In his chapter, “Critical Folklore Studies and the Revaluation of Tradition,” in the collection Tradition in the Twenty-First Century: Locating the Role of the Past in the Present, Stephen Olbrys Gencarella engages with Glassie’s temporal concept of tradition in proposing a “critical folklore studies.” Gencarella presents the model of tradition and betrayal, positioning the concepts not as antonyms but as necessary counterparts in the process of cultural reproduction. He writes, “Every opportunity to pass something on is also an opportunity to betray that passing.” Acknowledging that “tradition” is not inherently good, Gencarella argues that tradition bearers, communities, and networks are constantly negotiating what aspects of tradition will be transmitted, and what will be shed or “betrayed.” Current debates over the removal of Confederate and colonial monuments in the United States, including here in West Virginia, are one example of how official and state memory is often contested, but this process is also happening in cultural communities. The members of Scotts Run Museum—who not only regularly enact a counternarrative of their community but also have drafted a specific vision for its future—offer the most direct example of this, but there are others. Writer Shirley Campbell carefully preserved her autobiographical songs and poems in a notebook as a statement of identity and tangible artifact of her creative labor for a future reader. Home cooks and residents of Helvetia consider just what is at the core of their cultural traditions, allowing recipes, material culture, and communal celebrations to be revived, retained, and mutated so that those traditions might survive. And in Milton a dedicated pair of friends twine text and place to experience the writings of beloved hometown writer Breece D’J Pancake as a placemaking project, lending layered meaning to their hometown. These community members are invested in creating and maintaining shared cultural reference points in hopes they might leave behind a trace, a road map, a legacy, for the future vernacular culture of West Virginia. As Washburn’s rendering warns, though, while the intentional actions of tradition bearers are important in this process, which aspects of tradition endure and which aspects are cast off for the ages is determined not only by the conscious choices of their communities of origin but also is greatly impacted by the material conditions, environment, and ideological currents (not to mention mere happenstance) of the society in which they occur.3
The postapocalyptic narrative of Fallout 76 [the video game set in a post-nuclear disaster imaginary West Virginia in the year 2102], in which players inhabit a world ravaged by the atrocities of capitalism and are charged with rebuilding a society and culture out of what remains, suggests that we must consider the material conditions of cultural communities. Gencarella proposes that “folklorists must turn their attention to inciting crises in traditions that prohibit social justice.” I’m reluctant to wholeheartedly agree, as I believe that such a drastic intervention in a community-based tradition by a folklorist would need to be approached delicately and specifically, and is potentially problematic, putting too much power into the hands of one folklorist’s subjective assessment and interfering with communities’ self-determination of their own tradition making. But I’m interested to see the ethical protocol for such an interference further outlined. I argue instead that as a next step beyond documentation, contextualization, and presentation, folklorists, myself included, should be more attuned to the future life of traditions beyond sustainability, and actively work in collaboration with communities to combat the outside destructive forces, such as privatization, extraction, and austerity, that disrupt them and block their agency to negotiate the transmission of their traditions. Glassie gestures at this when he asserts that the antonym of tradition is not change, but oppression. “Oppressed people are made to do what others will them to do. They become slaves in the ceramic factories of their masters. Acting traditionally, by contrast, they use their own resources—their own tradition, one might say—to create their own future, to do what they will themselves to do. They make their own pots.”
But it is becoming ever harder for people to make their own pots. The deracinating forces of capitalism and its atrocities of extraction, environmental destruction, disease, poverty, and climate change that can act upon the creative practices of cultural groups are so powerfully disruptive that they are often the primary etic causes of the death of tradition. In West Virginia, witness, for example, the local community whose members for generations dug ramps on a certain hillside—a site of community practice and shared memory—now lost due to land being privatized or altogether ravaged by a coal company. Or the new communities of Haitian, Burmese, Puerto Rican, and Ethiopian refugees and immigrants who work long night shifts at the local chicken processing plant in the rural small town of Moorefield, where there are language barriers among workers and few places and little time to gather in community and engage in cultural practices. Or consider the community graveyard of a former Black coal camp in Logan County, where locals once gathered every Memorial Day to picnic and decorate the graves of their relatives, before it was destroyed when the gas company ran a pipeline through, cracking graves and disturbing remains. These sorts of disruptions seem to be occurring at an accelerating rate, particularly in a place like West Virginia, where the population, especially in rural areas, is declining faster than in any other state, the majority of land is owned by outside private companies and investors, and many of the livable wage-paying jobs that do exist demand long hours and grueling, often dangerous work, leaving little time or energy for other pursuits. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated outstanding and intertwined social issues including unemployment, poverty, poor health, addiction, racism, and structural reliance on a rapidly declining extractive and destructive monoeconomy. In the wake of the pandemic (if it’s possible to speak of such a thing), it will become all the more necessary for folklorists and cultural workers invested in the sovereignty of marginalized and oppressed populations to take a visionary approach to cultural work. To do so, our work must be in collaboration with communities and be based in material analysis. As Gencarella writes of his critical folklore studies, “It would not seek utopia but rather struggle to make the future better, redress past injustices, and improve the present for as many people as possible.” Perhaps, though, a bit of a utopian spirit would yield a beneficial and productive outlook for folklorists, inspiring us to work in collaboration with communities to not only envision collective futures but create them together, by fighting for improved material conditions for everyone.4