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Stephen Olbrys Gencarella
Gramsci, Good Sense, and Critical
Folklore Studies: A Critical Reintroduction
The following is the author’s reply to a comment made by José E. Limón
on the article “Gramsci, Good Sense, and Critical Folklore Studies,” pub-
lished in this issue (Journal of Folklore Research 47/3, 2010).
First, let me acknowledge my appreciation for Professor Limón’s
response to my article. I am honored that he has offered his criticism
and continues a discussion concerning the role of Antonio Gramsci
for American folklore. Professor Limón’s work is featured promi-
nently in an undergraduate course I teach on critical folklore studies.
Indeed, I would cite as a motivation for this and other articles my
belief that folklorists have not adequately taken up his calls to engage
Western Marxism in a serious way (Limón 1983, 1984). Our disagree-
ments about Gramsci are apparent and copious, but I am pleased to
see two folklorists having an argument about him and about the po-
tential for folklore studies to become critical.
Professor Limón raises several objections to my article. I would
identify the following question as his most pressing critique: “How can
we as folklorists possibly see our academic practice as one that should
call for the eradication of our subject matter and, really, our subjects as
creative people?” To this demanding query, I would readily affirm that a
critical folklore studies might indeed call for the eradication of folklore.
Let me offer a few concrete examples of folklore I would wish to see
eradicated. In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, televan-
Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 47, No. 3, 2010
Copyright © 2010 Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University
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gelist Pat Robertson claimed on The 700 Club that the event was one of a
number of curses brought upon Haitians by their ancestors, who ostensibly
made a pact with the Devil before gaining independence from France.
Following the election of the first U.S. African American president, a wave
of (often white) conspiracy theorists rose to prominence through claims
that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen. In conservative politi-
cal circles throughout the United States, it is increasingly fashionable—if
not mandatory—to reject vast scientific evidence demonstrating global
warming and evolution. Anti-immigration pundits and white suprema-
cists regularly spread rumors that equate growing Hispanic populations
with the rise of maladies ranging from crime to leprosy. After a collapse
in Utah’s Crandall Canyon killed six miners in 2007, the mine owner re-
jected criticism of massive safety violations by calling the mountain “evil”
and “alive.” I see no harm to folklore studies as an academic pursuit if we
folklorists seek to disrupt these and other pernicious expressions. And
doing so would ally us with a Gramscian perspective.
Although I agree with Professor Limón’s recapitulation of Gramsci’s
negative attitude toward folklore (and especially the folklore of Gramsci’s
time that nourished a fascist hegemony), I think his characterization is
not a charitable representation of Gramsci’s aim. Gramsci’s point, after
all, was that he did not want already marginalized people to be prison-
ers of their folklore, constrained by a localized vernacular community
held in the hands of petty dictators, or unable to wield national politi-
cal influence. This admonition against a purely vernacular education
is not a mere anecdote of an isolated history. We need only consider,
for example, the midterm election of 2010, in which the Tea Party/
Republican candidate for Senator in Delaware sought to dismantle
federal education standards and empower local school boards to teach
intelligent design in public schools.
A more charitable representation of Gramsci’s criticism of folklore,
I submit, would locate it within his comments on education, a concern
that remains as compelling and relevant today as it was under Mussolini’s
rule. Akin to Gramsci, I could not conceive any circumstance in which
it would seem just to deprive students of an education in science (or in
philosophy or in civics) in the name of promoting local and vernacular
conceptualizations of the world and the cosmos. If other folklorists
disagree, then our community should debate this rigorously.
The claim that some folklore should be eradicated also necessitates
that we folklorists reexamine the scope of our subject matter. I am not
Stephen Olbrys Gencarella Response to José E. Limón 261
of the opinion that folklore should be defined only by those genres
that dominated folklore studies in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies and that continue to populate the chapters of most introductory
textbooks. As I have urged folklorists to yet again reconsider who “the
folk” are (2009), I would also ask us to rethink what lore means in a
contemporary context. I suggest that we expand the notion to include
racism, sexism, classism, ageism, and homophobia. If we reframe these
formations as folklore, I doubt—and lament—that we will ever eradicate
our subject matter, and I fear that we would have enough to comment
on until our species no longer inhabits the planet.
