Folklore Has Always Been Modern

A Review of Recent Multilingual Publications from the Czech Republic

There may be nothing so modern as the search for the ancient. It was, accordingly, only with the advent of industrial civilization that people began to notice “folklore.” Emerging modern peoples, anxious to insert themselves into the long sweep of history, could revive folklore as a mediator between the old and the new, rooted in both the past and the present. It was in this sense the potential modernism of common people’s longstanding practices that made them recognizable as a coherent and valuable “lore” of “the folk.”

At the same time, folklore has always appeared to be at odds with the dominant forms of modern culture. Modernity has needed folklore and has also needed to denigrate it. The revival of folklore appears constantly precarious, and yet folklore has never (yet) ceased to be revived. So Martina Pavlicová poses a question that has been at the center of recent folkloristic reflection in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (as in the rest of the world): “Why do people continue to return to traditional rituals and customs, even when their lives are otherwise completely subsumed by consumerism and mass culture?” (“Rite, Custom, Habit—Ritual?” in Ethnocultural Traditions, 101).

While all folklorists may be implicitly concerned with folklore’s relationship to modernity, Czech and Slovak folklorists have long made this relationship into a central focus of their work. Considering only twentieth-century literature, we could point to the Prague Linguistic Circle, among whose leading figures were Roman Jakobson and Pëtr Bogatyrëv, who insisted on studying folk practices in terms of their contemporary structure and function rather than their distant past. In this same period the Marxist literary critic Bed?ich Václavek devoted numerous books and essays to the question of zlidov?ní, similar to the notion of “folk process” but more directly translated as “folkification,” referring to the process by which originally non-folkloric objects become lidové or “folk.” Later scholars would analyze the role of folklore in modernizing capitalist and socialist societies, discussing folklore’s relation to the “workers songs” of the historic labor movement, to the “mass songs” of the early Communist period, or to the “tramp songs” and “folk” music that emulated North American country and folk music, establishing a popular and often subversive counterculture. The titles under review here, however, are among the first to be accessible to English readers. Every article appears in both Slovak or Czech and English.

Pavlicová’s contribution to The Magic of World Music (“The Soul of the Folk and Its Discoverers”) explores this intellectual history by recounting scholars’ changing attempts to connect the “soul of the folk” to their contemporary world. For the most part, however, the articles in the volumes under review take this history for granted and pick up where earlier work left off, offering a catalogue of contemporary answers to the question posed by Pavlicová in Ethnocultural Traditions and Contemporary Society: why do people still insist on making folklore?

Four titles under review (those edited by Uhlíková, Pavlicová, and P?ibylová) collect contributions to an annual colloquium connected to the eclectic “Folk Holidays” (Folkové prázdniny) festival, which takes place every summer in Nám?š? nad Oslavou, Czech Republic. The colloquium is remarkable for its inclusion of leading musicologists and folklorists as well as music critics, performers, and fans; and the resulting publications reveal the mix of rigor and exuberance that such an environment couldn’t help but produce. Each volume compiles presentations at the previous year’s festival; each volume title is that festival’s theme, exploring a different dimension of the encounter between the modern and the ancient. The exuberant side of the series is also evident in the beautiful original illustrations adorning each book’s cover and in the ample color illustrations inside.

The Folk Holidays series begins with general reflections on two of the most significant attempts to reconcile the modern and the ancient, one of them now old—“folklore”—and one still new—“world music” (From Folklore to World Music). So Ji?í Plocek asks “What Actually Is World Music?” (the title of his contribution to the volume); and more specifically: to what extent can world music carry on the traditions of folklore? The subsequent volumes are, in a sense, responses to this question.

The series then moves to the geographic plane, discussing the relative modernity and un-modernity of the “east” and the “west” (From the East to the West and from the West to the East). Irena P?ibylová sets the stage with a reflection on the similarities and differences between the post-colonial world and the Czech lands where “We have never been fully colonized” (“From the East to West and Back Again,” 11). An article by Ji?í Morav?ík (“The Celts and the Boemi”) discusses the challenges facing Czech “Celtic” musicians, who seek a deep autochthonous identity based in their territory’s ancient history, but who must rely on foreign “Celtic” music in order to carry out this revival—while many of these foreign musicians themselves reject the label “Celtic” in favor of “Irish,” “Scottish,” and the like, explicitly rejecting the possibility of a transnational Celtic identity like the one taken up by Czech Celtic musicians.

