The Meanings of Tradition: An Introduction

Call it tradition or not, end-times bring on reflection, new-times prompt forecast Folklorists who might study tradition, and themselves are "imbued with tradition," according to Alan Jabbour who introduced the 100th anniversary of the American Folklore Society in 1988, embraced the occasion of a centennial to "reflect on the ancestral missions that have shaped us, the inherited values that we reflect and must radiate into the future" (Jabbour 1988: vii). Leaving behind the twentieth century in 2000 predictably ushered in another wave of reflection on folklore's fundamental principles. Even before the calendar turned to that magical number ballyhooed by the popular press, folklorists anticipated change with several anniversary celebrations that inspired them to look back to the forces that gave birth to their subject and ahead to challenges as scholarship matures and society changes. Eight years after the American Folklore Society's centennial celebration, the 150th anniversary in 1996 of the coining of the English word "folklore" presaged a round of symposia on folklore's fate as the century ended (Brown 1996). Special issues of folklore journals appeared heralding renewed efforts to locate folklore's study in scholarship and identify its core values (Feintuch 1995; Harlow 1998). All kinds of "revisiting" were apparent. The ground broken by Toward New Perspectives in Folklore (Paredes and Bauman 1972) rated a twenty-year retrospective with the philosophical title "theorizing folklore" in the journal Western Folklore (Briggs and Shuman 1993). The "new perspectives" hailed by organizers of an applied folklore meeting at Point Park, Pennsylvania, was the subject of Point Park Revisited (1998), a special issue of the Journal of Folklore Research. The Folklore Historian in 1996 took up "On (Not) Defining Folklore" with bows to Stith Thompson's stock-taking essay "Folklore at Mid-- century" (Baker 1996). Maybe it was the feeling that more than a turn and a reason for revisiting, but something on the order of a catapult into a new millennium brought the rhetoric of reflection to the level of "crisis" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). With apocalyptic overtones of millennium beliefs, some scholars could not resist the temptation to speculate on the "end of folklore" (Toelken 1998; see also Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1996; Bendix 1998). The twentieth century has passed and folklore is still here. In fact, there is reason in some quarters for optimism. Folklore theory ripples through a widening circle of fields, including recently planted ones of cultural studies, gender studies, whiteness studies, and organizational development. More presses than ever before seek out books on folklore and folklife, and the Internet has become a hotbed of folklore transmission. Federal endowments have folklorists at their helm; news of academic appointments and public programs resounds through the folklore fraternity. Whether one views folklore as half empty or half full, serious questions remain. Whether a time of reflection or crisis, it is avowedly a period of restructuring. One place for restructuring is in communication, as the Internet and wireless broadcasting have led to rethinking of folklore performance as a face-- to-face or localized encounter. Even as some observers bemoan the loss of intimacy in community and group, others note the reclustering of networks by shared, and often overlapping, interests that engender folklore. Another source of restructuring is increased mobility which has on the one hand informed ideas of transnationalism and globalism, and on the other encouraged reunions, festive occasions, and temporary communities worthy of folkloristic attention. Yet another is an academic restructuring as disciplines once devoted to an uplifting intellectual mission ally themselves, fragment, and reconfigure in response to populist, post-modern, post-sentimental pressures by which a dizzying array of popular expressive forms from advertisements to zoos become symbolic cultural texts. …