FOLKLORE 3141
alesced. The reach of BLIA is still farther, extending to areas
with even small communities of Taiwan emigrants. The only
Chinese Buddhist organization with a comparable overseas
network is Ciji Hui, which at the beginning of the third mil-
lennium had offices in twenty-eight countries. The two orga-
nizations differ from one another in that Foguangshan has
stationed clerics, and therefore opened temples, while Ciji
Hui has relied upon its impressive array of lay leaders to es-
tablish “offices.” Foguangshan’s international network of
temples exceeds not only that of other Chinese Buddhist in-
stitutions, but is one of the most extensive of any Buddhist
group.
Although the vast majority of devotees in Foguang
branch temples outside of Taiwan are overseas Chinese Bud-
dhists (with most having emigrated from Taiwan, although
small numbers have come from mainland China, Vietnam,
and Hong Kong), the organization has also devoted consid-
erable energy to bringing others into its fold. Hsi Lai Tem-
ple, Nan Tien Temple (Wollengong, Australia), and Nan
Hua Temple (Bronkhorstspruit, South Africa) have been at
the forefront of Foguangshan missionary endeavor. Hsi Lai
Temple and Nan Tien Temple both maintain BLIA chapters
serving several dozen non-Chinese members. Nan Hua Tem-
ple has undertaken the ambitious task of establishing a semi-
nary and orphanage. In the early years, at least, Foguang-
shan’s efforts to attract non-Chinese to its lay membership
or monastic corps has had only limited success.
Foguangshan gave formal symbolic imprint to its self-
avowed role as leader of the global Buddhist community in
1997, when it sponsored an international Triple Altar Ordi-
nation in Bodh Gayā, India (site of the Buddha’s enlighten-
ment). One hundred and fifty novices representing
Theravādin, Tibetan, and Mahāyāna lineages flew in from
countries around the world to take the three sets of vows.
The vast majority of participants were women, a significant
fact since neither Theravādin nor Tibetan Buddhism pro-
vides women with the opportunity to take the necessary pre-
cepts for full ordination as a bhiks: un: ı̄ nun. In the following
years, Foguangshan sponsored several other ceremonies in
which dozens more such women underwent bhiks: un: ı̄ ordina-
tion. Only time will tell whether this campaign will gain mo-
mentum and have a noticeable impact on Theravādin and
Tibetan Buddhist communities.
Master Xingyun and Foguangshan remain highly influ-
ential in Taiwan, enjoy a significant following among over-
seas Chinese, and to a more limited extent have influenced
non-Chinese Buddhists around the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chandler, Stuart. Establishing a Pure Land on Earth: The Foguang
Buddhist Perspective on Modernization and Globalization.
Honolulu, 2004.
Jiang Canteng. Taiwan Dangdai Fojiao. Taipei, 1997.
Jiang Canteng. Dangdai Taiwan Renjian Fojiao Sixiang Jia. Tai-
pei, 2001.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
Jones, Charles Brewer. Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the
State, 1660–1990. Honolulu, 1999.
Laliberte, Andre. “The Politics of Buddhist Organizations in Tai-
wan, 1989–1997.” Ph.D. diss., University of British Colum-
bia, 1999.
Pittman, Don Alvin. Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism: Taixu’s
Reforms. Honolulu, 2001.
STUART CHANDLER (2005)
FO KWAN SHAN SEE FOGUANGSHAN
FOLK DANCE SEE DANCE, ARTICLE ON
POPULAR AND FOLK DANCE
FOLKLORE. Folklorists have been interested in religion
as an area of research since the beginnings of the discipline
in the nineteenth century, although early folklorists often
conceived the beliefs of folk cultures not as religion but as
superstition or magic. Many folklore scholars were grounded
in scientific rationalism to the extent that they dismissed the
beliefs of the folk as ignorant superstition, even if these be-
liefs were part of systems that functioned in ways similar to
organized religion. By the early twentieth century, folklorists
and other social scientists recognized the link between reli-
gion and folk belief, but condescended toward both. From
the positivist perspective of folklore studies as a “historical
science,” superstition and religion were both considered pre-
scientific. In 1930 Alexander Krappe stated in The Science
of Folklore: “Superstition, in common parlance, designates
the sum of beliefs and practices shared by other people in so
far as they differ from our own. What we believe and practice
ourselves is, of course, Religion” (p. 203). Krappe implies the
dichotomy that later folklorists called folk/elite, with the folk
an invention of an intellectual elite who always defined folk
as inferior because they were construed as rural, isolated, and
uneducated.
On the other hand, folklorists were part of a larger intel-
lectual tendency to romanticize the folk, including idealizing
certain beliefs and practices associated with folk culture.
Folklorists’ attitudes towards the folk were similar to anthro-
pologists’ attitudes toward the primitive. According to
George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer in Anthropology
as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human
Sciences (1986), anthropologists have idealized the primitive
since the nineteenth century: “They—primitive man—have
retained a respect for nature, and we have lost it . . . they
have sustained close, intimate, satisfying communal lives,
and we have lost this way of life . . . and they have retained
a sense of the sacred in everyday life, and we have lost this
[spiritual vision]” (p. 129). Folklorists were similarly nostal-
gic about the folk and their beliefs, imagining some folk be-
3142 FOLKLORE
liefs as representing a spiritual connection to nature that civi-
lized people had lost and perceiving the folk as leading more
sacred lives than people in modern urban environments.
This romanticized construction of folk belief was maintained
simultaneously with the opposite academic construction of
folk belief as pathological. For instance, in the United States
folklorists represented Appalachian people as a folk in ways
that sometimes reinforced the stereotype of the irrational su-
perstitious hillbilly and at other times projected the image
of the wise old mountain healer who was spiritually close to
nature.
SUPERSTITION AND RELIGION. Most folklorists made a dis-
tinction between superstition and religion, even when evi-
dence indicated a close connection between beliefs and prac-
tices assigned to different categories. The religious
orientation and theoretical approach of the researcher were
factors in making this distinction, as were issues of race and
class. A comparison of the 1920s and 1930s research of white
folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett and black folklorist Zora
Neale Hurston illustrates the complexity of the cultural rep-
resentation of folk belief and religion in folklore scholarship.
Puckett and Hurston viewed the African American tradition
of hoodoo or conjuration in very different ways: Hurston as
a religion and Puckett as superstitious behavior. Puckett was
still theoretically grounded in the outdated nineteenth-
century concept of cultural evolution, while Hurston was
trained in the then current school of cultural relativism. Pu-
ckett, in his extensive collection Folk Beliefs of the Southern
Negro (1926), associates superstition with “uncultured and
backward classes of society” (p. 6), people who had not ad-
vanced up the ladder of cultural evolution as far as the edu-
cated elite. He therefore saw such African American folk
practices as midwifery as “murderous lore” that “should be
replaced by modern scientific knowledge.”
Hurston rejected Puckett’s pathological view and saw
hoodoo and conjuration as a systematic religion comparable
to Christianity. In a 1929 letter to the poet Langston Hughes
quoted by Robert Hemenway in his “Introduction” to Hurs-
ton’s Mules and Men (1935), Hurston writes “I am con-
vinced that Christianity as practiced is an attenuated form
of nature worship” (pp. xix–xx). After citing several Christian
rituals that contain nature symbolism, she proclaims, “Sym-
pathetic magic pure and simple. They have a nerve to laugh
at conjure.” She accepted the spiritual efficacy of hoodoo to
the point that she studied with a hoodoo priest and was initi-
ated into the practice and came to believe that conjuration
worked in particular instances. She argued against the patho-
logical perspective toward folk belief, but in order to present
a more positive picture of African American folk belief, she
tended to romanticize black southern folk culture as closer
to nature and more spiritual than modern societies. Hurs-
ton’s subjective position as an African American ethno-
grapher caused her to see her own culture in a more positive
light than Puckett as a white sociologist/folklorist born and
brought up in a southern racist society could. Despite their
differences, Hurston and Puckett confronted the same prob-
lem that scholars had encountered since the invention of the
folk in the eighteenth century: how to differentiate folk reli-
gion from other forms of religion.
FOLK RELIGION. In his seminal 1974 essay “Toward a Defi-
nition of Folk Religion,” Don Yoder points out that “the dis-
covery of folk religion in Europe had come at the time of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when rationalist clergy
attacked folk ‘superstitions’ in sermons and ministerial peri-
odicals” (p. 3). By the nineteenth century, German scholars
had included religion as an important component in the
study of Volkskunde (folklife), and by 1901 a German Lu-
theran minister used the term religiose Volkskunde (religious
folklife) for the first time. In the twentieth century, Europe-
an folklorists conducted extensive research on the religious
beliefs and practices of folk groups throughout Europe
among both Roman Catholics and Protestants. To German
and other European scholars, the folk were uneducated peas-
ants living in isolated rural areas, so that folk religion could
be differentiated from other forms of religion on the basis
of the elite/folk hierarchy: folk religion was simpler, contam-
inated by superstition, and often at variance with official
church dogma. Yoder used this long-standing dichotomy as
the basis for his definition of folk religion as “unofficial” and
“relatively unorganized” in opposition to official organized
religion: “Folk religion is the totality of all those views and
practices of religion that exist among the people apart from
and alongside the strictly theological and liturgical forms of
the official religion” (p. 4).
The same basic dichotomy worked for folklorists and
anthropologists as they began to study the religious life of
peoples in the New World. Folklorists especially were look-
ing for the equivalent of the European peasant in new envi-
ronments so that any isolated, rural, and relatively uneducat-
ed people were designated folk, and folklorists began to
collect such religious expressions as hymns, sermons, cus-
toms, and rituals from them. The definition of folk religion
as religious practices of peasants persisted well into the twen-
tieth century; William A. Christian Jr., who wrote the entry
on “Folk Religion” in the original 1987 edition of The Ency-
clopedia of Religion, directed his attention to “past and pres-
ent-day sedentary cultivators and pastoralists of Asia, North
Africa, southern Europe, and Latin America, and historically
to sedentary cultivators in northern Europe and North
America as well” (vol. 5, p. 370). His definition of folk as
pastoral leads him to conclude that the folk had disappeared
from North America and northern Europe as a result of ur-
banization and industrialization, in contrast to such folklor-
ists as Richard M. Dorson, who answered “yes” to the ques-
tion posed in the title of his 1970 article, “Is There a Folk
in the City?” Many of Dorson’s examples came from Euro-
pean immigrants and southern rural migrants in heavily in-
dustrialized Gary, Indiana, so that the peasant idea was still
underlying the conceptualization of folk.
