Necessity and Freedom in the Tradition Process
Dorothy Noyes
The Ohio State University
noyes.10@osu.edu(Note: The following paper is as delivered on January 23rd, 2010, at the Institute forAdvanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo. A corrected and properly
footnoted version is forthcoming.)

It is a great honor to be asked to speak to you today, and I would like to thank the
University of Tokyo, the Folklore Society of Japan, and the Society of Living Folklorefor sponsoring my visit. I'd like to give special thanks to Professor Suga Yutaka, Dr.
Hirayama Miyuki, and Dr. Konagaya Hideyo, for making my visit possible, translating
my remarks, and hosting me so generously. I also thank Dr. Michael Dylan Foster for his
help with our conversation today. And I thank all of you for coming today.
I would also like to convey to you all the greetings and the good wishes of theAmerican Folklore Society. It has been very exciting to us to hear about the renewed
vitality of Japanese folklore studies. We are eager to learn more about the work ourJapanese colleagues are doing: we were very glad to have a panel of Japanese folklorists
at our annual meeting last year, and we hope that more of you will be able to attend ournext meeting this coming October in Nashville, the home of country music.
Folklorists around the world find it difficult to defend the idea of a “living
folklore.” In the West, the very concept of folklore was shaped in the modern period todeclare certain practices pre-modern or obsolete. If anthropology addressed the so-called"primitive," the remote Other of Europe's colonies, the study of folklore claimed todescribe the intimate Other, the Other within: peasants and lower classes, minority
populations, non-Western peoples, women, and children. Folklore itself was described ascultural leftovers, maybe charming, maybe dangerous, but doomed in any case to slow
death. The idea of folklore as survival gave modernizers--state officials, factory owners,
educators, clergy, and others--the authority to suppress or transform any practices that

seemed to interfere with the modernization process, and to exercise control over thepeople described as "folk."
But we can now see the limitations of the modernizers' gaze. In the twentiethcentury, innumerable world crises revealed both the fragility of modernity and theongoing vitality of tradition and “traditional” actors. In politics, we have seen the fall offascist and communist regimes, the rise of civil rights movements in liberal societies andof anticolonial movements in empires, and more recently the resurgence of nationalisms
and populisms and the flowering of globalized youth cultures and social movements.
Technology has also surprised us, creating unpredictability instead of predictability andfostering opportunities for participation instead of turning us all into passive recipients ofmass culture. Japanese popular culture and Japanese youth culture, which haveinfluenced the whole world, offer ample evidence that economic globalization andtechnological modernization do not lead to homogeneity.
In the United States, folklorists trying to adjust the field's ideas to these
unexpected developments began to talk in the 1960s about the creativity in folklore: Dan
Ben-Amos famously declared that folklore was not inert survival, but "artistic
communication in small groups." Ever since the 1960s we have been talking about theimportance of individual artists and their active revisions of both folk tradition and massculture. We have talked about how new media and channels of communication, from thetelephone to Facebook, help folklore to circulate. We have talked about the emergence of
new folklore forms. We have talked about the past as a conscious selection and recreation in the present. We have worked very hard to show that the people who get called"folk" have dignity, intelligence, and agency. We have changed our methods of study toprivilege not the movement of cultural forms, but their use and meaning to actors in a
specific context, turning from comparison to ethnography. We have also worked to create
active connections among university professors, professionals in museums, archives, andnonprofit organizations who create public presentations for general audiences, andcommunity scholars--those people who work to document and interpret their own
traditions. All of these kinds of people come together in the American Folklore Society,and this is both rewarding and difficult.

