Baltimoreans have garnered a reputation for greeting one another by tagging “hon” to their speech. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, this small piece of local dialect took center stage in a series of rancorous public debates over the identity associated with Baltimore culture. Each time, controversy followed leading to consequences ranging from protests and boycotts to formal legislative action. “Hon” brought into focus Baltimore’s past and future by symbolizing lingering divisions of race, class, gender, and belonging in the midst of campaigns to unify and modernize the city. While some decried “hon” and “the Hon” as embarrassing, others hailed the word and the related image of a down-to-earth, blue-collar woman as emblematic of the authentic Baltimorean. This book tells the story of the battles that flared over the attempts to use “hon” to construct a citywide local tradition and their consequences for the future of local culture in the United States.

After the Civil War, Emancipation purportedly brought physical freedom to African Americans. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, blacks continued to experience inequality in all phases of American life—social, cultural, political, and economic. In pursuit of equality, African American movements interpreted folklore to reveal in their rhetoric the soul of a race and a path toward civilization. This book provides a comprehensive chronicle of these competing initiatives and their reception starting with the folklore society organized by Hampton Institute in 1893 and continuing through the early 1940s with the American Negro Academy, Fisk University graduates, William Hannibal Thomas, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Friends of Negro Freedom, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and blacks associated with the Communist Party USA. Disavowing a culture of fear, money, guns, and death, black folklorists in these movements exposed a racial inner life ranging from loving, loyal, and happy to imitative, tragic, spiritual, emotional, and creative. Each characterization of the race justified a distinct path and possible contributions to civilization. If unable to know their past, members of the movements and other folklorists were fearful that African Americans would be an anomaly among humanity.

The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies surveys the materials, approaches, concepts, and applications of the field to provide a sweeping guide to American folklore and folklife, culture, history, and society. Forty-three comprehensive and diverse chapters delve into significant themes and methods of folklore and folklife study; established expressions and activities; spheres and locations of folkloric action; and shared cultures and common identities. Beyond the longstanding arenas of academic focus developed throughout the 350-year legacy of folklore and folklife study, contributors at the forefront of the field also explore exciting new areas of attention that have emerged in the twenty-first century such as the Internet, bodylore, folklore of organizations and networks, sexual orientation, neurodiverse identities, and disability groups. Encompassing a wide range of cultural traditions in the United States, from bits of slang in private conversations to massive public demonstrations, ancient beliefs to contemporary viral memes, and a simple handshake greeting to group festivals, these chapters consider the meanings in oral, social, and material genres of dance, ritual, drama, play, speech, song, and story while drawing attention to tradition-centered communities such as the Amish and Hasidim, occupational groups and their workaday worlds, and children and other age groups. Weaving together such varied and manifest traditions, this handbook pays significant attention to the cultural diversity and changing national boundaries that have always been distinctive in the American experience, reflecting on the relative youth of the nation; global connections of customs brought by immigrants; mobility of residents and their relation to an indigenous, urbanized, and racialized population; and a varied landscape and settlement pattern. Edited by leading folklore scholar Simon J. Bronner, this handbook celebrates the extraordinary richness of the American social and cultural fabric, offering a valuable resource not only for scholars and students of American studies, but also for the global study of tradition, folk arts, and cultural practice.

In Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation, Juwen Zhang provides a systematic survey of such oral traditions as folk and fairy tales, proverbs, ballads, and folksongs that are vibrantly practiced today. Zhang establishes a theoretical framework for understanding how Chinese culture has continued for thousands of years with vitality and validity, core and arbitrary identity markers, and folkloric identity. This framework, which describes a cultural self-healing mechanism, is equally applicable to the exploration of other traditions and cultures in the world. Through topics from Chinese Cinderella to the Grimms of China, from proverbs like “older ginger is spicier” to the life-views held by the Chinese, and from mountain songs and ballads to the musical instruments like the clay-vessel-flute, the author weaves these oral traditions across time and space into a mesmerizing intellectual journey. Focusing on contemporary practice, this book serves as a bridge between Chinese and international folklore scholarship and other related disciplines as well. Those interested in Chinese culture in general and Chinese folklore, literature, and oral tradition in particular will certainly delight in perusing this book.

Jewish Bodylore: Feminist and Queer Ethnographies of Folk Practices explores the Jewish body and its symbology as a space for identity communication, applying the tools of bodylore (the folkloric study of the body) to the Jewish body in ways that are in line both with feminist and queer theory. The text centers a feminist folkloric approach to embodiment while simultaneously recognizing its overlaps with the study of Jewish bodies and symbols. It investigates Jewish embodiment with a keen eye to that which breaks from tradition. Consideration is given to the ways in which bodies intersect with time and space in the synagogue, within religious movements, in secular culture, and in childhood ritual. Representing a unique approach to contemporary Jewish Studies, this book argues that Jewish bodies and the intersections they represent are at the core of understanding the contemporary Jewish experience. Rather than abandoning or dismissing Judaism, many contemporary Jews use their bodies as a canvas, claiming space for themselves, demonstrating a deliberate and calculated navigation of Jewish law, and engaging a traditionally patriarchal symbol set which, in its feminist use, amplifies their voices in a context which might otherwise silence them. Through these actions and choices, contemporary Jews demonstrate a nuanced understanding of their public identities as gendered and sexed bodies and a commitment to working towards increased inclusivity within the larger Jewish and secular communities. In the end, this book is a foray into the world of Jewish bodies, how they can be conceptualized using folkloristics, and how feminist methodologies of the body can be applied fairly to Jewish bodies, celebrating the multitude of ways in which the body can be conceptualized and experienced.