Folklorists and anthropologists also conducted field re-
search on religious folklore in both urban and rural areas in
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION

Central and South America, where their theoretical concern
was with cultural syncretism. They examined the way native
religions merged with official religions. Yoder cites the “ex-
ample [of] the mélange of African primitivism and Roman
Catholicism that is in Haiti called ‘Voodoo,’ or the syncre-
tism between Catholicism and native Indian religious beliefs
and practices in Central and South America” (1974, p. 2).
The fieldwork of Hurston offers an example of how syncre-
tism also influenced folklore field research in the southern
United States, since she recognized the Catholic elements in
hoodoo in New Orleans. Anthropologists and folklorists still
considered religious folklore in socioeconomic class terms as
associated with peasants, although some had migrated to cit-
ies bringing their religion with them.
Throughout the history of folklore scholarship on reli-
gion, the folk/elite dichotomy has been a basic underlying
principle, whether in the study of European peasants, Afri-
can Americans, Appalachian whites, or people whose reli-
gions merge native and European elements. This began to
change for some folklorists in the 1960s when they started
to study urban and suburban folklore and gradually expand-
ed their research to include educated people of a higher so-
cioeconomic class, recognizing that folklore had adapted to
technology so that new genres such as “xerox lore” became
the subject of scholarly books. Finally, Alan Dundes could
answer the question asked in his 1980 article “Who Are the
Folk?” by saying that, in essence, we all are: a folk group is
any group with any one linking factor. Once the folk/elite
dichotomy had been undermined, folklorists who conducted
research on religion were freed to reconceptualize it in non-
hierarchical ways.
In 1995, Leonard Norman Primiano, in an important
essay entitled “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Meth-
od in Religious Folklife,” challenged the assumption of folk
as inferior: “Scholars within the discipline have consistently
named religious people’s beliefs in residualistic, derogatory
ways as ‘folk,’ ‘unofficial,’ or ‘popular’ religion, and have
then juxtaposed these terms on a two-tiered model with ‘offi-
cial’ religion” (p. 38). This implies the existence of a “pure”
religion that is “contaminated” by the folk in their everyday
religious practices. In order to correct the problems inherent
in this hierarchical dichotomy, Primiano suggests a new term
and a new theoretical concept: “Vernacular religion is, by
definition, religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter,
understand, interpret, and practice it” (p. 44). There is no
opposition here between folk and elite since all religious
practitioners would be included no matter what their socio-
economic class: every individual interprets religion within
the context of his or her everyday life (the vernacular dimen-
sion of life). Priests, rabbis, prophets, shamans—no matter
how high in the hierarchy of their respective religions—
would all practice vernacular religion in the sense that they
make individual interpretations of religious meaning and
practice in everyday circumstances. This approach avoids the
condescension of the old elite/folk dichotomy and attempts
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
FOLKLORE 3143
to treat religious practices with respect by concentrating on
the experiential aspects of religion. Primiano recognizes that
vernacular contains some of the same pejorative connotations
as folk, and some folklorists prefer to continue using folk reli-
gion as the scholarly term, but the theoretical concept of ver-
nacular religion has been widely accepted in folklore studies.
FOLKLORISTIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION.
Concepts of the folk and definitions of folk religion have had
a basic influence on theoretical approaches folklorists have
used in the study of religion, and as these concepts and defi-
nitions have changed, so have the approaches. Since most
folklore studies are grounded in field research, the best way
to understand theoretical approaches in folklore scholarship
is by examining representative individual studies since the
early 1900s. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anti-
quarians were interested in religious folk customs as survivals
of previous savage or barbarian times; they thought collect-
ing the beliefs and customs of peasants could provide an un-
derstanding of the past. The concept of cultural evolution
that was the basis for the survivalist approach had been dis-
credited by the late nineteenth century, but some anthropol-
ogists and folklorists continued to base their interpretations
of folk beliefs and religion on it well into the twentieth cen-
tury. Puckett clung to cultural evolution as an explanation
of African American folk beliefs in the 1920s, and Ovidiu
Birlia used cultural evolution as the basic approach for his
entry on “Folklore” in the 1987 edition of The Encyclopedia
of Religion. However, for most anthropology and folklore
scholars, cultural relativism had replaced cultural evolution
by early in the twentieth century. The history of anthropo-
logical and folkloristic studies of religion continued to over-
lap as the new paradigm of cultural relativism developed
models that then became dominant influences on the study
of religious folklore.
