Folklorica FULL 2024


Teaching Genre in Context 

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Teaching Genre in Context: Fieldwork and “Hanging Out” in Appalachia 
and Bulgaria  

Sarah Craycraft 
Harvard University 

Cambridge, Massachusetts  

Abstract 

Folklore classrooms often teach genre—a contested concept—as an 
introduction to the complexities of folkloristics. As folklorists interrogate the 
colonial legacies inherent to core concepts like genre, we must develop new 
teaching models that equip students to recognize cultural process while 
emphasizing how totalizing classification systems disenfranchise folk groups by 
obscuring cultural difference. This article juxtaposes experiments with sociality 
in East European folklife and Appalachian Ohio folklife, in which young people 
attempt to connect with older adults through culturally specific forms of sociality 
that do not easily fit within etic genre categories: the sedianka [work bee] in 
Bulgaria, daily bench talks, and “liars club” coffee meets in Appalachian Ohio. 
These examples illustrate the impact of intersectional identities on the legibility 
and usability of generic forms, while emphasizing how an understanding of genre 
framing can contribute to intergenerational relationship building. As Sabra 
Webber [2015] points out, emic genres that resist global classification can evade 
the totalizing, product-focused analysis that was built into colonialist 
systemization projects; attention to such forms can prioritize the agency of local 
cultural frameworks. Cross-cultural comparison offers fresh opportunities for 
examining how intersectional group dynamics are made visible through genre in 
our own folk groups. 

 

Teaching Genre in Context  

How—and should—genre be taught in introductory folklore courses as a 
core organizing concept for our field? One of eight keywords historicized in Burt 
Feintuch’s [2003] edited volume, Eight Words for the Study of Expressive 
Culture, genre has long been a cornerstone of folklore studies. For the scholar, 
genre “remains the generally stable trampoline from which folklorists and 
budding folklorists can spring into the constantly changing future of folklore 
studies,” providing folklorists with “a basic common terminology and a basic 
system of classification,” as noted by Trudier Harris-Lopez in her contribution to 
the volume [2003: 116-117]. For the instructor, genre serves as a scaffolding to 
introduce the dynamic traditions we study, long enough for new students to 
grapple with text, texture, and context in the classroom and as encountered in their 
lives. Introducing folklore through lists of genres can simplify a notoriously 
difficult-to-define field, especially in distinguishing it from disciplinary cousins 



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like anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and area studies. With Lynne 
McNeill’s [2013] helpful reframing of the major genre buckets of “verbal lore, 
material lore, customary lore, and belief,” as the more approachable categories of 
“things we say, things we make, things we do, and things we believe,” the task of 
convincing new students that folklore is, truly, all around us has never been easier. 
In this way, instructors can quickly move past the need to justify folklore as more 
than old stuff and onto the work of guiding students through key concerns: the 
different aesthetic parameters, skills, and knowledge of communicative and 
performative frameworks that shape the expressive forms we study. Attention to 
genre can reveal diverse expressions of meaning, value, and work done by 
expressive culture in the world; genre can serve as rhetorical resource, illuminate 
the complexities of performance, and be a mode of negotiating power and agency. 
(1)  

Still, genre presents scholarly, classificatory, and ethical challenges that call 
into question the usefulness—and indeed, ethics—of this concept [Ben-Amos 
1969; 1976; Harris Lopez 2003; N’Diaye 2021; Prahlad 2021; Shuman 1993; 
Webber 2014]. For many North American-educated students and instructors, 
genre lists make sense for the simple reason that mainstream education has 
already trained us to think generically. Most have been trained to separate and 
categorize from a young age through education systems heavily shaped by 
Eurocentric philosophies and canons, rather than to question classification 
systems as hierarchical constructions of power. As Enlightenment tools of 
mastery, collection and classification can represent and actively enact the 
suppression of contemporaneous traditions of knowing, exemplified by Tim 
Frandy’s [2018] eloquent reflection on Western science pedagogies and 
indigenous knowledges and Zhang’s [2020] discussion of the effects of 
implementing Eurocentric, Western ethnological models and classification 
systems in China. 

This article explores how genre is entangled with systems of power and ways 
to retain the concept’s capacity to elucidate how distinct communicative, 
rhetorical frames do work in our world through folk processes. It is not a defense 
of genre, nor is it a rejection of genre; it is an attempt to review how some of the 
complexities gestured at above might better be reflected and implemented in 
introductory folklore classes. Such work may lead to a decentering of genre, 
placing our emphases on other questions and concepts. Indeed, by setting out to 
write about the topics I present in this article, I found myself not only focusing on 
genre, but also expanding my reading to revisit the different meanings of genre 
that we evoke, and collapse, in our field, as well as entanglements between genre, 
performance, and context. Here, I think through how instructors can prepare 
students to leave our courses with the most crucial lessons learned and how we 
might captivate their interests without watering down the key ideas. 

To do so, I reflect on the place of genre in my own pedagogy, particularly in 
courses geared toward undergraduate students new to the field. Using moments 
from fieldwork and personal life experience, I think about how different 
approaches to documentation and listening might be fruitfully employed in my 



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own classes. I first consider historical and contemporary discourse surrounding 
genre in folklore studies, revisiting the long legacy of genre discourse and efforts 
to negotiate the relationships between analytic categories and lore as it is lived 
and understood on-the-ground, especially in response to contemporary social 
justice issues. While scholarly responses to COVID-19 drew on genre to notice 
and process COVID-era folklore, texts such as the summer and autumn 2021 
issues of The Journal of American Folklore, among others, point to the role of 
folkloristic concepts like genre in perpetuating systemic racism by imposing, for 
example, global categories and aesthetic priorities onto local traditions. Both 
topics have prompted me to revisit my approach to teaching our field, in and 
beyond the classroom. I draw on Sabra Webber’s [2015] discussion of genres in 
context to examine a lived example of “genre trouble” that I encountered during 
fieldwork in Bulgaria with young urbanites invested in rural revitalization, who 
sometimes turn to folklore as bridge-building avenues to connect with villages, 
village-dwelling older adults, and cultural heritage. These encounters, in turn, 
illuminated my own efforts to strengthen intergenerational connections back 
home.  

Together, these experiences resonate as cross-cultural, intergenerational 
encounters in unfamiliar settings. By discussing how they inform my 
understanding of the relationship between genre, intergenerational 
(mis)communication, and place, I offer several ideas for preparing students for 
more nuanced and meaningful fieldwork and data analysis. Further, I suggest that 
bringing such moments of miscommunication and blurriness [Geertz 1980] into 
the classroom opens opportunities for discussing the structural issues bound up in 
discussions of genres as sites of contestation about the authority to define systems 
of knowledge and ways of knowing [Shuman 1993]. This approach can help 
students more clearly see connections to folklore in their daily lives. I also believe 
that a deep understanding of genre has a crucial role to play in the teaching and 
reflexive mediation that folklorists regularly perform with community partners 
outside of the classroom in public-facing work and collaborative projects—
including responding to lingering colonial and imperial legacies in our field. 

