Landscape of Memory: Living Folklore in England

Editorial Reviews. Review. "Jerry Bird's voice is that of a writer for whom every echo of leondumoulin.nl: Landscape of Memory: Living Folklore in England eBook : Jerry Bird: Kindle Store.
Table of contents

Links appearing on the Site are for convenience only and are not an endorsement by us, our affiliates or our partners of the referenced content, product, service, or supplier. Your linking to or from any off-Web site pages or other Web sites is at your own risk. We are in no way responsible for examining or evaluating, and we do not warrant the offerings of, off-Web site pages or any other Web sites linked to or from the Site, nor do we assume any responsibility or liability for the actions, content, products, or services of such pages and Web sites, including, without limitation, their privacy policies and terms and conditions.

You should carefully review the terms and conditions and privacy policies of all off-Web site pages and other Web sites that you visit. Submissions It is our policy to decline unsolicited suggestions and ideas. Subject to the terms of our Privacy Policy , by transmitting or posting any Submission, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, transferable, irrevocable, and fully sub licensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, sell, assign, translate, create derivative works from, distribute and display any Submission in any form, media, or technology, whether now known or hereafter developed, alone or as part of other works.

You also acknowledge that your Submission may not be returned and we may use your Submission, and any ideas, concepts or know how contained therein, for any purpose including, without limitation, developing, manufacturing, distributing and marketing products. If you make a Submission, you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control the rights to your Submission. You agree to indemnify us for all claims arising from or in connection with any claims to any rights in any Submission. Disputes With respect to any dispute regarding the Site, all rights and obligations and all actions contemplated by these Terms and Conditions shall be governed by the laws of the Republic of Singapore, as if the Terms and Conditions were a contract wholly entered into and wholly performed within Singapore.

Any dispute relating in any way to your visit to the Site shall be submitted to confidential arbitration in Singapore, except that, to the extent you have in any manner violated or threatened to violate our intellectual property rights or the intellectual property rights of our affiliates, partners or licensors, we may seek injunctive or other appropriate relief in any court and you consent to exclusive jurisdiction and venue in any such court.

Read mir/landscape-of-memory-living-folklore-in-england

General You acknowledge and agree that these Terms and Conditions, which include our Privacy Policy , constitute the complete and exclusive agreement between us concerning your use of the Site, and supersede and govern all prior proposals, agreements, or other communications. We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to change these Terms and Conditions at any time by posting the changes on the Site.

Any changes are effective immediately upon posting to the Site. Your continued use of the Site constitutes your agreement to all such terms and conditions. We may, with or without prior notice, terminate any of the rights granted by these Terms and Conditions. You shall comply immediately with any termination or other notice, including, as applicable, by ceasing all use of the Site. Transmission is a vital part of the folklore process. Without communicating these beliefs and customs within the group over space and time, they would become cultural shards relegated to cultural archaeologists.

For folklore is also a verb. These folk artifacts continue to be passed along informally, as a rule anonymously and always in multiple variants. The folk group is not individualistic, it is community-based and nurtures its lore in community. Having identified folk artifacts, the professional folklorist strives to understand the significance of these beliefs, customs and objects for the group. For these cultural units [6] would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within the group.

See a Problem?

That meaning can however shift and morph. So Halloween of the 21st century is not the All Hallows' Eve of the Middle Ages, and even gives rise to its own set of urban legends independent of the historical celebration. The cleansing rituals of Orthodox Judaism were originally good public health in a land with little water; now these customs signify identification as an Orthodox Jew. Compare this to brushing your teeth, also transmitted within a group, which remains a practical hygiene and health issue and does not rise to the level of a group-defining tradition.

Once it loses its practical purpose, there is no reason for further transmission unless it has been imbued with meaning beyond the initial practicality of the action. This meaning is at the core of folkloristics, the study of folklore. With an increasingly theoretical sophistication of the social sciences, it has become evident that folklore is a naturally occurring and necessary component of any social group, it is indeed all around us. It continues to be created, transmitted and in any group is used to differentiate between "us" and "them". Folklore began to distinguish itself as an autonomous discipline during the period of romantic nationalism in Europe.

A particular figure in this development was Johann Gottfried von Herder , whose writings in the s presented oral traditions as organic processes grounded in locale. After the German states were invaded by Napoleonic France, Herder's approach was adopted by many of his fellow Germans who systematized the recorded folk traditions and used them in their process of nation building. This process was enthusiastically embraced by smaller nations like Finland, Estonia, and Hungary, which were seeking political independence from their dominant neighbours.

Folklore as a field of study further developed among 19th century European scholars who were contrasting tradition with the newly developing modernity.

Landscape Of Memory Living Folklore In England

Its focus was the oral folklore of the rural peasant populations, which were considered as residue and survivals of the past that continued to exist within the lower strata of society. This interest in stories, sayings and songs continued throughout the 19th century and aligned the fledgling discipline of folkloristics with literature and mythology. By the turn into the 20th century the number and sophistication of folklore studies and folklorists had grown both in Europe and North America.

