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Felidae

Felidae is the family of mammals in the order Carnivora colloquially referred to as cats. A member of this family is also called a felid. The term "cat" refers both to felids in general and specifically to the domestic cat (Felis catus).

The 41 extant Felidae species exhibit the greatest diversity in fur patterns of all terrestrial carnivores. Cats have retractile claws, slender muscular bodies and strong flexible forelimbs. Their teeth and facial muscles allow for a powerful bite. They are all obligate carnivores, and most are solitary predators ambushing or stalking their prey. Wild cats occur in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas. Some wild cat species are adapted to forest and savanna habitats, some to arid environments, and a few also to wetlands and mountainous terrain. Their activity patterns range from nocturnal and crepuscular to diurnal, depending on their preferred prey species.

Reginald Innes Pocock divided the extant Felidae into three subfamilies: the Pantherinae, the Felinae and the Acinonychinae, differing from each other by the ossification of the hyoid apparatus and by the cutaneous sheaths which protect their claws. This concept has been revised following developments in molecular biology and techniques for the analysis of morphological data. Today, the living Felidae are divided into two subfamilies: the Pantherinae and Felinae, with the Acinonychinae subsumed into the latter. Pantherinae includes five Panthera and two Neofelis species, while Felinae includes the other 34 species in 12 genera.

The first cats emerged during the Oligocene about, with the appearance of Proailurus and Pseudaelurus. The latter species complex was ancestral to two main lines of felids: the cats in the extant subfamilies and a group of extinct "saber-tooth" felids of the subfamily Machairodontinae, which range from the type genus Machairodus of the late Miocene to Smilodon of the Pleistocene. The "false saber-toothed cats", the Barbourofelidae and Nimravidae, are not true cats but are closely related. Together with the Felidae, Viverridae, hyenas and mongooses, they constitute the Feliformia.

Characteristics
All members of the cat family have the following characteristics in common: The colour, length and density of their fur are very diverse. Fur colour covers the gamut from white to black, and fur patterns from distinctive small spots, and stripes to small blotches and rosettes. Most cat species are born with spotted fur, except the jaguarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi), Asian golden cat (Catopuma temminckii) and caracal (Caracal caracal). The spotted fur of lion (Panthera leo) and cougar (Puma concolor) cubs change to uniform fur during their ontogeny. Those living in cold environments have thick fur with long hair, like the snow leopard (Panthera uncia) and the Pallas's cat (Otocolobus manul). Those living in tropical and hot climate zones have short fur. Several species exhibit melanism with all-black individuals.
 * They are digitigrade and have five toes on their forefeet and four on their hind feet. Their curved claws are protractile and attached to the terminal bones of the toe with ligaments and tendons. The claws are guarded by cutaneous sheaths, except in the Acinonyx.
 * The plantar pads of both fore and hind feet form compact three-lobed cushions.
 * They actively protract the claws by contracting muscles in the toe, and they passively retract them. The dewclaws are expanded but do not protract.
 * They have lithe and flexible bodies with muscular limbs.
 * Their skulls are foreshortened with a rounded profile and large orbits.
 * They have 30 teeth with a dental formula of . The upper third premolar and lower molar are adapted as carnassial teeth, suited to tearing and cutting flesh. The canine teeth are large, reaching exceptional size in the extinct saber-toothed species. The lower carnassial is smaller than the upper carnassial and has a crown with two compressed blade-like pointed cusps.
 * Their tongues are covered with horn-like papillae, which rasp meat from prey and aid in grooming.
 * Their noses project slightly beyond the lower jaw.
 * Their eyes are relatively large, situated to provide binocular vision. Their night vision is especially good due to the presence of a tapetum lucidum, which reflects light inside the eyeball, and gives felid eyes their distinctive shine. As a result, the eyes of felids are about six times more light-sensitive than those of humans, and many species are at least partially nocturnal. The retina of felids also contains a relatively high proportion of rod cells, adapted for distinguishing moving objects in conditions of dim light, which are complemented by the presence of cone cells for sensing colour during the day.
 * They have well-developed and highly sensitive whiskers above the eyes, on the cheeks, and the muzzle, but not below the chin. Whiskers help to navigate in the dark and to capture and hold prey.
 * Their external ears are large and especially sensitive to high-frequency sounds in the smaller cat species. This sensitivity allows them to locate small rodent prey.
 * The penis is subconical, facing downward when not erect and backward during urination. The baculum is small or vestigial, and shorter than in the Canidae. Most felids have penile spines that induce ovulation during copulation.
 * Felids have a vomeronasal organ in the roof of the mouth, allowing them to "taste" the air. The use of this organ is associated with the Flehmen response.
 * They cannot detect the sweetness of sugar, as they lack the sweet taste receptor.
 * They share a broadly similar set of vocalizations but with some variation between species. In particular, the pitch of calls varies, with larger species producing deeper sounds; overall, the frequency of felid calls ranges between 50 and 10,000 hertz. The standard sounds made by all felids include meowing, spitting, hissing, snarling and growling. Meowing is the main contact sound, whereas the others signify an aggressive motivation.
 * They can purr during both phases of respiration, though pantherine cats seem to purr only during oestrus and copulation, and as cubs when suckling. Purring is generally a low-pitch sound of 16.8–27.5 Hz and is mixed with other vocalization types during the expiratory phase. The ability to roar comes from an elongated and specially adapted larynx and hyoid apparatus. When air passes through the larynx on the way from the lungs, the cartilage walls of the larynx vibrate, producing sound. Only lions, leopards, tigers, and jaguars are truly able to roar, although the loudest mews of snow leopards have a similar, if less structured, sound.

