Reflecting On Folklore Paper by Hurston

When I visited the Collections floor at school last week, I had the privilege of looking at a paper on Folklore by Zora Neale Hurston. Folklore has been something that I have been interested in since my junior year of College, so coming across this was a real treat and allowed me to challenge my own ideas by looking through the lens that her early writing of Folklore provided.

Hurston describes Folklore as the “boiled down juice of human living and when one phase of it passes another begins which shall in turn give away before a successor.” I take “boiled down juice of human living” as meaning the essence of a person after stripping all the emotional and psychological layers built up over time. It is the reason a person lives and behaves the way he or she does — whether consciously or subconsciously. When I think of folklore, I picture regurgitating the regurgitated — with a slightly different perspective. Nothing I say or do is original — only a variation of the origin. However, over time, as variations are passed down, people have allowed themselves to be deceived that they are original or unique. To me, folklore can be two things — virtuous or vicious, and nothing more. We are all in some form or fashion “folklore” personified.

Hurston describes culture as “a forced march on the near and the obvious.” What this means to me is that culture is influenced by folklore and cannot be escaped. It reminds me of the saying, “what came first, the chicken or the egg.” When I think of culture and folklore, I think of “what came first, culture or folklore.” When we as humans look at the world and our surroundings, the way we perceive and filter our world is through the way we were taught and the things that we were previously exposed to—this is inevitable.