Folklore and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Abstract

The notion of "sustainability"—which crosses the realms of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities and shows up in public policy debates in the United States and abroad—requires a value system and behavior often at odds with the values of late capitalism, with its emphasis on consumption, pleasure, and narcissism. Weber, Veblen, and other intellectuals recognized this contradiction in the late 19th century. Almost a century later, Daniel Bell's book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) revived the debate just in time for the culture wars. This lecture poses a deceptively simple question: is folklore the friend or enemy of sustainability? Attempting to answer this question requires the folklorist to link the microsociology of knowledge, the usual realm of folklore studies, to the macrosociology of knowledge, especially to questions of national character.