Folk Culture

To fully understand the concept of folk culture, we must first separate the two words and define them individually, then rejoin them to completely comprehend the term's overall concept.

Folk, or folkways, are routine conventions of everyday life. They are the customary ways that people act: eating, personal hygiene, dressing, and so on. Folkways are actions and customs that are of little moral significance; they are often matters of personal taste.

Source: © iStockphoto/Calvin Ng.

Culture is a characteristic of societies, not of individuals. Culture is all that is learned in the course of social life and is transmitted across generations, determining social hierarchy. It is the learned, socially transmitted heritage of artifacts, knowledge, beliefs, values, and normative expectations that provide the members of a society with the tools for coping with problems. It also provides an individual in a society the correct and appropriate ways to eat, dress, and the language to use. Culture is also the beliefs to guide behaviors and the practices to follow, and thus it shapes and structures social life.

Folk culture exists within a society, and it is whatever a member must know or believe in order to operate in a way that is acceptable to its members; thus, they must do so in any particular role that they have accepted for themselves. Folk culture is what individuals must learn and is separate from their biological heritage. It is the forms and means of ideas that people have in their minds, their way of perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting these forms. It is the things people say and do, their social arrangements, and events, which are products or by-products of their society as they apply it to the task of insightfulness and dealing with circumstances.

Folk culture and folk customs are the beliefs and traditions, within a group that preserves its language, and the social order and ways of interpreting the world. They are the accumulated mores and way of life (tales) and learning of particular peoples.

One of the major aspects of folk culture is the spoken word or language, as a means to communicate the core concepts within a society, the important religious and philosophical reflections on the human condition. Societal cognition and individuals' understanding of their uniqueness are a shared attribute often related through a form of symbolic language, and that symbolic language is the central feature of folk culture. Symbolic language affixes a group's culture and is the shared time and place of a people, which is endowed by nature with a desire to pursue their [Page 973]personal self-interests within the society, which composes their knowledge of themselves. The ideas and concepts of societal cognition can be seen and understood by focusing on the corollary a folk culture has in its relationship to perception, reason, logic, and the way people classify objects and experiences in the world.

Folk culture is often a way a people make sense of their experience in ways that link them meaningfully to the wider world, a picture of reality based on a set of shared assumptions about how the world works. Folk culture is, in essence, the society's established symbolic frameworks, which highlight certain significant domains of social experience while rejecting others. Many folk cultures are a combination of worldviews that coexist in a single society; or a single worldview may dominate the way a society sees itself in the bigger picture. In addition, folk culture acts as a cultural device for understanding geographical features, societal landscapes, and historical backgrounds of folklore within a framework of socioeconomic and political domains.

...