In The Individual and Tradition: Folkloristic Perspectives, co-editors Ray Cashman, Tom Mould, and Pravina Shukla have assembled an immensely engaging collection of essays on vernacular cultural creativity. The editors present these essays as examples of “performer-centered ethnography”--as studies that focus on the individual artist and his or her creative practice. While folklorists and their colleagues in related disciplines typically articulate their research topics in terms of expressive genres or collective events, it is specific individuals whom they meet once they begin fieldwork. Such relationships with individuals are ongoing partnerships for the production and dissemination of knowledge, and they generate responsibilities that often last for years after fieldwork has been completed.

In a superbly written introductory chapter for this book, Cashman, Mould, and Shukla lay out a framework for the folkloristic study of individuals and traditions. They discuss an individual as a “performed subjectivity” and argue that “there is no self except in relation to others, to past precedent, and to ambient discourse” (4). They further suggest that an individual is “a bricolage, an on-going assemblage of performances, an intertextual work-in-progress” (5). Meanwhile, they describe tradition as both a resource and a process--as shared practices that individuals select and rework in the ongoing creation of performances. In the editors’ words: “If tradition is a process not unlike recycling, tradition as resource comprises those things available for recycling” (3). With these concepts of the individual and tradition in place, the editors proffer the book’s main argument: “the individual and tradition are inseparable and mutually constituting” (6). A tradition exists only in its enactments by individuals, while an individual exists only in relation to other people and to collective systems of knowledge and practice.

Though the editors present this book as a collection of performer-centered ethnographies, the essays also exemplify performer-centered history. The key terms of “individual” and “tradition” are both fundamentally temporal concepts. The concept of an individual locates a named person within time, with an emphasis on agency, intention, and the unfolding of a distinct experience. The concept of tradition, in turn, delineates culture in terms of processes of continuity and change over time. In short, this book locates the individual artist and culture within history and seamlessly combines ethnographic and historical perspectives. This synthesis has been an enduring strength of folklore as a discipline and a hallmark of the work of Henry Glassie, to whom this book is dedicated. As Glassie (1995: 399) himself noted in an essay for the Journal of American Folklore, tradition is “culture’s dynamic,” “the process by which culture exists,” and “the swing term between culture and history.”

In order to explore the complex synergy of individuals and traditions, Cashman, Mould, and Shukla have selected case studies that include a wide range of research methodologies, expressive forms, and geographic regions, with North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia all represented. The contributors to the volume employ a variety of sources: participant-observations, interviews (including oral history), archival documents in diverse media, creative literature, and material objects. Whether primarily ethnographic or historical in orientation, all of the essays offer fine-grained descriptions of particular individuals and traditions, as well as more general reflections on processes of cultural creativity. The inspiration of Henry Glassie’s scholarship and public practice runs throughout the book, with many of the authors commenting on his publications, teaching, and collegiality.

This is a big book, with twenty-six contributors and over 500 pages. Some examples of its contents are studies by Marjorie Hunt on Vincent Palumbo and Roger Morigi, craftsmen who grew up in ancient stone-carving communities in Italy and worked on the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.; Takashi Takahara on several generations of a family of ogre-tile makers in Japan; Charles Zug on Kim Ellington, a studio potter who, in his thirties, learned and became part of the North Carolina Catawba Valley pottery tradition; Karen M. Duffy on Wanda Aragon, an Acoma Pueblo potter who revived late nineteenth-century designs in part through her museum research; Philip M. Peek on Ovia Idah, a Nigerian artist who operated at the intersections of the Benin City court art tradition, contemporary African art, relationships with European and American scholars, and a growing tourist art market; and Pravina Shukla on Kersti Jobs-Björklöf, who has advocated folk costume in Sweden through her church activities, museum curating, and personal advice to community members (Shukla emphasizes the importance of documenting the preservation practices of community members themselves).

Other contributors to this book focus on how individuals construct a sense of self in performance, such as Ray Cashman on Packy Jim McGrath, an Irish storyteller who uses both personal experience narratives and fairy tales to compose a persona and articulate a moral stance; and John McDowell on several Andean storytellers, who personalize myths and, in a complementary fashion, frame memorates in terms of mythic traditions. Meanwhile, Tom Mould, in an examination of Choctaw prophecy narratives and Mormon memorates, calls for an adjustment to performance theory that recognizes emic evaluations of competence not based on concepts of art and that acknowledges a wider range of individual creativity than simply the achievements of star artists.

Another topic that receives substantial attention in this volume is the mediation of oral traditions. For example, Jennifer Schacker traces the dissemination of folktales in the works of Madame d’Aulnoy, a late seventeenth-century French writer, and in British publications and theatrical productions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Richard Bauman discusses the representation of rural American storytelling in the phonograph recordings of Cal Stewart, a popular entertainer at the turn of the twentieth century; and Michael Robert Evans explores how Paul DeMain, the editor of News from Indian Country, handled oral testimonies concerning the death of two FBI agents on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. In addition, the Irish playwright and poet Vincent Woods offers a meditation on his own writing and his discovery of Henry Glassie’s research on mumming traditions, while the editors close with a highly informative article on Glassie’s public folklore activities and scholarship, including an assessment of each of his books and a lengthy bibliography.

Where do these and the other essays in the book point in terms of future directions for folkloristic research? As a whole, this compilation suggests the need for more scrutiny of the circulation of individuals and traditions across diverse geographic locales, performance settings, and media. How are such circulations shaped by the social networks in which individual artists exist? How do the specific relationships that artists develop with other artists, diverse audiences, scholars, and advocates affect their creative choices within traditions? What types of negotiations occur in the recontextualization of oral traditions in print and electronic media and in staged performance settings? How do audiences interpret particular presentations of traditions in relation to constantly expanding intertextual fields of significance? And what are the consequences of all of this for individual artists and their communities? These sorts of questions remain of great importance as ever-evolving media and markets intensify debates over issues of cultural rights, opportunity, ownership, and representation.

Folklorists and other scholars of traditional arts are of course deeply implicated in these processes and debates. A major strength of this book is the critical attention that Cashman, Mould, Shukla, and their colleagues devote to the role of the researcher as mediator--as a documentarian, presenter, and advocate of individual artists and traditions. Many of the contributors to this volume offer reflections on the dynamics of the fieldwork process, their continuing dialogues with artists, and the ways in which their scholarship and public practice extend traditions. This book is strongly recommended to anyone interested in vernacular traditions and their re-creation in the individual imagination.

Work Cited

Glassie, Henry. 1995. “Tradition.” Journal of American Folklore 108:395-412.

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[Review length: 1285 words • Review posted on May 6, 2012]