Genre: Persisting Problems 

The year 2020 acted in many ways as a tipping point for already turbulent 
times. The collision of COVID-19 lockdowns and continued, unaddressed police 
brutality against Black Americans renewed attention to systemic racism, white 
supremacy, and imperialism entangled in many realms, including folkloristics. In 
our field, these colliding events produced instructive but oppositional ideas about 
the role of genre in the folklorist’s toolkit and everyday life. COVID-19 bifurcated 
my dissertation fieldwork in Bulgaria into pre-and post-pandemic experiences, as 
I discussed in the 2021 special issue of Folklorica [Craycraft 2021]. From my 
vantage point abroad, I followed along as colleagues in the United States turned 
to our folkloristic toolkit to observe, process, and document responses to the 
pandemic. Articles and videos by Maribel Alvarez [2020], James Deutsch [2020], 



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Andrea Kitta [2020], and others effectively put genre to use, helping scholars and 
the public notice how forms like material culture, humor, legend, conspiracy 
theory, etc. were used to make sense of our shared, yet increasingly atomized, 
experiences of the pandemic. I still teach these pieces to demonstrate how folk 
groups use varied communicative frameworks in everyday life to different ends.  

At the same time, global protests spurred by police brutality in the United 
States demanded a full-scale reexamination of structural marginalization and 
racialized violence. As mentioned above, the summer 2021 issue of The Journal 
of American Folklore published a transcription of the Francis Lee Utley Memorial 
Panel, “Race and Racism in the Practice and Study of Folklore” (delivered at the 
2020 virtual meeting of the American Folklore Society). Other texts in the issue 
called upon folklorists to closely examine our field, methods, and contributions to 
structural inequality. Similarly, recent books such as Theorizing Folklore from the 
Margins: Critical and Ethical Approaches [Otero and Martinez-Rivera 2021], 
Implied Nowhere: Absences in American Folklore [Ingram, Mullins, and 
Richardson 2019], and Advancing Folkloristics [Fivecoate, Downs, and McGriff 
2021] reiterate these calls. In particular, Anand Prahlad’s [2021] essay, “Tearing 
Down Monuments: Missed Opportunities, Silences, and Absences—A Radical 
Look at Race in American Folklore Studies,” renewed attention to these histories 
and presences. Prahlad invites us to revisit and reexamine how collection, 
classification, and erasure work in tandem with racialized violence. Prahlad 
writes: 

Closely connected to the practice of collection is the concept of genres. Is 
there any concept more critical to folklore studies or that more closely 
parallels Linnaeus’ erasure of indigenous typologies and conceptual 
frameworks and the replacement of them with those of European 
colonizers? Similar to the centuries-old debates about the terms “folk” 
and “folklore,” folklore studies has continued to revisit the notion of 
genres—but rarely in the interest of arguing that they are unnecessary, 
colonially inspired, or forms of cultural violence. [2021: 261] 

Writings by Sabra Webber [2014] and Mary Hufford [2003] resonate with these 
views. Webber writes: 

Before [an] artistic “product” becomes an object of academic study or 
national pride, it has frequently been wrested from its folk community 
and fitted into one “etic” or “universal” genre or another… cut from its 
moorings by folklorists, sociolinguists, cultural anthropologists, 
historians, or any of the myriad scholars who study narrative today. [36] 

The trouble with genres is that when they are reified (concretized), they 
stultify dynamic processes. [40] 

 



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Hufford likewise agrees that genre can problematically decontextualize folklore 
and reorder it in a Western system of logic, inscribing traditional knowledge 
within global, rather than local, contexts (a threat of etic categorization), all while 
obscuring these frameworks. 

Both Webber and Hufford use “genre” as a shorthand, but I believe both 
mean to refer to genre in terms of extraction and classification rather than the 
understanding of genre in which identifiable expressive forms make up everyday 
discourse and social life. This is a commonplace flattening that often happens in 
discussions about genre, a means of simplifying and indexing a complex history 
about which much has been written. When scholarship and classroom lectures 
conflate genre as an abstract concept with genre as a system of categories, though, 
we risk reifying these systems and obscuring the ways that power informs 
classification as a way of knowing. In collapsing this difference, the field faces 
two interlaced problems. First, we risk losing the memory of the centrality of 
genre study in producing the performance shift, in which conversations about 
genre were a key component of grappling with power, hierarchy, Eurocentrism, 
and Western perspectives in the development of contextualized folklore. Second, 
we lose the clarity necessary for distinguishing which aspects of genre study are 
harmful and which can be reappropriated for the development of a more 
liberatory, pluralistic study of folklore that makes space for the role of systemic 
issues like racism and the politics of culture.  

Considering the heightened, though not new or unprecedented, racialized 
violence of the past four years, I briefly review here the familiar history of 
discourses about genre and context, both of which were key components of the 
reorientation toward performance in the 1970s. One of the most important 
contributions to this shift was Dan Ben-Amos’s [(1969) 1976] essay “Analytical 
Categories and Ethnic Genres,” which drew on debates about etic and emic genres 
to advocate for an approach that recognizes the difference between imposed 
analytic categories and “ethnic” or local/native categories. This approach 
emphasized the importance of fieldwork for understanding context and the 
stylization of social actors in cultural practice. As Joe Graham [1981: 12] writes, 
“studying native classification systems provides insight into the importance of the 
alternative, ‘ground-level’ ways of ordering and giving meaning and value to 
life.” 

The performance turn, or the turn to contextualism, transformed our field’s 
earlier preoccupation with the analysis of decontextualized texts (itself a 
transformation from the earlier collection of popular antiquities), shifting 
attention instead to the contingencies of performance, the manipulation of 
audience attention by performers, and the importance of “local” categories [Ben-
Amos 1971]. Close analysis of variants of texts reveals that context is a crucial 
element that gives shape to form. Through attention to framing devices, that which 
is framed, and the flow of everyday life from which the frame sets apart expressive 
culture, contextualists demonstrated how performers direct attention back and 
forth across these elements. Context, as Mary Hufford [2003: 168] describes it, 
“is a historically contingent framework that we generate, shape, contest, and 



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critique through our cultural productions… a frame of reference created in order 
to constitute and interpret an object of attention.” This move did not displace the 
“text” component of “text, texture, and context” but instead drew attention to the 
interrelations between text and context as mutually constituting aspects of 
performance and practice, in which contexts are more than static backdrops [Ben-
Amos 1993; Georges 1980]. Context can invoke contemporary frames and 
historical precedent, as well as physical but also imagined or “remote contexts.” 

While vital, these conversations often excluded marginalized perspectives 
that already held these views, and they have not necessarily led to a field-wide 
grappling with the ways we continue to center collection as a crucial task of 
folklore scholarship and teaching [Bailey 2021; N’Diaye 2021]. Feminist 
interventions as well as perspectives informed by critical race theory and 
postcolonial studies crucially argue that the notion of ethnic classification systems 
in and of itself rests on cultural relativism and homogenous “local” worldviews, 
an approach to performance that reproduces power hierarchies and fails to 
recognize distinctions within groups, not to mention unequal access to interpretive 
authority [Ryan 1981; Roberts 2009; Sawin 2002; Shuman 1993]. These 
interventions expanded the scope of the performance turn, as well as the fixation 
on an ethnography of communication approach to folkloristics and folklife.  

