I’m actually feeling a little bit daunted this evening. When Steve Siporin called me a few months ago and invited me to talk out here, somehow or another it didn’t quite register with me that this was the Fife honor lecture. I thought I was just going to make a talk, you know, and I’m sort of used to doing that. People are always asking me to say a few words, to give time to one series of platitudes or another, and I really feel terribly honored to have been given this honor and really to me it’s very meaningful because I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of knowing both Alta Fife and her husband, Austin, and I have long admired their work. Their great contribution is a body of folkloring work that I think all later generations of folklorists will be able to build upon. Their work has characteristics that I think we should remember and we should try to emulate. It is thorough, it is respectful, it is accurate and it is complete. I think many of us forget sometimes how much we owe to such scholarship and how much our later work has been able to build upon it and I would like to suggest that this would be a good time for us all to recognize Alta Fife, who is with us tonight, who has been a friend and sponsor of the Fife Conference since the earliest days. Alta, would you stand up so everybody will get to know you.
Now, having said all that, I’m afraid I’m also going to have to say that I’m not in a position to emulate any of the characteristics that I so complimented you upon. I’m not going to give a folkloric and thoroughly scholarly address tonight and in fact, I’m going to be sort of rambly and sort of maybe even a little poetical. It’s going to be an informal discussion of some things I’ve thought about during my life as a folklorist and not the tightly structured and academic kind of work that I so admire in the Fifes. I’ve done a little bit of that from time to time but I just couldn’t make myself do it for this particular occasion. I guess what I’m going to present to you is a sort of a philosophical statement in which I’m weaving several ideas together, rather than an argument; but I suppose I’ve reached the time of life when if I don’t have a philosophy I’d sure better start getting one.
I grew up in a folklorist’s family, so I never really thought about folklore very much. It was just part of the surround. Traditional songs and music were what my father and brother dealt with, that’s all. I liked them, I thought some of the music was great and the words of some of the songs gave me the chills, and recording them and putting them into books and libraries where other people could find them and enjoy them too was just what we did. I was not, in my youth, a very theoretical person. In most ways, I still am not. I like the stuff best.
It wasn’t until — through a series of accidents — that I began to teach folk music and folklore courses in a Southern California state college that I myself began to have to try to think about what it was that I liked so much. In part, it started when I discovered to my really total surprise that most of my students didn’t have the least idea of what I was talking about when I said folk songs or folk music or folk anything. They had never heard songs that I had assumed were in everyone’s repertoire like “Casey Jones” or “Down in the Valley” or “Jesse James” — a total blank. They didn’t know a blues from a shape note hymn, a legend from a limerick.
I had to poke around to find out what they did know. They all knew “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, and a rather dull version of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”. Most of them could sing “Down by the Riverside”. They all remembered one or another counting out rhyme; most of the women had played skip rope and most of the men had played marbles, and so forth. As my students of the sixties and seventies and I explored the implications of what our shared traditional repertoires seemed to mean to us, I myself began to come to grips with a thought that had never occurred to me before. How totally remarkable it is that folklore — whether song, story, rhyme, proverb, whatever actually does manage to survive over centuries when it is so ordinary, when it receives so little conscious or organized or official attention.
Let me take you through an example that I used to use in my introductory folklore classes and I apologize because it’s absolutely trivial. But that’s why it’s very trivialness, if there is such a word, triviality, is what always struck me as so interesting. Suppose you and I were walking out across this campus after supper, maybe in an hour or so, I’m not used to your time zone here, but it’s dusk. We don’t know each other very well, and there are lots of silences that are beginning to become a little awkward. Both of us are beginning to cast around for some remark to make. The skies though here are wide and beautiful and they compel your attention. I watch them whenever I come west, I look at the sky all the time. So we’re looking at the sky and then we see the first glimmer of a star appear on the horizon, the first of the night to come. What might pop into your head to say? I very much doubt there is a person in this room who didn’t think star light, star bright, first star I see tonight before I said it. This is because we share, at least in part, a common identity, because we are of the same large group or family of human beings. If you didn’t think of this rhyme, you aren’t any better or worse than anybody else, you are simply from a different family. And though I knew your identity, I could still ring your chimes, as they say, with a different formula.
