Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore

TLDR

American folklorists have traditionally focused on special groups—by age, occupation, region, or ethnicity—shifting from text‑centric approaches to a social‑base perspective, though underlying assumptions still constrain empirical progress. The author proposes to examine these assumptions to suggest a more fruitful perspective on the social matrix of folklore. The author illustrates this by comparing two textbook formulations from Alan Dundes and Jan Bruner.

Abstract

of their discipline chiefly as the study of 'special groups'-age groups, occupational groups, groups living in certain regions of the country [and groups identified] by national or ethnic origin.2 To the extent that this focus on the part of American folklorists indicates a concern for the social base of folklore, it represents a fruitful reorientation from the more traditional approaches, which were heavily textand genre-oriented, and which viewed folklore as pertaining solely to peasants or primitives. There are, nevertheless, certain implicit assumptions underlying much of the thinking of folklorists concerning folklore and groups which appear to be exerting a constraining influence on the empirical development of the discipline and which appear also to involve a degree of conceptual distortion. I propose in this article to examine some of these assumptions with a view towards indicating a more fruitful perspective on the social matrix of folklore, for this, after all, is what the interest in folklore and special groups is all about. For the sake of illustration and as a point of departure, we may examine two formulations from the most widely used general textbooks in the field, Alan Dundes' The Study of Folklore and Jan Brunvand's The Study of American Folklore. Dundes defines the field for his students as follows: