A New National Folklore
We invite guests to tell us a little about how they work with folklore. This is a guest blog post by artist and writer, Lally MacBeth.
The Lost Folk: From the Forgotten Past to the Emerging Future of Folk by Lally MacBeth is described as 'A fresh and engaging celebration of the customs, places, objects and peoples that make up what we know as ‘folk’ in Britain'.
In 2019, the artist Jeremy Deller made a sign that read ‘Stonehenge: Built by Immigrants’. In my mind, you could extend this out to the whole of British folklore. I have always believed that ‘folk’ is very firmly of and for the people. It is for us all, wherever we begin and wherever we end up.
The inclusivity of folk is exemplified best by the enormous up-take in the last 30 years of events such as Chinese Lunar New Year and Notting Hill Carnival, but also by the multitude of lesser-known events that now move through the streets of Britain across the calendar year and mingle with more traditionally accepted representations of folk such as morris dancing, mummer’s plays and town carnivals. These include largescale Diwali celebrations that take place in Edinburgh, Ukrainian Ivana Kupala night festivities across the country in June, and Swedish St Lucia night events in London in December.
There are, of course, also smaller more private celebrations that take place, events that are rooted in community and folklore. In 1972, a group of Bengali students living in Cardiff began gathering together for puja, a form of private prayer. Initially this was conducted in their own homes, and used painted images and figures they had imported from India, but gradually it expanded to encompass a street festival as well as the prayer at home, and by the mid-1980s they had formed a committee. In 2002, they invited two craftsmen from Kolkata in India, Nimai Chandra Pal and Bishwajit Chakraborty, to Wales to make a series of Hindu effigies for the committee to use in their annual Hindu Durga Puja Festival at Caerphilly. Clay from the Ganges was mixed with clay from Wales to create five towering figures of gods and goddesses – Ganesha, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartikeya and Durga – a perfect fusion between two cultures, and a celebration of the community’s place in India and in Wales. Some of the original effigies can now be seen on display in St Fagan’s Museum in Wales, offering the sense that this is a new national folklore that is arising; one in which all communities are offered the opportunity to express their folk customs and practices, and one in which we can all learn from one another about the huge variety of folk practices that exist in Britain today.
Through these expressions of more typically private forms of folk culture we begin to have a picture of an evolving folk history of Britain, one where everyone is welcome and all folk practices are valid. This, for me, is incredibly exciting and points to a future in which folklore is at the heart of everyday communities in a meaningful and useful way, because in order for folklore to make sense in the times we are living in now it must evolve to represent the communities and people that inhabit Britain now.
You can read more about Lally and her work here.