Tenets: Communitarian Ideal
Being the first person to earn a PhD in folklore in the United States may not have made Roberts the father of American folklore. But his genial spirit, easy rapport with people, plain speaking and accessible scholarship earned him the nickname Uncle Warren among his students. It was a nickname that also spoke volumes about the kinship he believed to exist among handmade objects and the people who made them in traditional communities. Craft, material culture, vernacular architecture—these are the subjects he taught to several generations of Indiana University students, both in the classroom and in the field school he conducted every summer in DuBois County, Indiana. Folk culture, he instructed, was fully realized in material forms—chairs, log buildings, artfully carved gravestones—things he admired both for their own sake, as ingenious or creative resolutions of form and function, and as objects that served as metonyms of community.
Embedded in his notion of the “Old Traditional Way of Life,” or OTWOL, was a folk ideology that uniquely wed aspects of pre-modern realities (the handmade, traditional, and local) with a communitarian worldview, emphasizing the primacy of social networks and the common good over individual self interest. Suffice to say, OTWOL reified the homogeneity of social values and community understandings and effaced issues of race, class, gender, and industrialization. Roberts’ construction did not pursue undercurrents of conflict, tension, subterfuge, and deception in a community’s enactment of civic life, as well as in the political economy of external forces working on and against community. What it did pursue, however, was a radical reassertion of craft skill and folk artistry challenging the stereotype that rural craftsmen and the objects they crafted were crude and rustic. Thomas Walker |
About Warren E. Roberts
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“Ninety-five Percent of the Population