Using war memoirs, war journalism, and the personal experiences of John Paul Wallis as a Marine with two tours of duty in Iraq, Wallis and Mechling analyze the folklore shared by male warriors in the combat zone to understand how the traditional everyday practices of these men in groups serve as a form of psychological first aid for relieving the symptoms associated with the stress of living, working, and fighting in the combat zone. The authors study how boys and men are socialized in American culture, the context for their examining the folk traditions, including pet-keeping, rough-and-tumble play fighting, video game play, masturbation, dark play, and deep play.

The hen (or bachelorette) party, with its groups of visible, raucous women on trains, planes, and in public spaces is ubiquitous throughout the English-speaking world. The practice of the blackening, a unique form of kidnapping and “punishment” ritual, is limited to North Eastern parts of Scotland and to specific sectors of the population. Both are prenuptial rituals enacted by women. In Prenuptial Rituals in Scotland, Sheila Young produces a thorough description of how these two rituals were and are enacted and analyzes the ways these practices have changed through time as a social commentary. Young’s study provides valuable insights into identity, gender, social class, contemporary attitudes to ritual, and what it means to approach marriage in the twenty first century.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Belarus, an example of an authoritarian state, Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State presents over one hundred contemporary political jokes in the contexts of their performance. Throughout, Anastasiya Astapova demonstrates the salience of the joke genre, the multiplicity of humor manifestations, and the fundamental presence of intertextual links between jokes and another folk genre—rumor. Informed by real-life fieldwork in an authoritarian regime, Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State challenges many common theories of political humor, including the interpretation of political jokes as weapons of the weak. It illustrates how jokes and rumors remind communities of their fears, support paranoia, shape conformist behavior, and, consequently, reinforce the existing hegemony. In this rare study on everyday life in and reactions to repressive regimes, Astapova unveils political humor as it is lived.

Winner of the 2020 Chicago Folklore Prize CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 Despite predictions that commercial mass culture would displace customs of the past, traditions firmly abound, often characterized as folklore. In The Practice of Folklore: Essays toward a Theory of Tradition, author Simon J. Bronner works with theories of cultural practice to explain the social and psychological need for tradition in everyday life. Bronner proposes a distinctive “praxic” perspective that will answer the pressing philosophical as well as psychological question of why people enjoy repeating themselves. The significance of the keyword practice, he asserts, is the embodiment of a tension between repetition and variation in human behavior. Thinking with practice, particularly in a digital world, forces redefinitions of folklore and a reorientation toward interpreting everyday life. More than performance or enactment in social theory, practice connects localized culture with the vernacular idea that “this is the way we do things around here.” Practice refers to the way those things are analyzed as part of, rather than apart from, theory, thus inviting the study of studying. “The way we do things” invokes the social basis of “doing” in practice as cultural and instrumental. Building on previous studies of tradition in relation to creativity, Bronner presents an overview of practice theory and the ways it might be used in folklore and folklife studies. Demonstrating the application of this theory in folkloristic studies, Bronner offers four provocative case studies of psychocultural meanings that arise from traditional frames of action and address issues of our times: referring to the boogieman; connecting “wild child” beliefs to school shootings; deciphering the offensive chants of sports fans; and explicating male bravado in bawdy singing. Turning his analysis to the analysts of tradition, Bronner uses practice theory to evaluate the agenda of folklorists in shaping perceptions of tradition-centered “folk societies” such as the Amish. He further unpacks the culturally based rationale of public folklore programming. He interprets the evolving idea of folk museums in a digital world and assesses how the folklorists' terms and actions affect how people think about tradition.

Mining a mountain of folklore publications, North American Monsters unearths decades of notable monster research. Nineteen folkloristic case studies from the last half-century examine legendary monsters in their native habitats, focusing on ostensibly living creatures bound to specific geographic locales. A diverse cast of scholars contemplate these alluring creatures, feared and beloved by the communities that host them—the Jersey Devil gliding over the Pine Barrens, Lieby wriggling through Lake Lieberman, Char-Man stalking the Ojai Valley, and many, many more. Embracing local stories, beliefs, and traditions while neither promoting nor debunking, North American Monsters aspires to revive scholarly interest in local legendary monsters and creatures and to encourage folkloristic monster legend sleuthing.