Home of Maltese Ghana - History and Folklore

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History and Folklore

As an academic discipline, History in Malta has concerned itself almost exclusively with the study of monumental time, and the study of monuments as the expression of power. Folklore has been relegated to the study of popular time, the time of memories as memories, emblematic of a world that has been lost, and of 'tradition'. Because History has been primarily the record of official power either on people or on the landscape, it has abrogated the past to itself, and handed it to the elites (colonial or otherwise) who have been involved in the enterprise. Consequently folklore has been required to record intimate history and, to use a Shakespearean metaphor, the flotsam and jetsam of the lives of individuals passing through a history that folklore could not make its proper object of study. It is this flotsam and jetsam that folklore has been obliged to classify and label: the simple technologies, the proverbs, and customs of agriculture, childhood and old age, in an almost timeless cyclicality.

Folklore has been sensitive to its inadequacy vis a vis history in two areas. First, it has recorded the customs of ordinary folk, the peasants (or as De Soldanis called them the Beduini - in Cassar Pullicino, 1989a; 3) or urban poor, who were never the source of national culture. In some respects this subaltern culture was treated by the elite as an embarresment (Friggieri, 1988). Second, the folkloric enterprise concentrated on recording declining traditions, or customs the elite wished to forget (or certainly not to be reminded of), partly because concerned as folklore was with the 'Bedouini', they pointed to a North African link.(6) Location in Malta was never a matter of geography but of identity.

In a witty little book Nigel Dennis noted the topocentric nature of history, as well as the constant need for the reinvention of history as tradition:

'Malta and her historians have spent hundreds of years embracing Europe and the Holy Land and rebuffing Africa. In their own eyes, they have been to Southern Europe what Vienna has been to Eastern - the last, lonely fortress of Christianity. They have picked and chosen with care the sources of their origin, and many of the distortions that mark their written history and their popular beliefs come from the determination they have shown to look with disdain on the land of Numidia and Barbary. '(Dennis, 1972:9)

Dennis is not suggesting the construction of historical fictions, that a major exercise in historical duplicity is being practiced, or that once the North African dimension is displayed then history will be 'true' or 'correct'. Rather, he points to the plasticity of interpretation, and the need for the constant reinvention of history. His points to the harnessing of history to generational concerns and identifies history as a continual enterprise generating as much remembrance as forgetting.

The contrast to the status and role of folklore is striking. Folklore's initial self-imposed charter was remembering not to forget-not just the memories of ordinary folk, but those that embraced also the lands of Barbary - and thus an embarrassment to the ruling groups and elites to whom the historians had to accommodate themselves. In this respect folklore had an inverse role in Malta than it had in Greece or Cyprus. In Greece, folklore (laographia) was useful to History because it was hoped it could demonstrate that the modern Greeks were at least the spiritual and cultural descendents of the ancient Hellenes, if not their biological descendents. The study of laographia was useful for the study of politismos (high culture/civilization) (Just, 1995). Greek academia embraced folklore and popularised it; Maltese academia shunned it as a (potential) embarrassment and popularised history - i.e. the glorious deeds of the Maltese and the Knights against the Turks etc. Both of course were constructs, and equally ideological. Whereas the Greeks wanted to expunge (more recent) 'history' (the Ottoman period and its influences) in order to emphasise (Ancient Greek) 'origins' as a model of their national identity, the Maltese wanted to expunge 'origins' (especially in the Herderian model of language as the essence of national Culture) in order to emphasise 'history' (being in a European sphere of influence) as a model of their national identity. To paraphrase Just (1995) folklore represented the private doubts versus the cultural certainties of history.

As a political legitimation and disciplinary practice, History in Malta has thus been the recording of the progressive evolution of institutions, and of the manifestations of the power of ruling elites in the products of High Culture: painting, sculpture, churches, urban buildings, etc. In short, of how the island has long possessed European institutions. By contrast folklore could be subversive of this cultural identity as conceived within the process of nation state formation. The foremost living folklorist Guze Cassar Pullicino, following a linguistic model of culture, identified two 'elements' in Maltese folklore: the Romance element, and the 'older Semitic element which is probably Arab' (1989b: 60). Indeed Cassar Pullicino was at pains to point out, as against the elite sponsored view of history, that 'the Arab-Berber cultural influence did not end with the arrival of Count Roger in 1090, nor, as some historians assert with their final expulsion by King Fredrick II in 1224" (ibid: 60-61). He points to the ongoing links with the Muslim world under the Knights, the large number of slaves, the mixing of populations, and the popularity of Muslim slaves in providing charms against the evil eye, etc, a theme taken up by Cassar (1993) later. Folklore could thus be subversive of official high culture, or more precisely of the pretences of local ruling groups, including the harnessing of History as a discipline, because it concentrated on popular, non-nationalist, markers of ethnic identity, whilst History discoursed on High (elite) Nation-State-building Culture, or Patrimony.

The problem besetting folklore is that it has long been on a loosing wicket. Cassar Pullicino attributes this to the process of modernization which to many is a process of anglicization (modernity speaks in English). Concern over loss of tradition is a feature common to many of the 'conserving disciplines' in Malta (History, Archaeology, Art History, Language, etc). Here I restrict myself to folklore. Cassar Pullicino is aware of the contemporary decontextualization of tradition (folkorismus or 'fakelore') but he suggests: 'In the context of Malta, where our small size rapidly brings us to the forgetting and the destruction of minor things of little material value as we find in folklore, we are forced to say that folklorism (folklorizmu) of this type does no harm, because at least it keeps alive the remembrance of authentic aspects of old Maltese life, and it can help in the development of new (traditions) modelled on traditional (ones)' (1989b: 68). This topic has recently been explored by Boissevain and others (Boissevain 1992), but whereas they have concentrated more on the social changes that led to the revitalisation of traditions, and on the changing components of rituals to become more ludic, Cassar Pullicino pursues a different angle. What is important is the role of remembrance versus forgetting and loss. Remembrance is itself a good thing, even remembrance of things lost. Folklore thus become a process not so much as keeping alive, but of remembering not to forget.

It is not hard to see that folklore has become part of the post-modern phenomenon of nostalgia. We are witnessing perhaps another form of folklore and another way of talking about culture and tradition. I call this Folklore Mark II.