about those little stories
21 Sep 2010 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouFor the sake of clarity, I'm going to use the term 'folklore' to refer to all the little stories -- from the mythos of a culture, its anonymous but oft-repeated fairy tales up to its attributed greatest works/stories, to the minutiae of daily life and the advice elders give the next generation. (In essence, there is no reason for anyone to say, "my culture doesn't have that," because if you look at the list and the previous posts, you'll realize that although you may lack in one area, no one lacks in all areas, thus, everyone is raised with some type of folklore.)
The phrase I used before was "cultural currency," speaking in terms of external-culture authors "purchasing" a cultural bit of folklore -- but that's actually rooted in thoughts I was having on a macroeconomic, or macrocultural, scale. If you look at the exports of Japanese anime and manga, a significant number of them are moving along lines of cultural exportation (and the same goes for Korean manga), and an awful lot of the biggest of these exported products also incorporate significant distinctively-Japanese elements.
It's even in the most innocuous of moments in a story, like the Christmas-moment in Kimi ni Todoke where the protagonist's father tells her, "don't tell me what you want, tell Santa!" The next shot shows her hanging a paper tablet -- that looks an awful lot like a prayer tablet -- on a branch of the Christmas tree. To me, as someone who grew up with "writing a letter to Santa", this is both logical and at the same time clearly and strongly influenced by the protagonist's culture. It's the same idea... but not. That's part of cultural currency, where it can have an unexpectedly large impact -- unexpected, I say, because the one within the culture probably doesn't even think twice about it. (I'd never think to explain to anyone that "telling Santa" means "writing and mailing off a letter", but if you were raised writing your request and hanging it on the tree, you'd probably find "writing and mailing off a letter" to be both familiar and strangely unfamiliar at the same time.)
Anyway, the ground material of all stories is, I think, ultimately our fairy tales and myths -- even when these are wrapped up in the fancy dress of modernity. Even the notion of "urban fantasy" is really just taking the "once upon a time" facet and putting it into this-world, rearranging the features of those fairy tales and myths, but not enough to make them unrecognizable. It's when that urban or contemporary fantasy is exported that it merges with the overall cultural import-export exchange, and thus becomes fodder for other writers' and readers' imagination, elsewhere. Yes, possibly at times divorced from its original ground, but still... if there are loan-words, there can be loan-stories, too.
Behind all those thoughts, though, I was thinking this: that while it's pretty unrealistic to think that there's some overriding authority designating which stories are acceptable for import/export, the fact remains that when taken as a whole, this is how other-cultures create certain assumptions or expectations. This is why the average Swede I met, even perfect strangers, wanted to know if I grew up in a house with a pool and drove a BMW to school -- because their impression of the entire assortment of teenage protagonists in American movies and television invariably had kids who turned sixteen and immediately got a flashy new car to drive, and who went home at night to big houses. Yes, there are exceptions to that stereotypical Hollywood teenager, but those are exceptions, and exceptions don't impact the cultural stereotype, which is created on an amalgamation of the most common presentations. To see the deviations and exceptions requires the audience explore at a deeper level, and that's not always possible, feasible, or even of any real interest.
The upshot is: whether Japan realizes it or not (and it seems many companies do, when you think about the marketing used), its folklore is a major stream of its economy. You might even say entire industries in exportation are riding on the back of this exported folklore: the rage for wedding kimonos to hang on the wall, for chopsticks and teacups and rice bowls, for the notion of wabi-sabi decor, and even those stupid bedsheets with [chinese] characters that don't make any sense because the designer didn't expect anyone to actually be able to read it, silly. The market that exists for these things exists, in some part, I think, to the stories exported by that culture, which laid a groundwork.
This is far beyond simply anime and manga, mind you, though I'd say Spirited Away carries a huge chunk of the current story-export process, in terms of major Japanese folklore. Prior to that, though, there were samurai films and big robot movies and before that, stories and art and reports brought back by people who'd visited. If the first exported folklore was 'about' Japan, in the past fifty years it's become 'by' Japan, but otherwise it's not a major break in continuity.
I was thinking all this around the time I'd started looking for more Korean manhwa, because frankly, I wanted to see some other folklore. The presentation of Japanese folklore -- depending on source, of course -- sometimes starts to feel a little, erm, packaged. Every culture has its formulas, of course, and while I'm sure there are some who are constantly charmed by the quaintness of "everyone dresses traditionally and goes to the festival" -- just as I'm sure there are non-Americans who have a similar reaction to seeing/reading "everyone watches the Independence Day parade and then picnics during the fireworks" -- the fact that I'm seeing another culture's stereotypes doesn't change that all cliches do, eventually, bore me to tears. I have no more inclination to watch another Hollywood "poor girl gets makeover and wins rich boy" story than I do to watch another Japanese "let's all have a cafe for cultural day" story.