As Valerie Lee’s [1996] work demonstrates [Bailey 2021], the same is true 
of genre classification systems, which can obscure and reject expansive notions 
of folklife that do not center around genre study. Amy Shuman [1993] helpfully 
distinguishes between genre as an abstract concept and genres as a system of 
categories, noting that genres are not neutral, fixed objects, nor are systems of 
genre classification. Genres may be coherent at specific moments, but they are 
contingent forms subject to change. As she writes, “genre classifications are 
themselves cultural artifacts or constructions, positioned in historical and political 
situations” [Shuman 1993: 77]. The classification systems scholars use to 
organize and study genres reveal ideological questions: what are the grounds for 
“privileging, canonizing, or authenticating particular kinds of texts?” [Shuman 
1993: 73]. Genres are shaped by ideology, but they can also be ideology-shaping 
forms that express and encode different orientations toward community, 
belonging, and identity [Cashman 2007]. Recognizing the ideological weight of 
communicative forms that different actors wield or appropriate is a valuable task, 
and one that must be done with the politics of classification in mind. Neutrality in 
collecting, classifying, and describing genres will always be interpretive, and 
interpretations are ideological. Yet, contemporary critiques of genre also point out 
that the central focus on an identifiable text limits the scope of what folkloristics 
can address. 

In short, not all groups understand genre in the same way, and not all studies 
of folklore need center on genre or classification to be taken seriously by our field. 
As folklorists know, our shared language of genre is not always legible to nor 
appropriately descriptive of lore as it is lived, and etic genre categories do not 
easily capture the nuances and meanings of culturally specific, or emic, forms. 
Because of the nuances of group and the authority granted by interpretive power, 



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the liberating idea of emic forms becomes tricky. Indeed, imposing outsider, 
global categories can mask important distinctions and locally understood 
boundaries between modes of expressive culture. They can impose boundaries 
that do not exist at all. There exists a long, reflexive history of folklorists thinking 
critically—and skeptically—about genre and context. These are practices we 
should continue to foster and histories we should continue to teach.  

Rather than fully reject genre, Webber, for example, points to exemplary, 
eloquent studies of locally grounded forms that she explains as emic 
understandings of “hanging out”: forms of sociality that are directly shaped by 
cultural and societal contexts. These include Henry Glassie’s [1982] and Ray 
Cashman’s [2008] studies of the céilí, Dwight Reynolds’s study of the sahra, 
Richard Bauman’s [1972] study of general store gatherings on La Have Island, 
Nova Scotia, and Webber’s [1991] own study of similar gatherings among 
Tunisian women. Webber also points to “strolling events” described by Giovanna 
Del Negro and Harris Berger [2001]. We might also include retirement to the 
porch in Appalachia [Lozier and Althouse 1975]. These practices share 
similarities: spontaneity, unspoken rules for behavior and boundaries of 
participation within the group, and communicative expectations of “speech 
situations” [Bauman 1972: 333]. Further, Webber points out that these practices 
resist global classification precisely because of these specificities, and for the 
simple fact that they’re so ingrained into the everyday flow of life as to not be 
easily extractable. She emphasizes that these practices are sensual forms that 
engage all our senses, producing affective meaning and often manifesting in 
tangible outputs (adorned bodies, the production of folk objects). Langston Collin 
Wilkins’s [2023] study of hip hop culture also productively grapples with 
questions of context and the production of heritage. Indeed, through the example 
of slab car culture, Wilkins exemplifies how attentive noticing during fieldwork 
can illuminate the importance of an emergent tradition once immersed in place. 
These examples synthesize and make clear the sorts of situated, familiar traditions 
students are likely able to find in their own lived experiences. 

Understanding how folklore constitutes reality is an important goal for any 
student of folklore. Both etic and emic genres shape our realities, either by 
reinforcing dominant narratives or by expressing in-group meanings and points of 
view, in correspondence to the contexts prompting and texturizing the lore. While 
students often come to folklore classes for the “stuff,” a crucial goal for our 
courses must be to help them deconstruct text and context as fixed entities. The 
task, then, is not to train our students to find folklore and delineate its forms 
according to etic systems of classification. Instead, it is to train students to 
recognize when, how, and to what ends aestheticized communication is used in 
everyday life and specially marked moments—and indeed, how those moments 
and flows are formed through performative framings. The above conversations 
inspire me to refocus my teaching efforts on the development of keen 
observational skills: where, when, and how do people spend time together? How 
do these contexts set the stage for, and shape, expressive culture? How might 



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disruptions to context impact the cultural flows of everyday life? How might lore 
resist or adapt to such disruptions?  

Ideally, attention to context can raise questions of power, agency, identity, 
and structural inequality. For example, attention to the dynamism of context must 
reckon with the ways race, class, religion, gender, and age inform who spends 
time where, the expressive repertoires they draw upon to communicate value and 
meaning in these contexts, and the discursive frames that situate places and 
performances vis-à-vis modernity. Contextualism recognizes that place, too, is not 
a fixed reality [Lefebvre (1974) 1991], but rather a production or construction to 
which folklore contributes and even mediates [Bauman 1992; Hymes 1975; 
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1975]. Attention to context addresses the ways in which 
folklore “powerfully constitutes reality” [Hufford 2003:154].  

These topics suggest a need for more attention on the relationship between 
text and context. With this view in mind, I present below two intriguing cases that 
negotiate form, group, and context and which I plan to bring into my own 
introductory folklore classroom. 

Reactivating the Sedianka  

A difficulty—or pleasure, depending on your perspective—of teaching 
genre is that genres are not a-priori fixed forms. They are frameworks negotiated 
and utilized in context. When young people attempt to use culturally familiar 
genre forms to connect with older adults—self-consciously invoking traditional 
folklife—these efforts do not always yield desired results. In my fieldwork with 
intergenerational village revitalization projects in Bulgaria [Craycraft 2022], I 
noted several occasions in which younger group members tried to mobilize 
traditional forms in new ways, with varying degrees of success. In what follows, 
I discuss old and new meanings of the sedianka (plural sedenki)—a festive work 
gathering centered around some form of labor—as used historically and in the 
contemporary moment by young urbanites who seek to connect with villagers via 
traditional lifeways. (2) I point to the effects produced by new usages and suggest 
that part of the difficulty they experience hinges on a mismatch, or misperception, 
of form and context. 

Simultaneously an occasion for handwork, singing, dancing, courtship, 
ritual, friendship, and competition, the sedianka is both a recognizable social form 
and a context that produces and is produced by the performances of many genres. 
The traditional sedianka is a mostly archaic working party that takes its name from 
the verb sedia, to sit. As Angel Goev [1984] writes, the sedianka was more than 
a working party; it was a way of life. Lyuben Karavelov and Dimiter Marinov 
document the seasonal and gendered nature of the traditional sedianka [Goev 
1982]; its arrival marked the conclusion of harvest work and the coming of slower 
moments. When used now, sedianka is often glossed to indicate a women’s 
sewing circle or is sometimes used to simply mean the afternoon hangout sessions 
of the elderly, but the traditional form had many complexities and variations, in 
which naming conventions followed the specific task at hand. A sedianka referred 



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to a gathering where participants completed their own handiwork, while a tlaka 
or medzhia referred to a gathering in which participants worked on a collective 
task for their host (like stringing tobacco, shucking corn, and other agricultural 
tasks). Naming conventions can differ from region to region, and similar practices 
appear throughout the Balkans, with locally specific naming conventions and 
differences.  

