Dan Ben-Amos. Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context, in Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman, eds. Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press for the American Folklore Society, 1972.
…folklore is artistic communication in small groups.
Dell Hymes. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.
Folklore study is” the study of communicative behavior with an esthetic, expressive, or stylistic dimension.”
Jan Brunvand. The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction, 2nd edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.
Folklore comprises the unrecorded traditions of a people; it includes both the form and content of these traditions and their style or technique of communication from person to person.
Folklore is the traditional, unofficial, non-institutional part of culture. It encompasses all knowledge, understandings, values, attitudes, assumptions, feelings, and beliefs transmitted in traditional forms by word of mouth or by customary examples.
Edward D. Ives. Joe Scott, the Woodsman-Songmaker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.
No song, no performance, no act of creation can be properly understood apart from the culture or subculture in which it is found and of which it is a part; nor should any "work of art" be looked on as a thing in itself apart from the continuum of creation-consumption.
Barre Toelken. The Dynamics of Folklore. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
Tradition [means] not some static, immutable force from the past, but those pre-existing culture-specific materials and options that bear upon the performer more heavily than do his or her own personal tastes and talents. We recognize in the use of tradition that such matters as content and style have been for the most part passed on but not invented by the performer.
Dynamic recognizes, on the other hand, that in the processing of these contents and styles in performance, the artist’s own unique talents of inventiveness within the tradition are highly valued and are expected to operate strongly. Time and space dimensions remind us that the resulting variations may spread geographically with great rapidity (as jokes do) as well as down through time (good luck beliefs). Folklore is made up of informal expressions passed around long enough to have become recurrent in form and context, but changeable in performance.
…modern American folklorists do not limit their attention to the rural, quaint, or "backward" elements of the culture. Rather, they will study and discuss any expressive phenomena–urban or rural–that seem to act like other previously recognized folk traditions. This has led to the development of a field of inquiry with few formal boundaries, one with lots of feel but little definition, one both engaging and frustrating
Surely no other discipline is more concerned with linking us to the cultural heritage from the past than is folklore; no other discipline is more concerned with revealing the interrelationships of different cultural expressions than is folklore; and no other discipline is so concerned …with discovering what it is to be human. It is this attempt to discover the basis of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human existence that puts folklore study at the very center of humanistic study.
"Folklore," though coined as recently as 1846, is the old word, the parental concept to the adjective "folk." Customarily folklorists refer to the host of published definitions, add their own, and then get on with their work, leaving the impression that definitions of folklore are as numberless as insects. But all the definitions bring into dynamic association the ideas of individual creativity and collective order.
Folklore is traditional. Its center holds. Changes are slow and steady. Folklore is variable. The tradition remains wholly within the control of its practitioners. It is theirs to remember, change, or forget. Answering the needs of the collective for continuity and of the individual for active participation, folklore…is that which is at once traditional and variable.
Like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, folklife is often hidden in full view, lodged in the various ways we have of discovering and expressing who we are and how we fit into the world. Folklife is reflected in the names we bear from birth, invoking affinities with saints, ancestors, or cultural heroes. Folklife is the secret languages of children, the codenames of CB operators, and the working slang of watermen and doctors. It is the shaping of everyday experiences in stories swapped around kitchen tables or parables told from pulpits. It is the African American rhythms embedded in gospel hymns, bluegrass music, and hip hop, and the Lakota flutist rendering anew his people’s ancient courtship songs.
Folklife is the sung parodies of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the variety of ways there are to skin a muskrat, preserve string beans, or join two pieces of wood. Folklife is the society welcoming new members at bris and christening, and keeping the dead incorporated on All Saints Day. It is the marking of the Jewish New Year at Rosh Hashanah and the Turkic New Year at Nauruz. It is the evolution of vaqueros into buckaroos, and the riderless horse, its stirrups backward, in the funeral processions of high military commanders.
Folklife is the thundering of foxhunters across the rolling Rappahannock countryside and the listening of hill toppers to hounds crying fox in the Tennessee mountains. It is the twirling of lariats at western rodeos, and the spinning of double-dutch jumpropes in West Philadelphia. It is scattered across the landscape in Finnish saunas and Italian vineyards; engraved in the split-rail boundaries of Appalachian "hollers" and the stone fences around Catskill "cloves"; scrawled on urban streetscapes by graffiti artists; and projected onto skylines by the tapering steeples of churches, mosques, and temples.
Folklife is community life and values, artfully expressed in myriad forms and interactions. Universal, diverse, and enduring, it enriches the nation and makes us a commonwealth of cultures.
