Folklore goes digital
In her 27-year career in American studies, Patricia Sawin has studied culture through oral histories and cat memes.
Growing up in the 1970s, Patricia Sawin spent her Friday nights dancing in an elementary school gym. Not hip-hop or disco like her peers, but folk dances from all over the world. Every week, people came together to teach dances from countries like Scotland, Hungary and Sweden, sharing their cultural heritage through movement.
This weekly ritual of learning new moves, sewing costumes and performing eventually sparked a deeper curiosity in Sawin. She began to wonder: Could this exchange of culture and creativity be studied in school? Her curiosity led to a 27-year career as an academic and folklorist.
Now Sawin is chair and associate professor in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ American studies department. Sawin stresses that folklore is much more than quilts and old songs. It’s the cultural activities that people decide to maintain, perpetuate and pass on. It’s how we express creativity in everyday life.
“We’re in a world where we often think progress is the most important thing,” she says. “But remembering that there are a whole bunch of other, older alternatives is always interesting to me.”
Studying folklore
At UNC Chapel-Hill, folklore found its footing in the 1920s as part of a movement for scholars to define the South from within the South. Academics collected work songs from the mostly Black workmen who erected campus buildings, taught students to create theater productions about their North Carolina hometowns, sponsored a folk singing club and documented the budding student life at the time.
The University’s now 100-year-old academic discipline explores everything from graffiti to bluegrass, from religious festivals to immigration. More importantly, it explores how communities express their identities. Culture is no longer shared solely through oral storytelling or music festivals or potlucks — it’s shared through texts and social media and, yes, memes.
Online, we are interacting in ways that mirror a face-to-face conversation. Instead of speaking, we’re typing; instead of using facial expressions and body language, we’re using emojis; instead of making jokes or sharing stories, we’re sending memes. She’s found that while social media can be critical and create division, memes are a way to offer support and social connection, reflecting shared experiences.
“Memes are a little different because they’re not narrative, but they’re kind of like a poem,” Sawin says. “I mean, they’ve got all of these implications.”
And the memes she’s most interested in? Cats. She’s been studying how cat memes facilitate relationships in Facebook groups, even becoming tools for social advocacy. Sawin found that these memes tap into collective emotions, shared humor and social narratives to become a vehicle for discussing and promoting issues like workers’ rights and equality.
Combining culture and community
Sawin stayed at Carolina for nearly three decades because of the University’s unique folklore master’s program, the students she’s mentored and the state’s vibrant folk culture.
She wants to spend her retirement exploring research interests like transnational adoption, important to her as the mother of a daughter adopted from Guatemala. She also wants to volunteer with folk productions or in adoption organizations to combine her love for culture with her commitment to community.
The study of folklore will continue to adapt to changing technologies, and pioneering research like Sawin’s will illuminate how culture evolves and endures in the digital age.
“Folklorists are ethnographers, which means we interact with people, and we want to find out what’s important to them and why, and we want to celebrate their creativity,” she says.
