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Influence on the American folklore



The United States was formed on land that was, for centuries, home to a number of Native American tribes Subsequently, after a long history of both conflict and peace, the United States formed as a union influenced both by European cultures and Native American culture. The result was a unique shared history and culture that is still evolving today. From language to structures within society, Native American culture has played a major role in influencing historic and day to day development of American culture [ http://www.wisegeek.com/how-has-america-been-influenced-by-native-american-culture.htm ].

Of course, European influences on African American folklore are incontestable. English is the first language of African Americans and, like their African ancestors, African Americans enjoy and value imitation. By the same token, the folklore traditions of Americans of European descent reflect borrowings from Black traditions. Most folklorists agree that African American folk traditions are syncretized. Blacks have retained many West African aesthetic principles and wedded them to those from other cultures to which they have been exposed. The songs, narratives, jokes, rituals, beliefs, and so forth that result are intrinsically African American [Folklore: http://american-folklore-guide.blogspot.ru ].

Throughout the late 19th century and well into the 20th, African Americans migrated from rural Southern roads to urban Northern streets. Folklore continued to function as an essential expression of everyday Black life. Older genres were modified to fit city environments. Bluesmen frequently replaced acoustic instruments with electric ones, and lyrics focused on the challenges posed by urban industrial life. Quilters modified their techniques to include sewing machines. Worship services took place in storefront churches rather than in pine-board ones. Thus, urban life altered but did not diminish the importance of folklore [3, p.390].

African Americans celebrate verbal versatility and have employed a variety of modes of verbal communication to express themselves. Children are urged to hone their oratorical abilities. Girls often begin by chanting the intricate rhymes that accompany “Double-Dutch” jump-roping sessions. Boys and many girls develop their skills by participating in ritual insult-swapping sessions known as “playing the dozens.” In some circles, sophisticated verbal artistry is conveyed in toasts—lengthy epic poems featuring the escapades of unlikely Black heroes. Other familiar genres of African American folk speech include signifyin’, capping, rapping, loud-talking, and marking. Friendly competition is often the hallmark of these forms as individuals vie for respect by showing off their verbal prowess.

Contemporary legends and rumors are as common among African Americans as they are within the dominant culture. Some cycles, like the Kentucky Fried Rat and the mouse in the Coke bottle, are well known by both Blacks and Whites. But cycles specific to the concerns of African Americans have evolved and are well contained within the group. Businesses that have unorthodox advertising practices and symbolically charged products are often identified in these legends. The notion that “the government” constructs elaborate anti-Black conspiracies is often promoted [6, p.211].

Not all scrutiny of African American folklore has been on verbal forms. In the past several decades, many folklorists have turned their attention to material culture, in particular house types and quilts. Throughout African American rural communities, shotgun houses have been cataloged. The floor plans for these houses line up a back exit behind a front entrance with no wall or structural interference between the two doors. Thus, it is said that if a shot was fired from either the front or rear of the house, the bullet would go straight through, without lodging in the home. These houses are noteworthily similar to structures found in many West African communities. There the folk explanation for the floor plan maintains that if the spirit of an ancestor wanders into the home, it will wander out the other side without getting trapped within. Many quilts made by African American women and men vary a great deal from other American quilts. Like many kinds of West African textiles, long, rectangular strips dominate many of the quilts. Conventional symmetry in which a shape or a color is balanced on one side by the same shape or color on the other seems to be less important to African American quilters than to other quilters. Many Black quilters prefer to fool the eye by knowingly constructing asymmetrical arrangements. Synthetic fabrics are used more often in African American quilts than in mainstream quilts, and red is the most frequently used color. Academic attention to African American material culture has triggered interest in the art world [12, p.72].