Now isn’t this extraordinary? Just stop and think about it for a minute.
Here we sit in a room, maybe 75-100 people here, from many places across the nation, gathered together serendipitously for this one night, many of us never to see each other again, and still every brain in this room clicks through the miracle of almost instantaneous seriatim neurological synapses that we call memory and comes up with the same string of words. Now that, my friends, is what I call power. There is something in that ridiculous formula that transcends its overt triviality. I don’t know what it is, by the way. I haven’t any idea. Someday I’m going to take off a year or so to think about it, it’ll probably take that long. Such statements are extremely compacted. Full of all kinds of reference and association and they are very, very true and meaningful. Let me take this just a step further.
Think for a minute how many things you would rather be able to remember — Your social security number? The Gettysburg address? The dates of the Boxer rebellion? The second verse of America the Beautiful? I can think of any number of things I would much rather know than starlight, starbright, but there it sits in my brain, immovable and rock-hard, crowding out who knows how much more “worthwhile” and “useful” information. But I cannot forget it. I cannot erase it, no matter how I might try.
What good did starlight, starbright ever do for me? I do not have any idea, but I am willing to base my future intellectual work on the premise that it is joined to a number of other similarly undislodgeable cultural items that go a long way to making up my cultural identity. In other words, you could probably define a 20th century middle American (not a very easy thing to do, by the way) by postulating that he/she is a person who knows starlight, starbright and the tune of the “Bear Went Over the Mountain” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and similar shared standard cultural information — or “useless cultural lumber” — as some have put it.
I can’t go for that. It wouldn’t be there if it was useless. It wouldn’t be that hard there. One’s folkloric repertoire, many folklorists agree, is a kind of cultural schematic diagram through which one’s fundamental postulates, one’s basic understandings of the way the world works and the way life is, are all made clear, both to oneself and to others. We all desperately need to know and to be reminded occasionally just who we are. This is a very complicated world to fall through, and that is why we often thrill unexpectedly when we come across a shared symbol (a flag, a melody, an accent) that reminds us of our origins. They signal our identity back to us at the same time as it makes it plain to others. Most of the time, our folkloric repertoire is our nice part, the part we’re sort of proud of and think is pretty nifty and we want to share and to talk about it, and we want to tell everybody those great jokes, we like that part of ourselves, that’s why it’s such fun to be a collector, because you get to talk to people about things they want to tell you, not the things they would just as soon you wouldn’t ask.
In some way or other, then, I believe that starlight, starbright has something to say about me and who I am — and you, and who you are — and us, and who we are together. This is really what I find compelling about folklore, why I can never stop thinking about it, why I know that it will shape my thought no matter where I live or what I do. I will never stop wondering about the power of folklore, the mystery of the incredible stability-in-the-midst-of-changing of those bits and pieces of communication and behavior and how they signal in such a delicate way the cultural condition, and how their accurate analysis can be a key to the mystery of cultural differences. Folklore, one’s common stock of tales, proverbs, superstitions, symbols, rhymes, songs, dances, riddles, blessings, curses, rituals, ceremonials, beliefs, legends, place names, and all the rest of it — may very well turn out to be essential to the survival of peoples across time and space.
Oh, you can lose a lot of your tradition, you can forget it and still stay alive, of course, you can sure lose an arm or a leg and stay alive, but the quality of your life is forever different. And of course your common traditions will continually change about just as your common circumstances continually change about. But overall, it seems to me that the condition of a folkloric repertoire can — and often does — signal the condition of a particular group of people or a culture in the plainest of ways. Let me give you an example of a folkloric event I experienced that had gone through enormous changes but had still survived and was still recognizable and was still bearing witness to what it was going through.
