Folklore and Human Ecology

Folklore and Human EcologyAuthor(s): Douglas KennedySource: Folklore, Vol. 76, No. 2 (Summer, 1965), pp. 81-89Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1257910 .

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FOLKLORE - VOLUME 76 - SUMMER 1965

Folklore and Human Ecology by DOUGLAS KENNEDY

Presidential Address delivered before the Society at the Annual General Meeting on 17 March, 1965

THE history of the Folk-lore Society, as illuminated by the various presidential addresses, shows how the field of folklore has been extended by thought-provoking writings to cover a vast area of human behaviour. Folklore has no monopoly over this area but shares it with such separate disciplines as anthropology, compara- tive history of religion, of art, of literature, of music, etc. After re- reading my friend Allan Gomme's account in his address of I9521, I am emboldened to carry that story a stage further. In planning this venture I was further encouraged by my immediate pre- decessor in office in some remarks made in his address to Section H of the British Association in 1965.2 He was then referring to the misconception of folklore as a dead body of material rapidly de- composing.

When Mr Opie and his wife began collecting children's games they were told that they were forty years too late. The folk-song collectors of today are now accustomed to the comment that such collecting was done once and for all, by Cecil Sharp and his con- temporaries. But world folklore continues and all humans seem to be more and more involved. The truth is, as Professor Stith Thompson puts it,3 'We need only scratch the surface of our dearly bought civilization to find much that we share with all men.

In fact within us are two kinds of awareness, two distinct sur- faces or layers one of which we use calculatingly and the other an instinctive awareness which almost uses us, glowing and brighten- ing spontaneously with occasional high lights and darker reflections from our past animal inheritance.

1 Folklore, Vol. 63, 1952, p. 1-18. 2 Folklore, Vol. 74, P. 507.

Publication of the Modern Language Association of America. P.M.L.A., Vol. 79, No. 4, Pt. I, N.Y. 1964. F 8i



FOLKLORE AND HUMAN ECOLOGY

The products of this inner-folk-layer have through the ages provided evidence of our nature in the way of objects and materials, together with less tangible folklore matter, but just as illuminating as evidence, in the form of tales, sayings, songs, ballads, dances and other music and poetry. While the workings of self-consciousness help to distinguish man from other forms of life, the channel of ageless instinctive awareness helps to re-unite him, not only with his own immediate past, but with the whole world of nature. Here at the roots of his being is believed to lie the accumulated ancestral inheritance since his beginnings.

My own personal experience of these contrasted layers, thinking and feeling, head and heart, calculation and impulse, has been mainly in the fields of bodily action more particularly in dance. It was there that I often observed the conflict within the individual, between functions which should be in partnership and how often one of these functions the thinking, calculating, partner, was domineering. It is only the harmoniously integrated persons who are equipped to fit into the moving environment of the folk-dance and these are rare in our city life of today.

So many of those who take up dancing or games, late in life, try to direct their bodily movements by calculation. They choose the wrong faculty because it leaves them no alternative. Their habits of daily life have grown away so much from folk-life that they tend to use the trick of surface thinking for every kind of task and problem. So, when it comes to bodily action of an unfamiliar nature instead of feeling their way into movement, they stop and think or stutter and stumble. Moreover part of the trick played by the domineering partner is to produce rational arguments as to why you should stop and think it out, why you should look before you leap, why you should analyse and sum up the situation. So the majority of would-be dancers or games players really believe that they can only move by conscious effort, by will power. It is as I said the rarer ones, the 'natural' dancers, as we call them, who can depend on integrated impulse. This inheritance, the knack of un- selfconsciously employing the feeling faculty which is the mark of the balanced personality and of the artists and the craftsmen and your true countryman, is a folk-knack, but it is inherited by all of us. Most of us neglect and lose the knack or have it damaged or overlaid by schooling and sophistication and over-intellectualisa-

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tion. The 'naturals' who manage to keep it exercised like the artists and the craftsmen are the lucky ones. The lack of the feeling knack, and the ineffectiveness of the thinking partner as a substitute, is glaringly demonstrated when a visitor from England, a person of intellectual-habit is drawn into a chain dance, a kolo or hora or farandole with rhythms which are unusual. He tries to analyse these while in motion but this thinking effort segregates the faint intuitive impulse of his body to respond to the calls of the dance. While his calculating faculty would give anything for a chance to stop and think his body is dragged along, a striking non-conformist in the rippling chain. With luck he surrenders to the environment, abandons his attempted analysis and finds surprisingly that his body and limbs are falling into the prevailing rhythm.

