Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture by Simon J. BronnerReview by: David E. GayThe Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 113, No. 448 (Spring, 2000), pp. 214-216Published by: American Folklore SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/541296 .

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214 Journal of American Folklore 113 (2000)

that derives from the theory of evolution, lead- ing "to the general expectation that child de- velopment could also be seen as a form of progress and adaptation" (p. 19). At every turn Sutton-Smith refutes this argument, disproves it, or points out that there is not enough evi- dence to substantiate it. But wait: by a neat little ironical twist, Sutton-Smith's conclusive defi- nition of play "as a facsimilization of the strug- gle for survival," whose biological "function is to reinforce the organism's variability in the face of rigidifications of successful adaptation" (p. 231), is, by his own admission, yet another invented form of the rhetoric of progress. The argument that variability is "central to the func- tion of play throughout all species" (p. 221) is based on Stephen Jay Gould's three basic prin- ciples of evolutionary variability as laid out in Gould's Full House: The Spread ofExcellencefrom Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996). I would point out the difference, though, between the progress rhetoric and Sut- ton-Smith's ultimate definition of play as adap- tive variability: Sutton-Smith's view of play's relationship to evolution is that of an ongoing and adaptive reflection, not of a frozen copy or echo that no longer serves any functional pur- pose.

Though he may disagree with certain theo- ries, Sutton-Smith remains an advocate of all disciplines. In The Ambiguity of Play he politely suggests his own arguments and gently supports them but rarely asserts or insists. In his construc- tion of definitions he takes into account the ef- fects of class (see also his 1979 synthesis of the

proceedings of the third Johnson and Johnson Baby Products Company Round Table Con- ference in Play and Learning [New York: Gard- ner Press]), of disciplinary bent, and of culture; indeed, the effect of culture on theory is very much what this book is about.

Of great import here is Sutton-Smith's focus on children, whom he finds to be marginalized in most general approaches to play rhetorics. He calls children "the nonpowerful segment of the population" (p. 116). While recognizing that children are neither a race nor a class apart, Sutton-Smith finds it difficult to ignore that children are somehow in a separate social stra- tum from the rest ofus. Their power plays, their references, their games, songs, jokes, interests, tastes, and fashions, are reflexive and stunningly egocentric. While they are preparing for and

assimilating themselves into a future in the adult world, children are nevertheless functioning on their own terms in their own realm. In the chapter "Child Phantasmagoria," Sutton-Smith suggests a separate rhetoric of the imaginary--a phantasmagorical rhetoric (p. 152)-for children, examining the darker side ofchildren's play that adults would prefer to ignore, being unwilling to admit that it exists. This is a rhetoric that is "invented" by the author, for, although it ex- ists, it is not widely recognized, advocated only in children's literature and children's folklore (p. 171).

The Ambiguity of Play is logical, orderly, and meticulously crafted in its body and in its adornments. Epigraphs to chapters appear to be largely constructs of Sutton-Smith's imagina- tion, "playfully" attributed to barterers familiar and not so familiar (witness the aphorisms ofthe ubiquitous Dr. Frech and his supportive wife). Indeed, Sutton-Smith's approach to his text is in general quite playful, moving easily between the scholarly and the colloquial. But for all its frivolity of language and epigraphs, it is by no means a frivolous work. It is a search for defini- tions, a synthesis, a summary. The hypothesis presented here is complicated and abstruse, the proof complex and convoluted. For a quick summary laid out in plain form, the reader is ad- vised to study the chart on page 215, which maps the seven rhetorics ofplay to their respec- tive histories, functions, forms, players, disci- plines, and scholars. There is also a predictably splendid bibliography. The Ambiguity of Play will not leave undergraduates rolling in the aisles, but it may raise some eyebrows in the academy. After all, "play is the fool that might become king" (p. 213).

Following Tradition: Folklore in the Dis- course of American Culture. By Simon J. Bronner. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 599, illustrations, notes, biblio- graphic essay, references, index.)

