Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition

Western Folklore, Spring 2002 by Bendix, Regina

Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition. By Simon J. Bronner. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2002. Pp. xiv 283, preface and acknowledgments, notes, suggestions for further reading. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper)

Folk Nation is Volume Six of a series called American Visions: Readings in American Culture. The venue indicates the primary audience for this symbiosis of introductory essay and edited collection, namely, students of American studies, American history or American civilization. Simon Bronner, at the invitation of series co-editor Michael Barton, has put together a selection of seventeen articles and book excerpts from 1888 through 1994 which are to demonstrate the shaping of an American tradition through folklore documentation, scholarship, and practice. In style, the volume resembles the folklore casebooks spearheaded by Alan Dundes. Each selection is introduced by an informative headnote on the author and his intellectual context and on the selection itself. However, in contrast to the casebook tradition, Bronner opts here for a nearly 70-page introduction entitled "In Search of Tradition" which figures as Part I of the book, rendering the commented selections into the subordinated position of "Documents and Readings" in Part II.

The work is most suited for courses seeking to provide students in a neighboring discipline an introduction not merely to the history of American folklore studies, but also specifically to ways in which folklore was put to use in the active intellectual Grafting of an "American experience." While folklorists working in the United States have, since the 1970s, been at the forefront of examining the uses of folklore abroad (most famously so Bert Wilson in Finland [1976]), turning to folklore's use in the shaping of a "national spirit" in the United States is a perhaps more perplexing endeavor, as the number of potential uses and the number of constituencies seeing this potential is rather more complex than a two-party political system might make one think. What is more: the commitment to contribute to the building of America under everchanging auspices (with new immigrant populations on the one hand and a great commitment to a narrative of progress and thus change on the other) proves challenging for folkloristic rhetoric which "traditionally" found tradition in the past and did not have to seek it in the present and future. There certainly was no grand or winning narrative to be found, as Wilson could demonstrate for the Finnish use of the Kalevala, and Bronner himself states, "Looking at the dramatic tension in various confrontations is one way to approach the extensive story of folklore's use in, and meaning for, America" (p. 7).

For folklorists, Bronner's essay covers familiar terrain, surveying the intertwining of the developing field of American folklore studies with the larger sociopolitical context, abbreviated from Bronner's extensive Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture (1998). But fellow-travelers will be curious about the choices he made in Part II. Most interesting to this reviewer is Bronner's decision to place Michael Owen Jones's push toward an organizational folkloristics into this search for an American tradition. Finding W. W. Newell as well as John Lomax is less surprising, and discovering reference to the Folklife Preservation Act in the introduction and selections from Mary Hufford and Richard Kurin, written from folklore platforms at the American Folklife Center and the Smithsonian, respectively, certainly makes eminent sense in the framework of this collection. In combination with earlier selections by Benjamin A. Botkin, Holger Cahill and Alien Eaton, it is also possible to construct some continuities.

Finding Richard M. Dorson represented with an excerpt from America in Legend is perhaps somewhat surprising, but the legacy of and homage to Dorson's training in and commitment to American Civilization is otherwise palpably present in this volume as much as in Following Tradition and others of Bronner's works. Compiling a history of this nature for an audience clearly next to, but not in, folklore studies provides an opportunity for that which Dorson always urged his students to do: build recognition for the field so as to find ever-growing numbers of disciples for it. Dorson would most certainly not have chosen this particular lens, having devoted so much of his early energy to write against the use of folklore in anything other than academic analysis, but the spirit behind it is Dorsonian (and perhaps also quite different from the inspiration behind a special issue of The Radical History Review dedicated broadly to the same theme, "The Uses of the Folk," which also appeared in 2002).

Preparing a view of one's own field for the eyes of disciplinary neighbors is a challenge that would look quite different according to one's own location and inclination. Bronner's choices may presage some of his intended audience's expectations and one would wish for some of the most outspoken recent contributions to have found space in this anthology (two AFS presidential addresses, both held in Portland but more than two decades apart, come to mind immediately: the one by Dell Hymes, the other by John W. Roberts, and both printed in the Journal of American Folklore subsequently). Still: the endeavor to find platforms from which to launch folklore scholarship to be read beyond our field's small confines should be applauded.