Whereas European folklorists remained focused on the oral folklore of the homogenous peasant populations in their regions, the American folklorists, led by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict , chose to consider Native American cultures in their research, and included the totality of their customs and beliefs as folklore. This distinction aligned American folkloristics with cultural anthropology and ethnology , using the same techniques of data collection in their field research. This divided alliance of folkloristics between the humanities in Europe and the social sciences in America offers a wealth of theoretical vantage points and research tools to the field of folkloristics as a whole, even as it continues to be a point of discussion within the field itself.

The term Folkloristics , along with its synonym Folklore Studies , [note 1] gained currency in the s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. Congress in conjunction with the Bicentennial Celebration in , folkloristics in the United States came of age. Added to the panoply of other legislation designed to protect the natural and cultural heritage of the United States, this law also marks a shift in national awareness.

Fryderyk Chopin - Documentary about the life of Frédéric Chopin (2015)

It gives voice to a growing understanding that cultural diversity is a national strength and a resource worthy of protection. Paradoxically, it is a unifying feature, not something that separates the citizens of a country. In the diversity of American folklife we find a marketplace teeming with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for Americans".

The folk of the 19th century, the social group identified in the original term "folklore" , was characterized by being rural, illiterate and poor. They were the peasants living in the countryside, in contrast to the urban populace of the cities. Only toward the end of the century did the urban proletariat on the coattails of Marxist theory become included with the rural poor as folk.

The common feature in this expanded definition of folk was their identification as the underclass of society. Moving forward into the 20th century, in tandem with new thinking in the social sciences , folklorists also revised and expanded their concept of the folk group. By the s it was understood that social groups , i. The first group that each of us is born into is the family, and each family has its own unique folklore. As a child grows into an individual, its identities also increase to include age, language, ethnicity, occupation, etc. Each of these cohorts has its own folklore, and as one folklorist points out, this is "not idle speculation… Decades of fieldwork have demonstrated conclusively that these groups do have their own folklore.

This folklore can include jokes, sayings and expected behavior in multiple variants, always transmitted in an informal manner. For the most part it will be learned by observation, imitation, repetition or correction by other group members. This informal knowledge is used to confirm and re-inforce the identity of the group.

It can be used both internally within the group to express their common identity, for example in an initiation ceremony for new members. Or it can be used externally to differentiate the group from outsiders, like a folkdance demonstration at a community festival.

Significant to folklorists here is that there are two opposing but equally valid ways to use this in the study of a group: Beginning in the s, a further expansion of the concept of folk began to unfold in folkloristics. Individual researchers identified folk groups which had previously been overlooked and ignored. One major example of this is found in an issue of "The Journal of American Folklore", published This edition is dedicated exclusively to articles on women's folklore, with approaches that were not coming from a man's perspective.

Individual folklore artifacts are commonly classified as one of three types: For the most part self-explanatory, these categories include physical objects material folklore , common sayings, expressions, stories and songs verbal folklore , and beliefs and ways of doing things customary folklore. There is also a fourth major subgenre defined for children's folklore and games childlore , as the collection and interpretation of this fertile topic is peculiar to school yards and neighborhood streets.

That said, each artifact is unique; in fact one of the characteristics of all folklore artifacts is their variation within genres and types.


  • Atlas de imágenes en gastroenterología: Correlación radiología-endoscopia (Spanish Edition).
  • Editorial Reviews.
  • About This Item?
  • Lustschreie (German Edition).
  • Landscape Of Memory Living Folklore In England – leondumoulin.nl.
  • Product details.

It is however just this required variation that makes identification and classification of the defining features a challenge. And while this classification is essential for the subject area of folkloristics, it remains just labeling, and adds little to an understanding of the traditional development and meaning of the artifacts themselves. Necessary as they are, genre classifications are misleading in their oversimplification of the subject area.

Folklore artifacts are never self-contained, they do not stand in isolation but are particulars in the self-representation of a community. Different genres are frequently combined with each other to mark an event. There might also be special games played at birthday parties which are not generally played at other times.

Adding to the complexity of the interpretation, the birthday party for a seven-year-old will not be identical to the birthday party for that same child as a six-year-old, even though they follow the same model. For each artifact embodies a single variant of a performance in a given time and space. The task of the folklorist becomes to identify within this surfeit of variables the constants and the expressed meaning that shimmer through all variations: The formal definition of verbal lore is words, both written and oral, which are "spoken, sung, voiced forms of traditional utterance that show repetitive patterns.

Verbal lore is not just any conversation, but words and phrases conforming to a traditional configuration recognized by both the speaker and the audience. For narrative types by definition have consistent structure, and follow an existing model in their narrative form. It might be one you've already heard, but it might be one that the speaker has just thought up within the current context. This is folklore in action. Another example is the child's song Old MacDonald Had a Farm , where each performance is distinctive in the animals named, their order and their sounds.

