Bronner and the Folk-Lore

Bronner, in this piece, attempts to interpret the rhetoric established by writers on folklore the the 'Gilded age', the period from 1880 to 1900 in American history. At this time, as Bronner relates, had not yet espoused a positive – or even a 'neutral' – view on folklore; the word itself, at this time still most rendered in hyphenated form as "Folk-lore", denoted either 'primitive' social groups and their 'innocent' ways of behavior, or even derogatory designations of the uncivilized.

But things changed rapidly, and Bronner tells us how the folklore quickly after gaining entrance to the academic field became all the rage at scientific meetings and association; for instance, at the 1895 Congress of American Scientists, the subject "stole the show". And when the snowball started rolling it quickly gained corpus; Museums began assembling items for collections comprising the art of Native Americans, and entire sections were devoted to the exhibit of artifacts that were displayed in a way to reveal the newly acquired wisdom that art of so-called 'simple' societies lacked nothing of the aesthetic aspiration and merit as was imputed to the well-known products of western craftsmen.

Specific persons are mentioned by Bronner as both driving forces behind the gradual awakening of the awareness of the 'folklore' and as personifications of the very progress itself. For instance, Stewart Culin – the President and curator of the American Folklore Society – who, in older age and after years of studying exotic groups, commented that he was no longer sure that societies progressed towards any stage of maturity. Another man, Otis Mason, the head curator of the ethnological collections at the United States National Museum in the Smithsonian Institutions, who took on the task of sorting the museum's enormous collections. To begin with, he sorted all the objects according to the kind of society to which they pertained: from 'primitive' to 'industrial'.

No need to mention more of the details: the Gilded Age saw the development of academic awareness of the folklore; it should be mentioned, though, that a summary of all the opinions of this time, as rendered in Bronner's chapter, does not include artifacts or life-styles we today would group under the label. For instance, traditions of various groups of mainstream society who – for geographical or other reasons – maintain traditions of older vintage were not understood as folklore at this time as it is today.

The reason, as Bronner accounts the zeitgeist, seems to lie with the newly acquired endorsement of evolutionary historiography introduced at the end of the 19th century to the academic as well popular opinion. To be sure, "American writers viewed Indians as the nation's main 'primitives' during the Gilded Age" (Bronner, p. 9). Understandably, African-Americans presented a huge taxonomic problem to Americans. They were neither native to the continent, nor did they inhabit a virgin land. They were less remote than the Indians, more numerous, ad more geographically spread. Black culture – most widely known through expressions in church music – was therefore assigned to a 'cultural limbo': neither native and pure, nor civilized and refined. In other words, it was 'bastardized'.

But, as society in general developed, so did the appreciation of certain parts of black culture. Bronner goes through certain important intellectual figures form some black communities, such as Robert. R. Moton, principal of Tuskegee Institute; W. E. B. DuBois, teacher of Greek and Latin. Further progress was made spurred by the academic community: the famous Anthropologist Franz Boas from Columbia used the lessons of American black and Indian folklore to encourage replacement of evolutionary thoughts with relativism and plurality of cultures.

Characteristically, Boas for a while served as editors of the Journal of American Folklore from 1908 to 1924. Boas himself, however, faced isolated attacks by certain members of the scientific community; attacks founded on the simple fact that he was Jewish. As according to Bronner, antisemitism was another component in the difficult birth of the notion of the folklore: the Jewry, not really indigenous, but not really western either – although highly represented in university positions –, posited a problem to academics who clung fervently to evolutionary ideas.

In sum: the idea of the folklore was introduced to the academe via exoticism, jumping several hurdles of ethnic groups it was difficult to assign to any clearly defined step on the evolutionary ladder.

Bronner ends on an interesting note by mentioning that the same hardship is today encompassing the idea of culture in general: is it invested in everyday practices in the industrial world, or is it better to view it as a relic of past or exotic societies? Judging from Bronner's account of the folklore, the latter view is almost doomed to failure after some decades of academic argument.

-- Alexander