The problem, of course, is that I can't read hangul -- it's not like Japanese, where I can at least get a crude sense of things by parsing any kanji in the text -- so I'm limited to the output from scanlation teams. Fortunately, they seem to be as diverse as the manga teams, so there's a lot to choose from. Not as much as Japanese -- which dominates the scanlation field as much as the international manga/comic field, it seems -- but still, it's not like there's nothing.
To find the "pretty much amounts to nothing," you have to go looking for manhua -- the Chinese manga. To compare: on one site's database, you can't search for totals but you can search by summary, so I searched for all summaries containing the word "the". The database contains 5983 series scanlated: 369 of those are manhwa (Korean); 76 are manhua (Chinese), which leaves 5,538 Japanese series scanlated. Another site's database tracks Asian comics regardless of scanlation status; in that database, roughly 44,300 titles are Japanese, 900 are Korean, and 400 are Chinese.
The bottom line? If you have any interest in the export-import of Chinese folklore in tales/myths, you might want to try wuxia, because manhua-wise, it just isn't there. For an even more blunt version of the same, I search by the genre term "supernatural", which is effectively code for "cultural folklore" -- the demons, monsters, heros, and myths. Stories like Pahanjip or Bride of the Water God or Gegege no Kitaro or Nurarihyon no Mago or even the folklore you'd find embedded in retellings like Gekka no Kimi or Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
And... well, not much. 792 total: 709 manga, 75 manhwa, 8 manhua.
Somewhere in there, I segued into thinking about imperialism and the destruction of another culture's folklore by conquest or infiltration -- but then, as I kept digging for Chinese folklore-infused manhua, I started wondering whether it's possible to turn this imperialistic-style destruction on one's own culture.
And I started thinking, maybe that's why there's such a dearth of Chinese folklore exported, because the Cultural Revolution knocked the ground out from under a lot of the oral folklore. In the stories I've read by Chinese (modern) authors, there's a remarkable lack of folklore -- and what there is (by the broadest definition I'm using, here), is mostly related to, well... not to sound too bleak, but a lot of it seems to be related to basically "how not to end up with the authorities looking at you as a suspicious person." What kinds of music you shouldn't play (Western composers), which colleges are considered "better" for someone who wants to advance, the things you say and don't say if you want to keep getting along and not get in trouble.
Now, granted, some of the stories I've read -- like English -- are memoirs and/or fictional recitations of life in the middle of, or directly after the conclusion of, the cultural revolution. But other authors I've read were writing after Mao's death and more recent. Possibly one of the few jackpots of little-stories usually swirls around New Year's, but that's about it. Finding a whole genre of folklore-influenced, little-story-laden, fiction is... well, there certainly aren't any stories like Bride of the Water God that I can find (scanlated or not), and there sure as hell aren't any Gegege no Kitaros, either.
Which really sucks, because if we had an equal number of each of the types of Asian comics -- Japanese, Korean, Chinese -- with only a few exceptions, I would spend the majority of my time reading Korean and Chinese. But for Chinese, it's just not there.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not lumping Taiwan and PRC together -- I do know they're different -- but it seems as though the influence of the Cultural Revolution did stretch. That's my best guess, at least; after all, it stretched its hand down to cause unrest in Hong Kong, too, and that area was ostensibly an economic zone then-managed by Great Britain. (And I seem to recall hearing the tensions of the cultural revolution also made an appearance, here and there, in Kuala Lumpur, too. Hrmm.)
It only takes a generation to really undermine the cultural folklore, because these are predominantly stories passed from adult to child, whatever the relationship. So if the adults stop telling the stories for any reason -- especially if an entire nation of adults stop telling the stories -- there's no recreating that experience of subliminally absorbing the folklore. That experience is lost, and in a self-inflicted situation like the Cultural Revolution, it might be lost irreparably -- the same way so much is lost for continuing generations of Saami, for whom a wave of missionary outsider zeal did about the same thing, silencing nearly an entire generation of adults within a very short period of time. It's probably safe to say this is true of a huge number of conquered indigenous nations, but China is near unparalleled, I think, in that its change was self-inflicted. I mean, Russia attempted a break with the past, but it doesn't seem to have gone quite so far as Mao, in terms of almost literally uprooting major chunks of its folklore and tossing them out.