Every group bound together or by common interests and purposes, whether educated or uneducated, rural or urban, possesses a body of traditions which may be called its folklore. Into these traditions enter many elements, individual, popular, and even "literary," but all are absorbed and assimilated through repetition and variation into a pattern which has value and continuity for the group as a whole.
1.3.1 EXPRESSIONS OF FOLKLORE IN WRITTEN AND ORAL FORMS OF TEXT
“Expressions of folklore” means productions consisting of characteristic elements of the traditional artistic heritage developed and maintained by a community of (name of the country) or by individuals reflecting the traditional artistic expectations of such a community, in particular:
(i) verbal expressions, such as folk tales, folk poetry and riddles;
(ii) musical expressions, such as folk songs and instrumental music;
(iii) expressions by action, such as folk dances, plays and artistic forms of rituals whether or not reduced to a material form; and
(iv) tangible expressions such as:
(a) productions of folk art, in particular, drawings, paintings, carvings, sculptures, pottery, terracotta, mosaic, woodwork, metalware, jewelry, basket weaving, needlework, textiles, carpets, costumes;
(b) musical instruments;
[(c) architectural forms.]
The term ‘folklore’ was first coined by William Thoms in 1846. He referred to folklore in his letter to the The Athenaeum to replace ‘popular antiquities’ and ‘popular literature.’ Initially the word had been used in hyphenated form ‘folk-lore,’ but later on the hyphen was discarded. William Thoms meant to include manners, customs, observations, superstitions, ballads, proverbs and so on, in the term ‘folklore,’ which he summarized as the lore of the people. Indeed, the pioneering work done by Thoms did lead to increasing awareness about the characteristics of folklore and the second half of the 19th century witnessed a large interest shown by eminent scholars in understanding the fundamentals of the vast subject. Since the introduction of the term ‘folklore,’ scholars all over the world put their head together to offer a rational definition of the word. The controversy that emerged in satisfactorily defining the term was so intense that in the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, edited by Maria Leach, there are twenty-one definitions given by different scholars. While going through the definitions one can attribute the reasons for the dispute mainly to the oral tradition of folklore. In a society where the masses are illiterate, the oral tradition is the means through which propagation of the necessary elements of culture takes place. In such a society, scholars used the term ‘folklore’ to refer to the language of the people, the system of their livelihood like hunting, agriculture, customs relating to marriages, deaths, etc., and the basic code of conduct, all of which are transmitted orally. According to scholars, all elements of learning that are passed through an oral tradition from generation to generation in a society belong to the domain of folklore. However, it may not be wise to consider all that is passed on orally as folklore. It is, perhaps, more reasonable to limit folklore to the creative aspects of a society, as reflected in its day-to-day life and expressed in material or non-material forms, rather than referring purely to the form of transmission, whether written or oral. Alan Dundes observes rightly when he states:
Since materials other than folklore are also orally transmitted, the criterion of oral transmission by itself is not sufficient to distinguish folklore from non-folklore.
While upholding the fact that not all that is transmitted orally is folklore one must also try to analyze whether the reverse of this position can be accepted as a base for the purpose of argument, that is, whether it is correct to interpret that only those elements of learning which are transmitted orally form part of folklore. If this thesis is correct, most of those parts of folklore, which have evolved through the written method, fall outside the pasture of folklore. An English literature has a sizeable share of folk songs, folk tales, poems, riddles and even many stories forming part of great epic like Beowulf stories, all of which form part of the rich heritage of folklore, but are still essentially expressed and communicated in written form. It is only preposterous to deny the status of folklore to these manifestations solely on the ground that they are in written form. Again a quote from Alan Dundes proves this point beyond doubt:
There are some forms of folklore which are manifested and communicated almost exclusively in the written as opposed to oral form, such as autograph-book verse, book marginalia, epitaphs, and traditional letters. In actual practice a professional folklorist does not go so far as to say that a folktale or a ballad is not folklore, simply because it has at some time in its life history been transmitted by script or print. But he would argue that if a folktale or a ballad had never been in the oral tradition, it is not folklore. It might be a literary production based upon a folk model.
As in the case of other parts of the world, in Kazakhstan too ballads, folktales and folk music have passed through the oral and written traditions. Even though some of these forms of folklore are authored by famous personalities they were accepted by the folk and have become part of the folklore. Yet another category of folklore is that which is neither oral nor written. Folk dances, folk arts and crafts, folk paintings, sculptures, etc., are transmitted not orally or through written medium, but through visual tradition, imitations, observations, through training and performances. As such, the attempt to define folklore purely on the basis of the form in which it is transmitted or passed from generation to generation is also not a satisfactory or foolproof solution for arriving at a rational definition of the term of folklore.
