Lore & Learning
The British Folklorists: A History.
by Richard M. Dorson.
University of Chicago Press. 518 pp. $17.95.
Peasant Customs and Savage Myths, 2 volumes.
by Richard M. Dorson.
University of Chicago Press. 751 pp. $22.00.
There are many anthropologists at work today but few folklorists. With the exception of the efforts of a few American academicians, folklore seems to have run its course so far as intellectual or cultural pretensions are concerned, and the pursuit is now back in the hands of the amateur enthusiasts, where it all began in England three centuries ago. Precisely because the study of folklore has flourished and declined (it was yet another casualty of the First World War), it is now possible to render a retrospective judgment on its activities and accomplishments. Richard Dorson, professor of history and folklore and director of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University, and one of the few scholars with the requisite overall knowledge of the field, has set himself this task. His effort, the first comprehensive history of British folklore ever written, is crammed with information that will be useful to anyone interested in 19th-century intellectual history, particularly the origins of anthropology in England; in the final analysis, however, it falls short of the mark.
Like Hercules, folklore has always found its strength in its contact with the earth, that is, with the “lore” that its workers have turned up; perhaps because of this naturally empirical cast, it has always depended upon other disciplines for its key metaphors (e.g., evolution, “survivals”) and general theoretical formulations. One would think, then, that any account of folklore’s rise and fall would necessarily touch on many interesting questions in modern intellectual and social history, for folklore has been deeply involved in the formulation of many key ideas, such as the “folk” (obviously), the primitive, social evolution, and the origins and nature of myth and religion. Unfortunately, Professor Dorson, perhaps out of professional piety, has elected to write a collective biography—note the title—of his specialty and not a critical history. This is not to say that he abstains from passing judgment on the men and work he discusses, but the biographical method he employs—although doubtless easing the task of ordering the masses of material—has acted to swamp many of the most interesting questions in a welter of relatively unimportant personalities and details. Moreover, as a result of the chronological scheme, many important controversies become fragmented, with bits and pieces scattered throughout the successive biographies of the eminent folklorists, necessitating a certain amount of repetition to remind the reader of the part played by some other scholar already mentioned.
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A more serious lapse is Professor Dorson’s failure to consider folklore as part of the larger cultural history of the modern world. Instead, he has generally been content to focus on the vicissitudes of folklore itself, treating them as if they were mostly independent of broader movements; the result is that only occasionally has he concerned himself with setting folklore in the cultural context that gave it its meaning and raison d’être.
An example: the word “folklore” was coined in 1846 by an English antiquary named William John Thorns to cover the large and otherwise miscellaneous group of ceremonies, customs, stories, proverbs, “superstitions,” etc., that made up the fabric of the culture of the British lower classes. The idea of folklore, as echoed in the term itself, is thus deeply and problematically implicated in class relationships in mid-Victorian England: “they” are the folk, and “we” (middle-class scholars) study how they live at least in part because their lives, though lacking in amenities, seem somehow to be richer and more flavorful than our own. One is immediately reminded of Disraeli’s famous remark, made in 1845, only the year before Thoms’s coinage, that two separate nations—the rich and the poor—mutually ignorant of one another, were inhabiting the one England. Not only were the upper classes oppressing the nether orders economically but they were studying them too (the analogy to the colonial situation of poor blacks in America, with certain whites becoming experts on black “life styles,” might be noted in passing). One may perhaps see the folklorists all unconsciously acting as scouts in the van of the main army of journalists and sociologists that were soon to arrive and begin the full-scale investigation of the poor that obsessed late-Victorian England. I do not mean to imply that the factory system and Chartism are the keys to the discussion of folklore in the 1840’s, but certainly the particular context enriches any such examination. Professor Dorson is simply oblivious to the ideological content that his subject might possess.
Another example: in the most obvious sense the study of folklore could not have mushroomed to the extent that it did in the last third of the 19th century had conditions not been propitious. I refer first to the fact that post-Darwinian England was passing through a major spiritual crisis, and that people were anxiously seeking information or attitudes that could help them understand religion and its proper place in life. Folklore, or the folkloristic study of “primitive” religion, it was believed, could shed some light on the subject; as a result, even quite technical discussions between folklorists enjoyed substantial audiences. For example, Andrew Lang and Max Müller carried on a battle that lasted twenty-five years over the question of whether mythology was best understood philologically or anthropologically. Their polemic was conducted in general (not scholarly) magazines, and their frequent books were brought out by commercial publishers who could count on vigorous sales. Folklore mattered then as never again.
Another factor that propelled the comparative study of primitive religion by folklorists was the great imperial push by Britain and the other European powers in the second half of the century. Much of the data analyzed by the scholars back home came from traders and missionaries who followed the flag to the ends of the earth and then settled down, learned the native language, and proceeded to send back detailed (albeit often biased) reports. Most of the late-Victorian folklorists, believing as they did that the human mind was subject to the immutable laws of evolution, used these reports to unravel the mysteries of the “savage mind.” It was therefore a fortunate happenstance, to say the least, for the Colonial Office to find the writings of these folklorists ready to hand when it became necessary to train young District Officers; by the end of the century Whitehall was giving its men cram courses in anthropology before they went out to shoulder the white man’s burden.
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Lest I seem to be implying that the only satisfactory approach to the study of the history of folklore (or of any social science) is from an ideological point of view, let me hasten to note at least one important way in which Professor Dorson’s book is superior to the several histories of anthropology with which I am familiar. The tendency of scientists who attempt histories of their own disciplines is inherently Whiggish. That is, because scientists as a rule value work in their fields by the standard of its usefulness in solving problems—in short, by what might be called its operational “truth content”—they tend when writing history to assess the contributions of past workers by how closely they came to what is now accepted as scientific doctrine. The result is that the history of science in the hands of such writers tends to look like a straight highway that leads inexorably from the past up to the present (and the “truth”), and from which meander innumerable paths that go nowhere. These dead ends are, of course, “errors.” Thus it is difficult to find in a history of chemistry a discussion of the “phlogiston” hypothesis that is anything but condescending or derisive. Rarely is an attempt made by such historians to feel their way into the minds of the proponents of phlogiston and figure out what the latter thought they were doing and why, and what light that information might shed on the real nature of scientific discovery. The phlogiston people were wrong and Lavoisier was right; that’s all you need to know.
As anthropology, along with the other social sciences, has striven in the 20th century for the recognition and status accorded a science, its historians too have not been immune from this positivist attitude. It is therefore hard to find a sympathetic word for the likes of Andrew Lang except that he suppressed error in the form of Max Müller, or even more for Sir James Frazer, whose brand of naive, rationalistic, belletristic evolutionism is anathema to today’s anthropologists. Anyone unlucky enough to have lived in the prefunctionalist, pre-Malinowskian Urzeit deserves the outer darkness to which history has consigned him. Here Professor Dorson’s inclusiveness and lack of ideological partisanship are clearly advantages, for he is at his best in explaining and analyzing, in their own terms, and without deprecating, the complicated controversies that raged so fiercely and protractedly among folklorists. To any future historian of the social sciences, so long as he is not a deep-dyed positivist, The British Folklorists will be absolutely necessary, if not entirely sufficient, for writing his introductory chapters. This future historian might also find it handy, although by no means necessary in view of Professor Dorson’s full bibliographies, to have by his side the two companion volumes of extracts from source documents called Peasant Customs and Savage Myths that Professor Dorson has also edited and that are designed to be read along with The British Folklorists.
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