The third and fourth volumes in this series then turn to more specific themes, discussing the role of such apparently ancient and local things as ritual and magic in high-tech and cosmopolitan world music (The Magic of World Music) and discussing the meaning of this international festival’s location in the “highlands,” a space typically understood as a haven for local tradition and identity—but whose locality is, in a sense, modular, capable of being transferred to other highlands, or of descending to the lowlands, or of isolating itself from outsiders who try to identify with them (My Heart’s in the Highlands). The unstated thesis of these volumes, and perhaps of the entire series, seems to be that in spite of profound changes in the social practice of music, music may maintain its earlier power through continued deployment of folk symbols and motifs. As consumerism and mass mediation transform the social form of music, might music’s content still contain irreducible elements of locally grounded emotion and enchantment?

The final title under review, Ethnocultural Traditions in Contemporary Society, is more strictly scholarly and more thematically general than the Folk Holidays series. It is also the result of a conference, in this case a one-time event organized in Brno, Czech Republic, in October 2006. Although the conference itself is less innovative than the Folk Holidays colloquia, the unassuming book helps place the Folk Holidays contributions in broader generic and historical context. It emphasizes what might be considered “traditional” folklore in less professionalized and less commercialized settings, in contrast to the Folk Holidays’ thematic preference for the semi-commercial scene of folk and world music performers. This book’s publication in the midst of the Folk Holidays series draws attention to the fact that, while “world music” remains in many ways close to tradition and the folk, traditional “folklore” is also very much a part of the modern world.

The contributions to Ethnocultural Traditions in Contemporary Society take the reader through the recent historical vicissitudes of Czech and Slovak folklore, revealing the complex and often misunderstood relationship between tradition, innovation, and the region’s changing political regimes. Bernard Garaj tells of a Communist-era renewal of Slovak bagpipe playing that was so successful “not even the biggest optimists expected it” (“Ethnocultural Traditions Related to Bagpipe Playing in the Pohronský Region in Slovakia,” 141). Antonín Ba?inka describes a small town where folk music and dance are more alive today than in the late 1900s, when folk traditions had been almost entirely replaced by the popular commercial music of the day (“Carrying on the Folk Tradition in Music in Valašské Klobouky in the 20th Century”). And Juraj Hamar recounts perhaps the dramatic twentieth-century rise of folk marionette theater in Slovakia from a denigrated and unpopular form of entertainment to an art form of international renown (“Changing Traditions in the Family of Folk Marionetteers Anderle of Radva?”). A casual read of the book should disabuse readers of any notion that folklore was either simply repressed or exalted by Communism, or that folklore has been simply liberated or forgotten in the more recent period of liberal commercialism.

A recurring question, though one not always stated explicitly, revolves around the use of the term “folklore.” The Folk Holidays participants generally favor “world music” over folklore as an idiom for contemporary popular expression. The editor of Ethnocultural Traditions refers to “music and dance coming out of the folk tradition,” preferring “ethnocultural” to “folk” when applied to the post-Communist world. The contributors seem torn between a confidence that the valuable aspects of folklore can be maintained and a feeling that folklore as such must nevertheless be supplanted by something new. It remains an open question whether “world music” and “ethnoculture” can adequately substitute for their predecessor and, if so, what the significance of this substitution might be.

This brings us to a question that throughout these articles remains unasked. Given the social, historical, and spiritual shallowness often experienced in industrialized and marketized societies, it may not be so surprising in the end that people would “continue to return to traditional rituals and customs, even when their lives are otherwise completely subsumed by consumerism and mass culture” (Pavlicová). The more troubling question is: why people might allow themselves to be subsumed by consumerism and mass culture in the first place? Why have consumerism and mass culture become “modern” while traditions have become a thing of the past that we must continually struggle to revive?

Pavlicová also observes that rituals must always be simultaneously synchronic and diachronic; they must always repeat what was done in the past, but they must also be always new and renewed (“Rite, Custom, Habit—Ritual?”, 101–102). The same could be said of folklore in general. If it were not traditional, it could offer no lasting basis for community, no common ground upon which the folk might come together; but if it were not also new, remade with each person who bore it, then it would cease to belong to the actually existing folk. Each person who enters the orbit of folklore must also transform it, making it her or his own. From this perspective, the notion of “folk revival” appears redundant, for folklore is only folklore if it is continually revived.

Perhaps at a future conference the central question will not be “how could folklore ever be modern?” but “why has the modernization of something inherently modern proved so difficult?” And how have we built a society in which we must ask this question at all?

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[Review length: 1772 words • Review posted on April 13, 2009]