Especially important was the anthropological approach
that came to be known as functionalism. Bronislaw Mali-
nowski’s fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders became the
basis for the functional explanation of magic belief and relat-
ed behavior that he articulated in a 1931 essay, “The Role
of Magic and Religion.” His “anxiety ritual theory” influ-
enced the anthropological and folkloristic study of a wide
range of behaviors, from primitive magic to everyday super-
stitions to rituals in religious settings. He invited this wide-
spread application by suggesting that such behaviors were
found in both primitive and modern life: wherever there is
uncertainty in human endeavors, there will be magic and rit-
ual to help relieve the anxiety that arises from that uncertain-
ty. Rituals, whether they are as mundane as not walking
under a ladder or as elaborate as Catholic priests blessing
fishing fleets, function to give a psychological sense of con-
trol over uncertainties in life. The functional approach was
grounded in scientific rationalism as a way of explaining
what seemed to be irrational behaviors; a functionalist might
say that when modern educated people base their actions on
“magico-religious” beliefs, their behavior is analogous to
primitives. As folklorist Bonnie Blair O’Connor pointed out
3144 FOLKLORE
in her 1995 book, Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicines
and the Health Professions, the functionalist approach is im-
plicitly condescending to the people whose beliefs are being
studied; “they” are not capable of understanding their own
behavior the way “we” educated researchers are. This was a
submerged problem as long as the subjects were classified as
“primitive” or “folk,” but as the concept of folk expanded
beyond rural, isolated, relatively uneducated groups, the
issue emerged as politically significant.
In retrospect, present-day scholars can see that conde-
scension toward research subjects was a theoretical problem
all along for folklorists, including those conducting research
on folk religion in the United States. Most American re-
searchers in folk religion concentrated their field research on
fundamentalist Christians in the rural South. These Ameri-
can versions of European peasants were conceived of as the
folk, and if a researcher wanted to study the full range of their
traditional life, then their religion had to be included—a cir-
cular way of defining folk religion, but it went uncontested
throughout most of the twentieth century. Despite the fact
that there were a range of religions to study in the South,
folklorists concentrated on the most conservative fundamen-
talist and evangelical Christian denominations, undoubtedly
because they were large in number but also because they fit
preconceived notions about the folk. The very conservatism
of their religion made it seem more traditional, and from the
educated perspective of the folklorist, fundamentalists were
seen as more exotic than mainstream religions that were in
many cases closer to the folklorists’ own religious back-
ground.
In the 1960s and 1970s, folklorists studying fundamen-
talist Christian conversion experiences began to use such the-
oretical approaches as the one Victor Turner described in his
1969 book, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure.
One of the first folklorists to use ritual process theory was
William Clements in his 1976 article “Conversion and Com-
munitas”; he identified Turner’s ritual states of “liminality”
and “communitas” in the experiences of fundamentalists he
interviewed in Arkansas. Clements posits that since “many
folk Christians are poor, uneducated, and without social
prestige,” their experience of communitas functions “in a
compensatory manner” to make up for their lack of “social
commodities” (pp. 44–45). Following Clements, Patrick B.
Mullen discerned the same ritual pattern in conversion nar-
ratives among evangelicals in “Ritual and Sacred Narrative
in the Blue Ridge Mountains” (1983), and Jeff Todd Titon
applied Turner’s theory to religious expression in Powerhouse
for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist
Church (1988).
Unfortunately, ritual process theory continued the ten-
dency toward condescension in the study of folk religion by
applying it mainly to lesser-educated religious groups. Al-
though folklorists concentrated fieldwork on lower socioeco-
nomic fundamentalist religious groups in the rural South,
Turner’s ritual pattern can be seen across a wide spectrum
of religions among various socioeconomic classes and in
rural, urban, and suburban contexts. There was also a residu-
al effect of scientific rationalism in this approach in that ritu-
al process suggests social and psychological explanations for
religious conversion experiences, rather than considering the
possibility that they are spiritual experiences. A valuable cor-
rective to the tendency to condescend toward fundamental-
ists was the 1988 collection of essays Diversities of Gifts: Field
Studies in Southern Religion. The editors, Ruel W. Tyson Jr.,
James L. Peacock, and Daniel W. Patterson, and the contrib-
utors self-consciously tried to counter stereotypes by depict-
ing fundamentalist religion as complex beliefs and behaviors
in closely observed cultural contexts.
Folklorists theoretically refined the ritual process ap-
proach by applying it to contexts that required multiple in-
terpretations, recognizing that communitas and liminality
have significance beyond their religious meanings. A good
example of this is Sabra Webber’s study of the Islamic tradi-
tion of Ramad: ān. In “Ramadan Observed” (1984) she syn-
thesizes Turner’s ritual theory with cultural politics, seeing
Ramad: ān as a space for the negotiation of religious and polit-
ical meanings. She bases her study on her own fieldwork in
Tunisia and on other ethnographic accounts from North Af-
rica, where Ramad: ān combines elements of ritual and festi-
val. Ramad: ān is a lunar month-long fast in which the break-
ing of the fast at the end is an important element. Webber
sees Ramad: ān as a local liminal event that must be examined
within a larger “liminal period in North African and Arab-
world history” (p. 187), a publicly recognized awareness of
great change between more stable periods. “Ramadan at its
most basic . . . has become a paradigm that various political
and social groups, as well as individuals, are seeking to use
to represent their values” (p. 188). This multivocality com-
plicates the concept of communitas: “while at a community
level a kind of communitas is achieved, at the individual level
it provides, for some people, an opportunity for intensifica-
tion of pious or recreational behavior” (p. 191), and for oth-
ers an opportunity for coming of age, an expression of Mus-
lim identity in opposition to other religions, a statement of
acceptance or rejection of modernity, and even, for some, a
declaration of revolution. Webber’s field research indicates
an ongoing negotiation by Muslims about the meaning of
Ramad: ān. Unlike the research on ritual among fundamental-
ist Christians, where the interpretation comes from outside
observers, Webber’s use of ritual theory incorporates inter-
pretations from within the group, thus avoiding conde-
scension.