In the great majority of cat species, the tail is between a third and a half of the body length, although with some exceptions, like the Lynx species and margay (Leopardus wiedii). Cat species vary greatly in body and skull sizes, and weights:
 * The largest cat species is the tiger (Panthera tigris), with a head-to-body length of up to 390 cm, a weight range of at least 65 to 325 kg, and a skull length ranging from 316 to 413 mm. Although the maximum skull length of a lion is slightly greater at 419 mm, it is generally smaller in head-to-body length than the former.
 * The smallest cat species are the rusty-spotted cat (Prionailurus rubiginosus) and the black-footed cat (Felis nigripes). The former is 35 - 48 cm in length and weighs 0.9 - 1.6 kg. The latter has a head-to-body length of 36.7 - 43.3 cm and a maximum recorded weight of 2.45 kg.

Most cat species have a haploid number of 18 or 19. Central and South American cats have a haploid number of 18, possibly due to the combination of two smaller chromosomes into a larger one.

Felidae have type IIx muscle fibers three times more powerful than the muscle fibers of human athletes.

Evolution

The family Felidae is part of the Feliformia, a suborder that diverged probably about into several families. The Felidae and the Asiatic linsangs are considered a sister group, which split about.

The earliest cats probably appeared about. Proailurus is the oldest known cat that occurred after the Eocene–Oligocene extinction event about ; fossil remains were excavated in France and Mongolia's Hsanda Gol Formation. Fossil occurrences indicate that the Felidae arrived in North America around. This is about 20million years later than the Ursidae and the Nimravidae, and about 10 million years later than the Canidae.

In the Early Miocene about, Pseudaelurus lived in Africa. Its fossil jaws were also excavated in geological formations of Europe's Vallesian, Asia's Middle Miocene and North America's late Hemingfordian to late Barstovian epochs.

In the Early or Middle Miocene, the saber-toothed Machairodontinae evolved in Africa and migrated northwards in the Late Miocene. With their large upper canines, they were adapted to prey on large-bodied megaherbivores. Miomachairodus is the oldest known member of this subfamily. Metailurus lived in Africa and Eurasia about. Several Paramachaerodus skeletons were found in Spain. Homotherium appeared in Africa, Eurasia and North America around, and Megantereon about. Smilodon lived in North and South America from about. This subfamily became extinct in the Late Pleistocene.

Results of mitochondrial analysis indicate that the living Felidae species descended from a common ancestor, which originated in Asia in the Late Miocene epoch. They migrated to Africa, Europe and the Americas in the course of at least 10 migration waves during the past ~11 million years. Low sea levels and interglacial and glacial periods facilitated these migrations. Panthera blytheae is the oldest known pantherine cat dated to the late Messinian to early Zanclean ages about. A fossil skull was excavated in 2010 in Zanda County on the Tibetan Plateau. Panthera palaeosinensis from North China probably dates to the Late Miocene or Early Pliocene. The skull of the holotype is similar to that of a lion or leopard. Panthera zdanskyi dates to the Gelasian about. Several fossil skulls and jawbones were excavated in northwestern China. Panthera gombaszoegensis is the earliest known pantherine cat that lived in Europe about.

Living felids fall into eight evolutionary lineages or species clades. Genotyping of the nuclear DNA of all 41 felid species revealed that hybridization between species occurred in the course of evolution within the majority of the eight lineages.

