This is part two of a three-part series presenting the lesson suggestions on the Explore Your Community Poster (PDF), designed for middle school and high school classrooms. Read Part One. Read Part Three.
Community Culture: It’s All Around You
One important aspect of culture that is hard to remember when when we go out to collect cultural traditions, is that we are always in culture. Human beings need culture to get along and survive. So we can’t step outside of culture. We often become more aware of culture when we meet up with someone else’s traditions or language different from our own. So for many people their first project is to go out and collect songs, stories, or traditional arts of people different from ourselves. Then it may be hard to convince the people you want to interview that their traditions are important—because to them they are ordinary. But by persisting and reassuring people that what is ordinary to them is important, often we can learn important things about people’s lives and how important creativity is to human life. An example is this interview with Del Bonis and his wife Ida Bonis. The interviewer is Tom Burns, who asks Del about how he got started making sand sculptures at the beach in this interview. Once Mr. Bonis gets started, it is clear that sand sculpting is an important part of his life, and he gets especially engaged as he talks about teaching kids on the beach how to make sculptures.
It is also possible to take a look at what is important to your own life and see aspects of culture and creativity that are important and worth documenting. Looking back at yourself when you were younger, how did you count players when you needed to decide who is “it?” What were your favorite jokes when you were little? Do you tell different kinds of jokes now? Did you have favorite songs learned from classmates or at summer camp? As we grow up and get older some aspects of our culture change and we can become nostalgic about the things we used to do. That also is a way that we discover that the cultural activities we take for granted are more valuable to us than we thought when we were more actively doing them. Community culture, sometimes called “folklore” or “folklife,” is the living expression of culture in everyday life—anyone’s culture—learned and passed on informally from person to person.
Often it is said that folklore has no author. But those who study culture are also interested in stories we tell about ourselves, or our friends and families. A song someone makes up about their life can tell a lot about their experiences and hopes or fears. Tradition takes time, but personal experience can be immediate. To get a good picture of a culture, both are are important.
During the Great Depression in the 1930s there was an environmental disaster called the dust bowl, as the land dried out and the topsoil blew away. Many people from the central part of the United States were forced to move, and many went west to California to find work, often picking crops, as there was little other work to do. For many people this was a wrenching change from what they were used to. For high school students, it often meant being taken out of school to work picking crops to help support their families. That was what happened to Lloyd Stalcup, age 14, who found himself picking cotton instead of going to school. He wrote about his life in a song, “The Cotton Picker’s Song,” which tells a lot about what it was like to be a young man in those times. If it had not been recorded by two men documenting the migrant workers in California, Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin, this song, and its connection to history, would have been lost. So while traditional songs, stories, arts, and celebrations are often central to what is called folklife, the creative expressions original to individuals within their culture can also be of great importance to understanding that culture. Also, traditions change over time, so it is often interesting to find out what was done by previous generations, and what has changed.
Here are some examples of traditional culture. These may give you some ideas about what you would like to study:
- the stories that you tell at family holiday gatherings
- the nicknames you call your friends
- the jokes or chain letters that you forward to friends
- the ghost stories or legends you tell of strange happenings in your neighborhood
- the way your grandmother prepares special holiday dishes
- the notes and rhymes you inscribe in each other’s school yearbooks
- the songs your parents learned from your grandparents and sang to you, and which you may sing to your own children someday
- the rhymes you used for jump-rope or other playground games