These changes have been of great importance in reviving a field of study that once
seemed to be doomed to disappear along with its object. And they find support from a
broad social interest in popular creativity. As the imperfections of modern institutions
continue to reveal themselves, everyone is eager to explore alternative sources of social
knowledge, whether these are called "indigenous," "traditional," "grassroots," "opensource," "community-based," "peer to peer," "sustainable," or something else.
Chroniclers of contemporary culture such as Yochai Benkler argue that new networking
technologies have allowed the emergence of a "new folk culture" in which ordinary
individuals can communicate freely with one another and participate in collective cultural
creation across vast social differences.
Folklorists clearly have a vast field before them for ethnographic exploration. We
need to study the cultural forms developed in these new social networks, which become
communities of affiliation with their own conventions of communication, badges ofidentity, and characteristic genres of expression. You in Japan have perhaps the best fieldsite in the world for this kind of research. You can study cultural invention in the context
of a wealthy and well-educated society with both strong, rich native traditions and wellinformed access to the cultures of the world. So I hope that all of you are out doing
ethnographies on the streets of Tokyo.
But based on my American experience of our discipline, I would suggest to youthat studying new folklore forms is only one third of the work that folklorists need to be
doing. Our turn towards the new in the United States has been affected by certain
American habits of thought, deeply rooted in our political and economic tradition ofliberalism. Many of you may know from hearing the speeches of our presidents that
"freedom" and "choice" are two of the most powerfully emotional words in American
public discourse, so powerful that they can be used to justify war and economic
aggression. They are associated strongly with individualism, and the liberal idea of theindividual as a rational actor motivated by self-interest.
In asserting the dignity of the folk, American folklorists have been eager to show
women, children, minorities, and lower classes as rational actors who exercise freedom inmaking conscious choices and individual decisions. This is not surprising, since we haveoften participated in liberation struggles. When people sang old African Americanspirituals in the Civil Rights movement, they were singing for freedom. When people indifficult circumstances tell stories they are imagining a free space of fantasy andsometimes arguing for a free space of action in reality.
But we have to be careful not to imagine away the constraints of reality. No one,however educated or wealthy, is a wholly conscious rational actor making completely
independent decisions and communicating them with perfect clarity. All of us speak
through inherited languages and work with limited material resources. All of us learn
how to behave inside a social world and respond to social influences and pressures. All of
us often act without thinking, act irresponsibly, tell lies, repeat old habits. We are all
traditional. Our freedom and our energy have limits. Like other Americans, American
folklorists sometimes fail to recognize the burden of necessity.
There are two other paths for folklore research to take that can balance anoveremphasis on new cultural creation in our wealthy consumer societies. The second is
one I will not discuss today, because I and many other people have written a great deal
about it. Folklorists have much to say about the history of how cultures and people getcategorized. How did the label of "traditional" get attached to some practices, and"modern" to others? What happens when we imagine that some people are more
traditional than others? What happens to practices that get labelled as "folklore" or"intangible cultural heritage" and begin to receive special attention and regulation?
Because we have carefully studied the role of folklorists in encouraging and popularizing
nationalist movements in the past, we are in a good position to understand how conceptsof culture are being manipulated in contemporary economic initiatives and politicalconflicts.
The third path is the one I wish to discuss today. It is the most difficult part toinvestigate, the most tied up with our contaminated disciplinary history, and the easiest toforget. Instead of abandoning the materials we used to study, we need to return to themwith a different kind of attention. How can we talk about cultural creation that does not
happen under conditions of free choice, material abundance, and technologicalenhancement? What do we do with those old peasant cultures, premodern cultures,
everything we call tradition? Can we still learn anything from them or do we just put
them in a glass case and call them heritage?

I want to suggest that we go back and re-study the things we call folklore: the oldstories, songs, artifacts, and rituals, as they were practiced historically and as they arepracticed today, and that we not forget marginal and rural and impoverished communities
in our new enthusiasm for the creativity of the metropolis. Instead, let's remember thatwhat middle-class people in rich democratic societies think of as normal--that individuals
have many available options about their lives, and social and political freedom to choose
among those options--is in fact historically and sociologically exceptional. Most people
in most parts of the world in most periods of history, including today, feel their lives
guided by necessity into certain paths with limited forks to them. Within those constraints,
what kind of creative freedom can they exercise?