DAVID E. GAY Indiana University

By now folklorists must be used to having their work ignored in books about tradition. Mi- chael Kammen's The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American

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Book Reviews 215

Culture (New York: Random House, 1991), for instance, a long and intriguing book on the uses of tradition in American culture, is typical in its almost complete failure to mention folk- lore as either a subject or discipline-only 30 or so pages in a book of over 800. Edward Shils's Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) is even worse. And George Stock- ing's various books and essays on Franz Boas

only rarely mention his connection to the field of folklore. Simon Bronner's Following Tradi- tion stands as a corrective to this tendency, pro- viding a series of essays on the arguments folklorists have had about the uses and mean- ings oftradition from the Gilded Age on.

At the core of the arguments about folklore in the period Following Tradition covers is the opposition ofacademic and applied-is the task of the folklorist to preserve and study folklore or to encourage the use of folklore by writers, folk festivals, and others? This question has caused bitter feuds in the discipline between those who favor the presentation of folklore as materials for use and those who favor the preservation of texts and materials. Alfred Shoemaker, for instance, was critical of Penn- sylvania's first state folklorist, Henry Shoe- maker, becoming "especially annoyed at Henry's invitations to creative writers to elabo- rate on folklore" (p. 333). Alfred Shoemaker insisted on "an ethnological approach" to folk- life studies, and thus he "systematically gath- ered objective data-mostly material and social such as barns, customs, foods, and crafts" in or- der "to record the ordinary and characteristic lifeways of traditional communities," whereas Henry Shoemaker "wanted to record lore to inspire the public with imaginative local narra- tives that recovered America" (p. 333).

The most famous of these disputes was be- tween Benjamin Botkin and Richard Dorson, and Bronner tells the story well. Botkin saw the task of folklore as "restoring the sense of com- munity and continuity to modem life ..., therefore, the folklorist should take the initia- tive, which meant participating and creating new forms of popular culture" (p. 383). For Botkin "folkloristic initiative included reading folklore to children in elementary schools, writing new literature based on folklore, and promotion of folk festivals, all in the name of creating 'understanding and enjoyment' " (pp. 383-384). Botkin also had a very different sense

of what the dynamics of folk tradition were, and what materials should be included, than most ofhis academic critics. Indeed, Botkin

refused to distinguish between what people wrote, what happened in a movie, and what was said on a street corner. For him the stuff and process of folklore were truly protean. Not in the academic's limited sense of an item's being able to move from place to place and redaction to redaction, but in a profounder sense: from words in air to words on a page and back out again, from one meaning here to a vastly different kind ofuse there, from one kind of use here to a vastly different kind of use there. [BruceJackson, quoted in Bronner, p. 385]

Botkin's approach, thus, has much to rec- ommend it as an approach to folklore-espe- cially in a world where folklore is increasingly encountered in mass-mediated or literary forms and where orality is less and less an accurate measure of the traditionality of folklore (if, in- deed, it was ever really the key). But, for Dor- son, Botkin's work celebrated the spurious- "fakelore"-and not folklore and so was open to attack for its "vapid and inane generaliza- tion" (p. 380). And, as is well known to most folklorists, Dorson's attacks were continual and unforgiving. Bronner, a student of Dorson's, might be expected to side with Dorson in his presentation of the debates, but his account is in fact well balanced, presenting Botkin's work fairly and attending to inconsistencies of Dor- son's assaults on Botkin and others.

