Tradition
Tradition is one of the most important concepts in folklore. Unfortunately, while tradition may first seem simple enough to understand—just something handed down through time without change—it turns out to be more complicated than it first appears. This unit explores some of these complexities.
Henry Glassie explains that “tradition is the creation of the future out of the past” (Glassie 2003, 176). For Glassie, the concept of tradition is similar to the concept of history. He argues that neither tradition nor history is the past, but rather, they are creations based on the past. Glassie writes
History is not the past; it is an artful assembly of materials from the past, designed for usefulness in the future. In this way, history verges upon that idea of tradition in which it is identified with the resource out of which people create. History and tradition are comparable in dynamic; they exclude more than they include and so remain open to endless revision. (Glassie 2003, 176)
By this, Glassie means that both history and tradition are selective processes. Historical accounts are shaped by the perspective of an author and the sources available to him or her, so there can be multiple accounts of the same event. This also can happen when family members reconstruct a past event. Different elements stand out most strongly and different aspects blur. Sometimes details contradict each other.
Glassie adds, “If tradition is a people’s creation out of their own past, its character is not stasis but continuity” (Glassie 2003, 177). Despite how we might first think of it, tradition is not fixed in time or static but instead is ever-changing to meet new needs. Traditions can die out. Sometimes they are replaced by new traditions. Let’s take a fictional example of familial holiday customs. Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien and their two teenage daughters feel like they have always celebrated Christmas the same way every year. When asked to describe their Christmas customs, they mention having raisin bread and fish for supper on Christmas Eve and going to a church service. Their Christmas day begins with an exchange of gifts; later, they go to Mrs. O’Brien’s mother’s home two hours away to enjoy a turkey dinner with extended family. Yet, if pressed, they can identify differences. As the children grew up, the custom of leaving milk and cookies for Santa fell by the wayside.
Three years ago, their neighbours began having a party on Christmas Eve, and now the O’Briens drop in on their way home from the church service. Over the years, the family’s turkey dinner, which originally was served at lunchtime, moved to later in the day so that now the O’Briens have a brunch of breakfast casserole and coffee together before leaving for grandmother’s. Last year the youngest daughter made a cheesecake for dessert after the turkey dinner. Both Mrs. O’Brien and her mother have cut down on their Christmas baking so that there is no longer a wide selection of homemade cookies. Since Mrs. O’Brien’s sister was diagnosed with diabetes two years ago, some of the Christmas baking is diabetic-friendly, made with sugar substitutes. This year Christmas night included a visit, with all four of the O’Briens dressed as mummers, to the local care home where Mr. O’Brien’s father is a resident. These are just a few illustrations of how customs change over the course of a family’s life cycle to meet changing circumstances. Aging, health issues, individual preferences, and the changing composition of the family all shape traditions. So while it may feel like “we do the same thing every year,” family traditions—like all traditions—can experience both subtle and dramatic changes. Repetition creates a sense of familiarity, but ironically, traditions sometimes best represent continuity by evolving and adapting to suit changing circumstances.
This means that it can be difficult to determine how old a particular tradition might be. Sometimes practices we think go back hundreds of years turn out not to be that old. The term “Jiggs Dinner” is commonly used throughout Newfoundland and Labrador to refer to a boiled dinner with salt meat. While boiled dinner has been a staple from the time of earliest settlement, the name “Jiggs Dinner” is credited to a cartoon, “Bringing Up Father,” by George McManus, that became popular during World War I. The cartoon featured Jiggs, who had hit it rich in the lottery. Much to his wife’s dismay, Jiggs’ favourite meal was corned beef and cabbage. While he loved how it reminded him of his humble beginnings, Maggie felt it wasn’t fancy enough; it betrayed their working-class roots. Today, the original meaning of “Jiggs Dinner” might be forgotten—some people associate it with jigging cod or dancing jigs after Sunday dinner—but the origins do not really matter. “Jiggs Dinner” is now deeply associated with Newfoundland and Labrador where it has been adopted extensively as a national dish. And, it can take a lot less than 80 or 90 years for something to be regarded as “tradition.” Building on the example above, a family might only need to have cheesecake after Christmas dinner, or in celebration of someone’s birthday, for two or three years before if feels like a tradition.