Modelling of felid coat pattern transformations revealed that nearly all patterns evolved from small spots.

Classification
Traditionally, five subfamilies had been distinguished within the Felidae based on phenotypical features: the Pantherinae, the Felinae, the Acinonychinae, and the extinct Machairodontinae and Proailurinae. Acinonychinae used to only contain the genus Acinonyx but this genus is now within the Felinae subfamily.

Phylogeny
The following cladogram based on Piras et al. (2013) depicts the phylogeny of basal living and extinct groups.

The phylogenetic relationships of living felids are shown in the following cladogram:

title: Felidae


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Folklore

Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture. This includes oral traditions such as tales, myths, legends, proverbs, poems, jokes, and other oral traditions. This also includes material culture, such as traditional building styles common to the group. Folklore also encompasses customary lore, taking actions for folk beliefs, and the forms and rituals of celebrations such as Christmas, weddings, folk dances, and initiation rites.

Each one of these, either singly or in combination, is considered a folklore artifact or traditional cultural expression. Just as essential as the form, folklore also encompasses the transmission of these artifacts from one region to another or from one generation to the next. Folklore is not something one can typically gain from a formal school curriculum or study in the fine arts. Instead, these traditions are passed along informally from one individual to another, either through verbal instruction or demonstration.

The academic study of folklore is called folklore studies or folkloristics, and it can be explored at the undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. levels.

Overview
The word folklore, a compound of folk and lore, was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms, who contrived the term as a replacement for the contemporary terminology of "popular antiquities" or "popular literature". The second half of the word, lore, comes from Old English lār 'instruction'. It is the knowledge and traditions of a particular group, frequently passed along by word of mouth.

The concept of folk has varied over time. When Thoms first created this term, folk applied only to rural, frequently poor and illiterate peasants. A more modern definition of folk is a social group that includes two or more people with common traits who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. "Folk is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family." This expanded social definition of folk supports a broader view of the material, i.e., the lore, considered to be folklore artifacts. These now include all "things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)". Folklore is no longer considered to be limited to that which is old or obsolete. These folk artifacts continue to be passed along informally, as a rule anonymously, and always in multiple variants. The folk group is not individualistic; it is community-based and nurtures its lore in community. "As new groups emerge, new folklore is created… surfers, motorcyclists, computer programmers". In direct contrast to high culture, where any single work of a named artist is protected by copyright law, folklore is a function of shared identity within a common social group.

Having identified folk artifacts, the professional folklorist strives to understand the significance of these beliefs, customs, and objects for the group, since these cultural units would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within the group. That meaning can, however, shift and morph; for example, the Halloween celebration of the 21st century is not the All Hallows' Eve of the Middle Ages and even gives rise to its own set of urban legends independent of the historical celebration; the cleansing rituals of Orthodox Judaism were originally good public health in a land with little water, but now these customs signify for some people identification as an Orthodox Jew. By comparison, a common action such as tooth brushing, which is also transmitted within a group, remains a practical hygiene and health issue and does not rise to the level of a group-defining tradition. Tradition is initially remembered behavior; once it loses its practical purpose, there is no reason for further transmission unless it has been imbued with meaning beyond the initial practicality of the action. This meaning is at the core of folkloristics, the study of folklore.

With the increasing theoretical sophistication of the social sciences, it has become evident that folklore is a naturally occurring and necessary component of any social group; it is indeed all around us. Folklore does not have to be old or antiquated; it continues to be created and transmitted, and in any group, it is used to differentiate between "us" and "them".

Origin and development of folklore studies
Folklore began to distinguish itself as an autonomous discipline during the period of romantic nationalism, in Europe. A particular figure in this development was Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose writings in the 1770s presented oral traditions as organic processes grounded in locale. After the German states were invaded by Napoleonic France, Herder's approach was adopted by many of his fellow Germans, who systematized the recorded folk traditions, and used them in their process of nation building. This process was enthusiastically embraced by smaller nations, like Finland, Estonia, and Hungary, which were seeking political independence from their dominant neighbors.