African American quilts, sculpture, baskets, and other artifacts are found and sold in the finest museums and galleries. African American spiritual life has always been a rich source of folklore. During the slavery era, African Americans combined West African and Caribbean folk-belief practices with Christian beliefs. A system of folk belief known as conjure or hoodoo developed in many Southern locales. Believers supposed that conjure doctors understood how to use powers contained in nature, and some conjure doctors were accorded the same respect as preachers. Conjure or hoodoo are sometimes confused with voodoo, which is akin to vaudou in Haiti. These belief systems stem from Dahomean (present-day Nigeria) sacred practices. Dahomeans traded into slavery were transported to Haiti. Some of these slaves were then traded to New Orleans. Voodoo is an enormously complex system centered on root work and snake worship. In voodoo as well as santeria (Cuba and the United States), candomble (Brazil and the United States), and shango (Trinidad and the United States), African religious principles are syncretized with Christian principles [Folklore: http://american-folklore-guide.blogspot.ru ].

More conventional Christian worship is also common in African American communities. Folklorists have been particularly interested in the delivery styles of African American preachers and the status afforded the congregation. African American congregations actively participate in all aspects of the worship service. Preachers frequently chant their sermons, all the while soliciting affirmation and testimony from their listeners. A lively, vocal congregation is the sign of a successful preacher. Young African Americans often complain about the speed at which the population at large appropriates appealing Black folk expression. Music, clothing, dance styles, and art forms shaped by African Americans are soon adopted by the dominant culture. However, the impulse to transform and invent folk expression is a strong one, and African Americans, like all folk groups, will continue to enjoy an exciting folk culture.

Folk legends and folk beliefs did germinate in North America and they did reflect American energies and experi­ences, yet they prove to be for the most part carbon copies of the folklore in Tudor and Stuart England. Religious issues preoccupied colonial Americans, and in affairs of the church they stayed close to English and Continental models. Perry Miller has traced the hardening of the first generation of New England Puritan dissenters from the Anglican Church into a resbyterian orthodoxy of their own, and Daniel Boorstin has sketched the slippage of Virginian Anglicans into loose Congregational forms as a result of frontier conditions. But the colonies produced no new churches. Innovative American faiths such as Mormonism and Christian Science grew out of the nineteenth century [9, p. 288]. On theological matters the settlers remained on the whole conservative. Dissenting Protestant sects like the Puritans, the Quakers, and the Anabaptists crossed to America, not to evolve new creeds and forms, but to protect and maintain those already conceived, while the established churches—Anglican, Roman Catholic, Dutch Reformed—kept a hold on their New World communicants tight enough to prevent schisms or defections.

What was true for institutional religion proved even truer for its underside, the folk supematuralism that helped order the universe for seventeenth-century man. American colonists faithfully retained the folk beliefs they had inherited from their English and Continental forebears. We may set colonial and Tudor-Stuart spectral narratives side by side and find virtual duplication. Divine judgments and providences, witches and witchcrafts, ghosts and poltergeists, a personalized Devil and his train of invisible demons, provided the themes of countless anecdotes, legends, and cautionary tales on both sides of the Atlantic. Puritans in England and America kept diaries laden with providential incidents. Court records of witchcraft cases in both countries contained similar accounts of maleficium. Clergy and common folk in the mother country and in the colonies feared the Devil in his shapes of a suave gentleman, a black man, a black dog, and other guises. Such excellent studies as Katharine Briggs’s Pale Hecate’s Team, Alan Macfarlane’s Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, arid Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, which present in full detail the religious folk beliefs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, could readily extend their coverage to the North American colonies. George Lyman Kittredge did indeed title his older, classic work Witchcraft in Old and New England to indicate the transatlantic continuity of credence in witches [1, p.492].

Сontemporary Folklore

For two and a half centuries the American people were pre dominantly agricultural and rural, a nation of husbandmen The city served as a marketplace for the countryside. Northerners and southerners alike tilled the soil. The outdoor occupations of lumbering, mining, cattle-raising, sailing before the mast, loomed large in the economy. All these conditions appeared propitious for folklore, whose students regarded the hinterland as its proper habitat. Then in the decades following the Civil War, the center of gravity rapidly shifted from country to city, from farm to factory, from old-fashioned ways to new-fangled inventions. A society of hustle and bustle took over the stage; the organization man succeeded the frontier individualist; the tradition-directed pockets of American life dwindled before the onward march of the other-directed generation [4, p. 363]. How in the face of mobility, technology, mass media and mass conformity could folk traditions breathe and survive? And could one speak of “modern” folklore when by definition folklore must have demonstrated its ability to live among human beings for a considerable time?