Let me first give you a very brief account of a very complicated example. The
tradition that I have studied in fullest detail is a civic festival in Catalonia, thenortheastern region of Spain around Barcelona. It is called the Patum, from the sound of
the big drum that plays throughout its five days, and it has been performed once a year
without interruption in an industrial mountain town called Berga since the earlyseventeenth century. The core of the festival is a series of dances performed in the town's
main square several times in the course of five days. The dances feature different masked
and sculpted figures:a combat of Turks and Christian knights on horseback

a combat of angels and devils



two wild mules with firecrackers in their mouths, which chase people andchallenge authority

a crowned eagle that bows to the church and bows to the city hall before
performing a solemn dance

giants dressed like kings and queens that waltz together

two sets of dwarves, dressed like the lower classes but dancing to the same
melodies as the giantsa massive dance of devils wearing firecrackers on their heads and tails

and a final dance of the entire public, with the mule and the giants participating.

Today the festival has a designation from UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oraland Intangible Heritage of Humanity; it is regulated by a board appointed by the city, andofficial presentations explain that it is a Catalan tradition with pre-Christian historicalroots, instituted formally in the Middle Ages, unique to the town of Berga, maintained bypopular passion, and a symbol of Berguedan identity shared by all its people.
That story is a partial truth, masking something far more complex. It cannot be
proven that the festival masks existed in pre-Christian times, the medieval document theycite is a fake, and different elements were added to the festival at different times, withkey periods of creation and revitalization in the early seventeenth century, the 1890s, andthe 1960s. Some dances have disappeared from the festival and others, like the mule andthe devils, have multiplied because they were popular. Music has been added or replaced.
Although the combination of dances is unique to the town of Berga, and several
features of the figures are distinctive, both the different figures and the general festival
type are common across Catalonia. Only the eagle is unique to Catalonia; all the otherfigures are found with variations in many parts of Europe, the Mediterranean, and beyond.
The dances migrated along with people, and provincial towns like Berga copied
prestigious figures like the eagle from more important cities. The festival was not always
maintained by popular enthusiasm: during the Franco regime the city had to work hard tofind enough dancers, whereas since the 1970s there have been many more volunteers thanopportunities. In Berga, as everywhere else, the idea of a unique, ancient, autochthonous
folk tradition is a fantasy.
The Patum is shared by all the people of Berga: this is true, at least until heavy
immigration complicated the picture in the 1990s. But it does not mean what you might
think. Some people like the giants, and some people like the mule; some people will
follow one mule but not the other. Some people spend the whole festival looking downfrom a balcony, wearing their best clothes, while others want to be in the middle of theplaza, wearing jeans and a sweaty flannel shirt to protect themselves from falling sparks.
A few people are concerned with the symbolism, while for more it is important to getvery drunk and very tired.
The Patum began as a religious celebration on the Catholic holiday of Corpus
Christi, but the Catholic framework is important only to a small minority, and even thepriests disagree about whether it is a Christian festival or not. The official story of what
the Patum means changes with every political moment. The figures of the Patum are
flexible enough to have been interpreted as the submission of nature to the Holy
Sacrament, the triumph of traditionalism against liberalism, the triumph of liberalism
against traditionalism, Berga's joyful submission to the king, the free Catalan souldefeating the closed and oppressive spirit of Castilian Spain, Spanish fidelity rejecting
immoral Communism, and the rebirth of a people from a long oppression. One says whatis necessary for the festival to be permitted to continue, and even under the Franco
regime the Patum was not only tolerated but encouraged.
The Patum does not have a fixed meaning. A civic festival has to be inclusive,
and Berga contains manufacturers and factory workers, peasants and shopkeepers,
republicans and royalists, Catalan regionalists and Spanish nationalist, natives andimmigrants, men and women, young people and old people. No single interpretation
could ever be acceptable to all of these social positions. The Patum also has no single
author or source: it is not a top-down invention of the powerful and it is not a
spontaneous expression of resistance from below. The Patum has had thousands ofcreators over its four centuries of existence. The Church encouraged it, then tried torepress it. The city paid for the masks and the dancers, but the miners and peasants andadolescents who danced changed the emphasis of the dances, so that devils far outnumber
the angels. Manufacturers put in money to make new dwarves and giants. Lawyers wrote
histories and priests wrote poems to explain what the festival meant. In the 1930s
different political parties created new mules, each with a different focus for its aggressive
behavior. One band played the dances slowly and solemnly; another played them fast andwild. All of these contributions provoked arguments. All of them shaped the complex
organism of the festival.
So there is no "natural" community underneath traditional festival. Festivals result
from the mutual accommodation of social actors through continuous and difficult
negotiation. The great festivals--think of Carnival in Brazil--come out of conflictive
societies in political frameworks that are not liberal. People converse in symbolic
performance because free speech is not available. And they must develop forms incommon--shared genres like festival or epic--because they have no choice but to find away of living together. A harmonious society does not need festival. A conflictive society
uses festival to rehearse and reflect on social coexistence.
The Patum has many masks because Berga has many differences. Political,
economic, and social tensions have accumulated in the symbolism of the Patum as itstabilized itself over time. Some of the Patum elements are aligned, like the elegant
upper-class giants and the middle-class dwarves that imitate them. Some of the elements
are polar opposites, like the violent plebeian mule and the lordly eagle. Some of thedances are choreographed, with fixed music and a defined space of performance; others
move freely through the crowd to the sound of a drum. There is order and there istransgression. Everyone has a point of entry into the festival; everyone is represented.
The Patum offers a symbolic combat among the diverse elements that make up thecommunity. But it is a fight in which nobody dies. When the Christians beat the Turks
there is always one who escapes, and the devils who are killed by the angels in the second
dance return in much larger numbers at the end of the evening. The Patum educates not
through words but through the body. The dances are endlessly repeated in the course of
five days, during which no one sleeps or stops dancing. Fired by drink and drumbeats,
the crowding of bodies, and the thick falling sparks of slow-burning firecrackers,
townspeople begin to feel pain as pleasure, and their ideological divisions dissolve incommon bodily experience. The Patum teaches Berguedans that they will never love one
another, but also that no one is ever going away. Or as they say, "No morirem units, peròmorirem reunits." We won't die united, but we’ll die together. Drunken and wild,
beautiful and ecstatic, the Patum looks like freedom. But the Patum is about necessity.