My wife and I used to conduct a novice class in dancing and one of our enthusiastic pupils was a physicist, quite an eminent scientist who had chosen country-dancing as his counter irritant. But he had no natural flair for the folk-dance and his misapplied science only emphasized his physical illiteracy. After some weeks of frustration he greeted us one evening with an air of triumph. 'I have found the secret,' he said 'You mustn't think.' We refrained from saying 'We told you so' for our telling meant nothing until he found the knack and made the self-revelation himself. His over- weening analysing faculty had begun to get thoroughly bored and his child-size knack of bodily action had begun to feel its way and put out growing antennae.

One of the serious difficulties in the way of discussing feelings and their modes of operation is that there is no developed vocabulary apart from poetry and we try to make do with vague generali- zations about art and culture. So we are driven to employ the well used 'thinking' terms in some upside down fashion or else invent some new 'feeling' jargon on the spur of the moment. Every school of dance instruction has some private jargon which probably makes no sense outside its own walls.

This difficulty over an expressive vocabulary is even greater than might at first appear because the use or misuse of 'thinking' words only serves to increase the strangle-hold of our calculating faculty and make our confusion worse confounded. Lately I saw a Training College dance teacher driven to desperation by the bad effect of her ill-chosen words upon her pupils. She dumbly

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beckoned them to the floor and by mime and her example jockeyed them into a soundless dance depending on their senses, their

feeling and their perceptive 'antennae'. She was determined to get the group for once to feel something before they had begun to think about it: to leap before they looked, as it were.

Such shock treatment was undertaken because in her view these College students were almost patients in need of therapy. They were suffering from a feeling deficiency or a surplus of cerebration or both. As young children we are less prone to this disease but when we grow up and become more self-conscious an encrustation seems to creep over the 'antennae'. The crust thickens and

toughens and with constant use and misuse it becomes a hide too thick to be penetrated except by guile. Young children and other

primitives, with their antennae right out above the surface, learn their skills and insight not so much by cerebration but more by their way of life and play. Play is a most powerful integrating influence. While play on the one hand integrates the mental partners, knitting them together - domination by one partner, the intellectual-process, inevitably creates the self-conscious attitude that breaks the unity of head and heart and eye and the other senses. In our adult intellectual spheres head and heart are deliberately divided and the heart tends to be derided as untrust- worthy. It is thus of great importance that in those few places where the ancient traditional unity survives it should continue to be observed, especially among children and in the peasant- countries and among the thriving country folk everywhere. Once the old unity is destroyed by progress it may never be recovered.

One saving factor of some potency is the old power of the spoken word - of the sound as distinct from the written or printed symbol. Oral tradition still persists, helping to remind us that under our isolating crust we are all partly primitive.

In the field of folk-song and the act of singing one soon learns the supreme value of the oral channel. Picking up a song from the living sound carries the feeling of live movement with it. With this feeling of aliveness we can the better reveal and communicate the dramatic content and the very texture of poetry even if it be simple, homely or rough country stuff. The oral process, with its feeling of a live communication does encourage the antennae or the tentacles of tradition, to use Mr Opies phrase, to uncoil and reach out and

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seek contact. And there's another thing. In these deeper hidden recesses alongside our stored up past is a stored up energy, to be unleashed for us only under stress, in momentary danger or crisis and to lend us wings to fly or to give a second wind to the spent runner.

It is symptomatic that whenever the products of our folk behaviour are given an airing it is usually with an apology or a humble disclaimer.

Mr Opie quotes engagingly from the Geoponica of A.D. 700 on a method of charming away mice by writing them a polite note.4 The author describing the delightful method is careful to disclaim his belief in the practice for of course mice can't read letters.