Folklorists have not attempted to answer these questions, tacitly assuming that the mass culture of contemporary America is traditionless. Yet, paradoxically, vast bodies of folklore have coagulated in the midst of urban industrial America, and intimately touch the lives of city dwellers, college youths, and service men and women [4, p.245].

Depending upon how it is defined, “American” folklore may be pictured as nonexistent, relatively rare, or extremely common. As late as 1930 Alexander H. Krappe, a prominent American folklorist, was still European-oriented enough to take the extreme position that there was no such thing as American folklore, but only a few folkloric importations that eventually lost themselves in our mechanized age. The American Folklore Society itself was formed in 1888 partly to collect the “fast-vanishing remains” of foreign (including black) folklore in the United States; as for the phrase “American Folklore,” that referred to the Indians, or to the nationality of members of the society. Published collections of American folk­lore still appear prefaced with gloomy essays about disappear­ing traditions and the rapid loss of our meager folklore. The other extreme is reached by the many popular books and records that try to boost every scrap of Americana in sight—-old or new—as another example of our profuse national folklore. Most of these publications are very heavy on fakelore—that is, imitation folklore attributed to a group that never possessed it [1, p.207].

One should not be dogmatic about whether American folklore exists in abundance until the terms “American” and “folklore” are explained. Our criteria for “folklore” are “oral, customary, and material tradition,” while for “American” an inclusive definition would be “found in the United States,” and a restrictive one “originated in the United States.” Most American folklorists incline toward the inclusive view, as far as theory is concerned, although their field-collecting emphasizes older American, or at least Americanized, material. For example, while some American folklore collectors have realized that there exist traditional native songs (most of them relatively recent) of protest, industries, parodies, pornography, and the like, what they have collected most vigorously are old British tradi­tional ballads and lyrical songs.

American folklore research has amply demonstrated that there is a substantial body of oral, customary, and material tra­dition circulating in the United States, some of it home-grown, and some transplanted from other cultures. Of course, individ­ual folk practices do fade away, but new ones are constantly ap­pearing, so that the report of the demise of American folklore, as Mark Twain said about the report of his own death, “has been greatly exaggerated.” In a general sense we can say that some types of folklore (such as folk drama) are nearly extinct in the United States; some types survive vigorously in quite ancient forms (such as superstitions); some types have been revived for a popular audience (folk dances and songs); and some types are still being invented along contemporary lines (jokes) [1, p.231].

To assert that folklore is regularly being created and transmit­ted in contemporary American culture is to suggest that “the folk” must now exist in a modern guise. While most attempts to char­acterize the sources of folklore have emphasized isolation, lack of sophistication, and groups with relative homogeneity, judg­ing from the materials that folklorists collect and study, such qualities are certainly not essential to fostering folklore. On the contrary, folklore flourishes among some of the most sophisti­cated and mobile Americans—teen-agers, entertainers, ath­letes, professors, and members of the armed forces. Strict preconceived notions of who “the folk” are have led to much disputing in folklore research when energy might better have been devoted to field work and comparative studies to learn just how folklore actually is developed and put into circulation. To begin such studies, no better definition of “folk” would seem necessary than “anyone who has folklore.” [6, p.173]

 

Thus in the second chapter we have come to the following conclusion:

2.1 The American folklore is a fundamental creation of many Nations. Indian culture has developed at a high enough level. Even before the advent of America's first white people there existed a beautiful and rich culture of the native Indians. The American folklore gives us an objective and friendly panorama of American life. We can not talk about American folklore, not including in it the folklore of immigrants.

2.2 Studying of the American folklore is a young discipline and so a little studied. Still there are no exact classifications and sistematization of the American folklore. The myth receives in-depth examination. Also the main questions are origin and folklore development, and what factors influenced it. So different areas of researches are engaged in studying of folklore.

