ABSTRACT
While widely employed, the term “folklife” is used variously, for it may be used loosely to indicate the concern for context and the reliance on material evidence, or more specifically for an interpretation using the sociocultural idea of traditions serving integrative functions in a community. Folklife research originally claimed a distinction by focusing on local social context and behavior in contrast to the kind of literary treatment that sought the global view of tradition. Yet built into the old folklife enterprise was the assumption that data could become comparative, even quantifiable, to systematically compile data and interpret the patterns of everyday life for individuals and their communities across time and space. Europeans had a head start, pioneer American folklife scholars opined, but with the rapidly growing vigor of American folklife studies they imagined that traditions on the American continent could be documented, mapped, and analyzed. The message of the 1990s was that, while promising, carrying out the social philosophy of accounting for each traditional community and activity in nations as complex as the United States and Canada would be immense and problematic. In addition, the important psychological concern for investigating individual lives in the practice of tradition brings even more burden to the task. Into the twenty-first century, questions of temporary, mobile, organized, and emerging communities and the way they fashion a total identity-such as gangs, Internet groups, corporations, neo-shamans, and Recreational Vehical users (known colloquially as RVers)—suggest to
many new scholars a shift in attention from mapping of regions and communities to analysis of processes such as traditionalizing, symbolizing, and networking as new forms of communication and settlement evolve in postmodern society. The applications of folklife activity in public settings continue to be another concern of the new folklife movement, and new uses of folklife besides museums and historical societies in areas of therapy, education, human services, and government are actively being pursued.
