American Folklife: A Commonwealth of Cultures

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What is Folklife?

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 your grandfather and great-uncles telling stories of your father when he was a boy. It is the secret languages of children, the codenames of CB operators, and the working slang of watermen and doctors. It is the sung parodies of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and the parables told in church or home to delight and instruct. It is African-American rhythms embedded in gospel hymns, bluegrass music, and hip hop, and it is the Lakota flutist rendering anew his people's ancient courtship songs.

Folklife is 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 Persian New Year at Noruz. It is New York City's streets enlivened by Lion Dancers in celebration of Chinese New Year and by Southern Italian immigrants dancing their towering giglios in honor of St. Paulinus each summer. It is the ubiquitous appearance of yellow ribbons to express a complicated sentiment about war, and displays of orange pumpkins on front porches at Halloween.

Folklife is the recycling of scraps of clothing and bits of experience into quilts that tell stories, and the stories told by those gathered around quilting frames. It is the evolution of vaqueros into buckaroos, and the variety of ways there are to skin a muskrat, preserve shuck beans, or join two pieces of wood. It is the oysterboat carved into the above-ground grave of the Louisiana fisherman, and the eighteen-wheeler on the trucker's tombstone in Illinois.

https://www.loc.gov/folklife/cwc/