Folklore, as a field of study, further developed among 19th century European scholars, who were contrasting tradition with the newly developing modernity. Its focus was the oral folklore of the rural peasant populations, which were considered as residue and survivals of the past that continued to exist within the lower strata of society. The "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" of the Brothers Grimm (first published 1812) is the best known but by no means only collection of verbal folklore of the European peasantry of that time. This interest in stories, sayings and songs continued throughout the 19th century and aligned the fledgling discipline of folkloristics with literature and mythology. By the turn into the 20th century the number and sophistication of folklore studies and folklorists had grown both in Europe and North America. Whereas European folklorists remained focused on the oral folklore of the homogenous peasant populations in their regions, the American folklorists, led by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, chose to consider Native American cultures in their research, and included the totality of their customs and beliefs as folklore. This distinction aligned American folkloristics with cultural anthropology and ethnology, using the same techniques of data collection in their field research. This divided alliance of folkloristics between the humanities in Europe and the social sciences in America offers a wealth of theoretical vantage points and research tools to the field of folkloristics as a whole, even as it continues to be a point of discussion within the field itself.

The term folkloristics, along with the alternative name folklore studies, became widely used in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. When the American Folklife Preservation Act (Public Law 94-201) was passed by the U.S. Congress in January 1976, to coincide with the Bicentennial Celebration, folkloristics in the United States came of age.

"'…[Folklife] means the traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction or institutional direction.'"

Added to the extensive array of other legislation designed to protect the natural and cultural heritage of the United States, this law also marks a shift in national awareness. It gives voice to a growing understanding that cultural diversity is a national strength and a resource worthy of protection. Paradoxically, it is a unifying feature, not something that separates the citizens of a country. "We no longer view cultural difference as a problem to be solved, but as a tremendous opportunity. In the diversity of American folklife we find a marketplace teeming with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for Americans". This diversity is celebrated annually at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and many other folklife fests around the country.

There are numerous other definitions. According to William Bascom major article on the topic there are "four functions to folklore":
 * Folklore lets people escape from repressions imposed upon them by society.
 * Folklore validates culture, justifying its rituals and institutions to those who perform and observe them.
 * Folklore is a pedagogic device which reinforces morals and values and builds wit.
 * Folklore is a means of applying social pressure and exercising social control.

Definition of "folk"
The folk of the 19th century, the social group identified in the original term "folklore", was characterized by being rural, illiterate and poor. They were the peasants living in the countryside, in contrast to the urban populace of the cities. Only toward the end of the century did the urban proletariat (on the coattails of Marxist theory) become included with the rural poor as folk. The common feature in this expanded definition of folk was their identification as the underclass of society.

Moving forward into the 20th century, in tandem with new thinking in the social sciences, folklorists also revised and expanded their concept of the folk group. By the 1960s it was understood that social groups, i.e. folk groups, were all around us; each individual is enmeshed in a multitude of differing identities and their concomitant social groups. The first group that each of us is born into is the family, and each family has its own unique family folklore. As a child grows into an individual, its identities also increase to include age, language, ethnicity, occupation, etc. Each of these cohorts has its own folklore, and as one folklorist points out, this is "not idle speculation… Decades of fieldwork have demonstrated conclusively that these groups do have their own folklore." In this modern understanding, folklore is a function of shared identity within any social group.

This folklore can include jokes, sayings and expected behavior in multiple variants, always transmitted in an informal manner. For the most part it will be learned by observation, imitation, repetition or correction by other group members. This informal knowledge is used to confirm and re-inforce the identity of the group. It can be used both internally within the group to express their common identity, for example in an initiation ceremony for new members. Or it can be used externally to differentiate the group from outsiders, like a folkdance demonstration at a community festival. Significant to folklorists here is that there are two opposing but equally valid ways to use this in the study of a group: you can start with an identified group in order to explore its folklore, or you can identify folklore items and use them to identify the social group.

Beginning in the 1960s, a further expansion of the concept of folk began to unfold through the study of folklore. Individual researchers identified folk groups that had previously been overlooked and ignored. One notable example of this is found in an issue of the Journal of American Folklore, published in 1975, which is dedicated exclusively to articles on women's folklore, with approaches that had not come from a man's perspective. Other groups that were highlighted as part of this broadened understanding of the folk group were non-traditional families, occupational groups, and families that pursued the production of folk items over multiple generations.

Folklorist Richard Dorson explained in 1976 that the study of folklore is "concerned with the study of traditional culture, or the unofficial culture" that is the folk culture, "as opposed to the elite culture, not for the sake of proving a thesis but to learn about the mass of [humanity] overlooked by the conventional disciplines".

