The Meaning of Tradition: An Introduction

Call it tradition or not, end-times bring on reflection, new-times prompt forecast Folklorists who might study and themselves are imbued with tradition, according to Alan Jabbour who introduced the 100th anniversary of the American Society in 1988, embraced the occasion of a centennial to on the ancestral missions that have shaped us, the inherited values that we reflect and must radiate into the future (Jabbour 1988: vii). Leaving behind the twentieth in 2000 predictably ushered in another wave of reflection on folklore's fundamental principles. Even before the calendar turned to that magical number ballyhooed by the popular press, folklorists anticipated change with several anniversary celebrations that inspired them to look back to the forces that gave birth to their subject and ahead to challenges as scholarship matures and society changes. Eight years after the American Society's centennial celebration, the 150th anniversary in 1996 of the coining of the English word presaged a round of symposia on folklore's fate as the ended (Brown 1996). Special issues of journals appeared heralding renewed efforts to locate folklore's study in scholarship and identify its core values (Feintuch 1995; Harlow 1998). All kinds of revisiting were apparent. The ground broken by Toward New Perspectives in (Paredes and Bauman 1972) rated a twenty-year retrospective with the philosophical title theorizing folklore in the journal Western (Briggs and Shuman 1993). The perspectives hailed by organizers of an applied meeting at Point Park, Pennsylvania, was the subject of Point Park Revisited (1998), a special issue of the Journal of Research. The Historian in 1996 took up On (Not) Defining with bows to Stith Thompson's stock-taking essay Folklore at Mid-- century (Baker 1996). Maybe it was the feeling that more than a turn and a reason for revisiting, but something on the order of a catapult into a new millennium brought the rhetoric of reflection to the level of crisis (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). With apocalyptic overtones of millennium beliefs, some scholars could not resist the temptation to speculate on the end of folklore (Toelken 1998; see also Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1996; Bendix 1998). The twentieth has passed and is still here. In fact, there is reason in some quarters for optimism. theory ripples through a widening circle of fields, including recently planted ones of cultural studies, gender studies, whiteness studies, and organizational development. More presses than ever before seek out books on and folklife, and the Internet has become a hotbed of transmission. Federal endowments have folklorists at their helm; news of academic appointments and public programs resounds through the fraternity. Whether one views as half empty or half full, serious questions remain. Whether a time of reflection or crisis, it is avowedly a period of restructuring. One place for restructuring is in communication, as the Internet and wireless broadcasting have led to rethinking of performance as a face-- to-face or localized encounter. Even as some observers bemoan the loss of intimacy in community and group, others note the reclustering of networks by shared, and often overlapping, interests that engender folklore. Another source of restructuring is increased mobility which has on the one hand informed ideas of transnationalism and globalism, and on the other encouraged reunions, festive occasions, and temporary communities worthy of folkloristic attention. Yet another is an academic restructuring as disciplines once devoted to an uplifting intellectual mission ally themselves, fragment, and reconfigure in response to populist, post-modern, post-sentimental pressures by which a dizzying array of popular expressive forms from advertisements to zoos become symbolic cultural texts. …