Now I want to give you a more detailed example of how folklore is created insituations of constraint. We can see the process of traditional communities in the
microcosm of the prison. Although enclosed environments such as prisons and refugee
camps are hardly intended to foster collective cultural innovation, their conditions areoften favorable to it. People of different backgrounds with diverse knowledge are thrust
together in a situation of scarce resources, existential desperation, and enforced leisure.
In the harshest cases, human ingenuity must be devoted exclusively to thechallenge of physical survival. But in many cases where basic subsistence is provided for,

displaced persons face other challenges. They must salvage what they can of theirindividual and collective past. They must find an immediate occupation in the present,
and a way out of confinement. And they must learn to imagine a future without
guarantees.
These common problems routinely foster the rapid spread of religious, political,
and self-education movements inside prisons. They also inspire more specifically cultural
kinds of expression. Some, like the musical performances in the concentration camps ofNazi Germany, were imposed by the captors but simultaneously used by the prisoners tocultivate hope and express resistance. Others, like the reinvention of the Irish language
among political prisoners in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, were unsuccessfully repressedby the prison authorities. Some cultural expressions were responses to genocide: in Thai
refugee camps in the 1970s, performers of Cambodian court dance taught their elite art toa wider population in order to save it from disappearance. In refugee camps in Jordan in
the 1980s, Palestinians collected photographs, maps and oral histories to create "village
books" commemorating the villages that had been taken over by Israeli settlers in 1948.
In the 1920s, Chinese immigrants awaiting hearings for entry into California wrote
poems on the walls of the prison of Angel Island expressing their frustration andhomesickness.
My colleague William Westerman has studied a more recent case of artistic
creation among Chinese refugees awaiting immigration hearings in the US.1 In June 1993,
a dilapidated steamer ship called the Golden Venture was wrecked in a storm off of New
York Harbor after a journey of many months from China, along the African coast, andacross the Atlantic. The nearly three hundred passengers were Chinese, mostly from
Fujian province, seeking entry into the United States. Many made claims for legal asylum
based on persecution in China because of Christianity or violations of the one-childpolicy. Ninety-five of these men were placed in the minimum-security wing of a prison in
York, Pennsylvania, where they spent the next three years awaiting appeal hearings after