There are some social scientists who hold the view that folklore is the creation of a group of people who belong to the same contiguity of dwelling place and culture regardless of whether the location of residence is city, town or village. These scholars are of the view that folklore is the creative product of a community sharing similar habitat and culture. Their customs and beliefs, the language spoken and the traditional patterns of livelihood share certain common characteristics. Their folklore is reflected in their creative ideas and is the common property of the community.
Folklore, thus, is the product of human creativity, creation of people who live in a particular geographical area, sharing the same language, culture, mechanism of livelihood and living conditions. The life styles and traditions of the folk are characterized by a common identity. Folklore is the product of the creative ideas of the people who express such creativity through verbal, artistic or material forms, and this in turn is transmitted orally or in written form or through some other medium from one generation to another, belonging to a literate or nonliterate society, tribal or non-tribal, rural or urban people. In order to fully understand the depth and width of the term ‘folklore’, one must analyze the elements that constitute folklore. Those who view folklore as ‘verbal art’ confine the term to art forms which are transmitted orally, and folk arts like dance forms, painting or sculpture fall outside of the purview of such a term. Folk beliefs, customs, chants and charms are verbal and not art. Similarly, we have elements of folklore, which are neither art nor verbal namely, folk games, folk technology and folk medicine.
Based on the characteristics that have been identified as essential attributes of folklore it may be possible to categorize the following elements of folklore:
Folk Literature
A very important and popular component of folk literature is folk tales. These include myths, legends, fairy tales, anecdotes, short stories, etc. In addition, proverbs, riddles, ballads, songs, rhymes, etymologies, folk titles, metaphors, chain letters, poetry, etc. are all part of the folk literature.
Most of these elements which form part of folk literature have been created and passed on by word of mouth, some of them have been essentially oral literature now preserved in script and some have been traditionally preserved in written form.
Folk Practices
Folk practices cannot be termed as folk literature or folk art. Folk beliefs, customs, superstitions, rites and rituals, folk festivals, etc., are folk practices forming part of a community’s daily life. Folk games, folk sport, animal sports, etc., are related to the folk’s life but are of occasional occurrence.
Folk arts or artistic folklore
Folk dances, folk theatre, folk gestures are all performing arts. Non-performing arts like painting, sculpture, embroidery, weaving, carpet making, costumes designing, archery are also forms of folklore.
Folk Science and Technology
Methods of folk treatment, folk medicines, preparation of dairy products, fertilizers, methods of agriculture and seed technology fall under folk science. Under folk technology, folk architecture, tool making, ornament making, pottery, etc., are some examples of the common forms.
Thus, to conclude, based on the characteristics that have been associated with it, ‘folklore’ can be defined as the sum total of human creativity. It encompasses the customs, games, beliefs, festivals, and practices which human societies have owned through tradition from generation to generation. It includes literature, performing and non-performing arts, paintings, sculptures, arts and crafts, embroidered quilts, alpanas and their related mechanisms and designs, which have been handed down by tradition to the societies from previous generations through word of mouth or traditionally by non-oral means. The patterns of houses, fences, tools, and many other materials being used by the societies, as well as those materials, their traditional manufacturing techniques and architectural designs, which the human societies have inherited from their forefathers; the medicines and other objects invented through experimentation and traditional scientific methods, which passed on as heritage to the societies through generations. The process of creation, making, designing and construction of these elements, as well as their sustenance in the societies, which has been in operation since ancient times and in a similar manner their transmission, diffusion, creation of variants, reshaping and renewal which have also been a continuous phenomenon since long past. Some of these elements were handed down orally, some in writing, some both orally and in writing and some through practice, imitation and observation, but all have been the products of tradition. The process of their transmission is still continuing in present-day societies and this will continue to be so in the days to come. One of the important aspects of folklore is its impact on society as well as society’s influence on folklore. Folklore has a symbiotic relationship with society in that it causes changes in the society and the social changes also effect modifications in folklore. Consequently, the nature of folklore has been transforming over the ages. It is true that this inter-relationship is inseparable. But experts argue that since folklore is the product of the society and not vice-versa, the influence of the society on the folklore is much greater than the influence of the folklore on the society. This makes folklore animate, substantially absorbing social changes and, in parallel, moving with the society.