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Fair to Middlin': The Roots of the County Fair
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13661 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
2,689 Words |
| Author
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Roger L. Welsch
Plains folklorist Roger L. Welsch is professor of English and
anthropology at the University of Nebraska. |
What could be more typical of this country than a country fair? Why, it's as American, they say, as Mom and apple pie, hot dogs and the Fourth of July!
But wait a minute--Mom's name is Lukasiewz. Eastern European pierogis (fruit pies) are a likely antecedent for American apple pie. The provenance of the wiener is there to be seen in its name--from Wienerwürstchen, German for "a sausage in the style of Vienna." And the fireworks, celebration, and sun worshiping of that all-American holiday, the Fourth of July, are remarkably like the observations all around the world marking the summer solstice about a fortnight earlier.
Folklore is the study of lines of tradition rather than origins because almost all traditions have their roots in other, more ancient customs and simply do not start without clear and direct foundations in age-old phenomena. Even where an occasion is ostensibly historical, like the Fourth of July, it acts as a magnet that gathers to itself weaker, sometimes failing, or nearly forgotten items of folklore, thereby strengthening itself and giving new life to random traditions that are sometimes only indirectly germane to the celebration. Folklore rarely exists without an underlying function or functions, and a historically accidental event like America's Independence Day simply becomes a new focus for all of the activities whose original celestial rationale may have been weakening. Few Americans pay any attention to the summer solstice--or to the position of the sun in the sky at any time--and yet we still celebrate the solstice in our Fourth of July customs.
There is no better example of a cultural event that gathers to itself all manner of extraneous, related, or even obscure customs than the county fair, as all-American as ... as ... well, as the Fourth of July! It does not take a trained ethnologist to see tradition in lively action at the county fair. This autumnal celebration of harvest has drawn into itself similar features from countries and cultures throughout the world. Circuses, festivals, markets and itinerant arts and crafts have clustered within the county fair, as have ethnic, rural, and historical traditions and expressions.
Perhaps most significant, most mysterious--and certainly the most ancient, even prehistoric--are the calendrical observations that have incorporated themselves within the rural fair in such a way that sophisticated, computer-owning farmers and town dwellers visiting the fair participate in rituals that echo the wonder forgotten cultures expressed at
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