Pages: 22

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the academic disciplines of anthropology, folklore studies, and mythology, charting their divergences and also how these fields are intertwined—a multidisciplinary investigative framework that is used throughout the text. As an initial case study in Chapter 1, we describe three different coming-of-age rituals for three different communities, all located within 100 miles of each other. The first is a Navajo (Diné) ceremony for transforming girls into woman; the second example is an Orthodox Jewish ceremony in which boys become men and active participants in the community’s religious life; and the third is a quinceañera, a largely Hispanic-American coming-of-age ceremony for girls celebrating their 15th birthday. Using the insights from three intertwined disciplines reveals the commonalities as well as the differences in these ritualized events, and in the cultures that celebrate them.

Pages: 26

Chapter 2 continues the investigation into rituals and ceremonies, as well as festivals, and explains how researchers attempt to understand the meanings and reasons underlying the processes of ritualizing. Attention to the overall performative aspects, such as the audience and various contexts, is crucial to this study, as is an awareness of issues of identity, the functions of rituals, ideas of liminality, and more. Rituals shape our lives and our world and are a fundamental component of cultures worldwide. What to celebrate? What to mourn? How does one marry, or does one marry at all?

Pages: 21

Chapter 3 explores belief, superstition, and magic, which are often very complex ways that people express culture. Beliefs can have many components, including personal experiences, cultural traditions, symbolic associations, and sociability (“everyone is doing it”). Folk beliefs may or may not be true, but what makes them folk beliefs is that they are not currently accepted by the general institutional authorities, such as the scientific community. If and when they become accepted, they are no longer folk beliefs, but rather scientific ones. The lines between these discourses are thus fluid and ever-changing. Regardless, folk beliefs are powerful, personal ideas and forms of cultural expression that often persist among people whether accepted by the scientific community or not.

Pages: 23

Chapter 4 explores music, dance, and trance. While music has been called the “universal language,” there is, of course, great variety in its cultural expression, alongside cross-cultural commonalities. Music is often interlinked with dance, another seemingly universal phenomenon, appearing in myriad forms. Together, these forms of expression also are commonly associated with trance states, and the achieving of altered states of consciousness which occurs in many cultures reveals the power of music and dance.

Pages: 21

Chapter 5 explores narratives and the verbal arts. According to some cultural theorists, stories, more than anything, are what make us human beings–storytelling is at the center of who we are as a species, having very much to do with the development and survival of Homo sapiens. Appropriately, then, this chapter focuses on mythology, the fundamental stories held by communities and cultures, the stories that give meaning to people’s lives, and that often explain the afterlife and the fate of the soul.

Pages: 26

Chapter 6 focuses on legends, the genre of storytelling that is about events and things that might be true. Legends have a different cultural role than myths, in that they are a way for members of groups to negotiate what to believe. Are ghosts real? What about Sasquatch? Are alien beings from other planets visiting Planet Earth? Different cultures have vastly divergent stories about what might be true and these can overlap with history, rumors, and mythology. Among the case studies provided is the figure of the zombie, which illustrates how global popular culture has reworked and reinterpreted aspects of a foreign cosmology, in this instance the phenomenon of true-to-life (or death) actual zombies that are believed to exist in the country of Haiti.

Pages: 20

Chapter 7 investigates tales, various narrative fiction forms, and other assorted types of verbal expression. The history of the tale reveals a great deal about the history of the field of folklore studies, as well as the history of the development of nationalism and nation-states. Important approaches and methods were developed in the study of tales, and these ideas continue to be applicable to our understanding of stories today. Lastly, tales exemplify the slippage between oral, folkloric stories and the realm of authored literature. The history of tales and tale-telling in Europe is very much related to ideas of authorship and copyright, and today, the continuing expression of tale-telling via the internet, perhaps particularly in the realm of fan fiction, has blurred these previous distinctions. Fictional stories take many forms and serve many purposes, and this chapter also delves into a brief investigation as to the role of humor, in the form of jokes, tall tales, and more.

Pages: 23

Chapter 8 pivots away from verbal expressive genres and focuses on material culture—the objects we make and their cultural meanings. As with the other forms of cultural expression analyzed in this book, the sorts of things that are made and the meaning of those things vary greatly from one society to the next. Every culture, community, and subculture has uniquely specific knowledge of how to make things: how to craft, sew, cook, sail, quilt, tattoo, create street art, or to convey one’s subcultural affiliation. Very often our identities are expressed through material forms, whether it be our clothes, our hairstyles, or the tools of our trade.

Pages: 3

In Chapter 9 we present concluding thoughts about the study of culture during a time of rapid change, globalization, and the increasing digitization of forms of communication. During periods of cultural transformation, paying attention to what people actually do—what they say, how they ritualize, what they sing, what they craft, how they perform and express culture–is especially important, as cultural groups and communities also change and adapt as the world around them is transformed. Regardless of what groups and communities people participate in—whether long-standing and newly emergent—people will continue to share and create culture. Human beings are a social species, and cultural expression is at the heart of what it means to be human.