So the grandparents stop talking, the parents don't get the full extent of the folklore, and the next generation is raised with a new set of folklore. Yes, a new set, because we can never -- I think -- not have folklore. If we reach a vacuum or a chunk of outdated information, we fill it with something new or update the advice (though perhaps with the addendum of "back in my day..."). The result is that the next generation has a full plate of folklore, but it's a radically different folklore from the grandparents, and that, I think, can create a bizarre pseudo-cultural barrier right there, just as much as there's a subtle but definite cultural barrier between my Southern-ness and, say, a friend from Idaho.
It's not impassable, but it's something we don't always notice; we tend to assume we speak the same language and know the same history, so our culture is the same (because we're ignoring/unrealizing the interplay of 'regional' in there, along with 'gender' and 'race' and 'religion' folklore-influences, as well). But when it's in the same family, man, that's rough -- because family is supposed to be, for most people, the most common demoninator. If you don't have much in common with others, you at least know you've got shared history with your family -- but significant folklore-breaks like conquest, or something like the Cultural Revolution, can destroy that shared history, leaving you only with the illusion of shared folklore.
And then along comes the generation of great-grandchildren, who'd really like to recapture that lost folklore, but their grandparents are aging (and never really heard much of it at all, anyway) -- and the great-grandparents, the last mouths of that folklore who were raised in it themselves -- are gone. What little is captured is only an echo, and prone to questions of 'accuracy'. As if folklore was ever meant to be accurate! But worse, to me as a storyteller, is that such recapturing destroys the regional: if you can't recreate what people did on X holiday, then you borrow from someone over there who tracked down that folklore.
Eventually, the absence of extensive folklore means everyone's borrowing from others to create complete sets of folklore, and the regionalism is destroyed. Doubly so if we're getting into the realm of cultural anthropologists, some of whom I've read debating over whether this story or that story is "true" or whether it's a personal variation or a regional anomaly. The rich fabric of myriad folklore little stories is gone, replaced by a thinly-spread recreation.
What's worse is that so many of us (as evidenced by the replies to previous posts on this topic) see "folklore" as nothing more or less than "old stuff" or "stuff old people say" or even "superstitions that no one really believes". We ignore the wealth of new folklore we're developing -- from when/how it's okay to open a door for a lady, to proper cellphone etiquette (with "being suspended" replacing "seven years of bad luck", I suppose) -- and thus whether we're within a colonial, conquered, or self-inflicted cultural gap, we'll say, "we have no folklore, now" and discount the fact that folklore is never static, but always evolving.
I'm going to stop here because I've got other stuff to do, but I'll tell you where these thoughts led me, and we can hash it out in comments: the end-point of these thoughts is that perhaps the process of immigration and acculturation led the majority of Americans, over the past two-point-five centuries, to believe they must discard other-place folklore and adopt the new-place folklore... but as we consider folklore "old stuff" and discount newly-incorporated stories as folklore, perhaps our massive immigrant nation set aside what we'd left behind (either right away or as a process of acculturation), but dismissed all we were picking up to replace what we'd left behind or set aside.
The result: the majority population/privileged culture of the US -- white people -- don't realize there really is a white culture, and that this has nuances that off-set it from American culture, and that under that, there is most definitely a white folklore, as much as there are regional and familial folklores.
Maybe this might be one way to look at folklore, as a framework to get a better grasp (and come to a better awareness of) this 'white culture' that those on the inside have so much trouble seeing. Maybe if we see it as a collective of little stories -- old and modern -- then we can come up with a way to take ownership and pride, rather than appropriating other cultures as though this could fill some kind of perceived (but nonexistent, I say) 'gap' in our own folklore, or worse, declaring there is no such thing as 'white culture' at all, and declaring national culture to be indivisible and equal with racial (or even regional) culture. There is a thing as white culture, but with the issues of acculturation, immigration, imperialism, colonialism, and -- bluntly -- indenture and slavery -- the general 'white culture' has grown accustomed to seeing itself as the pure default, instead of understanding itself to be distinct, and valuable as something distinct.
Maybe I'm too optimistic in this, but I wonder if this major aspect of US racial/regional demographic (white people) were to see itself not as the "default baseline" but as "yet another racial sub-group with identifiable, if sometimes shared or overlapping, folklore", whether this might be a step in the right direction. That instead of saying, "you [immigrant, minority] need to acculturate to us [who are the measurable standard as default]", knowing each has culture/folklore might gradually move people towards seeing their cross-folklore positions as the meeting of two different minds, rather than as inferior who must ditch the superfluous as part of acculturating to the superior's [lesser, default] folklore.
