Tradition is the key concept in defining and interpreting all folklore and folklife, whether oral, written, electronic, customary, or material. No American folklorist is better qualified than Simon Bronner to review and update our ideas about what “tradition” means, then to apply to a variety of materials a postmodern approach to understanding the subject. He pulls off a masterful job in this important new book.
In a prologue and two chapters of definition and methodology Bronner replaces the “hasty academic relegation of tradition to...the supposed tyranny of the archaic, pastoral past” with the “folkloristic logic” of seeing tradition as a “meaningful, purposeful activity that is an instrument of knowing and navigating through social life.” Tradition, he demonstrates, is something enacted, not merely inherited or yielded to. Participation in tradition as a “symbolic activity” is explained using the Aristotelian concept of praxis (a favorite term for Bronner), emphasizing the doing of a process (such as telling jokes) rather than the results (such as a collection of joke texts). Going beyond “folklore in context” and “performance studies,” Bronner recommends—and demonstrates in later chapters—an integrated approach combining textual/comparative data with structural, behavioral, and above all, symbolic and psycho-social explanations of how tradition works in “folk” interactions. It’s an approach anticipated in 1973 by Kay L. Cothran’s brief essay “Participation in Tradition” (uncited here) which rejected “the notion of tradition as antiquity’s dead weight” and proposed viewing it instead as “the rules by means of which a given context is made sensible, by means of which further contexts are made possible.”
In chapter 1 Bronner identifies eight scholarly approaches to tradition, proposing his own concept of “handiness” as a metaphor for his own. Tradition, he suggests, involves “hands-on” experience, the “handing down” or “handing up” of ways of knowing and doing, revealing a “handiness” of knowledge and ability that constitutes our sense of tradition in modern culture. In chapter 2 Bronner adapts the scientific method as an “explanatory method for the study of tradition.”
This sounds much like the “grand theory” called for in Alan Dundes’ “last hurrah” address at the 2004 AFS meeting (published in JAF, 2005), although Bronner cites this presentation only in passing. In fact, he specifically denies that he is proposing “one grand explanation.” His “handy” approach is seldom mentioned in later chapters, even though his explanatory method is certainly “grand” (i.e., sweeping, comprehensive, multiple, detailed, etc.), and the influence of Dundes’ writings is strong, especially in terms of symbolic interpretations using Freudian insights.
Bronner applies his approach—barely summarized above, and worthy of close study—in eight chapters comprising case studies in interpretation of American folkloric traditions, with chapter titles and contents as follows: 3. Building Tradition (vernacular architecture); 4. Making Tradition (crafts); 5. Adapting Tradition (human development shown in children’s folklore); 6. Fading Tradition (Yiddish language and culture); 7. Personalizing Tradition (stortytelling by an African American father and son); 8. Symbolizing Tradition (scatological lore of the Pennsylvania Dutch); 9. Sporting Tradition (American football); and 10. Virtual Tradition (the Internet as a folk system). As these topics reveal, Bronner considers aspects of popular culture and the digital world as well as “folk” cultures.
Within these general subjects his view is broad; under vernacular architecture, for example, he analyzes Jewish sukkot (ritual booths), Amish barn raisings, and Houston homes built or decorated with recycled materials. In chapter 4 he includes such disparate materials (a partial list!) as the Arts and Crafts movement, folk art galleries, Norwegian-American rosemaling, weaving, basket making, pottery, Hmong “story cloths,” chair making, wood carving, silver smithing, folded paper toys, fences, gates, mailboxes, house and yard decoration, roadside markers and shrines, homecoming floats, Sears “Craftsman” tools, “crafted” Starbucks coffee products, Martha Stewart craft projects, and constructions created on computers and copiers. This whole melange is framed by themes from Longfellow’s iconic poem “The Village Blacksmith” and summed up by referring to how “from childhood to old age, from one end of the country to the other, crafts help define what people do and have done in[,] as well as to[,] America.” (Commas added to clarify his meaning here.) Unfortunately, the Longfellow quotation loses the word “mighty” in the line “The Smith a mighty man is he” (139), spoiling the meter. It would have been appropriate here to have mentioned one of his mentors at Indiana University, Warren E. Roberts, whose term “the old traditional way of life” (OTWOL, as he sometimes shortened it) epitomizes the traditional, so to speak, approach to folklife.
Chapters 8 and 9 owe the most to Dundesian analysis as Bronner views “the scatology of an ethnic identity” in Pennsylvania German tradition and the homoerotic aspects of football. The “feces theme” and “anality” in Pennsylvania German esoteric folklore “reveals what Dutchiness is about...to symbolically express the conflicts, and the guilt, felt by allowing the loss of the language, land and identity.” Here is Bronner’s summary statement after explaining details of American football traditions:
“Football—in its historical references to the frontier experience and urban-industrial synchronization; its invocation of tradition as an energetic competitive, adolescent coming-of-age ritual; and its social context as a masculine response to modernization—is both a reflection and a distortion of culture....a national spectacle of industrial, corporate, urban and digital praxis.”
Wow! Who says it’s “just a game”? And he doesn’t even mention the ritual of “tailgating” where a meal prepared on high-tech BBQ gear is eaten by a fan group at the rear of a vehicle while dressed in school colors and pumping up the group to cheer on the team. Well aware of the resistance to some Freudian interpretations, in chapter 10 Bronner admonishes the reader, “before you roll your analog eyes,” to consider all the evidence as he piles it on higher and deeper. I’m ready to give him a hand, since he convinced me.
Every reader will bring his or her own research or experiences to these “explanations”; I find them convincing partly because my own studies of urban legends tend to confirm them. Bronner mentions this narrative genre of modern culture a few times, but there are other possibilities. For example, the specific stories “of the urban legend type” told at slumber parties (208), if analyzed in more detail, would support his argument for how “children can anticipate the future and express concerns about the present.” The role of tampons in folklore as symbolic of “ritual dirt” (233-234) is also demonstrated in the legends called “Buying Tampax” and “The Blind Date” (the “stuck tampon” version). Similarly, the theme of unwittingly handling dreck (333) is echoed in “The Stolen Specimen” legend. While I am mentioning my own work, I will note that my chapter “Tradition and Innovation in Romanian Folk Housing” in my little book on Romanian house decoration describes the same sort of bricolage using metal and other modern materials as Bronner discusses in chapters 3 and 4. Another “all in the family” reference is Erik Brunvand’s essay on “The Heroic Hacker” which reinforces the idea of the Internet as a “folk system.”
This is an impressive book with a powerful message, only allowed a sketchy treatment in a concise review. If not for the problem of how to use the scatological and sexual material, I can envision it inspiring a Ken Burns special on PBS with “Tradition!” the opening number from “Fiddler on the Roof,” as background music, and taking a broad sweep across American culture à la Burns’ treatments of the Civil War, baseball, jazz, and Prohibition.
WORKS CITED
Brunvand, Erik. 2000. “The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age.” In The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story, edited by Jan Harold Brunvand, 170-198 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2003. Casa Frumoasa: The House Beautiful in Rural Romania. East European Monographs, No. DCXXX. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cothran, Kay L. 1973. “Participation in Tradition,” Keystone Folklore 18. Reprinted in Readings in American Folklore, edited by Jan Harold Brunvand, 444-448 (New York: Norton, 1979).
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[Review length: 1329 words • Review posted on November 30, 2011]