ABSTRACT
FOLKLIFE AND FOLK CULTURE The terms “folklife” and “folk culture” refer to the subject of tradition-directed communities and connote scholarly approaches beginning in the nineteenth century that emphasize the holistic study of everyday practices, artifacts, and expressions in community and group contexts. Linking “folk” with “life” and “culture” draws attention to a number of distinctions with “folklore,” which implies socially shared knowledge or common utterances. In both folklore and folklife, “folk” used as an adjective connotes customary patterns of behavior or informal, social ways of learning thought of as traditional. The reference to “life” suggests:
Folklife is often linked with “folk-cultural” or ethnological approaches that study a community as a cultural whole rather than from the perspective of a single genre (e.g., proverb, food, or art). Folk culture often refers to a group, typically rooted in a specific place, that is traditiondirected. It is often used to designate isolated, segregated, or socioeconomically separated groups that are relatively homogeneous. With life and the implications of choice and individual identity rather than the authority of a total culture as the focus, folklife is more commonly used in North America than folk culture (which tends to be used more often in South America and Europe), since it is flexible enough to cover individual, community, and group life within a modern, mobile, heterogeneous society and allow for multiple, simultaneous identities. Indeed, the American contribution to the global folklife movement is to theorize the cultural systems of emergent communities, identities, and networks (such as fraternities, gangs, and neo-pagans) in mass culture that intentionally and strategically construct
tradition and interconnected forms of expressive culture-combinations of dress, food, speech, art, and gesture-and often are not rooted in place by agriculture or history.