Hmmm. Dunno. Just a thought, really. Okay, a bunch of them.
The phrase I used before was "cultural currency," speaking in terms of external-culture authors "purchasing" a cultural bit of folklore -- but that's actually rooted in thoughts I was having on a macroeconomic, or macrocultural, scale. If you look at the exports of Japanese anime and manga, a significant number of them are moving along lines of cultural exportation (and the same goes for Korean manga), and an awful lot of the biggest of these exported products also incorporate significant distinctively-Japanese elements.
It's even in the most innocuous of moments in a story, like the Christmas-moment in Kimi ni Todoke where the protagonist's father tells her, "don't tell me what you want, tell Santa!" The next shot shows her hanging a paper tablet -- that looks an awful lot like a prayer tablet -- on a branch of the Christmas tree. To me, as someone who grew up with "writing a letter to Santa", this is both logical and at the same time clearly and strongly influenced by the protagonist's culture. It's the same idea... but not. That's part of cultural currency, where it can have an unexpectedly large impact -- unexpected, I say, because the one within the culture probably doesn't even think twice about it. (I'd never think to explain to anyone that "telling Santa" means "writing and mailing off a letter", but if you were raised writing your request and hanging it on the tree, you'd probably find "writing and mailing off a letter" to be both familiar and strangely unfamiliar at the same time.)
Anyway, the ground material of all stories is, I think, ultimately our fairy tales and myths -- even when these are wrapped up in the fancy dress of modernity. Even the notion of "urban fantasy" is really just taking the "once upon a time" facet and putting it into this-world, rearranging the features of those fairy tales and myths, but not enough to make them unrecognizable. It's when that urban or contemporary fantasy is exported that it merges with the overall cultural import-export exchange, and thus becomes fodder for other writers' and readers' imagination, elsewhere. Yes, possibly at times divorced from its original ground, but still... if there are loan-words, there can be loan-stories, too.
Behind all those thoughts, though, I was thinking this: that while it's pretty unrealistic to think that there's some overriding authority designating which stories are acceptable for import/export, the fact remains that when taken as a whole, this is how other-cultures create certain assumptions or expectations. This is why the average Swede I met, even perfect strangers, wanted to know if I grew up in a house with a pool and drove a BMW to school -- because their impression of the entire assortment of teenage protagonists in American movies and television invariably had kids who turned sixteen and immediately got a flashy new car to drive, and who went home at night to big houses. Yes, there are exceptions to that stereotypical Hollywood teenager, but those are exceptions, and exceptions don't impact the cultural stereotype, which is created on an amalgamation of the most common presentations. To see the deviations and exceptions requires the audience explore at a deeper level, and that's not always possible, feasible, or even of any real interest.
The upshot is: whether Japan realizes it or not (and it seems many companies do, when you think about the marketing used), its folklore is a major stream of its economy. You might even say entire industries in exportation are riding on the back of this exported folklore: the rage for wedding kimonos to hang on the wall, for chopsticks and teacups and rice bowls, for the notion of wabi-sabi decor, and even those stupid bedsheets with [chinese] characters that don't make any sense because the designer didn't expect anyone to actually be able to read it, silly. The market that exists for these things exists, in some part, I think, to the stories exported by that culture, which laid a groundwork.
This is far beyond simply anime and manga, mind you, though I'd say Spirited Away carries a huge chunk of the current story-export process, in terms of major Japanese folklore. Prior to that, though, there were samurai films and big robot movies and before that, stories and art and reports brought back by people who'd visited. If the first exported folklore was 'about' Japan, in the past fifty years it's become 'by' Japan, but otherwise it's not a major break in continuity.
I was thinking all this around the time I'd started looking for more Korean manhwa, because frankly, I wanted to see some other folklore. The presentation of Japanese folklore -- depending on source, of course -- sometimes starts to feel a little, erm, packaged. Every culture has its formulas, of course, and while I'm sure there are some who are constantly charmed by the quaintness of "everyone dresses traditionally and goes to the festival" -- just as I'm sure there are non-Americans who have a similar reaction to seeing/reading "everyone watches the Independence Day parade and then picnics during the fireworks" -- the fact that I'm seeing another culture's stereotypes doesn't change that all cliches do, eventually, bore me to tears. I have no more inclination to watch another Hollywood "poor girl gets makeover and wins rich boy" story than I do to watch another Japanese "let's all have a cafe for cultural day" story.