Folklore genres
Individual folklore artifacts are commonly classified as one of three types: material, verbal or customary lore. For the most part self-explanatory, these categories include physical objects (material folklore), common sayings, expressions, stories and songs (verbal folklore), and beliefs and ways of doing things (customary folklore). There is also a fourth major subgenre defined for children's folklore and games (childlore), as the collection and interpretation of this fertile topic is particular to school yards and neighborhood streets. Each of these genres and their subtypes is intended to organize and categorize the folklore artifacts; they provide common vocabulary and consistent labeling for folklorists to communicate with each other.

That said, each artifact is unique; in fact one of the characteristics of all folklore artifacts is their variation within genres and types. This is in direct contrast to manufactured goods, where the goal in production is to create identical products and any variations are considered mistakes. It is however just this required variation that makes identification and classification of the defining features a challenge. And while this classification is essential for the subject area of folkloristics, it remains just labeling, and adds little to an understanding of the traditional development and meaning of the artifacts themselves.

Necessary as they are, genre classifications are misleading in their oversimplification of the subject area. Folklore artifacts are never self-contained, they do not stand in isolation but are particulars in the self-representation of a community. Different genres are frequently combined with each other to mark an event. So a birthday celebration might include a song or formulaic way of greeting the birthday child (verbal), presentation of a cake and wrapped presents (material), as well as customs to honor the individual, such as sitting at the head of the table, and blowing out the candles with a wish. There might also be special games played at birthday parties which are not generally played at other times. Adding to the complexity of the interpretation, the birthday party for a seven-year-old will not be identical to the birthday party for that same child as a six-year-old, even though they follow the same model. For each artifact embodies a single variant of a performance in a given time and space. The task of the folklorist becomes to identify within this surfeit of variables the constants and the expressed meaning that shimmer through all variations: honoring of the individual within the circle of family and friends, gifting to express their value and worth to the group, and of course, the festival food and drink as signifiers of the event.

Verbal tradition
The formal definition of verbal lore is words, both written and oral, that are "spoken, sung, voiced forms of traditional utterance that show repetitive patterns." Crucial here are the repetitive patterns. Verbal lore is not just any conversation, but words and phrases conforming to a traditional configuration recognized by both the speaker and the audience. For narrative types by definition have consistent structure, and follow an existing model in their narrative form. As just one simple example, in English the phrase "An elephant walks into a bar…" instantaneously flags the following text as a joke. It might be one you have already heard, but it might be one that the speaker has just thought up within the current context. Another example is the child's song Old MacDonald Had a Farm, where each performance is distinctive in the animals named, their order and their sounds. Songs such as this are used to express cultural values (farms are important, farmers are old and weather-beaten) and teach children about different domesticated animals.

Verbal folklore was the original folklore, the artifacts defined by William Thoms as older, oral cultural traditions of the rural populace. In his 1846 published call for help in documenting antiquities, Thoms was echoing scholars from across the European continent to collect artifacts of verbal lore. By the beginning of the 20th century these collections had grown to include artifacts from around the world and across several centuries. A system to organize and categorize them became necessary. Antti Aarne published a first classification system for folktales in 1910. This was later expanded into the Aarne–Thompson classification system by Stith Thompson and remains the standard classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified oral artifacts grew, similarities were noted in items that had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups and epochs, giving rise to the Historic–Geographic Method, a methodology that dominated folkloristics in the first half of the 20th century.

When William Thoms first published his appeal to document the verbal lore of the rural populations, it was believed these folk artifacts would die out as the population became literate. Over the past two centuries this belief has proven to be wrong; folklorists continue to collect verbal lore in both written and spoken form from all social groups. Some variants might have been captured in published collections, but much of it is still transmitted orally and indeed continues to be generated in new forms and variants at an alarming rate.

Below is listed a small sampling of types and examples of verbal lore.

 * Aloha
 * Ballads
 * Blessings
 * Bluegrass
 * Chants
 * Charms
 * Cinderella
 * Country music
 * Cowboy poetry
 * Creation stories
 * Curses
 * English similes
 * Epic poetry
 * Fable
 * Fairy tale
 * Folk belief
 * Folk etymologies
 * Folk metaphors
 * Folk poetry
 * Folk music
 * Folksongs
 * Folk speech
 * Folktales of oral tradition
 * Ghostlore
 * Greetings
 * Hog-calling
 * Insults
 * Jokes
 * Keening
 * Latrinalia
 * Legends
 * Limericks
 * Lullabies
 * Myth
 * Oaths
 * Leave-taking formulas
 * Fakelore
 * Place names
 * Prayers at bedtime
 * Proverbs
 * Retorts
 * Riddle
 * Roasts
 * Sagas
 * Sea shanties
 * Street vendors
 * Superstition
 * Tall tale
 * Taunts
 * Toasts
 * Tongue-twisters
 * Urban legends
 * Word games
 * Yodeling

