Folk and traditional arts are rooted in and reflective of the cultural life of a community. They encompass the body of expressive culture associated with the fields of folklore and cultural heritage. Tangible folk art includes historic objects which are crafted and used within a traditional community. Intangible folk arts include forms such as music, dance and narrative structures. Tangible and intangible folk arts were developed to address a need, and are shaped by generational values derived from family and community, through demonstration, conversation and practice.
Tangible and intangible artefacts are used by historians to understand the significance of cultural forms in the historical community. This is done through studying their creation, transmission and performance which display the community's values and structure.
Terminology The combination of "folk" and "art" have been discussed extensively in literature to articulate meaning and delineate from other art genres.
Defining ‘Folk’
The social identity of 'folk' emerged in the late 19th century in rural populaces that were subject to greater poverty and lower literacy rates. This social identity eventually broadened to represent the underclass of modern society due to the rise in popularity of Marxist theory in the academic world, which began to identify both the rural and urban poor as allied subjects of economic inequality.
In the 20th century the growth of the social sciences contributed to an expanded definition of 'folk'. By the 1960's, 'folk' groups grew to encompass multiple cultural subgroups, where any individual could belong to multiple 'folk' groups. The first of these groups is one's family, which has its own unique family folklore. Eventually, various forms of identity such as age, language, ethnicity and occupation developed separate 'Folk' groups. Thus, it is understood that folklore develops from shared identity in any social group. As pointed out by Alan Dundes, "decades of fieldwork have demonstrated that these groups do have their own folklore."
'Folklore' can include jokes, sayings and certain behaviors, always transmitted in an informal manner. It is primarily learned by observation, imitation, repetition or correction by other group members. This informal knowledge is used to confirm and re-enforce the identity of the group. It can be used both internally within the group to express their common identity, for example in an initiation ceremony for new members, or it can be used externally to differentiate the group from outsiders, like a folkdance demonstration at a community festival. Significant to folklorists here is that there are two opposing but equally valid ways to use this in the study of a group: you can start with an identified group in order to explore its folklore, or you can identify folklore items and use them to identify the social group.The terms emic and etic refer to two different perspectives used in field research by folklorists and other cultural heritage professionals. The word emic applies to the perspective from within the social group; the word etic refers to the perspective from outside the group.
Even as the identification of folk groups spreads to all areas of our lives, the group most commonly associated with folk art involves the geographic location of a community. The art and artifacts from different communities and different regions are different; the origin of an individual pieces can frequently be recognized by its shape, patterns, and decorations. The "representative art of such societies is not created by its deviants and misfits… but by normal, intelligent, well-adjusted citizens who care deeply about their history and identity. Folk art comes mostly from the central values of a society rather than its fringe elements…" All of these objects are part of the collective identity of a community, who claim them as their own.
Defining ‘Art’
During the Middle Ages in Europe, a high proportion of surviving objects, including statues, paintings, drawings, and building arts were directly tied to the messaging and stories of the Roman Catholic church and individual salvation; they were created to the glory of God. Prior to1500 AD, all material artifacts were created by hand by individual artisans, each of whom was more or less skilled in his or her craft.
With the beginning of the early modern period in the 16th century, a new concept and vocabulary of art and fine art were invented within the western intellectual tradition. During the centuries spanning the late 15th to the late 18th century the emerging middle class in Europe came into their own and sought ways to display their newly minted wealth and power. They began to collect paintings and statues, and to commission new works such as personal portraits. In tandem with these new consumers of art, some few individual artisans were recognized as being exceptional, going on to become the great artists in the period of Renaissance art. In the parlance of this new age, these artisans were said to display individual personal inspiration in their work instead of an exceptional mastery of the age-old practices of their craft. Their works became known as works of art as opposed to the multitude of beautifully crafted objects created during the Middle Ages. Art became exclusive, created by gifted individuals for the limited few.
