Introduction Introduction

This introduction, and the wide variety of papers in the special issue itself, argues for an expansive orientation to the study of crime and folklore. Focussing at this time on crime and folkloristics is particularly significant because, like Farrell, Hayward and Young, in their polemical Cultural Criminology (2008), our particular historic moment calls for a critical re-evaluation of approaches to both crime and folklore; one that understands and elucidates the rapid technological, social and capitalist context in which crime itself is both the product and critique of the torsions of late modernity (Howard and Blank 2013). This brief and selective introduction provides a broader historic and intellectual context for the papers in this collection than is normally possible in individual essays; however, I will also argue, in a Kuhnian (1962) sense, that to understand the paradoxical absent presence of crime in folkloristics we need to consider more than “normal folklore” and, as such, the introduction is also a critical engagement with—and a salvation project for—some abandoned or underappreciated marginalia in the Anglo-American literature that make up the patchwork of engagement with crime, the law and the various cultural texts and practices that surround it. A key limitation to this introduction is its reliance on the Anglo-American tradition which will perpetuate the marginalization of continental European researchers and my Franco-Canadian colleagues (to name just two of several important sites of folkoristics). Where these omissions produce obvious lacunae, as in understanding Canadian folk outlaws/bandits, Louis Riel or European rumour/legends of racialized gang violence, for example, I hope future special issues will correct my slight treatment of these topics. I should also note that “crime” and “criminal” are being used as an economical writing device, while recognizing that: “The word criminal identifies… the way certain actions and kinds of actions are formally evaluated in a particular culture at a particular time. Crime is not so much a physical fact as it is a relationship, one that signalizes an attitude” (Jackson 1969: 26). Three years ago I was studying criminals who illegally grew marijuana; today, I am studying citizen farmers. Few things change as quickly as criminal definitions and I use the term noting it is problematic, emergent and subject to contestation by various social actors. This introduction is also studiously unconcerned with nomenclature and defining a disciplinary specific term. I leave it to others to debate Dorson’s (1981) Crimelore, anthropologists’ “crime talk,” Montell’s (1966) “folk justice,” the variations and limitation of reviving Botkin’s (1956) terminology to create “crimesay,” and the machinations on whether “folk-criminology,” “criminal folkloristics” or the “folkloristics of crime” better captures the project. Below I will merely argue that crime be considered within two broad and interrelated rubrics: folklaw and a pan-disciplinary cultural criminology. Following some of the themes presented in the nine papers collected in this special issue, I organize this critical literature review of folklore and crime into four broad categories for this introduction. First, I argue that crime and folklaw are part of socially embedded expressions of worldview. Second, where competing groups come into conflict (materially and discursively) expressions and debates over the nature of crime itself can be read through outlaw folk hero narratives. Third, as crime exists as both an experience and a narrative act, the scope and function of story to explain, contain and/or weaponize crime implicates performer(s) and audiences in deeply complex reciprocal and political discourses. Finally, the ethnographic encounter with crime and criminal communities completes the larger project by accessing and engaging with the absent voices and experiences of individuals most people tell stories about, criminals. To begin, our first, and perhaps oldest, …