Living inside a folk culture
What does it look like, and why should we want to do it?
There have been quite a few rumblings here and there about folk culture recently – evidence that folk seems to be having one of its resurgences again. It does swing in and out of fashion! – though it’s hasn’t ever really died out, in this part of the world at least, among those working in the creative arts, especially musicians and writers. I’ve been writing about folk culture since I finished If Women Rose Rooted and began working on The Enchanted Life, so I thought I’d join the conversation, expanding some thoughts I expressed in an article I wrote back in 2017. It’s a subject close to my heart, not least because the study of folklore was a major part of my MA in Celtic Studies at the University of Wales; as well as working intensely with folk tales, I also took a deep dive into song, dance, ritual and seasonal traditions.
It might be worth sharing a definition or two first, because folk culture is a term with a lot of baggage behind it; back in the day it certainly had connotations of tribalism and insularity. British cultural geographer George Revill had this to say about how folk culture has traditionally been defined:
Conventionally, folk culture refers to the products and practices of relatively homogeneous and isolated small-scale social groups living in rural locations. Thus, folk culture is often associated with tradition, historical continuity, sense of place, and belonging. It is manifest in song and dance, storytelling and mythology, vernacular design in buildings, everyday artefacts and clothing, diet, habits, social rules and structures, work practices such as farming and craft production, religion, and worldviews. Researchers and collectors from the later 19th and first half of the 20th centuries formulated a notion of “the folk” as relatively untouched by the modern world and of folk culture as precious survivals and relics from bygone cultures transmitted orally down through the generations.
But he also notes that ideas about what folk culture is, and can be, are changing – and indeed should change:
However, more recent work recognises the place of folk culture in the modern world as heterogeneous and emergent practice. … From this perspective, folk culture is evident in a multiplicity of local cultural reworkings, as individuals and social groups creatively make sense of the circumstances in which they live. Thought of in this way as emergent and freely adaptable vernacular culture, folk culture can be urban or rural and can combine cultural elements from different places, from traditional and commercial and from past and present cultural practices. Conceptions of folk culture not only inform long-standing themes of landscape, region, and place within cultural geography but also speak to more recent concerns with identity, habit, indigenous knowledge, diaspora, heritage, authenticity, and hybridity.
The phrases I’ve highlighted indicate exactly the kind of folk culture I’m interested in, and which I’ve written about and taught. It’s a folk culture which has its roots in the land/place we actually occupy now, but which has the open-mindedness, spaciousness and curiosity that allows us also to bring in the traditions and heritage of our birth lands or ancestral lands, if they are different. Because folk has never been a rigid notion; the whole point of folk culture is to grow and transform with the times.