Unit One: Folk Knowledge

image: Charles Collier

If my friend Gary hadn't stuck his arm out and stopped me from walking into the street that afternoon, I would have been a smudge mark on the Edinburgh pavement. Coming from the states and less traveled than my friend, I wasn't used to traffic flow in the UK and was looking left, instead of right, when beginning to cross the street.

People who have had a lot of traditional education need reminders like that once in awhile: some of the most prized kinds of knowledge may be less essential than more "pedestrian" types. Knowing how to walk about without dying is a kind of folk knowledge. You don't learn it in schools; you learn it in the streets.


As Dr. Petersen and I explained to our class, we have structured our course according to four broad kinds of knowledge media: folk knowledge, oral knowledge, written knowledge, and print knowledge. These are roughly chronological, though clearly overlapping, as we move forward from antiquity to the Renaissance. Let me introduce "folk knowledge."

Folk knowledge is practical knowledge for living that gets passed on from one generation to another within families and groups, independent of formal schooling. Such knowledge is especially related to physical well-being and material existence, but also includes cultural knowledge required for survival within a given society. Folk knowledge includes the critical "ways of the world" within a given time and place. These may be passed on orally or even through written means, but this knowledge depends more upon contextual understanding than textual information; more upon doing than learning; and more upon imitation and demonstration than upon skills of speaking or thinking.

Rather than viewing folk knowledge as primitive, it should be thought of as primary, or primal. People learn how to function, how to cope with their bodies, how to manage their close interpersonal relationships, and how to survive in their societies even if never formally instructed to do so. That's folk knowledge.

Obviously folk knowledge gets transmitted at least in part through oral communication, and folkways do get written down and even printed. But they do not depend upon the institutions of knowledge associated with these other knowledge media; they do not require schools, but simply living among the "folk" and adopting the ways of a group of people. As close as folk knowledge gets to schooling would be systems of master/apprentice relationships.

Here are some types of folk knowledge:

• domestic arts (cooking, sewing, midwifery)
• healing, hygiene, homeopathy
• athletics, sports, and hunting (as practiced outside of school systems)
• religious practices and rituals (obviously overlapping with other knowledge systems)
• civic and community practices and ceremonies
• spiritual-physical practices (like yoga, meditation)
• arts (dancing, music, or art not taught in schools)
• building
• shopping
• trade and commerce
• travel and transportation
• logistics (ordering and arranging objects in space and across distances)
• playing games
• entertaining

Students often do not realize how much folk knowledge they possess or how skilled they are at functioning in their material and social contexts. What kind of knowledge inventory do you have, if you set aside the subjects you've learned about formally in school?  What kinds of skills at functioning in physical or social environments have you felt comfortable enough with that you can teach these to others?