In his 2007 presidential address to the American Folklore Society (AFS), later published in the Journal of American Folklore, Bill Ivey boldly asserted that “antimodernism is a central motivating engine that runs through all of folklore” (Ivey 2011, 11). Painting a vivid picture of the archetypical homes where folklore researchers live, he described how they keep their “black-and-white TV set tucked far into the corner” while opting to “sing or dance” in their living rooms. Counting those in the audience that day among his dancers, Ivey proclaimed that we who research folklore are “temperamentally disposed against the forces of modernity”...

The word tradition is itself traditional in folklore studies. John Aubrey used it in his Miscellanies in 1696. In 1777 John Brand identified tradition—indeed, oral tradition—as central in the preservation of the rites and opinions of the common people (Dorson 1968a, 1:8). W. J. Thoms referred to “local traditions” in his 1846 letter to the Athenaeum where he proposed his neologism “folklore” (Dorson 1968a, 1:53), and E. Sydney Hartland, in the last years of that century, characterized folklore as the “science of tradition” (Dorson 1968a, 2:231). Tradition has remained central to most definitions of folklore ever since (Brunvand...

If we accept the proposition, as Henry Glassie asked us to do nearly a generation ago, that tradition is “the creation of the future out of the past” (Glassie 1995, 395), we benefit in turn by questioning how strongly a commitment to that-which-came-before motivates contemporary folklore studies. Glassie offered this contribution in the well-known special issue of the Journal of American Folklore on keywords for the study of expressive culture. It is arguably the most important statement on the concept in the 1990s, a culminating and encouraging depiction of tradition (and traditionality and practices of traditionalizing) as still essential to...

At a wedding reception I once attended, a banquet-style midday dinner of steaks, potatoes, and more traditional Filipino dishes gave way to wine, mahjong, and conversation. “Joan,” recounted stories of her childhood in the rural Philippines.¹ She described her “Auntie Loling” who had a “spirit friend.” Joan’s animated storytelling had commanded the attention of most of the players at the mahjong table when her daughter asked her: “How did [the spirit] exist? Did it used to be human before?” Joan responded to the whole group, booming in her typically authoritative tone:

They call it “espiritista!” In Filipino folklore there are...

Tradition is a powerful word. It calls authority and emotion and personal investment into being; it creates socially recognized realities, drawing ostensibly on the past, but is not necessarily grounded in anything but the community and discourse of the present. I first recognized this power at only ten or eleven years old, sitting at the kitchen table with my younger brother and sister, frosting sugar cookies in the shape of snowmen and preparing for an annual visit from Saint Nick. Performing seasonal actions each year, like frosting cookies and singing carols, was a point of pride and genuine, joyful satisfaction...

The European roots of folklore studies lie within the nineteenth-century explosion of the collection and publication of traditional expressions. Those expressions were documented, “artifactualized,” and made consumable by the curious among the emerging educated middle class and analyzed and discussed by the members of a scholarly community. Something similar to this explosion is happening again. Today, however, it is happening on the World Wide Web. The online folk do not only pass on tradition by electronic means, they also collect and annotate it. Essentially, the curation of tradition has itself become traditional.

In an effort to shed light on these...

Tradition is a nexus of the past, the present, and the prospective future, a place where human agency engages with some of the more substantive constructs of the past. As Henry Glassie once wrote, “(h)istory, culture, and the human actor meet in tradition” (Glassie 1995, 409). Today the world’s societies are undergoing an unprecedented era of rapid change, in large part brought on by new communicative technologies. This opens up new ruptures and fissures in our relationships to the past and, alongside these, new possibilities for rearticulating the past for our present and future selves. The need for critical understanding...

I clearly recall the moment when, in an Advanced Folkloristics graduate seminar, a classmate of mine gave in to her mounting frustration, slammed her book shut, and demanded to know how she wasn’t an anthropologist. As a class, we were reading the works of several anthropologists, learning the techniques of ethnographic writing and research, and seeking to understand and explain the cultures of diverse groups of humans; what about our experience was setting us apart from anthropology students, other than the name of the department in which we studied? “Good question,” I remember thinking.

Folkloristics and anthropology are close cousins,...

I argue in this essay that grasping the “handiness” of tradition is the key to the analytical strategy of folklore studies; the way people perceive the hand (active, immediate, instrumental, gestural, and visible), particularly in relation to the mind (passive, remote, nonproductive, individualized, and unseen), dictates the way scholars conceive folklore as pervasive, relevant, contemporary, functional, expressive, and ultimately meaningful. Being a cultural resource at hand, tradition represents everyday processes of social control and expression, and these processes are often set in contrast to modernization associated with standardization, commercialization, discontinuity, and artificiality. The idea of tradition is “handy” or effective...