Webber’s research is one indication of a broader shift
in the study of folk religious behavior from the nineteenth
century to the present: a movement away from considering
the folk and their beliefs as inferior. Folklorists accepted the
underlying elite/folk hierarchy for a very long time, but once
that was questioned, resistance to it created an effort to re-
move pejorative judgments from the documentation and
analysis of folk religion. One result of this movement is folk-
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION

lorist David J. Hufford’s “experience-centered” theory,
which tries to avoid prejudging religious experiences. In a
book and a series of articles, Hufford has identified the con-
descension toward and dismissal of spiritual experiences as
a major scholarly problem in folk belief and folk religion
studies. He began to formulate his approach to such phe-
nomena in his 1982 book, The Terror That Comes in the
Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault
Traditions, by researching the cross-cultural “old hag” or
“Mara” tradition in which people wake up paralyzed in the
night thinking that some supernatural entity is pressing
down on their chests. The experience transcends religious
difference with reports from Jewish and Christian believers,
as well as from Islamic sources, where the experience is relat-
ed to the jinn, an evil or mischievous spirit that visits during
the night.
Hufford has also applied his approach to other spiritual
phenomena, such as out-of-body experiences and visitations
from the dead, in his essay “Beings without Bodies: An Expe-
rience-Centered Study of the Belief in Spirits” (1995). His
approach to these experiences is grounded in phenomenolo-
gy: he is critical of preconceived assumptions that explain the
behavior in psychological or cultural terms, as, for instance,
having Freudian symbolic meaning. Rather, his approach
concentrates on the experience itself as reported firsthand by
the person involved, opening up the possibility that the expe-
rience was an actual contact with another dimension.
Many folklorists who study religion have accepted Huf-
ford’s theoretical model as a useful balance to the social con-
struction of reality that might view all such spiritual experi-
ences as “deconstructed ‘situated hallucinations,’” a phrase
used by Margaret Mills in a 1993 article in which she urges
folklorists to strive for a sense of what “feels real” in the lives
of the people that they study. On the other hand, Patrick B.
Mullen in his 2000 essay, “Belief and the American Folk,”
points out that researchers can never determine the exact na-
ture of the “core experience” itself, that the experience is al-
ways mediated by the person in the act of telling it to the
researcher. Mullen argues that folklorists should not just be
interested in the core experience but also in the “examination
of narrating, the process of communicating a supernatural or
spiritual experience in a specific cultural context” (p. 137).
A folklorist does not have to accept or reject a spiritual expe-
rience as real in order to examine the cultural process where-
by the experience was communicated to others. This suggests
that the performance approach, which has been a major
component of folklore studies since the 1960s, still has rele-
vance for the study of the expressive dimension of folk reli-
gion today.
PERFORMANCE APPROACHES. Performance theory was part
of a 1960s and 1970s paradigm shift in folklore studies that
incorporated the contextual analysis of anthropology with
the ethnography-of-speaking approach of sociolinguistics
and the Kenneth Burke rhetorical approach of literary critical
theory in order to examine folklore not as static text but as
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
FOLKLORE 3145
part of a dynamic cultural process. The emphasis was on the
specific situation in which the folklore was communicated,
the performance context. Richard Bauman defined perfor-
mance in 1992 as “an aesthetically marked and heightened
mode of communication, framed in a special way and put
on display for an audience” (p. 41). This certainly describes
many cultural expressions that occur within a religious con-
text, and although folklorists concentrated on verbal art in
secular storytelling at first, it was not long before theoretical
principles from the performance approach were being used
to interpret narrating in religious contexts.
Kirin Narayan’s 1989 book, Storytellers, Saints, and
Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching, is
based on field research in India, where she observed and par-
ticipated in storytelling sessions conducted by a Hindu holy
man, Swamiji. Narayan employs performance and other ap-
proaches to analyze the way Swamiji uses storytelling to teach
people who come to him seeking spiritual guidance. She fo-
cuses on eight folk narratives in specific performance situa-
tions, taking into account the personality and character of
the storyteller and dynamic interactions with his audience in
order to explain how religious “truths . . . are made compre-
hensible and persuasive . . . through the medium of stories”
(p. 243). Swamiji’s stories communicate general religious
principles, “yet by telling a story instead of making a general-
izing statement, Swamiji endows these principles with a vital
immediacy” (p. 244). Narayan’s study of Hindu storytelling
has application to storytelling in a wide range of other reli-
gious settings.
