Material Culture

During the first half of the twentieth century, folklorists tended to confine their studies to (1) orally transmitted lore — especially songs, stories, legends, proverbs, and riddles — (2) certain customary traditions, such as rituals and festivals, and (3) traditions related to belief systems — luck, weather prediction, divination, and the like. Often neglected was the whole realm of human activity concerned with “craft,” the traditional aspects of how objects are made and used.

Influenced by cultural anthropologists, cultural geographers, and European ethnologists, all of whom regularly included objects and the human activities and beliefs associated with them as elements of their studies, folklorists gradually came to accept what has come to be known as “material culture” as an equally valid area for documentation and analysis. Since the 1960s, American folklorists have been energetic in their studies of material culture.

American folklore studies of material culture typically address how objects are designed, made, and used, and what they mean (on various levels) to those who make and use them. Folklorists are also interested in the objects themselves, and in such matters as their shapes and dimensions, the materials from which they are made, their decorative elements, and the variations between different makers and groups, as well as variations over time and place.

Houses, barns, and other traditional buildings constitute a subcategory of material culture known as vernacular architecture. Other objects of interest include baskets, boats, clothing, furniture, metalwork, pottery, and quilts. In general, folklore studies of material culture have favored handmade objects such as these, and craftsmanship itself has been a special focus.

The Archive of Folk Culture has many collections that document material culture. The Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project Collection (1978) includes documentation of the quilting tradition carried on in rural communities along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The Paradise Valley Folklife Project Collection (1978 – 82) includes documentation of numerous objects integral to the rancher’s life in northern Nevada, from boots to branding irons to saddles, all the way to ranch houses and barns. The Pineland’s Folklife Project Collection (1983) includes documentation of the construction and use of traditional New Jersey bird-hunting skiffs. The Grouse Creek Cultural Survey (1985) teamed folklorists with anthropologists, sociologists, architects, and city planners to investigate the relationships among architectural history, folklife, and historic preservation. The Italian-Americans in the West Project Collection (1989 – 91) includes a wealth of information about Italian-American material culture, including vernacular architecture, the traditional oven known as the forno, and various objects associated with family-run wineries. And the Maine Acadian Cultural Survey Project Collection (1991 – 92) includes painstaking documentation of barns and houses that can be used to determine the geographical extent of the Acadian cultural region.

Allied to material culture is folk art, which can be defined as the use of physical items in the production of symbolic and aesthetic works by untrained artists. Folk art takes a variety of forms: painting, sculpture, multimedia displays, and assemblages, as well as the decorative aspects of otherwise utilitarian objects. Hex signs on Pennsylvania Dutch barns, tin man sculptures made by metalworkers, front yard installations and Christmas displays, decorated school lockers, carved gun stocks, and tattoos are but a few examples of this rich vein of traditional expression.

The term folk art is somewhat problematical and has been used to encompass a variety of productions. Folklorists and the owners of art galleries have debated the definition of folk art to an uneasy truce. Gallery owners and many museum curators tend to favor folk art objects that have fine art equivalents, such as painting and sculpture. They customarily showcase the individual image and object rather than the context within which it was made. Words such as naive, self-taught, and individualistic are used to describe these objects, and the exceptional rather than the representative creation is featured. In fact, the folk artist is sometimes characterized as an outsider, visionary, or idiosyncratic, although gallery owners are loath to relinquish the magic word folk in advertising their work.

Just as everyone tells stories, knows the words to at least a few songs, celebrates holidays, and holds certain beliefs, all people practice some form of folk art. The everyday aspects of folk art would include the way people decorate the interiors of their homes or offices, their style of dress and body decoration, their flower gardens, and even their pencil doodlings and graffiti. The title of Kenneth Ames’s book on folk art, Beyond Necessity (1977), goes to the heart of how folk art might be differentiated from crafts. Where crafts speak to the needs of everyday living, folk art speaks to the emotions and beliefs and the need for aesthetic satisfaction. Yet who is to say that the world of art is any less necessary to humanity than the utilitarian world?