But Bronner's Following Tradition does have some flaws. The chapters are often overlong and thus lose their sharpness. Issues of race, though examined closely in the chapter on the Gilded Age, are inconsistently applied in the others, and class is largely ignored. What role did class and race play, for instance, in the work of Martha Beckwith, a white female academic scholar who studied Hawaiians, Native Ameri- cans, andJamaicans-or in the work of folklor- ists more generally, where often a white academic studies either peoples of color or eth- nic groups from outside the dominant culture and from a much lower social class? What of the problem of the dominant culture's appropria- tion of Hawaiian and Native American culture for its own uses? And sometimes Bronner's characterizations of writers and their research miss the mark-as in his account of the work of the Grimms. Indeed, Bronner shows little

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216 Journal of American Folklore 113 (2000)

familiarity with the cultural project of the Grimms, especially Jacob, in re-creating the Germanic past or with German-language scholarship on the Grimms. Even so, Bronner's book is an important contribution to the his-

tory of folklore studies, one that moves beyond the traditional Whiggish narrative of continual

improvement to a narrative that highlights the

presence and importance of ideology and per- sonality in the debates that have wracked the field. Following Tradition is a necessary comple- ment to the many books that overlook the role of folklore in American culture and to histories of the field that present only the views of the

ideological winners in the debates over the

meanings and uses oftradition.

Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability. By Alan Dundes. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997. Pp. xii + 162, preface, acknowledgments, bibliography.)

FRANKJ. KOROM Boston University

In a review article on recent and innovative works on the anthropology of India titled "Is Homo Hierarchicus?" (American Ethnologist 13:745-761, 1986), Arjun Appadurai draws at- tention to the limitations of a hierarchical view of Indian society based on the rigidity of the caste system. Critiquing Louis Dumont's classic Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press, 1970), he writes, "Dumont also

composed an elegy and a deeply Western trope for a whole way of thinking about India, in which it represents the extremes of the human

capability to fetishize inequality" (1986:745). Indeed, since the mid-1980s a number of alter- native anthropologies have emerged to move us away from a caste-centered inquiry of Indian society.

It is within this climate of a significant para- digm shift that Alan Dundes presents us with a return to the obsession that has dominated the concerns of colonial administrators and eth-

nologists in India for centuries. Although Dun- des is familiar with some of the critiques of Dumont (p. 8), he dismisses them as inade-

quate, boldly forging ahead with a psychoana-

lytic reading of secondary sources on the caste system. He argues that while much of the eth- nographic literature is descriptive, there is pre- cious little written about caste and untouchability from an analytical perspective. He therefore justifies his return to a Dumontian

approach-which is essentially structural-as a necessary step to explain the possible origins and logic behind the caste system's purported propagation of social inequality. There is no doubt that some South Asia specialists will ac- cuse the author of orientalism and reduction- ism for countering current trends by moving in a reverse direction to essentialize hierarchy within the caste system, but criticism has never

stopped him from making compelling, ifsome- what predictable, arguments in the past. This book is likely to stir as much controversy in In-

dology as Life Is like a Chicken Coop Ladder (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) did in Germanics. It therefore deserves to be read by specialists and nonspecialists alike. My fear, however, is that most Indologists will shun the book out of a sheer "fear of Freud" alone. But such paranoia would be unwise, for Dundes

presents a fascinating, albeit selective, overview of the caste system in India in order to posit a

generalized theory of the psychological origins ofuntouchability in India.

Essentially, the argument put forth is a simple one: that there is an intimate association be- tween caste hierarchy, untouchability, and toi- let training in India. In fact, the author goes so far as to state that "fear of feces . . . lies at the

very heart of the entire Indic caste system" (p. 64). How he arrives at this astonishing conclu- sion is a dizzying ride through an array of sources culled from the colonial and anthropo- logical literature on India, with a smattering of evidence from translated Hindu texts. In the course of explicating his understanding of the

binary nature ofIndic concepts concerning pu- rity and pollution, Dundes takes us on a guided tour through the literature on such diverse top- ics as the sanctity of the cow, the phenomenon of widow burning, Freud in India, and gypsy "marginal survival."

He links all of these phenomena to an analy- sis of two narratives told in India about a crow and a sparrow. The first is a formula tale of AT 2030B, in which the crow must wash his beak before dining with the sparrow. The crow as a low, dark, and polluted carrion

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