Material culture

The genre of material culture includes all artifacts that can be touched, held, lived in, or eaten. They are tangible objects with a physical or mental presence, either intended for permanent use or to be used at the next meal. Most of these folklore artifacts are single objects that have been created by hand for a specific purpose; however, folk artifacts can also be mass-produced, such as dreidels or Christmas decorations. These items continue to be considered folklore because of their long (pre-industrial) history and their customary use. All of these material objects "existed prior to and continue alongside mechanized industry. … [They are] transmitted across the generations and subject to the same forces of conservative tradition and individual variation" that are found in all folk artifacts. Folklorists are interested in the physical form, the method of manufacture or construction, the pattern of use, as well as the procurement of the raw materials. The meaning to those who both make and use these objects is important. Of primary significance in these studies is the complex balance of continuity over change in both their design and their decoration.

In Europe, prior to the Industrial Revolution, everything was made by hand. While some folklorists of the 19th century wanted to secure the oral traditions of the rural folk before the populace became literate, other folklorists sought to identify hand-crafted objects before their production processes were lost to industrial manufacturing. Just as verbal lore continues to be actively created and transmitted in today's culture, so these handicrafts can still be found all around us, with possibly a shift in purpose and meaning. There are many reasons for continuing to handmake objects for use, for example these skills may be needed to repair manufactured items, or a unique design might be required which is not (or cannot be) found in the stores. Many crafts are considered as simple home maintenance, such as cooking, sewing and carpentry. For many people, handicrafts have also become an enjoyable and satisfying hobby. Handmade objects are often regarded as prestigious, where extra time and thought is spent in their creation and their uniqueness is valued. For the folklorist, these hand-crafted objects embody multifaceted relationships in the lives of the craftspeople and the users, a concept that has been lost with mass-produced items that have no connection to an individual craftsperson.

Many traditional crafts, such as ironworking and glass-making, have been elevated to the fine or applied arts and taught in art schools; or they have been repurposed as folk art, characterized as objects whose decorative form supersedes their utilitarian needs. Folk art is found in hex signs on Pennsylvania Dutch barns, tin man sculptures made by metalworkers, front yard Christmas displays, decorated school lockers, carved gun stocks, and tattoos. "Words such as naive, self-taught, and individualistic are used to describe these objects, and the exceptional rather than the representative creation is featured." This is in contrast to the understanding of folklore artifacts that are nurtured and passed along within a community.

Many objects of material folklore are challenging to classify, difficult to archive, and unwieldy to store. The assigned task of museums is to preserve and make use of these bulky artifacts of material culture. To this end, the concept of the living museum has developed, beginning in Scandinavia at the end of the 19th century. These open-air museums not only display the artifacts, but also teach visitors how the items were used, with actors reenacting the everyday lives of people from all segments of society, relying heavily on the material artifacts of a pre-industrial society. Many locations even duplicate the processing of the objects, thus creating new objects of an earlier historic time period. Living museums are now found throughout the world as part of a thriving heritage industry.

This list represents just a small sampling of objects and skills that are included in studies of material culture.

 * Autograph books
 * Bunad
 * Embroidery
 * Folk art
 * Folk costume
 * Folk medicines
 * Food recipes and presentation
 * Foodways
 * Common handicrafts
 * Handmade toys
 * Haystacks
 * Hex signs
 * Decorative ironworks
 * Pottery
 * Quilting
 * Stone sculpting
 * Tipis
 * Traditional fences
 * Vernacular architecture
 * Weather vanes
 * Woodworking

Customs
Customary culture is remembered enactment, i.e. re-enactment. It is the patterns of expected behavior within a group, the "traditional and expected way of doing things" A custom can be a single gesture, such as thumbs down or a handshake. It can also be a complex interaction of multiple folk customs and artifacts as seen in a child's birthday party, including verbal lore (Happy Birthday song), material lore (presents and a birthday cake), special games (Musical chairs) and individual customs (making a wish as you blow out the candles). Each of these is a folklore artifact in its own right, potentially worthy of investigation and cultural analysis. Together they combine to build the custom of a birthday party celebration, a scripted combination of multiple artifacts which have meaning within their social group.