No movement toward a critical folklore studies will be tenable if
we do not rethink our understanding of what lore and folk mean and
continually adapt that understanding to new political circumstances.
Perhaps in this case, Professor Limón’s definition of folklore is much
closer to Gramsci’s than mine is to either. If that is so, I understand why
he could conclude that the story of Gramsci’s potential contribution is
over. For me, however, folklore is not limited by a range of genres or
means of performance, nor is it even something a “folk” does. Rather,
I understand folklore to be a constitutive rhetoric, a lore that creates
both a folk and a corresponding group of antagonists, whether that
lore take the form of a superstition or a legend or a piece of political
oratory or a television advertisement.
So, yes, I do think there are times when folklorists should seek to
eradicate folklore and might dedicate their research to such an undertak-
ing. Such an approach requires a folklore studies that is not necessarily
celebratory, but also not necessarily pessimistic; rather, it requires one
that is critical.
That concurrence with Gramsci established, however, I do not
agree with Professor Limón when he estimates that I “accept Gramsci’s
wholesale indictment of folklore genres.” I think that at times good
sense would call for indicting folklore, and at others good sense would
call for embracing it. The devil is in the details, as the saying goes. Or
to state it otherwise, I would refute any attempt to support or reject
folklore (or philosophy or science) without first understanding its
manifestation in a particular rhetorical and political circumstance.
This leads me to address Professor Limón’s fair concern with my
insertion of religion and Gadamer into a discussion about folklore
and folklore studies. I shall take these issues separately. With respect to
religion, I reiterate that Gramsci’s dismissal of folklore needs to be un-
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derstood within his more expansive discussion of forms of knowledge
and the establishment of pedagogies for social justice. His critique of
religion was, certainly, directed toward the Vatican and the Catholic
Church’s compliance with the fascist regime in Italy, but Gramsci also
regarded the same Church as a model of a long-standing hegemony
and therefore one from which Marxists might learn. I agree with
Gramsci on both points.
However, if Gramsci were to assert that religion itself be regarded as
a natural impediment to social justice, I would disagree. I am an athe-
ist, but I would like to imagine that his opinion of religion would have
evolved had he lived long enough to see its role in, for example, the
American Civil Rights movement and in the fostering of goodwill and
solidarity among disparate religious communities in the wake of 9/11 (a
goodwill I fear is now disintegrating in the name of crass political gains).
Furthermore, Gramsci’s discussion provides a way to recognize dif-
ferences without splitting hairs between doctrinal and folk religion.
This advances another realm for intellectual collaboration between
academics, and also another arena for critical intercession in the “real”
world. To give one example, I am not particularly concerned about
whether abstinence-only morality would normally qualify as a subject
for folklore studies or religious studies, but I do think we folklorists
should conduct research with policy implications to demarcate how
such a morality has been employed as a means to limit education on the
science of pregnancy, AIDS, and for that matter, human desire itself.
I am willing to agree with Professor Limón’s assertion that I played
the Gadamer card quickly, perhaps with such alacrity as to seem en-
gaged in sleight-of-hand. To restate my reason for doing so: Gadamer
offers a counter-point to Gramsci’s advocacy for science as the crown
of an arboreal metaphor. He also provides a means to shift the discus-
sion from good sense (as another step up toward that crown) to phro-
nesis—to a practice of managing apt political responses to contingent
and situated circumstances. Even as his own stance shies away from
overt political intervention, Gadamer presents a vision of philosophy
(and science) that is not necessarily an improvement upon folklore,
but rather a complement to it.