The performance approach mainly concentrated on nar-
ratives, but it has been applied more broadly to sermons,
hymns, rituals, and other religious expressions. One of the
first studies of religious expression as performance was Bruce
Rosenberg’s The Art of the American Folk Preacher (1970),
but he goes back to an earlier model, the oral-formulaic ap-
proach, for his primary theoretical focus. In many ways, the
oral-formulaic approach of Albert B. Lord and Millman
Parry was a precursor of performance theory because of its
emphasis on oral performance. In The Singer of Tales (1960),
Lord formulated the oral-formulaic thesis based on fieldwork
he and Parry had conducted on performances by South Slav
epic poets that provided the evidence of certain oral formulas
that also occur in written poetry. Rosenberg identified simi-
lar themes and formulas in improvised oral sermon perfor-
mances by American preachers. Gerald Davis later argued in
“I’ve Got the Word in Me and I Can Sing It, You Know”: A
Study of the Performed African American Sermon (1985) that
formulas are indeed part of the African American preacher’s
performance, but they are culture specific and related to
rhythmic patterns that are not the same as those used by epic
poets. In both studies, belief is not so much an issue as the
artistic dimension of the performance, and this gets at one
of the problems that folklorists have faced in using a perfor-
mance approach to religious expression: such studies contex-
tualize traditional religious communication in terms of the
3146 FOLKLORE
specific circumstances of performance, but tend to leave out
the dimension of belief.
As Diane E. Goldstein states in her 1995 article, “The
Secularization of Religious Ethnography and Narrative
Competence in a Discourse of Faith,” many researchers treat
“belief issues as essentially external to the scope of research.
The folklorist’s concern with verbal artistry provides grist for
such an approach in that it often lays stress on ‘the verbal’
and ‘the art’ to the neglect of the underlying cognitive aspects
of culture” (p. 23). We are reminded of Mills’s concern that
folklorists are leaving out the felt experiential nature of belief
and practice in ethnographic descriptions. Goldstein points
out that scholars tend to separate language from religion in
order to avoid belief as a factor, and consequently they have
not fully understood the cultural meaning of religious experi-
ence. She says that the performance approach concentrates
on art in a way that leaves out the performer’s sense of the
divine, thus secularizing religious communication and mak-
ing the approach inadequate as a means of understanding the
cultural process being examined. The term performance sug-
gests a metaphor underlying the theory, which prompts
Goldstein to ask, “Why would you use the dramatistic meta-
phors of stages and actors if you knew about religious experi-
ence?” (p. 29).
Some folklorists respond that no matter how divinely
felt the experience itself is, it is communicated from one
human to another in social contexts that sometimes require
the speaker to engage a listener through artistic means. The
specific context of communication must be taken into ac-
count; some contexts require performance techniques and
others do not. As most performance scholars recognize today,
an effective theoretical approach to folk religion would com-
bine performance and culturally based theories. The “keys”
that define performance in Bauman’s Verbal Art as Perfor-
mance (1977) are culturally relative, so that a specific reli-
gious performance situation must be examined within its
larger cultural frame, including the role of belief. The re-
searcher needs to be “fluent” in the keys of the particular cul-
ture being studied. Goldstein points out that this has not
been the case in many performance studies of folk religion,
but this is not the result of a flaw in the theory, but in its
application.
Goldstein’s example from her own fieldwork illustrates
the importance of taking the group’s beliefs into account
when examining communication about religious experience.
She compares testimonies by two different women in an
evangelical worship service; one seems to the researcher to
be more articulate and effective and the other halting and in-
effective, but to people in the congregation the inarticulate
testimony was deemed more sincere and ultimately more au-
thentic and divinely inspired, at least partially because it was
not a smooth performance. Their belief system privileged ef-
fect over style: “touching the hearts” of people in the congre-
gation was thought to be a sign of divine inspiration. In Bau-
man’s terms, the competency of performance was not
evaluated on the basis of artistic keys, but on authenticity of
belief. Performance theory still seems relevant here: even if
the qualities of performance are lacking in one testimony,
they are made apparent by the presence of performance keys
in the other. The important thing is for the researcher to be
familiar with the relationship between aesthetics and belief
in the particular religious culture under scrutiny.
CULTURAL STUDIES APPROACHES. Performance approaches
to folk religion concentrated so much on the aesthetic di-
mensions of a specific situation that they neglected larger cul-
tural and ideological issues that informed the performance
itself, as J. E. Limon and M. J. Young point out in their 1986
critique of performance studies in general, “Frontiers, Settle-
ments, and Development in Folklore Studies, 1972–1985.”
Limon and Young also criticized folklorists doing perfor-
mance studies for their concentration on verbal art and ne-
glect of material culture. These imbalances were partially cor-
rected by the growing influence of cultural studies on
folklore scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s.
Folklorists using cultural studies approaches helped fill
in the gaps by examining power relations within folk religion
contexts, including numerous studies of both oral traditions
and material culture. For instance, in the 1993 essay “Mul-
tivocality and Vernacular Architecture: The Our Lady of
Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank, Staten Island,” Joseph
Sciorra traces the history of a neighborhood grotto built by
a group of Italian-American men in New York. He inter-
viewed some of the builders to situate the tradition within
local culture, and he also placed his study in the larger con-
text of the history of Catholic grottoes in Europe and else-
where. His research indicates the social and political reality
of the official/unofficial dichotomy in folk religion. This may
be an imagined construct, but it was manifested in the exer-
cise of power by local church authorities in an attempt to
keep religious activities within the control of the priests after
local parishioners started their own neighborhood proces-
sions and grottos. The struggle took place over many years,
but the folk parishioners were able to maintain the Mount
Carmel grotto that still stands today as an attraction for
thousands of visitors to an out of the way neighborhood on
Staten Island.