1

My account of the prison art is taken from his Fly to Freedom: The Art of the Golden
Venture Refugees (New York: Museum of Chinese in the Americas, 1996). See also theshort film of the same title, produced by Barry Dornfeld.

their initial applications for asylum were denied. While in prison they began to makesculptures out of folded paper.
The supposed founder of this prison tradition is as shadowy a figure as the poet
Homer: it is said that he was a man who was later moved to another prison, but no one
can give his name. The story is that other men noticed him folding torn sheets of paper
into triangles, stacking the triangles together, and shaping them into a simple bird
according to a craft technique called zhizha, used in China primarily to make funeraryobjects.2 Out of boredom, they began to imitate him, using waste paper in the prison to
make birds and other forms they had seen in China, such as good-luck pineapples.
Soon the men, few of whom could speak any English, realized that the paperfolding could become a means of communicating more fully with the prison guards andthanking their court-appointed lawyers. The next form they taught themselves to makewas an American eagle, its wings and tail made from folded paper, its body of papiermâché made from toilet paper. Then, by rolling paper into tubes instead of folding it into
triangles, they learned how to make bird cages, complete with movable doors—sometimes with the word “China” inscribed on the cage. The eagles, inside the cages,
were joined by Chinese-language poems and such mottos as “Fly to Freedom.” With
plastic spoons they learned how to add texture to toilet papier-mâché, sculpting featherson their eagles and eventually shaping a Statue of Liberty. The cardboard boxes frominstant ramen noodles provided stronger material for larger architectural constructions
such as pagodas and towers. The men were not permitted scissors, so they cut paper withthe edges of the stiff subscription forms stapled into the magazines.
The prison chaplain and, later, the prison authorities were supportive of thisactivity, which kept the men occupied and in tolerable spirits as their detention prolonged
itself. With the aid of a church-based support movement, the chaplain supplied them withmagazines, glue, and colored pens. Eventually, the prison authorities permitted thesupervised use of children’s plastic safety scissors. The church support group began tomarket the art outside the prison to raise money for the men’s defense.
The art developed through teaching and mutual observation inside the prison. The
prison wing was divided into "pods," each containing several cells. Individuals worked in2

I thank OSU graduate student Levi Gibbs for investigating the Chinese context for me.