Bishop Percy in presenting his famous 'Reliques' begged the indulgence of his readers for the very simple and humble nature of his material. There is an omnipresent intellectual snobbery about the products of the deeper layers, the dark and tangled places in men's minds. It was this snobbery which presumed that those folk-songs, the popular ballads of the Reliques with their un- doubtedly strong and wide appeal, must have originally sprung from a cultivated mind and this high-level composition had been eroded by oral tradition through time into its current simplicity.

All through the disputations over the origins of folk-song and popular ballads runs this myth of the clever and inspired poet whose work was translated into ever simpler terms until it finished up near doggerel: In fact the evidence of the strong conserving and preserving elements of oral tradition suggests exactly the opposite. It was Motherwell who first had the courage and hardihood to suggest that the folk-ballads far from benefiting had suffered from the editing of Sir Walter Scott and others and that they were better left just as they emanated from the folk-source with their unity still un-segregated and still rooted in the dark and tangled layers of tradition. I am now talking in terms of the branch of science known as ecology. My own early adventures in this field were with plant colonies in mountain coombs and on salt marshes, where the relation of individuals to each other and to the plant community in which they are neighbours stands out clearly as a texture of harmony in living. It was Sir George Stapledon's

4 Folklore, Vol. 74, p. 523.

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posthumous book, Human Ecology, that prompted me to make some comparisons between our Folklore and his Ecology.

In plant ecology one does not study the whole colony truthfully by examining the separate individual entities. Here to segregate is to destroy the individual's function in their relatedness and any features of a distinctive character lie with the whole colony in its relation to the wider environment.

Humans compared with plants are doubly complicated because they have inner facets to their personalities, depending on internal

relationships, as we have seen in the case of head and heart, two partners within one corporate body with its internal environment. But they also take their complexion from an outer environment sometimes from a well-defined social colony. If we select for study such human colonies living a tribal life or in a peasant community or even in certain industrial and mining communities which may be fairly sophisticated in outlook we find a folk-life with features comparable to plant colonies. Ability to conform and fit into the folk-life of such colonies can be shown to depend upon the tentacles of tradition.

But my descriptions, my words and phrases my references to conforming and fitting in arise from this aforesaid limited vocabulary and from my established standpoint as an habitual analyser, as an intellectual, and a convicted segregator. I think from mere habit in segregations which have to be integrated to make a whole. I can feel a unity in a folk-dance or ballad but I can only think of its parts. I am steeped in the current idea that if there is a problem we must get in an expert or a specialist. Only through my limited studies in ecologycan I claim to have had even a half-heartedtraining in tackling the all-round studyof a unityof a wholesale wholeness. It seems clear tome that a pictureof countrylife as it still persists in the more rural parts can only be drawn truthfully if the ecological standpoint is taken. From this viewpoint we take a wide-eyed glance at the close interplay between man and the other living forms around him, animal and plant. His very tools and implements seem to have shaped themselves to his hands and his every bodily movement advertises the adaptedness of his limbs and body (the internal environment) and their smooth unhurried economical behaviour. Surely to perceive and savour these phenomena, as facets of a whole relatedness, is to observe living folklore. Wittingly or unwittingly,

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to the collectors and the recorders of folklore in the field all the elements of the lore, customs, stories, songs, dances and tunes have grown out of this relatedness. The value of studies in ecology lies in their integrating influence on limited concepts derived from specialist studies. Biology as a science now covers such a vast field of knowledge and investigation that it has become segregated into ever narrower lines of specialization, so specialized in fact, that the specialists are finding it increasingly difficult to communicate their ideas to one another. This is to some extent true of human society as a whole. It is no exaggeration to say that we are getting to know more and more about less and less. But in my view the most serious aspect of segregation is the almost universal 'apartheid' that divorces the two areas of human experience we call head and heart. The 'Head' in our modern educational systems receives a degree of cultivation that is intense and sustained. The 'Heart' is fobbed off with a little art, a dash of poetry, some music, some dancing, all already boned and filleted and dehydrated by calculating heads. But whether designed for Heart or Head the 'subjects' are bound to have been analysed classified indexed and catalogued into fragments. The interpretation of these segregates is not advanced by the actual cataloguing although that process conveniently tells us how much how many how often etc. Nor does a synthesis of dead fragments bring these back into a living relationship even if you call it an integration. It takes some creative miracle to bring educational 'subjects' to life and creative miracles spring from the Heart. So we come face to face with a truth which is sourly un- palatable to the 'Head' that it by itself without the ancient partnership of the Heart is an incomplete not to say an incompetent guide to right action. Right action depends on an education which has included right feeling along with right-thinking. So one must be prepared for the resistance, which often appears as an intellectual snobbery, of the kind expressed by Bishop Percy when publicly presenting his Reliques: it is the resistance to any suggestion of sharing authority with so unrespectable even ambiguous a consort as feeling, a mere animal trait, however old it may be in folk- tradition.

