Humble Theory Folklore's Grasp on Social Life [Hardcover]

Celebrated folklorist, Dorothy Noyes, offers an unforgettable glimpse of her craft and the many ways it matters. Folklore is the dirty linen of modernity, carrying the traces of working bodies and the worlds they live in. It is necessary but embarrassing, not easily blanched and made respectable for public view, although sometimes this display is deemed useful. The place of folklore studies among modern academic disciplines has accordingly been marginal and precarious, yet folklore studies are foundational and persistent. Long engaged with all that escapes the gaze of grand theory and grand narratives, folklorists have followed the lead of the people whose practices they study. They attend to local economies of meaning; they examine the challenge of making room for maneuver within circumstances one does not control. Incisive and wide ranging, the fifteen essays in this book chronicle the humble theory of both folk and folklorist as interacting perspectives on social life in the modern Western world.

Tying folklore to larger trends in Western cultural thought, leaving behind narrow concerns with genre or fossilized expressive forms,Humble Theoryshowcases the potential of folkloristics to contribute meaningfully to interdisciplinary conversations about culture.

Dorothy Noyes is Professor in the Departments of English and Comparative Studies, a faculty associate of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, and past director of the Center for Folklore Studies, all at the Ohio State University. Her books includeFire in the Pla?a: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco and the forthcoming Sustainable Interdisciplinarity: Social Research as Social Process, coauthored with Regina Bendix and Kilian Bizer. l3(