Read together, I think Gramsci and Gadamer underscore the impor-
tance of good sense and phronesis as political resources and thereby
pave a path for folklorists to enter conversations with scientists and
philosophers. Additionally, their ideas encourage critical folklorists
Stephen Olbrys Gencarella Response to José E. Limón 263
to offer judgments and to react to the politics of judgments as they
are rendered by others involved in propagating lore that constitutes
a folk and their antagonists. In short, Gadamer improves Gramsci’s
notion of good sense by emphasizing judgment, a concept I think is
missing too often in conventional folklore studies and is essential to
any critical one.
Professor Limón is correct in noting that I offer an adaptation of
Gramsci, but I hope I have demonstrated that this adaptation is not
anti-Gramscian, for it shares a commitment to providing rigorous edu-
cational opportunities that encourage people to make political judg-
ments and offer criticism. He may not be persuaded by my particular
adaptation, but it does not seem to me that Professor Limón regards
all adaptations of Gramsci to be without merit, as he cites Raymond
Williams (and Manuel Peña and Luigi Lombardi-Satriani) favorably.
I do not disagree that all three are important interlocutors with
Gramsci, and each is a scholar with whom folklorists should be familiar.
I would argue, however, that the stellar contributions of Peña (and
Lombardi-Satriani, who is less known to English-speaking folklorists)
are the exceptions that prove the rule of our far-too-little engagement
with Gramsci. As for Williams, I would point out that since his death
in 1988 a number of other scholars have offered either significant ad-
aptations of Gramsci (e.g., Stuart Hall, Paolo Freire, Ernesto Laclau,
and Chantal Mouffe) or reactions to him (e.g., Gayatri Spivak, James
Scott, and Judith Butler); put simply, these uses of Gramsci’s work are
not frequently addressed in folklore studies.
To converse regularly with these post-Gramscians would bring
folklore studies much closer to critical cultural studies, and that is
precisely my aim in advocating a critical folklore studies. I would like
to close this response, then, by ruminating on the meaning of that
term critical when it is paired with studies rather than placed in op-
position to folklore (as Professor Limón does in the introduction to
his response). Critical in this sense implicates several ideas: the critical
of Critical Theory (that is, the legacy of Marxism and the critique of
capitalism); the critical that calls social institutions and commonsense
formations into crisis in order to evaluate and revalue them; and the
critical that forefronts intervention and activist research rather than
observation. As I explained in my initial article, I am not interested
only in understanding folklore as it might foster a counter-hegemony.
I am interested in forging a new hegemony, one founded upon and
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socializing in progressive values, radical democratic politics, and eco-
nomic social justice. And I see the development of a critical folklore
studies as integral to this mission.
Finally, I should admit that despite my defense of Gramsci, I do
not consider myself a devotee, and in fact generally despise cults of
personality. I would not ask folklorists to become Gramscians, nor
define a critical folklore studies as one inevitably indebted to him.
Rather, I would ask folklorists to consider Gramsci an important wres-
tling partner, as someone good to think with (even as one might think
in opposition to), precisely because he demands that we answer the
problems of education and identify rather than obscure the politics
of our research.
I think of José E. Limón in a similar way, and I thank him for his
serious treatment of this matter. And as Professor Limón concluded
his reply to Jack Zipes’s response to “Western Marxism and Folklore,”
I hope that this dialogue will continue.
University of Massachusetts
Amherst
References Cited
Gencarella, Stephen Olbrys
2009 “Constituting Folklore: A Case for Critical Folklore Studies.” Journal of
American Folklore 122/484:172–96.
Limón, José E.
1983 “Western Marxism and Folklore: A Critical Introduction.” Journal of
American Folklore 96/379:34–52.
1984 “Western Marxism and Folklore: A Critical Reintroduction.” Journal of
American Folklore 97/385:337–44.
Zipes, Jack
1984 “Folklore Research and Western Marxism: A Critical Reply.” Journal of
American Folklore 97/385:329–37.
Stephen Olbrys Gencarella is Associate Professor in the Depart-
ment of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
where he offers courses in folklore studies and rhetorical studies. He
has twice been elected to the Board of Directors for the Massachusetts
Teachers Association, one of the largest unions and democratic orga-
nizations in the commonwealth. ([email protected])
