Expressing gratitude is far from the primary tasks of a reviewer, charged to assess the value of a book, summarize its key points, and pronounce a recommendation. However, my first response to Folklore Concepts, a collection of some of Dan Ben-Amos's most significant essays, is gratitude, especially for the introductory comments by Henry Glassie and Elliott Oring and for Dan Ben-Amos's concluding personal remarks on writing his essay on the definition of folklore in context. I expect many readers will be grateful to have so many of Ben-Amos's essays in one place.
Henry Glassie’s introductory essay provides important historical context, especially valuable for readers less familiar with, or just learning about, these significant essays. As Glassie notes, Ben-Amos's definition of folklore, “artistic communication in small groups,” was written when performance was emerging as a central paradigm of folklore research, a shift in research from the comparison of texts to the contexts in which they were communicated. As Ben-Amos writes in “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,” his focus was on communication. Indeed, he provides another definition, not inconsistent with the now well-known one, but more elaborate: “folklore is a system of communicative acts that has cognitive, expressive, and social characterizing features, its own rhetorical or performative principles, and its learned rules, to which speakers and participants adhere” (xix). At the end of the volume, Ben-Amos returns to his definition of folklore in a personal essay that further explains his approach.
Ben-Amos is recognized as a folklorist with extensive historical knowledge of the field, and this book reflects multiple histories, both as a chronicle of Ben-Amos's own work and as a discussion of how his ideas and those of others built on and sometimes critiqued the legacies they inherited from mid-nineteenth-century European ideas about folklore. He observes that the intertwined attributes of “traditionalism, irrationality, and rurality; anonymity, communality and universality; primacy and oral circulation became consolidated in the idea of folklore” (5), but that they were normative terms, representing a priori assumptions that, as long as they were unchallenged, limited folklore research and theory. Those debates are far from over, and this book is central to anyone engaging in them. In the essay, “The Name is the Thing,” revised from his response to the 1996 debates about whether to replace the term “folklore,” Ben-Amos provides a most useful summary of the positions of the folklorists who participated in the discussion. Although the questions about the term are not part of current debates, the issues raised remain significant. I encourage readers to turn to the final brief story at the end of the essay; it is quintessential Ben-Amos.
Folklore Concepts is an argument for returning to, integrating, and challenging the history of folklore scholarship as part of contemporary research. Two of Ben-Amos's most important and most useful essays, “The Seven Strands of Tradition” and “The Concept of Motif in Folklore,” both included in this volume, exemplify his thoughtful, exacting analysis of key terms and concepts. His purpose is not to chart the history of these terms but instead to differentiate their uses. These essays serve to resuscitate these terms and restore their usefulness.
Folklore Concepts is primarily a book of folklore history and theory, but it also includes “Two Benin Storytellers,” a meticulously crafted comparison of traditional and professional narrators and their contexts of performance. Additionally, readers already familiar with Ben-Amos's classic essays may not know “Native Americans and the Emergence of Folklore,” important, among other things, for a discussion of cultural relativism that remains relevant today.
Folklore Concepts engages us in the debates and excursion of ideas that shaped the field of folklore that we know today, all situated within histories of scholarship. I’m grateful to replace the hefty manila folder of photocopies marked “Ben-Amos” in my file cabinet with this stellar volume.
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[Review length: 633 words • Review posted on October 21, 2022]