self-explanatory, these categories include physical objects ( material folklore ), common sayings, expressions, stories and songs ( verbal folklore ), and beliefs and ways of doing things ( customary folklore ). There is also a fourth major subgenre defined for children's folklore and games ( childlore ), as the collection and interpretation of this fertile topic is particular to school yards and neighborhood streets. Each of these genres and their subtypes

7350-411: The necessary beat to complex physical rhythms and movements, be it hand-clapping, jump roping, or ball bouncing. Furthermore, many physical games are used to develop strength, coordination and endurance of the players. For some team games, negotiations about the rules can run on longer than the game itself as social skills are rehearsed. Even as we are just now uncovering the neuroscience that undergirds

7448-460: The next meal. Most of these folklore artifacts are single objects that have been created by hand for a specific purpose; however, folk artifacts can also be mass-produced, such as dreidels or Christmas decorations. These items continue to be considered folklore because of their long (pre-industrial) history and their customary use. All of these material objects "existed prior to and continue alongside mechanized industry. … [They are] transmitted across

7546-400: The novella The Nemesis of Fire . Elementals related to the four classical elements appeared in the fiction of Michael Moorcock , notably his 1972 novel Elric of Melniboné , and a variant appeared in the 1970s Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game . The concept has since been expanded on in numerous other fantasy , computer and trading card games . Folklore Folklore

7644-547: The past that continued to exist within the lower strata of society. The " Kinder- und Hausmärchen " of the Brothers Grimm (first published 1812) is the best known but by no means only collection of verbal folklore of the European peasantry of that time. This interest in stories, sayings, and songs continued throughout the 19th century and aligned the fledgling discipline of folkloristics with literature and mythology. By

7742-531: The performance and this is where transmission of these cultural elements takes place. American folklorist Roger D. Abrahams has described it thus: "Folklore is folklore only when performed. As organized entities of performance, items of folklore have a sense of control inherent in them, a power that can be capitalized upon and enhanced through effective performance." Without transmission, these items are not folklore, they are just individual quirky tales and objects. This understanding in folkloristics only occurred in

7840-506: The period of romantic nationalism in Europe. A particular figure in this development was Johann Gottfried von Herder , whose writings in the 1770s presented oral traditions as organic processes grounded in the locale. After the German states were invaded by Napoleonic France , Herder's approach was adopted by many of his fellow Germans, who systematized the recorded folk traditions and used them in their process of nation building . This process

7938-408: The rural poor as folk. The common feature in this expanded definition of folk was their identification as the underclass of society. Moving forward into the 20th century, in tandem with new thinking in the social sciences , folklorists also revised and expanded their concept of the folk group. By the 1960s, it was understood that social groups , i.e., folk groups, were all around us; each individual

8036-420: The same function of learning and practicing skills needed for growth. So bouncing and swinging rhythms and rhymes encourage development of balance and coordination in infants and children. Verbal rhymes like Peter Piper picked... serve to increase both the oral and aural acuity of children. Songs and chants, accessing a different part of the brain, are used to memorize series ( Alphabet song ). They also provide

8134-410: The second half of the 20th century, when the two terms " folklore performance " and "text and context" dominated discussions among folklorists. These terms are not contradictory or even mutually exclusive. As borrowings from other fields of study, one or the other linguistic formulation is more appropriate to any given discussion. Performance is frequently tied to verbal and customary lore, whereas context

8232-521: The self-representation of a community. Different genres are frequently combined with each other to mark an event. So a birthday celebration might include a song or formulaic way of greeting the birthday child (verbal), presentation of a cake and wrapped presents (material), as well as customs to honor the individual, such as sitting at the head of the table and blowing out the candles with a wish. There might also be special games played at birthday parties, which are not generally played at other times. Adding to

8330-444: The sophisticated world of adults, and quite as little affected by it. Of particular interest to folklorists here is the mode of transmission of these artifacts; this lore circulates exclusively within an informal pre-literate children's network or folk group. It does not include artifacts taught to children by adults. However children can take the taught and teach it further to other children, turning it into childlore. Or they can take

8428-403: The speaker has just thought up within the current context. Another example is the child's song Old MacDonald Had a Farm , where each performance is distinctive in the animals named, their order, and their sounds. Songs such as this are used to express cultural values (farms are important, farmers are old and weather-beaten) and teach children about different domesticated animals. Verbal folklore

