| Vernacular entrepreneurship is the term I use to describe the professional storytelling practice that I observed in Ireland during fieldwork trips in 2013 and 2014. Broadly, vernacular entrepreneurs attempt to make a living from a self-directed engagement with folklore. Specifically, they constitute a field of artistic and social practice that invites folklorists to re-evaluate the nature of professionalized folklore, storyteller identity, artistic community, and oral tradition. The following dissertation is my effort to explore these topics. With each of five chapters, I introduce a rubric for the study of folklore that is suspended in a web of orality, literacy, commodification, and electronic mediation.;Chapter 1, on vernacular entrepreneurship, critically analyzes the concepts of tradition, professionalism, and folklore in order to provide a theoretical basis for the performance of folk narratives in public, monetized circumstances. Chapter 2, on folkloric templates, describes the collection of personal, contextual, and material resources that inform the practice of professional Irish storytelling at large. Chapter 3, on semiterritorialization, examines the landed and landless inhabitations that storytellers populate in an effort to illustrate how community can be formed along geographical, mediated, and discursive lines. Chapter 4, on multimedia interchange, posits a vast array of media---oral, written, and recorded---as the basis for oral tradition. Chapter 5 closes the study with notes on folklore's context of production, or those communicative infrastructures ensuring that folklore is perpetually and remarkably contemporary, rather than an anachronistic remnant of a bygone time.;Throughout this study, I frame folklore as patterned, vernacular expression---a fundamental yet mercurial form of human communication that reflects the social climate at hand. In this dynamic, folklore is perennially drifting away from the sorts of groups and places where it has flourished in the past. The challenge for folklorists is to accept perpetual motion as a peculiarity of our subject matter. We do not have to endorse each new instantiation of folklore, but we are compelled to find places for them in our intellectual repertoires. |