Consider the following passage recounting the youthful memories of Linka 
Gekova Gergova, a celebrated elder and folk singer from a village in western 
Bulgaria, as recorded and narrated by Martha Forsyth: 

In the fall, after the harvest was in, the girls began to gather for sedenki 
(and of course, where the girls go, the boys go too…). Working by the 
light of that flickering vidale (kerosene lamp), spinning or embroidering 
or making lace—Lord, what lace they made to deck themselves out when 
they went to the dance! Even in those poverty-stricken years they 
somehow managed to find thread to make lace—extravagant lace that 
showed beneath their heavy outer garments, almost from the knee to the 
ankle! They vied with each other, hiding the full splendor of their 
handiwork until Christmastime or Easter came, when they would unveil 
their newest finery. Whose sleeves were the best? Who had discovered 
the most wonderful lace pattern, set in beads or sequins or tiny coins in 
the most ingenious way? “Oh, at those sedenki we’d just sing and sing 
and sing—the boys would come, every boy would sit down next to the 
one he liked, we’d knit and crochet, and spin and do our work… They do 
this in the fall, and they keep it up all winter long. They like to get 
together at houses where it’s quiet, where there aren’t a lot of menfolk 
around, where there aren’t so many men in the house—they get 
embarrassed if there’s a lot of men around. And the boys come too—or if 
they don’t show up, ‘C’mon, let’s go out and sing something—they’ll 
hear us, and then they’ll come!’ so we’d sing one of those good rousing 
ones (na búčeno)—maybe ‘The small village had supper early’. And then 
the boys would come …. One would sit down beside one girl, another 
beside another, and they’d chatter away. Oh, it was so much fun! You’d 
sit there and you’d work, and your boyfriend would sit beside you—All 
evening long, we’d tell jokes, and then we’d get up and dance a little, and 
then we’d sit down and work some more.” [1996: 63, 393] 

Gergova’s memories demonstrate the dynamism of the sedianka and its flexibility 
in relation to the social situations of the moment. At a time when young people 
had limited agency regarding choice of marriage partner (especially young 
women), the sedianka served as a context for interaction, flirtation, and, for young 
women, demonstration of one’s capabilities as an efficient, skilled worker. Young 
women claimed some agency in the courtship process through the collective 
lighting of a secretive zaklazhdane [sedianka fire]. The zaklazhdane is held 
without the presence of young men to both mark the beginning of the season and 



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manifest their partner of choice, through ritual invocation. By performing a series 
of tasks, chants, and rites, they hoped to draw their preferred suitors to the ensuing 
season’s sedenki [Goev 1979]. 

Older, married women, too, participated in sedenki, but not always with the 
younger generations. While for older women, working parties were more often 
intended to enliven obligatory work while keeping good company, for younger 
girls the obligation of completing work and producing an enviable dowry doubled 
as occasions for courtship and socialization. The activities of the moment—when 
to dance, when to sing, and when to tell jokes and chatter amidst the work—would 
arise fluidly as a dynamic of the performances typical for the sedianka, in response 
to the contexts and configurations of performers in each new gathering. The 
sedianka also demonstrated a playful twist on surveillance: though youth were 
less surveilled by older adults, peers (both boys and girls) observed one another 
closely, as simultaneous instigators and audiences for collective performances of 
song, dance, verbal play, and craft.  

As a genre and context that produced lore, then, the sedianka can be 
understood through several overlapping temporal frames: the folk calendar as 
shaped by seasonal labor rhythms, courtship, and ritual rites of passage. This 
complexity is clearest in the song repertoire associated with sedenki. In the 
Bulgarian folk song catalog, songs performed at the sedianka are sedianka 
songs—those sung and collected at or recalled from sedenki. These might include 
songs with meta-themes related to sedenki, e.g., making, courtship, marriage, and 
love, but sedinki also include songs that young people wish to sing and dance to, 
pulled from other seasons, exemplifying the dynamic relationship between 
individual and situational contexts and tradition in performance [Bauman 1983]. 
Song selection and performance were based on who was present, their preferences 
and singing abilities, and desires to entice participants to the event due to their 
resonance and musicality. Song choice, timing, and location depend on contextual 
elements: who was in the house, where were the boys and was their presence 
desired, and which songs would produce the context most desired for their 
performances of both song and sewing and, one imagines, gossip and storytelling, 
joke telling, dancing, and of course the pretense and/or reality of work. Sedenki 
songs often offered meta-narrations, both contextualizing what happened from 
moment to moment and also producing the moments depicted. Put in Hufford’s 
[2003] terms, song performances were framed by the sedianka-as-context but also 
drew attention to and created the frame, invoking other remote contexts and 
reminding participants of the many layered meanings of this form. (3)  

The sedianka as described above has largely faded from practice, save for 
demonstrative performances and self-conscious revival performances that bring 
new meanings and goals. As villages and everyday performance contexts shifted 
during the socialist period, so too did the cultural practices of everyday life 
[Silverman 1983; Kaneff 2004; Buchanan 2006]. Bitova kultura [everyday or 
household customary culture]—the interwoven practices of folksong, verbal lore, 
material lore, and courtship with shucking parties, sewing circles, and the lore that 
animated these already dynamic contexts—was spliced and separated from above 



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by state actors who sought to reframe aspects of everyday life within the 
framework of national heritage, as staged performances that undergirded the 
socialist modernity project. Traditional textile production was industrialized, 
professionalized, and eventually traditionalized and heritagized, as well. The full-
scale production of textiles and handiwork at home became somewhat superfluous 
and was relegated to free time, separate for most from their production for the 
state. (4) For example, one villager showed me a bureau filled with textiles—
doilies, table runners, and handmade socks—all produced during work breaks at 
the factory where she was employed before retirement.  

For older adults in the present, the sedianka can represent both collective 
and individual, site-specific memories. One older woman I know, for example, 
locates the sedenki of her youth under a specific walnut tree, such that the 
landscape evokes and holds memories, akin to Keith Basso’s [1996] discussions 
of lore and place. Many recall stories of dynamic sedenki as narrated by their 
mothers and grandmothers, if not as living memories of their own. Though the 
pieces of the sedianka remain, they are fragmented and distributed across life in 
the postsocialist, capitalist village arrangement, relegated to new contexts of 
creation. Practices like sewing, knitting, crochet, and embroidery are still 
performed by women in villages, in the winter months especially, but for most the 
social aspect is absent from their making. Older women explain that nowadays, 
they generally produce textiles alone while watching television, such as their 
beloved Turkish soap operas. Folk singing and dancing still occur in many 
villages, but in choirs composed of small groups of mostly pensioners. And of 
course, young people are more likely to court using cell phones and café meet-
ups than in sedinki. 

Because handwork has become less common amongst young women as a 
necessary occupation, it has likewise ceased to be a prominent occasion for 
hanging out in their everyday lives. For this reason, sedenki are more easily 
associated with older women and villages, as the actors and contexts most often 
linked in collective memory to traditional practices. Curiously, though, young 
urbanites are increasingly drawn to villages and presocialist lifeways (both real 
and imagined). Sometimes, those engaged with village revitalization projects 
draw on the concept of “sedianka” in new ways that gloss the above history and 
selectively focus on the aspects that are useful to young people in the present: the 
display or discussion of traditional skills, memories of craft and making, and time 
spent in community, especially with older adults. These new uses invoke contexts 
of the present but also the remote contexts of the older sedianka, in which the 
gathering is more than simply a hangout, part of a growing repertoire of traditional 
forms used in new ways in contemporary life. (5) 

I have most prominently observed this in my work with Fabrika za Idei, or 
Ideas Factory, an NGO that hosts the annual village residency program called 
Residentsiia Baba [Granny Residence]. This program facilitates urban-rural 
intergenerational relationship-building by placing young urban-dwelling 
Bulgarians in the homes of older adults living in villages. The residencies prompt 
young participants to draw on art and folklore as ways to improve rural life and 



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revitalize desirable cultural practices that have dwindled over time. Sometimes, 
these involve planning meetings that invite locals and project facilitators to think 
about village livability together, events that Fabrika za Idei sometimes refers to 
as “sedenki,” though the purposes of the meetings are to generate ideas and share 
information for upcoming cultural programming, rather than spin yarn or 
embroider a tunic. The facilitators occasionally weave traditional forms and 
language into their contemporary practices in this way. 