8526-412: The study of a group: you can start with an identified group in order to explore its folklore, or you can identify folklore items and use them to identify the social group. Beginning in the 1960s, a further expansion of the concept of folk began to unfold through the study of folklore. Individual researchers identified folk groups that had previously been overlooked and ignored. One notable example of this

8624-405: The study of folklore is "concerned with the study of traditional culture, or the unofficial culture" that is the folk culture, "as opposed to the elite culture, not for the sake of proving a thesis but to learn about the mass of [humanity] overlooked by the conventional disciplines." Individual folklore artifacts are commonly classified as one of three types: material, verbal or customary lore. For

8722-470: The study of folklore. With the increasing theoretical sophistication of the social sciences , it has become evident that folklore is a naturally occurring and necessary component of any social group; it is indeed all around us. Folklore does not have to be old or antiquated; it continues to be created and transmitted, and in any group, it is used to differentiate between "us" and "them." Folklore began to distinguish itself as an autonomous discipline during

8820-420: The topic, there are "four functions to folklore": The folk of the 19th century, the social group identified in the original term "folklore" , was characterized by being rural, illiterate, and poor. They were the peasants living in the countryside, in contrast to the urban populace of the cities. Only toward the end of the century did the urban proletariat (on the coattails of Marxist theory) become included with

8918-478: The totality of their customs and beliefs as folklore. This distinction aligned American folkloristics with cultural anthropology and ethnology , using the same techniques of data collection in their field research. This divided alliance of folkloristics between the humanities in Europe and the social sciences in America offers a wealth of theoretical vantage points and research tools to the field of folkloristics as

9016-464: The turn of the 20th century, the number and sophistication of folklore studies and folklorists had grown both in Europe and North America. Whereas European folklorists remained focused on the oral folklore of the homogenous peasant populations in their regions, the American folklorists, led by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict , chose to consider Native American cultures in their research, and included

9114-432: The use of symbolic language, and employing the subjunctive mood . In viewing the performance, the audience leaves the daily reality to move into a mode of make-believe, or "what if?" It is self-evident that this fits well with all types of verbal lore, where reality has no place among the symbols, fantasies, and nonsense of traditional tales, proverbs, and jokes. Customs and the lore of children and games also fit easily into

9212-688: The utility of the object. Before the Second World War , folk artifacts had been understood and collected as cultural shards of an earlier time. They were considered individual vestigial artifacts, with little or no function in the contemporary culture. Given this understanding, the goal of the folklorist was to capture and document them before they disappeared. They were collected with no supporting data, bound in books, archived and classified more or less successfully. The Historic–Geographic Method worked to isolate and track these collected artifacts, mostly verbal lore, across space and time. Following

9310-437: Was enthusiastically embraced by smaller nations, like Finland, Estonia, and Hungary, which were seeking political independence from their dominant neighbors. Folklore, as a field of study, further developed among 19th-century European scholars, who were contrasting tradition with the newly developing modernity . Its focus was the oral folklore of the rural peasant populations, which were considered as residues and survivals of

9408-459: Was highly influential in medieval natural philosophy . Although Paracelsus uses these foundations and the popular preexisting names of elemental creatures, he is doing so to present new ideas which expand on his own philosophical system. The homunculus is another example of a Paracelsian idea with roots in earlier alchemical, scientific, and folklore traditions. In his 16th-century work A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on

9506-563: Was prominent in popularizing Paracelsus' theory of elementals. It particularly focused on the idea of elemental marriage discussed by Paracelsus. In the book, the titular "Count of Kabbalah " explains that members of his order (to which Paracelsus is said to belong) refrain from marriage to human beings in order to retain their freedom to bestow souls upon elementals. Comte de Gabalis used the terms sylphide and gnomide to refer to female sylphs and gnomes (often "sylphid" and "gnomid" in English translations). Male nymphs (the term used instead of

9604-513: Was the original folklore , the artifacts defined by William Thoms as older, oral cultural traditions of the rural populace. In his 1846 published call for help in documenting antiquities, Thoms was echoing scholars from across the European continent to collect artifacts of verbal lore. By the beginning of the 20th century, these collections had grown to include artifacts from around the world and across several centuries. A system to organize and categorize them became necessary. Antti Aarne published

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