For a Short Time Only

Peter Benes is the longtime director of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife. His aim in this entertaining and painstakingly researched book is to show how migration, itinerancy, and the diffusion of European popular culture in early America were intertwined. “Strolling” work meant “amusements and the ‘minor’ arts,” from puppetry and acrobatics to waxworks (p. 6). Itinerant-taught “mannered or schooled culture,” such as psalmody and penmanship, is also included (ibid., emphasis in original). The focus is on biographies of individual travelers. Following the Swedish folklorist Carl W. von Sydow and the cultural historian Peter Burke, Benes identifies immigrants as “active bearers,” “tradition-bearers,” or “carriers” of popular culture, “whose efforts kept alive old practices and introduced new ones among their relatively ‘passive’ audiences” (p. 8). This diffusion model depends on chance, choice, markets, and the Atlantic transit system; so some practices were transmitted and others were not. Some “old practices” declined from the first generation—thus requiring “resurgence”—or were unknown. “Delayed transmission” was common. An entertainment available in England in 1700 might arrive in America a century later with a new troupe of itinerants. Benes devotes chapters to impermanent migration and the ephemeral presence of opportunistic European itinerants who crisscrossed the Atlantic to profit from an absence of competition. Sojourners lingered until local authorities grew intolerant, paying customers dried up, or opportunities arose elsewhere. Benes documents thirty-five itinerant occupations in two useful tables with impressive primary-source data on these skillful wanderers from 1675 to 1836, identifying specialties, places of origin, and travels (pp. 34–35

Art · Entertainment · Folklore · Folkloristics · Genealogy · Media studies · Popular culture · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · History · Philippine History and Culture

• That ancient and modern wonder”

  Open Access•Alexander Clayton•Atlantic Studies•2023

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