Folklorists divide customs into several different categories. A custom can be a seasonal celebration, such as Thanksgiving or New Year's. It can be a life cycle celebration for an individual, such as baptism, birthday or wedding. A custom can also mark a community festival or event; examples of this are Carnival in Cologne or Mardi Gras in New Orleans. This category also includes the Smithsonian Folklife Festival celebrated each summer on the Mall in Washington, DC. A fourth category includes customs related to folk beliefs. Walking under a ladder is just one of many symbols considered unlucky. Occupational groups tend to have a rich history of customs related to their life and work, so the traditions of sailors or lumberjacks. The area of ecclesiastical folklore, which includes modes of worship not sanctioned by the established church tends to be so large and complex that it is usually treated as a specialized area of folk customs; it requires considerable expertise in standard church ritual in order to adequately interpret folk customs and beliefs that originated in official church practice.

Customary folklore is always a performance, be it a single gesture or a complex of scripted customs, and participating in the custom, either as performer or audience, signifies acknowledgment of that social group. Some customary behavior is intended to be performed and understood only within the group itself, so the handkerchief code sometimes used in the gay community or the initiation rituals of the Freemasons. Other customs are designed specifically to represent a social group to outsiders, those who do not belong to this group. The St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York and in other communities across the continent is a single example of an ethnic group parading their separateness (differential behavior), and encouraging Americans of all stripes to show alliance to this colorful ethnic group.

These festivals and parades, with a target audience of people who do not belong to the social group, intersect with the interests and mission of public folklorists, who are engaged in the documentation, preservation, and presentation of traditional forms of folklife. With a swell in popular interest in folk traditions, these community celebrations are becoming more numerous throughout the western world. While ostensibly parading the diversity of their community, economic groups have discovered that these folk parades and festivals are good for business. All shades of people are out on the streets, eating, drinking and spending. This attracts support not only from the business community, but also from federal and state organizations for these local street parties. Paradoxically, in parading diversity within the community, these events have come to authenticate true community, where business interests ally with the varied (folk) social groups to promote the interests of the community as a whole.

This is just a small sampling of types and examples of customary lore.

 * Amish
 * Barn raising
 * Birthday
 * Cakewalk
 * Cat's cradle
 * Chaharshanbe Suri
 * Christmas
 * Crossed fingers
 * Folk dance
 * Folk drama
 * Folk medicine
 * Giving the finger
 * Halloween
 * Hoodening
 * Gestures
 * Groundhog Day
 * Louisiana Creole people
 * Mime
 * Native Hawaiians
 * Ouiji board
 * Powwows
 * Practical jokes
 * Saint John's Eve
 * Shakers
 * Symbols
 * Thanksgiving
 * Thumbs down
 * Trick or Treating
 * Yo-yos

Childlore and games

Childlore is a distinct branch of folklore that deals with activities passed on by children to other children, away from the influence or supervision of an adult. Children's folklore contains artifacts from all the standard folklore genres of verbal, material, and customary lore; it is however the child-to-child conduit that distinguishes these artifacts. For childhood is a social group where children teach, learn and share their own traditions, flourishing in a street culture outside the purview of adults. This is also ideal where it needs to be collected; as Iona and Peter Opie demonstrated in their pioneering book Children's Games in Street and Playground. Here the social group of children is studied on its own terms, not as a derivative of adult social groups. It is shown that the culture of children is quite distinctive; it is generally unnoticed by the sophisticated world of adults, and quite as little affected by it.

Of particular interest to folklorists here is the mode of transmission of these artifacts; this lore circulates exclusively within an informal pre-literate children's network or folk group. It does not include artifacts taught to children by adults. However children can take the taught and teach it further to other children, turning it into childlore. Or they can take the artifacts and turn them into something else; so Old McDonald's farm is transformed from animal noises to the scatological version of animal poop. This childlore is characterized by "its lack of dependence on literary and fixed form. Children…operate among themselves in a world of informal and oral communication, unimpeded by the necessity of maintaining and transmitting information by written means. This is as close as folklorists can come to observing the transmission and social function of this folk knowledge before the spread of literacy during the 19th century.

As we have seen with the other genres, the original collections of children's lore and games in the 19th century was driven by a fear that the culture of childhood would die out. Early folklorists, among them Alice Gomme in Britain and William Wells Newell in the United States, felt a need to capture the unstructured and unsupervised street life and activities of children before it was lost. This fear proved to be unfounded. In a comparison of any modern school playground during recess and the painting of "Children's Games" by Pieter Breugel the Elder we can see that the activity level is similar, and many of the games from the 1560 painting are recognizable and comparable to modern variations still played today.