the common space of the pod, while other men stood by and watched them. New
creations were displayed in the windows of the pods, so that men in other pods could
look across the corridor and see them. Pods developed distinctive specialties incompetition with one another. As a new technique was created, some individuals set
themselves to perfecting it, while others continued to experiment. Boredom, internal
rivalry, and the desire to communicate with and please the audience outside the prison
encouraged the proliferation of different designs through the two and a half years inwhich the art was practiced. The large Chinese architectural forms like pagodas were
found to take up take up too much time and material for the need at hand, and to be too
big for the aesthetic scale of the medium, which favored miniatures. More playful or
purely decorative animals and plants replaced them. The magazines that were the sourceof paper also provided new design ideas: the men looked at advertisements for decorative
vases and figurines and copied them in their papier-mâché designs. From 1993 to 1996
the men created as many as 10,000 paper sculptures, with a dozen men as the principal
artists in the community.
"On a small scale,” notes longtime observer Bill Westerman, “village life in theprison became a map of human creativity and folk tradition.” But, he adds, that should
not delude us into thinking that the men were at ease or happy: the art was also a way of
struggling with severe depression. "The development and complexity of the art are
extracted from the utter waste of lives needlessly on hold.” The US Immigration andNaturalization Service was then, and is still today, woefully understaffed and inefficient,and political conflict over immigration policy made the Golden Venture an especiallycontroversial case. By the end of 1996 all but two of the men, separated from theirfamilies, hopeless of release or resolution to their cases, had stopped making art.
The Golden Venture art emphasized the desire for freedom: the men dramatized
their own situation by designing caged eagles. And making the art was itself an exercise
of freedom within the severe constraints of necessity, including the men's own
psychological limitations. The Golden Venture case shows us in microcosm how
vernacular creativity works. Traditional knowledge is applied to new materials in a newsituation. The form develops through mutual observation, innovation, and competition.
Inclusion and prestige within the tradition result from a commitment to participation andthen from skill. Technical innovations respond to the challenges posed by the specificmaterials, their limitations, and their scarcity. Aesthetic and symbolic innovation are bornout of playfulness that arises from boredom and frustration and from the powerful need tocommunicate by any means available, since the official channel was both severely
restricted and ineffective. These conditions--scarcity, frustration, and constraint--arehighly concentrated in prison life, but they are also characteristic of what we call"traditional communities." They generate poems, stories, music, pottery, textiles, festivals,
and everything else that we call folklore.
The Golden Venture case also shows us what happens to traditional art once it
begins to circulate in a liberal consumer society. The men's case received a great deal of
publicity in the mid-1990s, and, unusually for the United States, their predicament
excited sympathy among people of widely different political persuasions. Because somewere Christian and some claimed persecution for refusing abortion, conservative
Protestant church groups rallied to their cause. On the left, they received attention from
activists for refugee rights and public folklorists interested in traditional art as a tool ofsocial justice. Their art and their story were featured in an article in Life magazine and innews stories on the prestigious television programs Sixty Minutes and The MacNeilLehrer News Hour. An exhibition of the art was mounted at the Museum of Chinese in
the Americas in New York City in 1996, and later shown at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington DC. A selection of the art was also taken to the Pacific Coast Origami
Conference in San Francisco in Autumn 1997. Much later, in 2006, a documentary,"Golden Venture," played at several US film festivals, and the trial of one of the ChineseAmerican traffickers brought the case renewed attention.
What were the results of all this publicity? It was of limited use in easing theprisoners' situation. Through the sale of the sculptures, about $100,000 was raised for the
men's legal defense. 38 of the 286 Golden Venture passengers eventually were granted
asylum, based on proof of forced abortion or sterilizations, and some juveniles werereleased to foster homes. Exceptionally, thanks to efforts by the folklorist Bill Westerman
and a volunteer legal team, five of the principal paper artists were granted green cards
under a special legal provision for "artists of extraordinary ability," designed originallyfor elite performers like Mikhail Baryshnikov and Yo-Yo Ma. A judge later overturnedone of these rulings, claiming that folk art was collective and did not demand
extraordinary ability.
The rest of the men had less satisfactory outcomes. Ten died in the shipwreck. At
least 99 gave up their appeal attempts and submitted to deportation. A dozen went tocountries in Latin America. Many more disappeared into the population while awaiting
trial. In February 1997, a week after an embarrassing front-page story in the New YorkTimes and the sending of two paper sculptures to President Clinton, the Clinton
administration finally pardoned the fifty-three men remaining in prison, an ambiguous
legal position that allowed them temporary work permits but still left them subject toarbitrary deportation. Today, sixteen years later, many of these men have formed families
and own successful businesses (including two restaurants in my own city of Columbus,Ohio) but their legal cases are still unresolved. One or two kept making art for a few
years after release in the hope of selling it, but the tradition essentially disappeared
among the men once they dispersed and there was no more use for it.
But that is not the whole story. If you google "Golden Venture Folding," you willfind more than 8000 hits. The Origami Resource Center, Wikipedia, and other websites
will give you photographs and technical instructions for making your own folded-paper
figures like those made in the Pennsylvania prison. It seems that when the art was shownin 1997 at the West Coast origami show, it awoke an enthusiastic response among
amateurs of paper-folding. Within a year, three picture books had been published inJapan and one in the US, where the practice became known as 3-D (three-dimensional)
origami. Kits for making it were also being sold. In this decade, Golden Venture folding
has become popular in Romania, where several websites feature the technique. It appears
on other sites in Brazil. In 2007, a Japanese art student at Iowa State University used tothe technique to make a working chair out of 35,000 pieces of paper, in order to show theuse of recycled materials and also to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. Someof the older sites mention that the technique was developed by illegal Chinese immigrants
in prison seeking to raise funds for their defense, but in most cases the phrase "Golden
Venture" appears without any explanation. The names of Yan You-Yi, Wu Luo Zhong,Zheng Xin Bin, Chen Fen Hou, and the other prison artists have long since disappeared in
the transmission of the practice.