As part of this new market of fine art for European monied elites, another distinction was introduced between objects which were functional and objects whose only purpose was to create pleasure, i.e. to be aesthetic. The ideas of the Middle Ages were abandoned, in which no distinction was made between the practical and the beautiful in the evaluation of crafted products by either the artisan or the consumer. Replacing them were the ideals of the Renaissance, in which the idea of art as purely aesthetic, lacking any practical purpose, gained credence. This distinction gave rise to the dichotomy of art vs. craft: art was reserved for the elites, everything utilitarian was consigned to the much larger group of functional objects, which were not considered art.
This same early modern period also marked an increasing awareness in Europe that there were other lands and other peoples whose traditions were not European. Christopher Columbus set sail, as one of the first during the Age of Discovery and the concomitant globalization of world history. In the words of Gerald Pocius, Europeans discovered the "other" at this time. These "others" lived somewhere else, in cultures that appeared more cohesive than the contemporary cultures of Europe; their lifestyles seemed integrated and meaningful. Their material culture was also very different than the artifacts common in Europe. These foreign objects were intriguing to the Europeans, however they did not fit in the newly defined genres of "art" and "fine art", which were for the most part confined to painting and sculpture. To get around this, the artifacts of the "other" were labeled as "folk art" or "primitive art", differentiated from the European elite creations, which were "genuine art". These new labels connoted a qualitatively inferior object, the assumption was that they were of a lesser quality than the newly defined European fine arts.
With these new labels introduced during the early modern age, the European ideas of "art" and "fine art" became entrenched, specifically by exclusion of most of the material culture that surrounds us. The truly inspired work of an "artist", for the most part working in the media of either painting or sculpture, was qualitatively different and more than the exceptional objects produced in Europe by a master craftsman. All utilitarian objects were no longer counted as art; they were of an inferior nature, produced by craftsmen and artisans for the community as a whole. "Folk" or "primitive artifacts" produced in other lands by other cultures, as defined by the European Renaissance, were also qualitatively different and less than the works of art produced by European masters. Henry Glassie, a distinguished folklorist studying technology in cultural context, notes that in Turkish one word, sanat, refers to all objects, not distinguishing between art and craft. The latter distinction, Glassie emphasizes, is not based on medium but on social class. Simon Bronner takes this further. "… if the folk art object in the aesthetic view is not social and cultural, then what is it? It is a thinly veiled commodity… It is a cultural statement by its owners rather than by its makers… Folk art here is a matter of economics, of education, and of social status." By 1800, the concept of art for the upper classes only, confined to painting and sculpture, limited to the powerful and wealthy, became the understanding in the European mindset.
The subsequent question becomes how to escape the ethnocentricity of this European concept of art. In his essay on "Art", Gerald Pocius concludes with a definition of art specifically as it applies to material cultural heritage for communities across the globe.
The art of the folk is not about solitary individuals and unique items, it is about skilled artisans living in community, who demonstrate in one or more pieces an exceptional skill, honed over years of practice working in their chosen medium.
Labeling The term folk art is a category label, created within the western intellectual tradition to describe objects outside of that tradition. The category is not derived from the object itself like the labeling of a clay pot, which is made of clay and is functionally used as a pot. Instead it is imposed from without, by art critics and consumers who are working out of a different cultural context. In discussing "The Idea of Folk Art", Henry Glassie states the problem succinctly: “Distinctions arise when we view the art of one tradition from the perspective of another…. It’s all a matter of where you stand and where you look.” A set of characteristics to define the category of folk art has been listed above; some of these characteristics are more specific, others less so. This is a category label that has little or no connection with the object itself; instead the connection is to the outsider's perception of the object. Through the process of categorization, the attempt has been made "to systemize and order in an artificial and simplistic fashion that which is extremely complex, sometimes contradictory, and maybe even chaotic." Despite all attempts at categorization by art critics, consumers, marketeers and folklorists, the object itself remains an authentic cultural artifact that some individual somewhere created to address a (real or perceived) need.
Craftsmen, Artisans, and Artists