In one instance, the NGO hosted a neighborhood intergenerational get-
together in the capital city of Sofia, inviting older residents of the neighborhood 
to join for a meal and a sharing of memories about the local neighborhood. When 
older locals failed to join the evening’s events, the young people turned to 
reflection. Collectively, they pondered whether generational social expectations 
for gathering (such as bringing a dish or gift for the host) may have impacted 
locals’ decisions not to attend the event. The group discussed the use of sedianka 
as an open possibility; perhaps inviting people to join for the common purpose of 
completing handiwork and story-sharing together could open new possibilities for 
intergenerational exchange. To the young urbanites, the sedianka-as-frame 
offered a tantalizing possible bridge between generational systems of meaning. 

Months later, I was able to test this potential bridge during my fieldwork 
with Residentsiia Baba, in the northwestern village of Deleyna in the Vidin 
province. In this border village, life revolves mostly around the rhythms of 
pensioners, their yards and housework, and the two establishments remaining in 
the village: the krŭchma [café/bar] and magazinche [small shop]. Locals gather in 
the central square each morning for coffees and groceries, and they return in the 
late afternoons for a second coffee or beers. Each day, groups of women gather 
for afternoon chats on shady neighborhood benches around the village.  

Along with six other participants in their twenties and thirties, I was tasked 
with creating an interactive arts project for the village residents. My collaborator, 
Elena, and I decided to document the textile collections and stories of six women 
and showcase them in a photography exhibit. We photographed their individual 
pieces—handwoven pristilki [traditional aprons] and towels, crocheted socks and 
lacey doilies—as well as the women who had inherited and added to these 
multigenerational collections. We also planned an interactive story circle inviting 
women of all ages to share their memories connected to these textiles and 
explained this event as a “малка седянка за разказване” [a small sedianka for 
conversational sharing]. We spread news of the event by word of mouth and by 
distributing handmade invitations, pictured below, to ensure that the women 
would clearly understand our intent.   

 



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Figure 1: Handwritten invitations to a village story circle. Photograph by 
author. 

 
The invitations read as follows: 

Каним те на малка седянка за разказване: Кои са текстилните 
ръкоделя, които се крият в къщата ти? Кои са историте, свързани с 
тeзu ръкоделия? Моля, избери едно ръкоделие, което носи история, 
която искаш да споделим с малка група слушатели. 

Кога: Сряда 17:00 ч. Къде: Пред Читалището 

Донеси твоето ръкоделие, твоята история, и твоята прекрасна 
усмивка! 

[We invite you to a small storytelling session: What are the textile crafts 
that hide in your house? What are the stories connected to these 
handcrafts? Please choose one handcraft that carries a story which you 
would like to share with a small group of listeners.  



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When: Wednesday at 5pm. Where: In front of the chitalishte (cultural 
center) 

Bring your handcraft, your story, and your wonderful smile!] 

The event was well and cheerfully attended by about fifteen local women. 
Together, residency participants sat in a circle with the older generations, poised 
to listen to one another’s stories. However, very few of the women came to the 
event with a handcraft in hand. They explained that they rarely sew anymore—
why would they bring a piece they’d already finished to a sedianka? We quickly 
pivoted, and the women took turns sharing somewhat stifled memories about 
sewing circles of the past with some coaxing from us facilitators. Eventually, our 
“story circle” became a jolly conversation, in which the women talked to us and 
each other about old production techniques and treasured items they used to have.  

Despite a shared identity as part of the national body of Bulgarians (for all 
but myself), nested layers of insider and outsider much more complex than the 
insider/outsider binary allows for, and the generational positioning of each 
participant all shaped how they oriented to this moment. We, the young guests 
from the city, had invoked “sedianka” as a frame for memory sharing about 
practices in which the women used to participate; this use of the sedianka-as-
frame asked the women to move back and forth temporally, recognizing a 
continuity between storytelling in the present and making in the past. This framing 
omitted other aspects of sedenki that the older women may have associated with 
the form, such as courtship, sociality, making, singing, joking, and other emergent 
forms. We had come to this moment, “the situational context,” with different 
“contexts of meaning” in mind, or perhaps unspecified ideas of what the context 
of meaning for a contemporary sedianka could be [Bauman 1983]. 

As outsiders hoping to learn about and animate folklife, we were less 
attentive to the living traditions that are part of the daily lifeways of older adults 
in the present. (6) But insofar as we created an occasion to spend time with these 
women, the event was a success. We had gathered an intergenerational group, and 
we had spent time thinking about handwork together. In hindsight, we recognized 
that there was already a context in the village for hearing memories and stories: 
the daily coffee gatherings the women were already participating in served as the 
emic form of socialization in the present and the local context for story-sharing. 
This is rather backward from the typical etic/emic situation, in which outside 
scholars try to impose a global category on a local context. Our experience 
suggests that emic, living genres will shift as all living forms do, and that 
revitalization contexts might produce different meanings for familiar forms. By 
overlooking the ways that generational position differently situated group 
members, memory, and proximity to tradition, we also overlooked the contexts 
and frameworks that participants brought to our story circle and, thus, the 
frameworks for interpreting a new invocation of the sedianka. The momentary 
confusion we all experienced was produced by intersecting positionalities and the 
ways they impacted genre production and reception. 



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More than anything, this moment revealed the slippery nature of group, 
reminding us that the esoteric meanings of lore will take on new significance when 
groups are heterogenous (which they almost always are) and thus the ways they 
interact with tradition must be understood through an intersectional lens [Borland 
2021]. Attention to context can lead students to more nuanced understandings of 
genre and group, as illustrated here by presumptions of shared identity that are 
complicated by the revitalization context. I point to this example because it was 
highly instructive for me as a budding ethnographer attempting to understand 
shifting intergenerational relationships to people, places, and traditions in 
Bulgaria. This is not to say that lore-contexts cannot be reimagined, reanimated, 
and recontextualized, nor that there is a problem with performing forms like the 
sedianka in new ways; as many scholars have demonstrated, tradition entails 
change. Being knowledgeable about, and showing appreciation for, the practices 
in which people used to participate can be interpreted as a kind of caring and a 
way to build relationships based on trust. (7) Rather, it is to emphasize that new 
uses can create confusion when the framing and keying are not made clear. Like 
scholars, everyday actors often operate with appropriate categories in mind, an 
aspect of adapting performances to context [Bauman 1975].  

