| Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture |
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Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Index, photos. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. Folklorist Charles Joyner introduces this work by noting that one of the largest questions posed by students of the South is whether there is a distinctive southern culture. Early efforts to answer this query have sought southern identity in the social and political behavior of the region's dominant white males, while other explanations point to the common experiences of all southerners, black and white, men and women, past and present. None, however, have focused specifically on the relation of history to folk culture, a gap which Shared Traditions intends to fill. Joyner notes that this relationship would seem to be an essential starting point for any effort to understand the South because of the rich folk culture shared southerners. The volume opens with "Southern Folk Culture: Unity in Diversity," an exposition of the significance of folk culture and a survey of its major forms in the South. Joyner investigates the concept of sense of place, speculating that folklife fosters its creation. Next, he explores definitions of the South, concluding that wherever its borders are drawn, the South displays enormous diversity that must be addressed by the student of southern folklife. Joyner identifies three major cultural groups whose interaction has formed the basis for southern folk culture: White, "red," and Black. However, he recognizes many smaller groups within and among these groups, and he emphasizes that the complex relationships between them over the past four centuries have produced a southern culture. This introductory chapter continues with a discussion of folk speech and other forms of linguistic folklore (such as proverbs, legends, and folktales), as well as the material culture genres of foodways, folk arts and crafts, and architecture. It concludes with an overview of southern folksong and music. Joyner asserts that southern culture is extraordinarily rich because it results from a history of cultural sharing. The rest of the book is divided into five sections. Part 1, "The Old South," elaborates on the linguistic, religious, and musical interchanges between Whites and Blacks throughout the last four centuries. It then turns to a fascinating description of daily slave life on an antebellum plantation, addressing folklife, folklore, social relationships, and community dynamics by making effective use of first-hand historical accounts by slaves and plantation owners. This section also includes a chapter about slave ritual and resistance; the chapter postulates a range of symbolic behaviors on the parts of both plantation owners and slaves. Joyner discusses manifestations of complex power relations, shared celebrations of rites of passage, and the telling of animal trickster tales as a form of ritual behavior. The last chapter in this section examines the convergence of history and folklore surrounding John Brown and uses Victor Turner's concept of "social drama" to analyze in detail the events of Brown's life. Part Two of Shared Traditions--"Three Historiographical Forays"--explores the work of three scholars who wrote about southern folk culture. Chapter Six describes the effort of David Potter, a native southerner and historian, to identify and investigate the distinctive features of southern society. While previous works had called attention to the South's agrarianism, backwardness, conservatism, individualism, localism, paternalism, racism, religious piety, and violence, in 1961 Potter began the effort to analyze the significance of those qualities and their relationship to southern folklife. The next chapter describes David Hackett Fischer's placement of folklife at the very center of American history, extrapolated in his 1989 Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Chapter Eight describes folklorist and native southerner Henry Glassie's studies of Irish folklore, folklife, and community, noting the similarities between Northern Ireland and the American South in terms of the juxtaposition of folk culture, political discord, and violence. Part Three of Shared Traditions, "The New South," moves to the twentieth century. Four chapters feature the diverse topics of ethnicity, folk music, and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapter Nine, "A Community of Memory: Assimilation and Identity among the Jews of Georgetown," is an examination of the unique experiences of the southern Jewish. Chapter Ten, "The Sounds of Southern Culture: Blues, Country, Jazz, and Rock," vividly illustrates the multi-cultural roots of American music and what Joyner reiterates is the central theme of southern culture, its multi-cultural mix. Chapter 11, "Sweet Music: Tradition, Creativity, and the Appalachian Dulcimer," explicates the dynamic character of this folk tradition, a source of both continuity and innovation. In Chapter 12, "Sea Island Legacy: Folk Tradition and the Civil Rights Movement," Johns Island and Gullah culture is used as a model to explore changes in the U.S. since the 1960s. Part Four, "Folklore and History: A Dialogue," returns to the central and unifying theme of Shared Traditions. As Joyner noted in his introduction, "most of this book elaborates the significance of folk culture to the understanding of history. But the penultimate section highlights the importance of history to the understanding of folk culture" (p. 8). The first essay in this section demonstrates how crucial historical considerations are to the modern redefinition of "legend" as a genre. The last two chapters in this section--"A Model for the Analysis of Folklore Performance in Historical Context" and "Folklore and Social Transformation: Historians and Folklorists in the Modern World"--examine the disciplines of folklore and history and their symbiotic relationship. Joyner also examines the emergence of the new social history in the 1960s and 1970s; at this same time, the folklife studies movement in the United States attempted to foster a more holistic approach to the study of folklore. Joyner feels that the concurrent shift in folklore scholarship from concern with traditional genres to the study of oral communication and performance deflected a real connection between the new social history and folklife studies. In the mid-1980s, folklorists seemed to be manifesting a shift back to concentration on the text, portending a "postmodern" era, in Joyner's opinion; a reconsideration of relationships between history and folklore. Part Five of Shared Traditions is a brief afterword entitled "Endangered Traditions: Resort Development and Cultural Conservation on the Sea Islands." It is Joyner's personal plea for moderation and conservation of an invaluable cultural heritage, the folk culture of the Sea Islanders. Alice Morrison Mordoh |