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.
“We would drive over to the garage, and somebody would unlock it and get the record player and these heavy boxes of records. We’d take them to the school, and people would take turns teaching dances,” Sawin says. “I was a ballet dancer, so I just loved it.”
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 set the foundation for what would become a lifelong career as an academic and folklorist.
Folklore is everywhere — even online. From the stories we tell our friends to the recipes passed down through families to the playground rhymes that children still chant today. Folklore bridges the gaps that separate us and helps us understand the ways we identify ourselves.
“It’s easy to say folklore is trivial, and any one instance of it maybe is,” Sawin shares. “But on the other hand, it connects and feeds and contextualizes so much.”
Now chair of the American Studies department at UNC-Chapel Hill, 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.”
Defining folklore
When Sawin began studying folklore in the early 1980s, scholars still taught that culture could be divided into three categories: elite culture, which is practiced by upper classes and is often exclusive; popular culture, which is the widely accessible and ever-changing lifestyle of the masses; and folk culture, which is communal, passed down through generations, and rooted in specific group identities.
Today, the lines between these categories have blurred. Elements of elite culture, such as fine art and high fashion, have become more accessible and popularized, while pop music is heavily influenced by folk traditions like blues and country. Similarly, popular culture is increasingly shaping folk culture by commercializing certain traditions like Oktoberfest or modernizing folk narratives like the contemporary retellings of fairytales.
Because of this blending, the study of folklore has broadened, expanding its scope beyond simply documenting history and traditions. Folklore is vibrant, pliable, and constantly adjusting to how we create, share, and connect with one another.
“We’re interested in these little touches of artistry in everyday life,” Sawin says.
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, and more importantly, it explores how communities express their identities.
Examining traditions and identity
Sawin has been a professor at Carolina for 27 years. As a researcher nearing retirement, she has seen firsthand the ways folklore has withstood and adapted to change.
Her early research focused on how everyday performance — whether singing or storytelling — intersects with gender, particularly how women’s roles in performance are often limited in conservative cultures. This interest led her to study Bessie Eldreth, a North Carolina folk singer, resulting in her dissertation and later a book that explored the gender tensions shaping Eldreth’s life and work.
Sawin’s research then took her to Louisiana, where she examined rural Mardi Gras celebrations and the shifting cultural dynamics within Cajun communities. Her work there highlighted how traditions persist and adapt in response to societal changes.
After Sawin adopted a daughter from Guatemala, her focus shifted to the folklore of culturally blended and international adoptive families. She explored how these families navigate the merging of traditions and cultural identities, contributing to a broader understanding of family dynamics in modern society.
“There’s a whole set of stories many families have that tell the amazing, miraculous way that their kid ended up in their family,” she says. “I realized that parents were willing to tell me them because they thought I needed to know or, at the very least, would understand as a fellow adoptive parent.”
Exploring digital connections
Sawin has also witnessed the birth and surge of digital folklore. 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.
While teaching a class about urban legends, Sawin discovered that many of her students made sense of scary or puzzling events by creating and sharing memes. These short, humorous, and powerful forms of modern-day folklore influence the way people communicate with and relate to each other.
“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. By observing the evolving trends of this content, she’s built an archive and identified how memes reflect hot-topic social and political issues.
“I love cats, so I started collecting the cat lady memes, and there are zillions,” she says. “I have a ‘save’ category folder in my Facebook, and I just go, ‘Oh, I’ll save that one. There’s another one.’”
One of her big projects involved collecting memes from the viral twitter account @JortsTheCat. What started as a platform to share funny content about an orange tabby cat named Jorts and his friend Jean, turned into an online space for social advocacy. The account has posted photoshopped pictures of Jean and Jorts walking a picket line and tweeted support for union workers from the cats’ point of view.
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.
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.
Combining culture and community
Sawin has stayed at Carolina for nearly three decades because of the university’s unique folklore master’s program, the students she’s mentored, and the vibrant folk culture of North Carolina. The university’s strong tradition of studying Southern folklore, along with the freedom to explore her interests, kept her passionate about both teaching and research.
As Sawin moves out of a position in academia, she wants to spend retirement exploring her research interests. She said she’d like to return to her project studying people involved in transnational adoption because it poses great significance for her. She also wants to spend time volunteering 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.