This echoes the patterns that introductory folklore students often encounter 
as they begin grappling with the nuances of performance, genre, and living 
traditions in context. When instructors guide students to look for lore, we often 
send them out into the world with a metaphorical butterfly net of sorts, tasked 
with extracting an item from their everyday lives to examine through the 
microscope of the fieldnotes journal or the short reflection paper. In my 
experience, this sometimes produces confusion and lackluster results. Careful 
analysis by sharp students will attend to the nuances and dynamism of context, 
but often their understanding of context stops at the level of a flat stage upon 
which lore is performed. They don’t gain a deeper understanding of the robust 
interplay of the elements and positionalities that produce reality-shaping, living 
traditions in all their complexity. 

A deeper understanding of the interactions between genre, context, and 
group might make sense of missteps, without mapping typologies and hierarchy 
onto groups and their lore. These skills can also be instructive for organizations 
like Fabrika za Idei. Despite coming from an entirely different cultural 
background, I can share fieldwork tools and folkloristic concepts that are helpful 
for community engagement between Bulgarians of different generations. I have 
observed that training young Bulgarians to first notice how life works in rural 
spaces, in order to build projects alongside the practices of older villagers, can 
produce more meaningful intergenerational connections and more thoughtful 
community programming.  

Understanding not only form and aesthetics, but also the parameters 
producing and shaping which elements of tradition will resonate across space and 
time, is a crucial skill that most instructors want their students to glean from 
folklore courses. The skill of noticing allows us to think about, for instance, 
structural challenges to intergenerational bonding in rural spaces, and to devise 



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ways of venturing across those boundaries for meaningful interaction. We can 
appreciate that certain contexts facilitate gathering more than others, the ultimate 
prerequisite for other forms of sharing and the sensible stage upon which 
vernacular verbal lore lives in the everyday lifeworld. We can appreciate, too, that 
young people in very different places attempt intergenerational connection in 
similar ways. As such, we might have lessons to learn from one another, beyond 
revitalizing named genres of folklore. 

Illuminating Home: The McMen of Southern Ohio (8) 

Engaged teaching goes hand in hand with self-reflection about ongoing 
projects of one’s own. My immersion in Deleyna prompted significant reflection 
about my own home region and my relationships to the older generations in my 
life. Likewise, these reflections have inflected my teaching. My fieldwork 
especially prompted me to consider more carefully the habits and hangouts of my 
father, Ralph. I have always thought of my dad, a former farmer and telephone 
line repairman, as a witty joker, a clever storyteller, and a keen observer of 
everyday life, someone at the ready with proverbs and quick one-liners. Though I 
have recorded a small number of his stories, it was not until I returned from 
fieldwork that I began to recognize his regular participation in a conversational 
context all its own: near-daily morning meetups at a local McDonald’s, with a 
group that refers to itself as the “McMen.” In fact, this is where he met his now-
wife, Suzy, the honorary “referee” of the McMen and one of the few women who 
participates in these meetups. Throughout my childhood, my dad would go 
uptown in our small community for a coffee with the friends he had accumulated 
throughout his life in southern Ohio. His regular “coffeeshop” visits, as he refers 
to them, were, for me, a facet of what Dorothy Noyes [2016: 148] refers to as the 
surround: “Aspects of practice that are not sought out as unusual experiences but 
taken for granted as already present and, at least in the modern West, devalued as 
trivial,” and that entails various “frameworks of social interaction.” Dad likes his 
coffee, and he likes to shoot the breeze with his old buddies. He returns in the late 
morning. From my perspective as a busy youth, this was just an insignificant part 
of life’s rhythms. 

Later attending university in a large city—Columbus, Ohio—I was 
socialized into a different sort of adulthood than that of my parents and older 
friends, one filled with happy hours, hip restaurants, museum visits, and bookshop 
browsing. The one thing my dad and I easily shared was our perpetual coffee 
drinking. Upon arriving home from college for a weekend, I would be greeted 
with the announcement that “coffee’s on the pot.” We’d catch up over cups of 
Folgers and non-dairy powdered creamer, or we’d grab a cheap cup of 
McDonald’s coffee and drive around the county doing errands. As I grew into 
adulthood and began to travel, I’d occasionally bring my dad a souvenir of local 
ground coffee or a mug, because coffee felt like a shared language for us. 
However, my dad was not impressed by my high-priced “mud coffee.” With my 
immersion in different spaces, our tastes had diverged.  



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Graduate study as a folklorist reframed my understanding of some of these 
attempts to bridge intergenerational, spatial gaps. With my ethnographer’s eye, as 
well as the lens one develops after leaving home and returning regularly for 
occasional visits, I began to pay more attention to the rhythms of my childhood 
home. The adult rhythms and preferences shaping the daily lives of those who had 
raised me were a mystery of sorts, and it took fieldwork with young people and 
older adults in Bulgaria to turn my eyes intentionally back to questions of sociality 
in my own region. 

Such realizations, of course, are not processed on one’s own, but with one’s 
cohort. I have been lucky to discuss these slow revelations with a friend and 
colleague, Jordan Lovejoy, who shares with me a small-town, working-class 
Appalachian upbringing. Among other insights, our ongoing conversations about 
folklore, home, and region have revealed significant overlaps in our fathers’ 
habits. Jordan’s father hangs out with his buddies not at a local McDonald’s, but 
instead in front of a local gas station. He is a member of the gas station’s “Guard 
Shack,” a group of local men who are recognized locally by a lighthearted name 
(in reference to their regular presence by the door), and members gather for 
socialization at places not intended to facilitate deep hanging out. Despite 
differences in locale, the groups are similar in member demographics and activity. 
Jordan and I have compared their patterns of moniker, class, gender dynamics, 
and the presence of a fluid flow of verbal lore produced by, in, and about these 
groups and the contexts in which they gather. (9) 

Bauman [1972: 340] reflects on similar speech situations among the La Have 
islanders in Nova Scotia, in “talk situations of the general store as a culturally 
defined scene,” situations in which talking is enjoyed for its own sake as a form 
of sociality, not for specific performative aesthetics. Both the men of the West 
Virginia Guard Shack and the McMen of Mt. Orab gather for sociality, as do the 
women of Delyena, Bulgaria. Their “lies” or tall tales, jokes, stories, and 
ruminations on daily life arise as part of the aesthetic flow of conversation. As 
Webber [2015] writes, such emic gatherings are resistant to global classification 
yet resonate cross-culturally with local, situated flair. To know where to go to 
encounter living tradition, we must spend time in the flow of sociality. As 
dynamic contexts that produce, and are themselves, lore, we can see parallels 
between the bench-sits, café conversations, and bar sessions of Bulgarian villages, 
the McDonald’s and gas station hangouts of older men in West Virginia and Ohio 
(among other places), and the ways of “hanging out” familiar to contemporary 
young people.  

I recently attended my very first meetup of the McMen; at least three decades 
younger than the most junior member of their regular circle, not to mention a 
woman, I was certainly an anomaly. With my stepmom, Suzy, and my dad as 
mediators, I met the people who have populated the surround of my life for years. 
Rising earlier than I normally would, I joined them for coffee and breakfast at a 
set of tables farthest from the cash register. I was nervous, not knowing exactly 
how to position myself in relation to this group of jokesters. What stories had been 
shared about me, the liberal-voting, world-traveling daughter with a career my 



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father struggled to describe to his friends? I needn’t have worried, as the most 
awkward conversations took place between my dad, stepmom, and me. The 
McMen were on their best behavior and more subdued than I’d anticipated. 
Perhaps we were all a bit bashful.  