It was a long time ago, 1975 to be exact; according to the ancient Chinese calendar, it was the Year of the Rabbit. I happened to be teaching in an anthropology department in a greater Los Angeles college at the time and I happened to read in the newspaper about the local Chinese-American parade through Chinatown that heralded in the beginning of that year. I’ve never been able to forget the description. The parade was led by a phalanx of Los Angeles Police Department motorcycle policemen. Then came a United States Marines military band and color guard, with massed stars and stripes held high. Then there was an open sedan, almost completely hidden by a bevy of costumed Playboy bunnies, who cooed and coiled around the Grand Master of the Los Angeles Chinese-American New Year’s Day Parade — Hugh Hefner, the Big Rabbit himself — who sat in the back seat waving to the spectators. Following him, on foot, was an untidy straggle of passionate and plainly furious Chinese matrons, holding up home-made signs protesting (the reporter was told) the joke, and shouting their anger in a variety of local Chinese dialects. The ultimate peace of the affair was guaranteed by a concluding display of yet more Los Angeles motorcycle officers. There was no more. That was the whole parade.
Colleagues and friends had varying opinions on the event. No one particularly defended what had happened, but many said in effect, “Well, after all if that’s what ‘they’ want, who are we to say ‘they’ shouldn’t get it? The thing must have been sponsored by local Chinese-American business interests, and those folks might have liked it, though the more old-fashioned traditional Chinese plainly didn’t. Won’t it be interesting to see which faction comes out on top? Maybe we ought to put a couple of graduate students on to it?” And I got a depressing vision of squads of anthropology students sitting about being terribly interested in the decline of ancient Chinese custom and tabulating all its potentially variant outcomes like some super-hyper cultural horse race. And I think it was then that I discovered that what I really was, was a public sector folklorist.
I think I had been one all along. I have never been able to see, for one thing, how people can actively think of folklore outside the public arena.
By it’s every definition, by it’s inherent proventence, by it’s name itself, folklore simply is non-private; it is known at least to more than one; it is not original nor individualistic. It is incorrigibly of, by, and for the group, be the group large or small.
Months, though, after the Los Angeles Chinese-American parade, I found I was still worrying over the episode, still feeling obscurely guilty. What had actually happened there? What spoken or unspoken messages had been received by the Los Angeles Chinese community? Why had they apparently felt that their especial long-time celebrational ways — their dragon dances, their banging brasses, their special red and gold costumes, their throwing lettuce around and all the rest of it — were no longer interesting, worthy of replication, fulfilling, amusing, compelling or even — God help us — profitable? Maybe they weren’t even safe? Chineseness, they seemed to be saying, had better be expressed publicly in up-to-the-minute American terms. Joking was surely more appropriate than seriousness. Good Americans could prove themselves such by self-ridicule and placatory displays of mainstream vulgarities.
In later months, looking at similar celebratory events in other groups from tribes to townships, I became ever more acutely aware that the act of public self-presentation was a critical moment for minority (and majority) communities, a time when a huge number of important decisions had to be made. In a way, every component had to be agreed upon separately on each occasion: which parts of the old to keep, which bits of the new to incorporate, what emotional tone should dominate, what overall message conveyed, how might the young, the old, the conservative, the avant-garde, the rebellious, best be accommodated? Each event was a living cultural and social self-portrait, almost always somewhat nervously projected, with a cautious eye to the beholders.
In some celebrations, self-parody triumphed, and mutual misunderstandings and destructive stereotypes became seriously, if not even dangerously, crystallized. In others, a few tentative mutual points of respect and appreciation began to surface, and it began to seem that, just as all immigrants and country people were not happy peasants nor singing/dancing throngs, neither were all middle-class majority folks brainless boobs or yahoos either.
