Identity

For this post, starting small and then working big seems to be a good idea. The reason being is that in class I saw that one factor of folklore was identity. If I am not going too far out on a limb, I think that folklore defines us and supports our identity along with aspects of our cultural groups. Therefore, I would like to think my identity can first be found in my family, the smallest folk group for which I belong. In this family group we mostly practice oral folklore. We have stories of relatives past, and we revere them by telling of their lives. It is from the stories told about them that my identity has some sort of base. The next group would then be my occupational group. I don not know yet what the folklore of a student is, but I can take a gander at it having to do with the relationship between student and professor and school ceremonies. Are these interactions guided by unwritten customs and traditions? Is graduation a form of customary folklore? The third group for which claims me would be regional. As a youth, I was raised in Virginia near the Blue Ridge and then after many years was drawn back to the mountains, which are about ten minutes from my present house. With a little alcohol, some hillbilly dialect may appear, and I also have a pension for bluegrass music, which when coupled with country slang can be justified as oral folklore components. Lastly, I would say that Anglo-Saxon is my ethnic group. Incidentally though, Jan Brunvand states in her book, The Study of American Folklore, that “ the United States is a prime multicultural meeting ground of foreign folklores and thus provides an ideal arena for observing the survival of old traditions and the assimilation of new ones” (62). I feel that ethnically when it comes to things such as beliefs, customs, arts, food, sayings and songs that I am an Anglo Saxon carrying around bits of the old that have been assimilated with bits of the new. Before I wrote this or read about the six major kinds of ethnic groups or pondered the “many definitions” of folklore, I did not think too deeply about folklore. At least now I can start to examine the groups I belong to and began to understand the folklore within them by breaking down the particular oral, customary, and material components that define them as folk groups.