A similar study by Suzanne Seriff in 1991, “Homages
in Clay: The Figural Ceramics of José Varela,” focuses on a
Mexican-American folk artist whose clay figures often depict
religious themes. Like Sciorra, Seriff’s theoretical approach
to folk religion is grounded in cultural politics and ethnic
identity, focusing on power relationships between dominant
and minority cultures. Seriff, Sciorra, and other folklorists
concerned with cultural politics see religious and spiritual is-
sues not just in aesthetic terms, but also within ideological
contexts. Varela’s folk art can be understood best through his
“concern for community and his passion for the past as a for-
tification against the spiritual and cultural isolation of being
Mexican in an Anglo-dominated world” (p. 162). Varela
worked for low pay at an Anglo-owned brick and tile factory
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION

in a small Texas town; he “surreptitiously” used clay from
the factory to create his figures and fired them in the factory
kiln. Some of these he gave or sold to friends, and later in
life he sold them at markets in San Antonio. He also donated
his time to the local Catholic Church in order to build an
outdoor grotto to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who “sym-
bolizes the sacred essence of the Mexican community”
(pp. 148–149). Varela “has created a productive niche for
himself and his fellow Mexicans . . . in part by creatively
manipulating the conditions of his own oppression—that is,
by transforming the materials of the factory in which he
works into familiar and fantastic forms to be circulated . . .
among members of his own community” (p. 163). Folklor-
ists often assume the role of advocates for the people they
study, and Seriff and Sciorra’s research suggests that they
have defined the folk as oppressed and disenfranchised with-
in the context of their religious practices in order to argue
for their rights.
FEMINIST APPROACHES. Feminist approaches to folk religion
share the political perspective of cultural studies while pro-
viding a more specific ideological focus. Seriff and another
folklorist, Kay Turner, conducted field research that pro-
duced the 1987 essay “‘Giving an Altar’: The Ideology of Re-
production in a St. Joseph’s Day Feast.” “This woman-
centered altar tradition provides a splendid case in point for
understanding folklore practice and performance through a
feminist orientation” (p. 446). Their approach combines
performance and feminist concerns by viewing the feast of
Saint Joseph as a creative symbolic expression of women’s
power of reproduction. The feast “gives dramatic and aes-
thetic recognition to the sustaining values of nurturance,
care, comfort, and support—the birthright of the mother,”
but it moves from the religious to the ideological in that “re-
ligious belief is specifically wedded with the ideology of re-
production. . .it is through the care and nurturance shown
to the Holy Family on this day that the importance of
women’s daily caretaking of the earthly family is sacralized”
(p. 458). This study indicates how folklorists have gone be-
yond performance in a narrow aesthetic sense by viewing reli-
gious artistic communication within a broader ideological
frame including feminist principles, and beyond verbal art
to consider foodways and other aspects of material folk cul-
ture. Turner expanded the scope of her research in folk reli-
gion to include a variety of women’s altars across cultures in
Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars
(1999).
Susan Starr Sered uses a similar feminist perspective to
examine an entirely different religious group in Women as
Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women
in Jerusalem (1992), and the principle of women’s empower-
ment underlies her research as well. She moves beyond the
focus on one genre of religious expression to consider a range
of expressions and behaviors including life stories, rituals,
nonverbal gestures, and everyday experiences. As in other
feminist folklore studies, Sered analyzes women’s religious
activities within the context of a dominant patriarchal cul-
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
FOLKLORE 3147
ture and identifies strategies whereby these largely illiterate
women become experts at rituals that are concerned with
maintaining the wellbeing of their families. She traces their
empowerment in terms of both gender and age: “The Jerusa-
lem women describe a shift from relative ritual powerlessness
when young, to intense ritual respect and involvement in old
age and especially widowhood” (p. 138). By focusing on illit-
erate women, Sered may be reinforcing the old concept of
the folk as an oral culture, but this reinforces her feminist
ideological perspective by concentrating on a group that is
socially marginalized in the modern world.
Like Sered, Elaine J. Lawless began her scholarly re-
search by concentrating on subjugated women within an al-
ready marginalized culture in Handmaidens of the Lord: Pen-
tecostal Women Preachers and Traditional Religion (1988),
but then she switched to more middle-class religious cultures
in Holy Women, Wholly Women: Sharing Ministries of Whole-
ness through Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography (1993).
The development of her research over those years illustrates
a broader shift in folk religious studies from rural, relatively
uneducated, fundamentalist religions to urban and subur-
ban, educated, “mainstream” religions. In Handmaidens of
the Lord, Lawless examines the process whereby women in
a religion that considered them inferior and submissive to
men could become respected preachers and leaders in their
congregations. She concentrates on their life stories and ser-
mons using both feminist and performance approaches. She
analyzes preaching styles in performance terms, but the keys
to performance reveal images directly related to their experi-
ences as women. These stylistic devices then become verbal
strategies that work to secure leadership roles for women in
the church; specifically, the reproductive images used in
women preachers’ sermons are seen as part of a “maternal
strategy” to reinforce the role of preacher as “Mother” to the
congregation. As with other cultural studies approaches to
folk religion, power relationships are the focus within a reli-
gious setting.