The sheer number of festivals and public events was impressive to me. They seemed to be multiplying like rabbits. During the decade of the 70’s, which was not only a turning-point in my own life, but an important period in the development of public sector folklore. Just to remind you, the legislation creating the American Folklife Center, later to be placed at the Library of Congress, was then before the Congress. The Smithsonian Institution was deep in the planning of what was to be the most breathtakingly original cultural event of the century — the 1976 Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife on the National Mall. Those of us in this room who participated in that incredible twelve-week-long assemblage, where for the first time in history a seriously considered attempt was made to recognize all the cultures in a single nation, were forever affected. We will never be the same again, and a good thing too, I think.
During this period of the 70’s there were so many festivals and galas and celebrations and old-timers days and ethnic and tribal bashes of all descriptions going on that I recall a meeting initiated by a group of concerned folklorists in 1977 to discuss whether or not this was a truly healthy situation. I believe Mr. Griffith was also at that meeting and came out equally astonished. As though we could do anything about it. As though the power was with the folklorist. The power was out there with the folks, they were the ones doing the celebrating. Admittedly, the 1976 Smithsonian extravaganza was an influential event, planned and conceived by professional folklorists, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists. It was supposed to — and did — set lots of how-to-do-it patterns, some of which survived and some of which didn’t, but it represented just the foamy crest of the fundamental wave. There were much deeper things going on. Please remember always that you simply cannot make people do things they don’t want to do over the long haul unless you’re willing to bring out the artillery. You cannot buy them, you cannot bribe them. All folkloric history tells us this without exception.
One thing I began to notice during this period was that everybody was going to everybody else’s festival. Now that was sort of unusual, it hadn’t happened that way in my childhood. People went to their own festivals, but I began to notice that every festival I went to was significantly attended by crowds of people obviously not of that group. They were going seriously, taking grandma and grandpa and the kids, spending the day, trying out “funny” foods, listening seriously to strange music. At Old Settlers Days or Portuguese festas or Native American pow wows, all of us — insiders and outsiders — seemed to be looking for something, something outside and extra to our ordinary lives, sometimes in a remarkably gentle spirit of inquiry. We seemed to be in an educable frame of mind, at least for a while. I remember a tent on the Mall in 1976 where Italian-Americans spent the whole afternoon telling long complicated stories in Italian with only a brief preliminary explanation of the plot-line by a translator; and big audiences sat there fascinated for hours, rocking with laughter at the right spots (the story-tellers were awfully good) but almost nobody in the crowd, it turned out, really understood Italian. They were just feeling the pattern, and the elegance of the language, and the expertise of the tellers, as they might have appreciated an Italian grand opera. Another time, in another place, I sat in an audience of Massachusetts factory hands listening to a one-hour program of a capella solo fiddle music played by a Cape Breton fiddler preceeding an anticipated contra dance. Lots of young couples were there ready for action but not a soul moved, not a chair even squeaked.
During this same period, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal granting agency, decided to take seriously it’s responsibility to put some public money into the support of folk arts as well as fine arts, and I had the good luck to get in on the early part of the action. Boy, did I learn a lot. I learned that money — as I had always thought — was truly a most deceptive and treacherous commodity; it didn’t even make a very reliable incentive. Many a time after an advisory panel of experts had voted not to fund an activity, we discovered that the people had gone right on ahead and done it anyway. (One panel, in awful frustration about a really dreadful idea, asked if we could vote an applicant some money if he/she/they would just promise earnestly never to do it.) Many a time, after the Folk Arts staff had carefully negotiated with an applicant group to help them develop a scheme that we could fund under our guidelines, we found later that the entire event had been a disaster because they hadn’t really had our ideas in mind anyway and thus they had carried them out sloppily or uncritically.
Guidelines and policies, I began to realize, are in many ways as much determined by the people who apply under them as by the people who formulate and administer them. The whole institution of a granting agency turns out to be a carefully and delicately balanced and, in many respects, unspoken agreement between the general public (who put up the cash) and the workers in a particular field. In other words, the balance of the power is still back there in the folklore and back there with the folks.