It is important not to equate age with value. In fact, it may be more useful to reflect on the popularity of a tradition than its origins. Who participates and who does not? Why? The answers to these questions potentially reveal more about the tradition’s meanings than its beginnings. This is true even for what E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger term “invented traditions.” The authors write that many “traditions” that “appear or claim to be old are really quite recent in origin and sometimes invented” (1983, 1). For example, Hugh Trevor-Roper has said that the kilt does not have as long a history as a symbol of Scottish nationality as one might first think (Trevor-Roper 2008). He argues that the kilt is an artificial creation of Highland traditions in Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These traditions were presented as ancient, distinctive, and belonging to the whole of Scotland (Trevor-Roper 2008, 16). Trevor-Roper writes: “The kilt is purely a modern costume, first designed, and first worn, by an English Quaker industrialist, and … it was bestowed by him on the Highlanders in order not to preserve their traditional way of life but to ease its transformation: to bring them out of the heather and into the factory” (Trevor-Roper 2008, 22). He points out that another layer of meaning was added when the British government attempted to exercise control over Scotland in 1747 through an act that prohibited any man or boy from wearing Highland dress. Only members of British army highland regiments who had adopted tartan and kilts as part of their uniforms were exempt. Although the act was repealed in 1782, it lives on in popular memory, and thus in Scotland, the kilt is now linked not only to Scottish highland history but to the cultural oppression of the Scots at the hands of the English. Folklorists would be quick to point out that, even if the kilt’s historical origins are not as old as first thought, this fact does not diminish the kilt’s power as a cultural symbol. People in Scotland today, and those of Scottish descent worldwide, identify with the kilt and understand it as a symbol of heritage. Its deep meaning for them is what is important.
Folklore’s link to identities (ethnic, cultural, regional, and national) is a topic we touched on in the last unit from a historical perspective. As we discussed, the first scholarly study of folklore was motivated by nationalistic purposes. Poet and philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder identified folk poetry as the archives of a nationality, where one heard the people’s voice. Herder’s identification of national bodies of folk poetry inspired scholars like Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm to collect native dialects, folktales, and folksongs as expressions of the soul of the people. From Herder’s time, folklore has been linked to national character. The most extreme incidence comes from Germany during the 1930s when proponents of the Third Reich interpreted folklore to show the national superiority of the Aryan people and to reinforce the views of the party. Several treatises were published on folklore and its use as a political tool to reinforce growing anti-Semitism among Germans. Contemporary German folklorists have studied the political use of folklore from this period. They have shown how verbal folklore—especially folktales, legends, jokes, and proverbs—was analyzed and quoted by Nazis to prove that the “healthy” folk mind had long recognized the negative qualities of the Jews. Folklore was used to stress racial purity and promote Germany’s cultural unity.
Fortunately, examples of folklore’s links with cultural identity in Canada are far less extreme and sinister than those in Germany’s history. Nonetheless, it is significant that the two Canadian locations where one can receive a degree in folklore are Quebec (although there the study is called ethnology) and Newfoundland (the University of Alberta has specialized in Ukrainian folklore). Laval’s program, established in 1949, has a decidedly regionalist bias and scholars explore traditional Québécois expressions such as clothing, folksong, folktale, and folk art. There is an ethnology association in Quebec, and Québécois constitute the majority membership in the national organization, the Folklore Studies Association of Canada (FSAC). In contrast, decidedly few members of FSAC come from Ontario where, it can be argued, they express provincial identity in ways other than to emphasize folklore. An exception is made for heritage items like “pioneer” arts and crafts, as we will discuss further in unit ten.