Lawless used her research in fundamentalist churches to
begin to formulate the concept of “reciprocal ethnography”
in which the field-worker is obliged to share her research
findings with the subject. This collaborative research process
requires an ongoing relationship between the folklorist and
the person providing information about his or her culture,
including discussion between ethnographer and subject on
possible scholarly interpretations, and then incorporating the
consultant’s response in the final report. This approach is
complicated by differences in levels of education, socioeco-
nomic class, and religious belief between researcher and sub-
ject. Lawless writes in a 1992 essay, “‘I Was Afraid Someone
Like You . . . An Outsider . . . Would Misunderstand’:
Negotiating Interpretive Differences Between Ethno-
graphers and Subjects,” that she failed to take her consul-
tants’ responses into account in the published version of
Handmaidens of the Lord, but she began a dialogue with one
of the preachers later. This woman felt that because Lawless
3148 FOLKLORE
was a religious outsider she had misinterpreted her sermons,
and Lawless herself came to believe that the preacher’s re-
sponses should have been included in the book in order to
make the scholarly interpretation fuller and richer.
Holy Women, Wholly Women is a product of reciprocal
ethnography, taking into account the detailed responses of
the women preachers who were the subjects of the research.
However, in this case, the women were closer to Lawless in
terms of education and religious beliefs, making the recipro-
cal process less difficult and the results more collaborative.
Lawless uses feminist and performance approaches, but this
time with mainstream, more highly educated preachers,
again interpreting figurative language in their sermons, espe-
cially metaphors of nurturing, as revealing particular views
and strategies of women. Differences in class and education
have been transcended by gender in her two studies, and in
both cases Lawless has situated herself subjectively within the
study of religion.
REFLEXIVE ETHNOGRAPHY. Subjectivity has taken on in-
creasing importance in folk religion studies, developing from
the earlier “invisible ethnographer” of “objective” research to
the visibly foregrounded first-person narrator of reflexive
ethnography. David J. Hufford has made the most compre-
hensive statement of the significance of reflexivity in folklore
studies of belief in his 1995 essay, “The Scholarly Voice and
the Personal Voice: Reflexivity in Belief Studies.” Hufford
argues for the necessity of the researcher situating himself or
herself subjectively within the ethnographic enterprise, say-
ing that this is especially important in studies of belief and
religion because of the need to make clear the influence of
the researcher’s assumptions on the representation of the reli-
gious belief system of an “other.” He points out that all too
often the “objective” stance masks a position of disbelief in
religious ethnography. “A reflexive analysis of our scholar-
ship enables us to distinguish among the beliefs of our infor-
mants, our scholarly knowledge, our personal beliefs and our
occupational ideology. This permits coherent discourse and
various warranted moral actions” (p. 71). Instead of hiding
one’s own beliefs, the scholar should make them clear, there-
by allowing different interpretations, including moral or
ideological ones, to be stated directly, rather than implied as
subtext.
Reflexivity in religious ethnography also opens up the
possibility of fieldwork and analysis by members of the reli-
gious group, and this is a growing approach in folk religion
studies. The “native” perspective is another position among
many subjectivities and is legitimate as long as it is recog-
nized reflexively; no longer can the insider’s position be seen
as less objective than the outsider’s since they are both sub-
jective. A good illustration of this is Nikki Bado-Fralick’s
Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual,
in which she uses her dual perspectives as a Wiccan priestess
and as a scholar trained in folklore and religious studies to
examine a Wiccan religious ritual. Bado-Fralick frames her
study in terms of her subjectivity, allowing her to explore
such ethical problems as dealing with secrecy and to examine
processes of identity formation from within. Her research
also indicates how folklorists have blurred the line between
folk and popular religion, recognizing that both are systems
of belief and practice as complex and worthy of study as the
more academically privileged mainstream organized reli-
gions, and thus resisting the dismissal of such religions often
implied in terms such as New Age.
Another study of what might be classified as New Age
religion is Roseanne Rini’s 1997 dissertation, “Elizabeth
Kelly: Contemporary Spiritual Teacher and Healer,” which
was based on extensive interviews with a healer and psychic,
Elizabeth Kelly, who was widely respected and consulted by
well-educated people in the small college town of Yellow
Springs, Ohio. Rini initially contacted the woman healer for
personal advice and came to know her as a friend and to con-
sult with her on a regular basis. Their personal relationship
gradually expanded to include a researcher/consultant di-
mension, and Rini was able to gain a greater understanding
of Kelly’s belief and practice from a perspective that included
her roles as scholar and believer. Reflexive ethnography has
legitimized this kind of research within one’s own religious
groups in ways that were unimaginable in the past.
These examples of research in New Age religion illus-
trate that the scholarship in folk religion has expanded well
beyond the old paradigm of the folk as peasant, and these
and other examples from folklore scholarship since the early
twentieth century indicate that the theoretical approaches
have grown from simple survivalism to a complex pluralism
of choices. The folk are now conceived as any group of peo-
ple with any linking factor, although approaches grounded
in cultural politics tend to focus on disenfranchised and op-
pressed minority groups as the folk. Folkloristic approaches
to the study of religion have developed along similar lines as
the general shifts in postmodern theory, with a special em-
phasis on performance, cultural studies, and feminism. Un-
derlying all the various definitions and approaches used by
folklorists to study religion is the ongoing concern for indi-
vidual experience within specific everyday situations and
broader cultural contexts.
SEE ALSO Anthropology, Ethnology and Religion; Folk Re-
ligion, overview article; Popular Religion.
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PATRICK B. MULLEN (2005)