Clad in a uniform they surely must have agreed upon beforehand—button-
up plaids and trucker hats from our county fair—they earnestly asked me to tell 
them about what I was up to in life, told me about their connections to one another 
and even to me, e.g., “Your mom used to babysit my son.” Most interestingly, 
they narrated their relationship to McDonald’s, noting its changes in management 
and décor over the years and the ways this had shifted their group’s meetups. For 
example, chairs and tables bolted to the floor hindered their ability to gather closer 
together. I realized that for the group, McDonald’s offers a space for sharing 
stories about life in this community and the lives that pass through and around it; 
with the decline of public life in my community and the closure of other local 
“greasy spoons,” as my dad calls them, options are limited. Thus, retooling a 
corporate environment that serves affordable coffee and doesn’t rely on customer 
turnover for tips is a good option for this group. What’s more, they are attuned to 
similar groups who meet up at McDonald’s franchises around the Ohio Valley, 
even noting redecorations and top-down changes to some of the stores. Beyond 
the genres of verbal lore that pass among them—jokes and stories, yes, as well as 
nicknames and personal narratives—my brief first introduction to the McMen 
gave me a new way of imagining my hometown, its neighboring communities, 
and my elders. It left me curious to better understand the meetups of different 
social groups who call my county home, to know more about how people 
communicate and perform for one another in their daily lives. 

In first noticing the places for “hanging out” characteristic of my own 
intergenerational folk groups—in contexts I now know play host to lore—I can 
then begin to pay more attention to the aesthetics of expressive communication 
and cultural practice that arise in spaces that have not been heritagized or raised 
to attention as “art” or “occasion” [Noyes 2016]. This kind of noticing illuminates 
what is important to this group: not just coffee, nor McDonald’s per se, but an 
accessible “third space” for gathering for everyday modes of sociality outside the 
home [Oldenburg 1989]. In societies that largely do not prioritize weather-safe, 
not-for-profit spaces in which aging adults may gather and in which community 
infrastructure does not offer comfortable places to gather (as in Bulgaria, where 
benches and village centers are plentiful even in small villages), third spaces like 
community cafes and chain restaurants become sites of sociality deeply ingrained 
in daily rhythms. This initial noticing opens possibilities to entertain the questions 
and observations that scholars like Prahlad [2021] and N’Diaye [2021] have urged 
folklorists to consider more deeply in the wake of 2020: who is or is not present 
and why (gender dynamics, class, race, and traditions of whiteness); that is, the 
layers of context situating lived experience and emergent expressive culture. 

 

 



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Conclusion: Thinking With and Beyond Genre  

As Maribel Alvarez and Selina Morales [2022: 164] write, “Cultural 
expressions are always embedded in contexts of power.” So, too, are our tools for 
conceptualizing and unpacking forms and contexts. Responding to the above, my 
introductory folklore lectures attempt to introduce the histories shaping the study 
of folklore alongside the stuff itself, but I have also been slow to overhaul my 
methods and pedagogies. I still organize my course units and weekly lectures 
according to genre, and my assignments still ask students to identify and describe 
folklore in the world using mock fieldnotes exercises: look for jokes, proverbs, 
festivals, coming-of-age rituals in your everyday life. What might the genre be? 
What does this generic framing tell you about the messages conveyed by the lore? 
I have explained how and why folklorists have used genre as a tool, while making 
clear that genres, like other classification systems, can deprioritize and even erase 
local systems of meaning. My intent is to help my students notice and understand 
both the nuances of the forms that folklorists study, as well as the history of 
folklore’s shifting approaches to and understanding of genre. I try to make clear 
that the field itself is grappling with these challenges, and I invite them into these 
conversations; for example, I leave space for them to debate whether we should 
carry on using genre as an organizing heuristic for the field of folklore studies.  

In the most recent iteration of my class, I introduced genre along with a 
lecture providing background on the Enlightenment and folklore’s role in nation-
building projects. One question in their midterm exam asked students to discuss 
the affordances and consequences of using analytic categories or “universal 
genres” to document and study folklife. One student’s response reflected on 
discrepancies between the messages I taught in lecture, the assignments I asked 
students to complete, and the syllabus that I had constructed. As the student 
replied: 

At its core, folklore is totally fluid and examines all of what makes the 
folk the folk, and what makes the group the group. So, when trying to set 
up the contexts within which we study each type of individual folklore, it 
would make sense that some sort of fluidity would be carefully noted, but 
instead, the class, which serves as Harvard’s introduction and therefore 
probably an accurate introduction to the subject, separates each genre 
into its own module. This is totally valid, and makes the study of folklore 
easy to follow, but… the rigid classification [can] also detract from the 
value, and ultimately, from the fun and connectedness of folklore… 
genres of folklore are helpful in distinguishing what exactly is being 
discussed, but they generally are overly restrictive when it comes to 
highlighting the importance of the forms, and can actually detract from 
the goal of folklorists, which is generally to note, analyze, and 
understand interaction. Rigid genres cannot have space for notes about 
interaction, and while the genres are not inherently rigid, studying 



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folklore within any boundary holds back the holistic study of the folk that 
should be key in the field. (10) 

In many ways, I am proud of, and take some credit for, this student’s capacity to 
evaluate and critique the frameworks the course presented, even as I recognize 
from this reply that I, as an instructor, and the student, as someone new to the 
field, still have some learning to do when it comes to conveying the material I 
want my students to glean from our time together. (11) By asking my students to 
find and classify folklore as an entry point to the field, I replicated some of the 
very problems I drew to their attention. Instead of dwelling on the complexities 
of living lore in all its richness and even capacity for harm, I find myself 
policing boundaries. This leaves me and my students collectively unsatisfied, 
even as I believe we are thinking deeply about the role of genre in folkloristics 
and our lives. Many of our discussions end up focusing on genre leakage and 
what is and is not traditional. 

But these are conversations that should be happening in the classroom, and 
conversations that we can and should build into our course designs. By doing so, 
we set students up with the tools to make connections between difficulties with 
identifying ideal types vs. the reality of lore as it is lived and problems of 
boundary marking and categorization in broader realms (such as national 
boundaries). I am very much at the drawing board, so to speak, as I test out new 
ways to convey genre, context, and performance to an introductory folklore 
class. For my part, I will not be eliminating genre from my instruction, but I will 
be rethinking how I approach, and ask students to approach, its complexities 
alongside other core concepts. I offer the following recommendations for 
instructors, me included, to try the next time we teach an introductory folklore 
course. The below list does not offer novel approaches, but suggests subtle shifts 
guided by the analytical insights of our field put toward the questions about 
power and systemic injustice students must be prepared to grapple with today: 

 
1 Introductory courses should address how genre systems are implicated 

in political questions and how they carry colonial and imperialist legacies.  
2 Our courses must differentiate between genre as an abstract analytical 

system, abstract types for thinking with, and existing forms as they are lived, 
named, and recreated in context. 

3 For those of us who organize our syllabi around genre groups, we might 
revisit and reframe our courses around, instead, the crucial questions for the study 
of everyday life that our field addresses or problems/situations that specific genres 
address well. If I may extrapolate from my own experiences and that of fellow 
graduate students alongside whom I moved through my studies, new instructors 
can feel the pressure to cover the wide range of genres that our field can address 
at the expense of the pressing questions exemplified by some forms. Moving away 
from a class plan structured around genres gives some freedom to explore these 
topics without ticking off a genre checklist. 



