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Moving in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Roger D. Abrahams
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Extract

Americans are movers. The rest of the world, looking on, has said this of us, and we can hardly argue with their perceptions, for we place such a positive value on mobility, tying it to personal and social progress. But we are hardly unambivalent about moving. In response to a need for roots, we cling to an agrarian family image of the good and proper and cooperative life lived in harmony with the seasons. Some of the most powerful fictions by which we negotiate for a common order are as fully explored in our folk and popular forms of expression—especially our songs and dances—as in our more sophisticated and complex works of art. It is in such conventional forms that we find the most consistent explanations of what it means, socially and psychologically, to travel on or to come home to stay.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 3 , October 1978 , pp. 63 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

NOTE

This essay was written while a Fellow at the National Humanities Institute at the University of Chicago, and it developed in some part out of discussions held in the Myth Seminar. I am especially indebted to Neil Harris and John Cawelti who led the discussion, and to Eric Leed who was involved in the midst of it all. Neil Harris has written a number of articles on nostalgia: perhaps the one most useful for this discussion is “200 Years of Love and Hate: We and Our Machines,” in The New Republic (11 23, 1974), 33Google Scholar. The songs and story of Almeda Riddle may be found in A Singer and her Songs, ed. Abrahams, Roger D. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1972)Google Scholar: I have compared the repertoires of Granny and Marybird in “Creativity, Individuality and the Traditional Singer,” in Studies in the Southern Literary Tradition, 3 (1970), 5–36Google Scholar, and many of Marybird's songs are to be found in Anglo-American Folksong Style, ed. Abrahams, Roger D. and Foss, George Jr., (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968)Google Scholar. I do not mean to indicate, by lack of footnotes, that no one else has ever written on patterns of movement, metaphor, or dance in the United States; rather, my lack of “documentation” occurs precisely because of the vastness of the literature in these areas. Some of the ideas included here have been gestating for years, and were included in a lecture I gave (on many occasions) called “The Square and the Groovy,” in which I discussed the type of stylistic innovations occurring in the sixties through popular cultural innovations and invigorations brought on by yet one more Euro-American flirtation with Afro-American performance styles and terms.

I have profited greatly by first reading and then talking with Victor Turner on these matters of symbolic movement. The book by MacCannell, Dean, The Tourist (New York: Schocken Books, 1975)Google Scholar, also sharpened my thinking about instant communities on-the-go. My undying thanks to Janet Sue for helping in the revisions, to Julie Hayes for typing and retyping, and to Jack Salzman for his patience and help.