In short, in contemporary society art forms can circulate much more freely thanhuman beings can, and they can circulate independently of binding social relationships.
This kind of freedom is not inherently good or bad, but it seems to me that it changes thenature of folklore. Often it encourages the flowering of art forms. Origami enthusiasts aremaking paper creations that would never have been tried by the Golden Venture prisoners.
Popular music poses a more conspicuous example: Japanese musicians have made major
contributions to musical forms developed in places like Harlem or Jamaica. Many art
forms are now cultivated not by communities of necessity but by communities of choice,people from around the world who love the tradition, who devote their skills to it freely,
and who bring a diverse range of knowledge and cultural influences to its practice. The
traditions are valued as such, without having to be attached to social purposes.
The new communities of necessity do not have much time for making art: poor
people today are migrants working long hours in factories in Mexico or China. The few
people who remain in the traditional communities of necessity--rural areas andindigenous communities around the world--are encouraged to "preserve" their traditions
in order to attract tourists, allowed to be curators rather than creators of "intangible
cultural heritage."
Individuals in any of these situations have a different relationship to their art than
the traditional one. (Of course I am here drawing an ideal distinction for the sake ofclarity.) It is worthwhile here, from my European perspective, to remember the original
definition of tradition in Roman law. Traditio comes from the verb tradere, to pass, and it
referred to a means of transferring property between individuals. Traditio was distinct
from inheritance, based on descent, and distinct from abandonment, which allowed theproperty to go to anyone. In traditio, the owner designated his successor by a physicaltransfer from hand to hand. He passed the property or a symbol of it, such as the key to awarehouse, to the new owner. The transfer had to be a conscious and deliberate act on
both sides.
This to me is a useful image for the transmission of folklore in a traditionalsituation. The hand-to-hand transfer marks a personal relationship of mutual obligation
between giver and receiver. We can take the touch of hands as a metaphor for all of thecontextual knowledge that comes with folklore: how it is to be performed, how it is to be
used, what it is for. The conscious transfer involves responsibility on both sides. The
receiver agrees to take responsibility for the practice. Just as importantly, the giver agrees
to let it go, to give up control. So tradition is not static, but moves forward in time,
remembering at the same time where it came from.
Of course I am not saying that cultural transmission in the context of social
obligation has disappeared entirely, or that it can only happen in the real space ofpremodern communities. But it is less common and less easy in conditions of mobility
and abundant choice. And it is easy for those of us brought up to cherish our freedom toforget that there is value in knowing how to live under constraint: knowing how to sharesocial forms with people we do not like in circumstances that we did not ask for.
It is important, though, for humanity not to lose this knowledge. We are now
learning in frightening ways that consumption has ecological limits. We are also learningthat a society fragmented into communities of choice can fall apart into violence. Because
folklorists have long studied the kind of people who learn how to live with necessity, we
have an important role in helping contemporary society to use its freedoms wisely andconserve them for the future.
I have spoken to you today, as you see clearly, out of my own Euro-American
intellectual tradition. I hope that the activities in the Folklore Society of Japan and theSociety for Living Folklore will make it possible for me and my colleagues to enrich ourunderstanding of folklore through the long tradition of Japanese thinking about art andaesthetics. I look forward to learning from you all.