2.3 The American folklore took over some of the features of European legends and fairy motifs. Europeans moved their religious views to tribes of Indians, who believed in the supernatural. Legend is an individual creativity of the different nations. But similarities are not only between people, located on the same continent. The similarities are observed in the fairy tales and legends between Europeans and Indians. There are many legends spread through immigrants and have changed over time and have changed over time and became more fit the new location.

2.4 Thanks to Indian tribes was formed a unique culture, which has no equal. It was formed for centuries and from time to time was influenced by the immigrants and foreigners. The great influence was exerted on the culture, language and religion.

The culture of the American colonies was based on face-to-face oral communication – despite growing numbers of books, newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and almanacs.

2.5 In contemporary conditions, folklore in many respects ceased to perform its original normative - regulatory functions. However, it is saved and continues to play a role in the culture in general, and in the modern everyday culture. Folklore developed and oriented to contemporary standards, manifests itself in music, literature and culture.

 

CONCLUSION

In this work we considered the American folklore since its origin to the present. We found out that the American folklore at present is the greatest base of beliefs, traditions and legends of different nations. For many centuries it has developed and incorporated the best feature of different nations thus keeping its original uniqueness.

The American folklore is unique by the fact that includes a special spirit of freedom, which was presented to it by Indians. Only in this Land could be created such independented and invincible people.

The Age of Exploration encouraged wild stories and vivid fantasies, for truth itself was wonderful. Twin images rose about America that would persist across the continental frontier, the conceits of an Earthly Paradise and a Howling Wilderness, and the wake of these images threw up a spume of fabulous tales.

Images of heroes created for a long time became an example for imitation. Fantastic heroes, the fearless and persevering purposes in achievement, and their adventures admired people, awekened in them good feelings and hatred to all dark, mercenary, unfair. Combat life of epic heroes reminded of the difficult and heroic past of the nation. brought up in the people's pride in their Homeland, love for her, and called on the fight against foreign invaders.

Various phenomena of nature and social life in the minds of ancient people personified in the images of good and evil creatures which help people or hurt. People have always dreamed of a victory over the forces of evil, they believed in the ultimate victory over them. This belief due to the victory of fairytale characters monsters and evil wizards.

There is a significant number of preserved oral and written works, which prove that in spite of the fact that the American folklore had been subject to considerable influence, it kept the original features. But most importantly it reflects the spirit of its nations and continues to evolve with it, finding reflection in the contemporary art forms. The folklore is permanently present in all art works, even if we do not see it. The folklore reflects history of the country, the whole life experience of the ancestors and forms the mentality of its people.

The old folklore goes from oral existence; like all other areas of spiritual culture of a men and his art, it has acquired a new form of distribution - through books, radio, and television.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

1. J. H.Brunvand. The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction,- Norton, 1998. 640 p.

2.David J. Boorstin. The Chicago History of American Civilization, - University of Chicago P, 1968. 247 p.

3. Richard M. Dorson. Handbook of American Folklore, Indiana University Press, 1986. 584 p.

4. Richard M. Dorson. American Folklore, - University of Chicago Press, 1961. 350 p.

5. Richard M. Dorson. America in Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present, - Pantheon Book, 1973. 336 p.

6. Roger L. Nichols. American Indians in United States History, - University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. 288 p.

7. Roger L. Nichols. The American Indians: past and present, - University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. 401 p.

8. Robert Baron. American public folklore history issues challenges, - New York, 2008. 22 p.

9. Linda S. Watts. Encyclopedia of American folklore, - Facts On File, 2007. 468 p.

10. Richard M. Dorson. A theory for American folklore, - Indiana University, 2009. 215 p.

11. Simon J. Bronner. Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition, - Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 283p

12. Kenneth L Untiedt, Ed. Folklore: In All of Us, in All We Do, - University of North Texas Press, 2006. 298 p.

13.Charlie T. McCormick, Kim Kennedy White. Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art, - ABC-CLIO, 2011. 1287 p.

14. Simon J. Bronner. American Children's Folklore, - August House, 1988. 281 p.

15. David Pickering. Dictionary of Folklore, - Facts on File, 2000. 324 p.

16. Levette J. Davidson. A guide to American folklore, - Greenwood Press, 1969. 132 p.

 

 

 

 




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