The problem, of course, is that I can't read hangul -- it's not like Japanese, where I can at least get a crude sense of things by parsing any kanji in the text -- so I'm limited to the output from scanlation teams. Fortunately, they seem to be as diverse as the manga teams, so there's a lot to choose from. Not as much as Japanese -- which dominates the scanlation field as much as the international manga/comic field, it seems -- but still, it's not like there's nothing.
To find the "pretty much amounts to nothing," you have to go looking for manhua -- the Chinese manga. To compare: on one site's database, you can't search for totals but you can search by summary, so I searched for all summaries containing the word "the". The database contains 5983 series scanlated: 369 of those are manhwa (Korean); 76 are manhua (Chinese), which leaves 5,538 Japanese series scanlated. Another site's database tracks Asian comics regardless of scanlation status; in that database, roughly 44,300 titles are Japanese, 900 are Korean, and 400 are Chinese.
The bottom line? If you have any interest in the export-import of Chinese folklore in tales/myths, you might want to try wuxia, because manhua-wise, it just isn't there. For an even more blunt version of the same, I search by the genre term "supernatural", which is effectively code for "cultural folklore" -- the demons, monsters, heros, and myths. Stories like Pahanjip or Bride of the Water God or Gegege no Kitaro or Nurarihyon no Mago or even the folklore you'd find embedded in retellings like Gekka no Kimi or Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
And... well, not much. 792 total: 709 manga, 75 manhwa, 8 manhua.
Somewhere in there, I segued into thinking about imperialism and the destruction of another culture's folklore by conquest or infiltration -- but then, as I kept digging for Chinese folklore-infused manhua, I started wondering whether it's possible to turn this imperialistic-style destruction on one's own culture.
And I started thinking, maybe that's why there's such a dearth of Chinese folklore exported, because the Cultural Revolution knocked the ground out from under a lot of the oral folklore. In the stories I've read by Chinese (modern) authors, there's a remarkable lack of folklore -- and what there is (by the broadest definition I'm using, here), is mostly related to, well... not to sound too bleak, but a lot of it seems to be related to basically "how not to end up with the authorities looking at you as a suspicious person." What kinds of music you shouldn't play (Western composers), which colleges are considered "better" for someone who wants to advance, the things you say and don't say if you want to keep getting along and not get in trouble.
Now, granted, some of the stories I've read -- like English -- are memoirs and/or fictional recitations of life in the middle of, or directly after the conclusion of, the cultural revolution. But other authors I've read were writing after Mao's death and more recent. Possibly one of the few jackpots of little-stories usually swirls around New Year's, but that's about it. Finding a whole genre of folklore-influenced, little-story-laden, fiction is... well, there certainly aren't any stories like Bride of the Water God that I can find (scanlated or not), and there sure as hell aren't any Gegege no Kitaros, either.
Which really sucks, because if we had an equal number of each of the types of Asian comics -- Japanese, Korean, Chinese -- with only a few exceptions, I would spend the majority of my time reading Korean and Chinese. But for Chinese, it's just not there.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not lumping Taiwan and PRC together -- I do know they're different -- but it seems as though the influence of the Cultural Revolution did stretch. That's my best guess, at least; after all, it stretched its hand down to cause unrest in Hong Kong, too, and that area was ostensibly an economic zone then-managed by Great Britain. (And I seem to recall hearing the tensions of the cultural revolution also made an appearance, here and there, in Kuala Lumpur, too. Hrmm.)
It only takes a generation to really undermine the cultural folklore, because these are predominantly stories passed from adult to child, whatever the relationship. So if the adults stop telling the stories for any reason -- especially if an entire nation of adults stop telling the stories -- there's no recreating that experience of subliminally absorbing the folklore. That experience is lost, and in a self-inflicted situation like the Cultural Revolution, it might be lost irreparably -- the same way so much is lost for continuing generations of Saami, for whom a wave of missionary outsider zeal did about the same thing, silencing nearly an entire generation of adults within a very short period of time. It's probably safe to say this is true of a huge number of conquered indigenous nations, but China is near unparalleled, I think, in that its change was self-inflicted. I mean, Russia attempted a break with the past, but it doesn't seem to have gone quite so far as Mao, in terms of almost literally uprooting major chunks of its folklore and tossing them out.