Songs such as this are used to express cultural values farms are important, farmers are old and weather-beaten and teach children about different domesticated animals. Verbal folklore was the original folklore , the artifacts defined by William Thoms as older, oral cultural traditions of the rural populace.

In his published call for help in documenting antiquities, Thoms was echoing scholars from across the European continent to collect artifacts of verbal lore. By the beginning of the 20th century these collections had grown to include artifacts from around the world and across several centuries. A system to organize and categorize them became necessary.

Easily Read Documents Online

This was later expanded into the Aarne—Thompson classification system by Stith Thompson and remains the standard classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified oral artifacts grew, similarities were noted in items which had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups and epochs, giving rise to the Historic-Geographic Method , a methodology which dominated folkloristics in the first half of the 20th century.

When William Thoms first published his appeal to document the verbal lore of the rural populations, it was believed these folk artifacts would die out as the population became literate. Over the past two centuries this belief has proven to be wrong; folklorists continue to collect verbal lore in both written and spoken form from all social groups. Some variants might have been captured in published collections, but much of it is still transmitted orally and indeed continues to be generated in new forms and variants at an alarming rate.

The genre of material culture includes all artifacts that you can touch, hold, live in or eat. They are tangible objects, with a physical presence intended for use either permanently or just at next meal. Most of these folklore artifacts are single objects which have been created by hand for a specific purpose. However folk artifacts can also be mass-produced, such as dreidels or Christmas decorations. These items continue to be considered folklore due to their long pre-industrial history and their customary use. All of these material objects "existed prior to and continue alongside mechanized industry.

Of interest to folklorists are their physical form, their method of manufacture or construction, their pattern of use as well as the procurement of the raw materials. Of primary significance in these studies is the complex balance of continuity over change in both their design and their decoration. In Europe before the Industrial Revolution everything was made by hand. While some folklorists of the 19th century wanted to secure the oral traditions of the rural folk before the populace became literate, other folklorists sought to identify hand-crafted objects before their production processes were lost to industrial manufacturing.

Just as verbal lore continues to be actively created and transmitted in today's culture, so these handicrafts , possibly with a shift in purpose and meaning, can still be found all around us. For there are many reasons to continue to hand make objects for use. It could mean these skills are needed to repair manufactured items. Or perhaps a unique design is wanted which is not or cannot be found in the stores.

Many crafts are considered to be simple home maintenance, such as cooking, sewing and carpentry. Handicrafts have also become for many an enjoyable and satisfying hobby. Last but not least, handmade objects have taken on the sheen of prestige, where extra time and thought is spent in their creation and their uniqueness is valued. Many traditional crafts have been elevated to the fine or applied arts and taught in art schools, such as ironworking and glass-making. Folk art is found in hex signs on Pennsylvania Dutch barns, tin man sculptures made by metalworkers, front yard Christmas displays, decorated school lockers, carved gun stocks, and tattoos.

Many objects of material folklore, big and small, are challenging to classify, difficult to archive and unwieldy to store. How do we preserve these bulky artifacts of material culture, and how do we use them? That is the assigned task of museums. Toward this goal the concept of the Living history or open-air museum has been developed, beginning in Scandinavia at the end of the 19th century. These museums are here to teach, not just display. Actors show how items were used, reenacting everyday living by people from all segments of society.

In order to achieve this, these museums rely heavily on the material artifacts of a pre-industrial society. Many locations even duplicate the processing of the objects, thus creating new objects of an earlier historic time period. These Living history museums are now found throughout the United States and the world as part of a thriving heritage industry.

This list represents just a small sampling of objects and skills which are included in studies of material culture. Customary culture is remembered enactment, i. It is the patterns of expected behavior within a group, the "traditional and expected way of doing things" [28] [29] A custom can be a single gesture , such as thumbs down or a handshake. It can also be a complex interaction of multiple folk customs and artifacts as seen in a child's birthday party, including verbal lore Happy Birthday song , material lore presents and a birthday cake , special games Musical chairs and individual customs making a wish as you blow out the candles.

Each of these is a folklore artifact in its own right, potentially worthy of investigation and cultural analysis. Together they combine to build the custom of a birthday party celebration, a scripted combination of multiple artifacts which have meaning within their social group. Folklorists divide customs into several different categories. It can be a life cycle celebration for an individual, such as baptism, birthday or wedding. A custom can also mark a community festival or event; examples of this are Carnival in Cologne or Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

A fourth category includes customs related to folk beliefs. Walking under a ladder is just one of many symbols considered unlucky. To ask other readers questions about Landscape of Memory , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Sep 26, Stephen Palmer rated it really liked it Shelves: Great little book culled from Merry Meet magazine features on the folklore tales of Britain.

Not-so-great proof-reading didn't spoil it for me. Christiansen rated it it was amazing Sep 07, Julie rated it liked it Jul 03, Sarah rated it really liked it Oct 23, Hannah rated it really liked it Jun 08, Ben Gruagach added it Jun 28, Cathy marked it as to-read Jul 10, Susan marked it as to-read Jul 31, Graham Lee added it Apr 13,