I kind of liked figuring this out, because I had been feeling for a long time that what was really going on down at the bottom — somewhat obscured by our contentious, yeasty, egalitarian, pushy-shovy, hot-shot society — was a fundamental reaction against the drive to sameness engendered by the overpowering energies of burgeoning electronic computerization and electronic media.
The way I began to see it, the world had been cautiously walking up towards the great announced date of 1984 and when we got close to it we had not liked what we saw there. We had looked at the world of tomorrow, and we didn’t think it was all that special. And I really believe that the people who are living in the United States in the late 70’s and early 80’s, along with much of the rest of the world, began to back-pedal. They began to say, stop. We are not all of a single piece. We are all of different pieces — individually and collectively. You must speak to us as individuals and as special, even if temporary, collectives. There are particular beauties about us as individuals and as collectives that must be cherished and cared for. We all belong to different collectives, and we all want to be in on the action. In the Endowment, I began getting calls from people who identified themselves as Ruthenians and as Irpinians (I had to go look them up in the dictionary, I thought they were putting me on). But they were highly exercised over the fact that they were constantly being lumped into festivals and programs as Ukranians, not Ruthenians, or Italians, not Irpinians, as they wanted to be. We’re different from these other fellows, they said. We’re special.
The National Endowment for the Arts began with enormous hesitation to present National Heritage Fellowships to the living exemplars of outstanding artistic traditions. We were terribly worried about doing this; we took, indeed, four years of repetitive and agonizing panel debate to work out the first tentative program. We were afraid of everything. We were afraid that we would be sowing dissension rather than pride. We were afraid that the artists who were not selected would be angry with the artists who were. We worried we were incorrectly singling out the individual from the group. We worried we might not be using the correct criteria for judging the art. We worried and we worried and we worried.
So far I can assure you that our fears seem to have been groundless. We had forgotten about one of the major patterns of our culture: the periodic recognition of the individual through birthday celebrations, lottery winnings and queen-for-a-day programs. All of our possible competing artists, as far as I can tell, simply think: well, next time it is probably going to be my turn. And I can also tell you this: of all the ways to fund folk artistry developed by the Folk Arts Program, this rather corny idea frankly has been far and away the most popular with the general American public. What the National Heritage Fellowship program seems to do is to make nationally visible the artistry particular to one of our participating ethnic or vocational or religious groups, groups that we don’t want to have disappearing into the mainstream, groups that thrust up the particularly skilled and creative individuals to stand as their representatives, groups that we always hope will continue adding their special unique genius to our future. As a nation, I do believe we like, we savor, in many important ways we even revere our capacity to include and welcome differentness. That capacity may actually turn out to be a vital factor in our survival.
And without sounding mystical, let me tell you that I don’t think it was any accident at all that the National Heritage Fellowship program got itself together and appeared at this particular moment in history. Nor was it any accident that the Folk Arts Program itself took form in that most improbable host agency, the National Endowment for the Arts which had been created essentially to preserve and advance the finest of the fine arts, the likes of the American Ballet Theater, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts and the Boston Symphony. Nor was it an accident that most states now have a professionally staffed state-wide folk arts program — a development no one would have thought possible twenty years ago. Barry kindly laid that at my instigation. Well I may have instigated it, but other people had to do it. The idea had to come at the right time when it was ready to happen.
I think that the development of public sector folklore was a cultural corrective action that was as inevitable as the present-day continental drift or the greenhouse effect or the melting of the glaciers thousands of years ago. People sometimes talk to me about the “power” the Folk Arts Program has with its three million dollars of grant money to give out annually. Three million dollars! Such people are not up on present day population figures - or the size of most Washington agencies. Myself, I feel like a small wooden chip — okay maybe a medium sized chip — floating down a river. Only by the accident of coming up against a fortuitously aligned series of rocks and branches can the chip I ride ever even begin to change the course of the river. The power is still out there. The power is still in the folklore and let me add this, to the degree to which we keep in touch with that and love it and try to understand it, to that degree will we be the stronger also. I am talking to all my folklorist friends now.