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4 Craft classroom assignments that guide students to spend less time 
collecting and more time hanging out. Folklorists sometimes place more emphasis 
on text and texture than context. I believe this sets students up to treat context as 
the last step in folkloristics, rather than the one that so many folklorists actually 
begin with in their own work. Students stand to gain deeper learning when we 
craft assignments that place less emphasis on collecting and more on first 
grappling with already-existing contexts for group expression and the 
relationships within and between groups. (12)  

5 Alternatively, set students up to collect “ideal type” examples of a 
particular genre and build in class time to unpack their experiences. Were they 
successful, or did they struggle to locate ideal types? What might we learn from 
these experiences of “failure” in the field about the relationships between 
categories, the everyday flow of expressive forms, and the relationships between 
analytic categories and folklore on-the-ground? Such an approach emphasizes the 
tensions around the edges and places their focus on process, not product, setting 
the stage for performance and practice frameworks to further enliven their 
thinking. 

6 Introduce genre later and context first. Maybe this actually looks like 
situating genre in historical context, or maybe it means assigning walking tours, 
trips to the city library, or a guest visit with an extension agent to understand the 
politics of the place in which they are learning about expressive culture. 
Undergraduates need more guidance in keeping both the 
contingencies/emergences of the present and structural power dynamics in mind. 
A context-first approach might help them bring these crucial aspects of 
performance to the forefront, rather than simply tacking them onto a genre 
analysis at the end of the semester. 

7 Model this kind of contextual approach by teaching messy examples, like 
those described above. While they do not perfectly exemplify an ideal type of a 
genre, they illustrate the sorts of complexities young people are more likely to 
encounter in their everyday lifeworlds and can be pathways toward learning how 
understandings of old forms can be illuminating in emergent contexts. 

 
When done well, a folklore class provides a guide for, and an approach to, a 

more observant, empathetic life that recognizes the everyday artistry and 
knowledge all around us, underacknowledged by other sorts of institutions and 
dominant histories. In my current introductory class, I plan to use the two 
situations described above midway into the semester as case studies that illustrate 
how concepts like group, genre, and context might morph and change in the 
present moment, as experiences I have lived through and collaboratively shaped. 
They are not the clearest examples of group, context, and genre; they are actually 
quite messy as introductory examples. For me, this is part of their appeal, as they 
are examples that ask students to think critically about the ways social actors try 
to negotiate complex layers of belonging: spatial boundaries, generational 
boundaries, and temporal boundaries. They usefully illustrate what can happen 



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when people with different positionalities within a group try to engage with 
“insider” practices or try to use an older form in a new way.  

The Bulgarian case gets us to the meat of the matter: why young people 
might turn to (dormant) traditions and what happens when they do. It also 
provides a peek at collecting that we can interrogate together, under my guidance, 
by pointing out the sorts of documentation sessions that rarely yield lore as it is 
lived. This, I hope, will be instructive for them as they think about folklore in their 
own groups. With the proper framing, it can subtly introduce them to the 
complexities of public-facing work, heritage, and self-conscious tradition. The 
example from my hometown, on the other hand, demonstrates the sort of hanging 
out that I’d like them to participate in, as well as my own willingness to be 
uncomfortable to more deeply understand the life of someone close to me. By 
guiding them first to think about contexts of sociality, then through the nuances 
of noticing framing devices and the work of genre in moments of interaction, and 
finally to make links between structural change, profit, and the ways our everyday 
lives are entangled with both, I hope to overcome some of the barriers to 
understanding the value of attention to living lore that my student and our 
colleagues have noted. 

A folklore education that is committed to the dynamic role of context in 
cultural practice and performance can better demonstrate the relevance of our 
discipline, while simultaneously furthering the goal of reckoning with the inherent 
harms of our core concepts. While I still view genre as an important aspect of 
folklore for students to understand, either as part of our field’s history or one tool 
of many in our tool bags, my challenge, and ours, is to adjust our work—
assignments, examples, syllabi, class exercises, and applied practice—such that it 
aligns with the narratives we craft about the field of folklore’s own meta traditions 
of continuity and change. 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

I am grateful to Amy Shuman, Danille Christensen, the anonymous 
reviewers, and the Folklorica editorial team for their invaluable comments on 
early drafts of this manuscript. 

 

NOTES 

1 A robust folkloristic literature explores the relationship between etic and 
emic genres, intertextuality among genres, and genre, power, and ideology. See 
Briggs and Bauman [1992], Graham [1981], Cashman [2007], Gilman [2009], and 
of course the rich overview by Harris-Lopez [2003], among others. 

2 Sedianka is often transliterated in English-language scholarship as 
sedyanka. Indeed, it is a vernacular word transcribed as eye dialect; pronunciation 



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23 

and transcription, let alone transliteration, appears differently throughout the 
country and publications about the form. 

3 Most scholarly mentions of sedianka discuss the event as the setting for 
folk song with a brief discussion of the dynamics of the form beyond its place in 
the seasonal round. See Donna Buchanan [2006], Mercia MacDermott [1998], 
and Timothy Rice [1994; 2000] for examples. Angel Goev [1984] and Martha 
Forsyth [1996] are notable exceptions, providing deeper illustration of the 
dynamism of sedianka as context and complex genre. 

4 The professionalization of textile production is an exception, especially 
in the case of dantela [shuttle lace], Chiprovtsi chergi [carpet runners from 
Chiprovtsi] and kilim [carpet] production that have been outsourced to villages 
throughout southern and southwestern Bulgaria [Pisancheva 2022]. The 
production of some textiles, like lace, once connoted modernity. Other textiles 
have been relegated to the realm of the past—appropriate for staged performance, 
but no longer part of the modern home or adorned modern body. Textile 
production deemed consequential to national memory became reframed as 
heritage. Textile production as economic enterprise underwent a different story. 
Today, Western European clothiers relegate their clothes production to rural 
Bulgaria. See Kapka Kassabova [2023] for creative representation of the impacts 
of these processes in southwestern Bulgaria. 

5 For another, though different, invocation of sedianka, see Iva 
Kyurkchieva’s [2018] discussion of SedyankaTA, a craft meet-up meant to 
support the transmission of dwindling textile craft knowledge, founded in 2011 
and still active today. 

6 I, the outsider from a different cultural background, was coincidentally 
the only young person participating in the residency from a rural community. 
Nonetheless, I was an outsider to the sedianka-as-frame.  

7 I am grateful to Danille Christensen for pointing out the value of showing 
others we care about their practice. 

8 I thank my father and stepmother, Ralph and Suzy Craycraft, as well as 
the McMen of Mt. Orab, Ohio, for welcoming me kindly into their group on an 
early December morning, and I thank my father for putting up with my continued 
efforts to draw connections between tradition and everyday life in our shared 
southern Ohio experiences. 

9 Ongoing personal communications, 2023-2024. I am grateful to Jordan 
Lovejoy for our generative sharing, and I thank her for permission to note our 
discussions of her father’s sociality practices. 

10 I thank my student, Malachi, for permission to include and attribute this 
portion of his exam response and to cite him by name, at his request. Malachi is a 
second-year student at Harvard University. 

11 For example, I would have been more satisfied if my student had 
expressed that folklore is not just present in a romanticized “flow of life” but is 
actually situated within multiple contexts, set apart from the “flow” by aesthetics 
and framing devices. Both student and instructor have lessons to learn. 

12 See Morales and Alvarez [2022: 162]. 



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