Of course, Memorial is the university where one can earn a degree in folklore in English Canada. The founding of the department here in 1968 corresponded with a rise in “Newfoundland nationalism,” or pride in Newfoundland and being a Newfoundlander. A Newfoundland-centred view of the world developed, which was (and is) expressed in a lively, revivalist music tradition that draws directly and indirectly on provincial traditional music; in drama; and of course in comedy like Codco and more recently This Hour Has Twenty-Two Minutes.
Newfoundlanders, and Atlantic Canadians generally, rely on folklore to help define their regional identity. This has evolved partly because we see ourselves in this way and because the region has come to be heavily identified with folk traditions. It’s an association that has both esoteric and exoteric dimensions. And it is complex because, at times, those of us who live here resent the singular portrayal of Atlantic Canadians as quaint fisherfolk sitting around with a bottle of rum and a fiddle. At the same time, we can be quick to capitalize on this image and tourism ads from all four Atlantic Provinces promote images of a slower-paced life, of friendliness, and of close-knit communities. Regional companies like Sobeys don’t show Atlantic Canadians as progressive and advanced but instead stress a “down home” quality and a historically rooted element to our lives.
Historian Ian MacKay undertook what has been thus far the most extensive and exciting study of the creation of this down-home, fishing folk image that he identifies as “Innocence,” a local variant of antimodernism. His focus is on Nova Scotia and the story remains to be written for the rest of the Atlantic Provinces. Yet some of what he describes in Nova Scotia applies to the rest of the region as well. He ties folklorists, writers, poets, journalists, and travel promoters into the creation of this fishing folk image that was privileged over other subjects during the interwar years in novels, paintings, broadcasts, and photographs of Nova Scotia, primarily because cultural producers recognized its potential appeal in an international marketplace. They portrayed Nova Scotian life selectively and looked back to a particular time (the golden age of sail), to men (specifically fishermen), to certain parts of the province (the south shore), to one ethnic/cultural group (the Scots), and to the social identity (the “folk”). Although Nova Scotia had healthy industries in the 1920s and the 1930s, they were not the subjects of the novels of Frank Parker Day, the photographs of Wallace MacAskill or the folksong collections of Helen Creighton. Rather, they, and other cultural producers, communicated that Nova Scotia’s true essence was contained in the rustic, the unspoiled, the picturesque, the quaint and the unchanging. One of Mackay’s main tenets is that this vision was convincing, not only for outsiders but also for Nova Scotians.
A similar study has not yet been published for Newfoundland, but an article by Pat Byrne exploring the Screech-In represents this kind of cultural deconstruction. In his study, Byrne draws attention to the commodification of folk culture. Whereas it used to be that only things were for sale, departments of tourism and others throughout Atlantic Canada now attempt to sell us and our whole way of life. This is seen in the Screech-In, where part of its purpose is to extend the benefits and pleasures of being a Newfoundlander—a membership—to everyone who visits. But we all know that being screeched in does not turn a visitor into a Newfoundlander. In this regard, it is an empty rite of passage. As what Hobsbawm and Ranger would call an “invented tradition,” the Screech-In has different meanings. Arguably, the Screech-In emphasizes rather than diminishes the different social locations of its participants (Newfoundlanders and visitors).
It is important to remember that folklore can communicate many messages at different times or all at the same time. From the early years of this century, folksong collectors in Newfoundland and elsewhere have claimed they were recording the vestiges of a tradition. Yet, people in communities throughout Newfoundland still enjoy a vibrant musical tradition. It is not what it was at the turn of the century and not what it will be in another century. Why would it be? As stated above, folklore continually reinvents itself to meet changing needs. In the case of the Screech-In, a relatively new expression that arose in part to meet the demands of tourist operators, not all Newfoundlanders view it in the same way. Some are embarrassed by its stereotypical presentation of aspects of Newfoundland culture, while others see it as an expression of welcome to visitors and a bit of good fun; they revel in the release it offers from their usual social roles. Folklore speaks multivocally, both diachronically (through time) and synchronically (in the present day).
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