Let me say just a few words to the special groups that are here in the audience tonight. There are some folklorists here from both the public and the academic sector. I would like to say to both groups: We are important, we folklorists. We are not powerful, but we are important. It is time that we realize that what we say matters, that what we say has impact and meaning in the world. It is time we took ourselves seriously. Ours is a dangerous but rewarding profession because of the strength of the materials with which we deal. Our main problem is that none of us knows enough because there is so much to know.
I believe that those of us working within the public sector are responding to a genuine cultural imperative. It is our responsibility to rise to that imperative and do our work the very best way we can conceive, seeing to it that the channels of the future are kept broad enough so that all the varying parts of the stream — old, young, unheard of — get heard, and get heard for a change at the top of their powers and not when they are declining. Those of us in the academic sector have the responsibility of keeping faith with the truth as it can be known across history. And we also have the enormous responsibility of training. We must learn, I believe, to think about our students in new ways, not simply as extensions of our own experiences, but as builders of the future. It is not impossible to reconcile scholarship and hope.
There are other people here who represent the interested public, people who cared enough about the notions of tradition and folklore to come here for a week’s discussion or an evening’s lecture. Let me recommend a special responsibility to you: of learning how to be a good folklore audience, by which I mean respectful, caring, critical and knowledgeable of the cultures that surround you and of which you are a part. Bear in mind you may be dealing with somebody else’s essentials, somebody else’s starlight, starbright. We have to go gently here. We have to know, we have to sense, we have to try to feel it. And all of us together, academic and non-academic can do the primary thing. We can learn to keep forever looking around us, moving over, making room, leaving some sociable space, some sociable silences, making sure that everybody is there, seeing to it that every people have the possibility of remembering and preserving and changing, if and as and when they want to, their own essentials. That is the bottom line. Everything else is decoration — important, but step two, not step one.
Let me try to make this all come together just a bit more sensibly by telling you one last story that might stay with you a little while as it has stayed with me since it happened. Quite a few years ago when I was first working at the Endowment, a Sioux lady came to see me in my office along with an ancient Sioux elder. I didn’t know anything about Sioux anything. But I tried to listen carefully and speak respectfully and behave as I thought a public servant should behave. Finally, we ladies completed our particular business, and, just as we were getting ready to end our conversation, the old gentleman said to me out of the blue — the first thing he had said, really except hello — his opaque eyes turned towards the window: “Did you ever see a tipi city?” And there was a long pause.
It was late in the day and I was awfully tired and everybody else had gone home and I had this crazy feeling that I had been somehow transported into some kind of a Saroyan play, but I hadn’t ever seen a tipi city, and I told him so. “Oh, you ought to have seen a tipi city,” he told me, his old face shining with recollection. “My father showed me one time. He woke me up in the middle of the night when I was just a little boy, and he took me by the hand and he got me out of bed, and we walked out of the house and we walked all night long, out through the country, all through the night. And in the first light of morning, I saw a real tipi city shining as far as the eye could see. Hundreds and hundreds of tipis — it was so beautiful, all white and pale. And you know the wonderful thing about a tipi city? You couldn’t ever get lost in a tipi city! My father showed me. If there were six poles or eight poles showing at the top, that meant one tribe or the other. And if there was a fox tail hanging from one pole, that meant one clan, and if there was a turkey wing, that was another. Once you learned how it worked, you couldn’t ever get lost in a tipi city. . .” And his old face beamed hopefully across the office.
I escorted the old gentleman and his young friend out into the Washington streets, in which no turkey wing nor fox tail would ever indicate where they were, in which so many of my fellow citizens would always be lost, hoping once again that the disciplines I have so long both joined and supported will rouse themselves in their full vigor to interpret, mediate, and help preserve the human symbols that have meant so much to human kind. We don’t know everything about how to do it, that is true, but we do know some things, we do know enough to go on with. For this year is the year of the Dragon, and in a few years, it will be the year of the Rabbit again. . . .