Folklore
What is folklore?
Folklore is our cultural DNA. It includes the traditional art, stories, knowledge, and practices of a people.
While folklore can be bound up in memory and histories, folklore also is tied to vibrant living traditions and creative expression today.
Folklore covers a wide range of topics, including issues recently covered in the news such as fake news, cryptozoology, legends, holidays, internet memes, traditional and world music, and the supernatural. Folklorists are active in all areas of our society, studying topics such as education, healthcare, poverty, and immigration.
Common understandings of folklore associate the term with either past-ness or inaccuracy, but folklore is and does so much more! Though folklore connects people to their past, it is a central part of life in the present, and is at the heart of all cultures–including whatever culture we call our own–throughout the world. Folklore may include traditional customs, beliefs, stories, dances, and songs. It may include things that are not backed up by evidence (does Trump really alter everything with Sharpies? Did Robert Johnson really make a deal with the devil?), but it also includes the very real, experienced, evidenced cultural expressions and beliefs of people and the communities in which they participate.
Street art to commemorate George Floyd protests: folklore. New ways of commemorating death in a pandemic that alters our common rituals of honoring life (like the Zoom Funeral): folklore. Folklore can be found at your job (water cooler jokes or the right times to plant and harvest), in your home (your family’s recipe box or the quilt on your couch), or on the internet (the memes you scroll through or the chain emails you receive).
Every group with a sense of its own identity shares, as a central part of that identity, folk traditions–the things that people learn to do largely through oral communication and by example: believe (religious customs, creation myths, healing charms), do (dance, make music, sew clothing), know (how to build an irrigation dam, how to nurse an ailment, how to prepare barbecue), make (architecture, art, craft), and say (personal experience stories, riddles, song lyrics).
These ways of believing and knowing are circulated among small groups of people. Local knowledges often respond to, augment, and fill the gaps in between their own understandings and those created by larger, more dominant, or mainstream groups. Folklore asserts group identity, challenges cultural norms, and provides examples for ways of living a good life. The word “folklore†names an enormous and deeply significant dimension of culture.
Sumber : https://whatisfolklore.org/