7 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). This idea of folkways differs from folklore. The word “folklore” was coined by a British scholar William Thoms in 1846 as “the generic term under which are included traditional institutions, beliefs, arts, customs, stories, songs, sayings and the like current among backward peoples or retained by the less cultured classes of more advanced peoples.”
This idea of folklore was modified by scholars in the 20th century, but some of its biases still survive. Architectural historian Dell Upton observes that “in many treatments of folk culture, change is viewed as decay; folk culture is thought to be constantly threatened. It is a ‘dying’ thing which somehow never manages to expire.” This problem has led scholars such as Upton, James Deetz and Henry Glassie to shift their thinking from “folk” to “vernacular” culture. Cf. Dell Thayer Upton, “Early Vernacular Architecture in Southeastern Virginia” (thesis, Brown, 1980); Richard M. Dorson, Handbook of American Folklore (Bloomington, 1983), xi-xii, xiv, 115, 323-40.