Contentious Choices - Lindsey's Post for week 2

The first thing I want to mention, though I don’t deem it worthy of an entire post, is how much this week’s readings leads me to believe there should be a strong and vibrant study of the Folklore of Academic Journals. Reading the whole issue of The American Historical Review allowed me to see it as a material artifact of the academic discipline, one that creates a patterned meaning, transmitted through journal after journal: first Levine’s article, then the others’ critiques, then the rejoinder by Levine. I may hesitate to say that it’s the scholarly version of a call and response spiritual, but I can’t help but be struck by the ritualization of this group process. Phew. Now that I have gotten this off my chest, I suppose I will write of less meta- things.

While reading Levine’s main article, I did not peg him as a pure ‘functionalist’ as Lears did, though I did understand how Lears came to that conclusion. Lears writes that Levine’s functionalist approach leads to the argument that “the cultural products people purchased were a more-or-less direct expression of their needs and indeed of their experience generally – tools for coping (Lears 1992: 1418).” Lears goes on to state that Levine’s argument “obscures key distinctions between producers and consumers and between folk and industrial societies (Lears 1992: 1418).” Lears’ critique of Levine is a valid one, yet I believe Robin Kelley did a more thorough job expressing the way in which Levine could focus more on the inherent tension between producers and consumers of popular culture – by looking at the ways “popular culture can simultaneously subvert and reproduce hegemony (Kelley 1992: 1405).”

The tension Kelley describes is between a) a given folk group that exists within a broader hegemonic culture (a top-down approach to viewing popular and folk culture) and b) this folk group’s ability to actively subvert this hegemony by making informed choices based on factors of race, gender, or social status. This tension Kelley describes allows Levine’s argument for understanding the choices folk groups make to be valid without becoming over-celebratory. This complex way of viewing a folk group does not allow for an idealized type (what Levine doesn’t state but perhaps intends), and gives folklorists a chance to study what I found most interesting in Davis’s article: the unpopular choices of popular America. By looking at both popular and unpopular choices a folk group (like the American working class) makes, one can see the complex, sometimes contentious ways in which these groups participate daily in the greater, often hegemonic society where they reside.