Now the true countryman exhibits these two partners in balance. So indeed do many individuals who charm us with their humanity. But the countryman as a type bears the mark of it on his bearing

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within his environment. The townsman is apt to regard the countryman as just a slow-thinker while he in turn looks with suspicion on the slick snap judgments of the townsman. Those writers on the countryside who loved it while they portrayed it such as Gilbert White, Cobbett Howitt etc., give their faithful pictures in ecological terms.

Your President last year said of them. 'It almost seems that the lasting greatness of a writer can be assessed by his awareness of things which having been will always be, the traditional beliefs, customs, songs and speech of ordinary people.'5 He goes on 'An understanding of the oral literature of his country is a necessity for any man who aspires to be a national poet. I noticed recently in a Rumanian Ethnographic publication6 that there is talk of a 'new folk lore' being officially cultivated in relation to the new Marxist

economy, one might say calculated. We have seen in recent years with dismay how this 'new folklore' has tarnished the presentation of ritual customs and ceremonial dances which we knew before the iron curtain fell. These new presentations are patently selfconsciously shaped to show-off the performers to a snap judgment type of audience conditioned to admit slickness. These more recent slick performances seem very far from the pre-war impressions we gained from the traditional performances of earlier days and I would suggest that the ecological standpoint applied to the present day so called folklore dancing of European countries would help to sift the living traditions from those dished up for tourism. From practical personal experience I would also suggest that any product of analysis of the actual material, as noted, of the movements, etc., would not be sufficient in itself to reveal the difference between true and false.-It would be tragic if all the peasant communities in the Communist countries followed this sample quoted from a Rumanian source and the attempt was made deliberately to justify the conscious replacement of the real tentacles of tradition, in which these countries have been historically so rich, by a pseudo- tradition based on a calculated synthesis of studied segregations.

Quite a different approach to folklore and folk-life is clearly called for: not a new approach but a re-discovery with a re- appraisal of the full implications of relatedness as it is observed

6 Folklore, Vol. 75, P. 83. 6 Reusta da Ethnographie Rumania, Vol. 4, P. 385; Vol. 6, p. 575. 88




and perceived in ecology. In our hearts, if not even grudgingly admitted in our heads, we know that the very rich content of our consciousness, upon which our self-intellect forages and feeds, rests on an inner fountain of life. The human ecologist would have us re-plan our methods and abandon the egoistic rationalism which permeates our world whatever we put in its place.

We could start with the assumption that the intuitive sense of the right way to act, which reveals character, can be trained through experiences, as in play, which are character-building. We know from tradition that we create our own characters as we learn a craft by following the example of the master craftsmen, these great characters who set us an example of common sense more valuable than the kind of knowledge that is learned in the classroom. This is the lesson of the old tradition and the very core of folklore.

I am not alone in believing that the time is overripe for such unifying influences to bring together the fruits of the segregated studies, for stressing the advantages of a closer partnership between the intellectual and intuitive processes. Such a re-focusing of interests would benefit the whole of education as well as the separate disciplines of Psychology, Anthropology, Archaeology, Musicology, Medicine, etc. It was with something like this in mind, a small flicker of timely integration that might, like the grain of mustard seed, grow into something quite substantial that I re- echoed the call for a folk-study centre in London first mooted in this society some fourteen years ago.

While this would obviously become a useful and practical point of reference and exchange of views and experiences, it would also provide a tiny forum, where voices could be heard speaking over a wide field of human studies with their overlapping margins and concurrences. Even such a small start in this direction would surely help to further the objects of the various separate folk- societies and their common interest in the deeper understanding of man.

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Folklore and Human Ecology