So the grandparents stop talking, the parents don't get the full extent of the folklore, and the next generation is raised with a new set of folklore. Yes, a new set, because we can never -- I think -- not have folklore. If we reach a vacuum or a chunk of outdated information, we fill it with something new or update the advice (though perhaps with the addendum of "back in my day..."). The result is that the next generation has a full plate of folklore, but it's a radically different folklore from the grandparents, and that, I think, can create a bizarre pseudo-cultural barrier right there, just as much as there's a subtle but definite cultural barrier between my Southern-ness and, say, a friend from Idaho.
It's not impassable, but it's something we don't always notice; we tend to assume we speak the same language and know the same history, so our culture is the same (because we're ignoring/unrealizing the interplay of 'regional' in there, along with 'gender' and 'race' and 'religion' folklore-influences, as well). But when it's in the same family, man, that's rough -- because family is supposed to be, for most people, the most common demoninator. If you don't have much in common with others, you at least know you've got shared history with your family -- but significant folklore-breaks like conquest, or something like the Cultural Revolution, can destroy that shared history, leaving you only with the illusion of shared folklore.
And then along comes the generation of great-grandchildren, who'd really like to recapture that lost folklore, but their grandparents are aging (and never really heard much of it at all, anyway) -- and the great-grandparents, the last mouths of that folklore who were raised in it themselves -- are gone. What little is captured is only an echo, and prone to questions of 'accuracy'. As if folklore was ever meant to be accurate! But worse, to me as a storyteller, is that such recapturing destroys the regional: if you can't recreate what people did on X holiday, then you borrow from someone over there who tracked down that folklore.
Eventually, the absence of extensive folklore means everyone's borrowing from others to create complete sets of folklore, and the regionalism is destroyed. Doubly so if we're getting into the realm of cultural anthropologists, some of whom I've read debating over whether this story or that story is "true" or whether it's a personal variation or a regional anomaly. The rich fabric of myriad folklore little stories is gone, replaced by a thinly-spread recreation.
What's worse is that so many of us (as evidenced by the replies to previous posts on this topic) see "folklore" as nothing more or less than "old stuff" or "stuff old people say" or even "superstitions that no one really believes". We ignore the wealth of new folklore we're developing -- from when/how it's okay to open a door for a lady, to proper cellphone etiquette (with "being suspended" replacing "seven years of bad luck", I suppose) -- and thus whether we're within a colonial, conquered, or self-inflicted cultural gap, we'll say, "we have no folklore, now" and discount the fact that folklore is never static, but always evolving.
I'm going to stop here because I've got other stuff to do, but I'll tell you where these thoughts led me, and we can hash it out in comments: the end-point of these thoughts is that perhaps the process of immigration and acculturation led the majority of Americans, over the past two-point-five centuries, to believe they must discard other-place folklore and adopt the new-place folklore... but as we consider folklore "old stuff" and discount newly-incorporated stories as folklore, perhaps our massive immigrant nation set aside what we'd left behind (either right away or as a process of acculturation), but dismissed all we were picking up to replace what we'd left behind or set aside.
The result: the majority population/privileged culture of the US -- white people -- don't realize there really is a white culture, and that this has nuances that off-set it from American culture, and that under that, there is most definitely a white folklore, as much as there are regional and familial folklores.
Maybe this might be one way to look at folklore, as a framework to get a better grasp (and come to a better awareness of) this 'white culture' that those on the inside have so much trouble seeing. Maybe if we see it as a collective of little stories -- old and modern -- then we can come up with a way to take ownership and pride, rather than appropriating other cultures as though this could fill some kind of perceived (but nonexistent, I say) 'gap' in our own folklore, or worse, declaring there is no such thing as 'white culture' at all, and declaring national culture to be indivisible and equal with racial (or even regional) culture. There is a thing as white culture, but with the issues of acculturation, immigration, imperialism, colonialism, and -- bluntly -- indenture and slavery -- the general 'white culture' has grown accustomed to seeing itself as the pure default, instead of understanding itself to be distinct, and valuable as something distinct.
Maybe I'm too optimistic in this, but I wonder if this major aspect of US racial/regional demographic (white people) were to see itself not as the "default baseline" but as "yet another racial sub-group with identifiable, if sometimes shared or overlapping, folklore", whether this might be a step in the right direction. That instead of saying, "you [immigrant, minority] need to acculturate to us [who are the measurable standard as default]", knowing each has culture/folklore might gradually move people towards seeing their cross-folklore positions as the meeting of two different minds, rather than as inferior who must ditch the superfluous as part of acculturating to the superior's [lesser, default] folklore.
Hmmm. Dunno. Just a thought, really. Okay, a bunch of them.