These same artifacts of childlore, in innumerable variations, also continue to serve the same function of learning and practicing skills needed for growth. So bouncing and swinging rhythms and rhymes encourage development of balance and coordination in infants and children. Verbal rhymes like Peter Piper picked... serve to increase both the oral and aural acuity of children. Songs and chants, accessing a different part of the brain, are used to memorize series (Alphabet song). They also provide the necessary beat to complex physical rhythms and movements, be it hand-clapping, jump roping, or ball bouncing. Furthermore, many physical games are used to develop strength, coordination and endurance of the players. For some team games, negotiations about the rules can run on longer than the game itself as social skills are rehearsed. Even as we are just now uncovering the neuroscience that undergirds the developmental function of this childlore, the artifacts themselves have been in play for centuries.

Below is listed just a small sampling of types and examples of childlore and games.

 * Buck buck
 * Counting rhymes
 * Dandling rhymes
 * Finger and toe rhymes
 * Counting-out games
 * Dreidel
 * Eeny, meeny, miny, moe
 * Games
 * Traditional games
 * London Bridge Is Falling Down
 * Lullabies
 * Nursery rhymes
 * Playground songs
 * Ball-bouncing rhymes
 * Rhymes
 * Riddles
 * Ring a Ring o Roses
 * Jump-rope rhymes
 * Stickball
 * Street games

Folk history
A case has been made for considering folk history as a distinct sub-category of folklore, an idea that has received attention from such folklorists as Richard Dorson. This field of study is represented in The Folklore Historian, an annual journal sponsored by the History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society and concerned with the connections of folklore with history, as well as the history of folklore studies.

Folklore performance in context
Lacking context, folklore artifacts would be uninspiring objects without any life of their own. It is only through performance that the artifacts come alive as an active and meaningful component of a social group; the intergroup communication arises in the performance and this is where transmission of these cultural elements takes place. American folklorist Roger D. Abrahams has described it thus: "Folklore is folklore only when performed. As organized entities of performance, items of folklore have a sense of control inherent in them, a power that can be capitalized upon and enhanced through effective performance." Without transmission, these items are not folklore, they are just individual quirky tales and objects.

This understanding in folkloristics only occurred in the second half of the 20th century, when the two terms "folklore performance" and "text and context" dominated discussions among folklorists. These terms are not contradictory or even mutually exclusive. As borrowings from other fields of study, one or the other linguistic formulation is more appropriate to any given discussion. Performance is frequently tied to verbal and customary lore, whereas context is used in discussions of material lore. Both formulations offer different perspectives on the same folkloric understanding, specifically that folklore artifacts need to remain embedded in their cultural environment if we are to gain insight into their meaning for the community.

The concept of cultural (folklore) performance is shared with ethnography and anthropology among other social sciences. The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner identified four universal characteristics of cultural performance: playfulness, framing, the use of symbolic language, and employing the subjunctive mood. In viewing the performance, the audience leaves the daily reality to move into a mode of make-believe, or "what if?" It is self-evident that this fits well with all types of verbal lore, where reality has no place among the symbols, fantasies, and nonsense of traditional tales, proverbs, and jokes. Customs and the lore of children and games also fit easily into the language of a folklore performance.

Material culture requires some moulding to turn it into a performance. Should we consider the performance of the creation of the artifact, as in a quilting party, or the performance of the recipients who use the quilt to cover their marriage bed? Here the language of context works better to describe the quilting of patterns copied from the grandmother, quilting as a social event during the winter months, or the gifting of a quilt to signify the importance of the event. Each of these—the traditional pattern chosen, the social event, and the gifting—occur within the broader context of the community. Even so, when considering context, the structure and characteristics of performance can be recognized, including an audience, a framing event, and the use of decorative figures and symbols, all of which go beyond the utility of the object.

Backstory
Before the Second World War, folk artifacts had been understood and collected as cultural shards of an earlier time. They were considered individual vestigial artifacts, with little or no function in the contemporary culture. Given this understanding, the goal of the folklorist was to capture and document them before they disappeared. They were collected with no supporting data, bound in books, archived and classified more or less successfully. The Historic–Geographic Method worked to isolate and track these collected artifacts, mostly verbal lore, across space and time.

Following the Second World War, folklorists began to articulate a more holistic approach toward their subject matter. In tandem with the growing sophistication in the social sciences, attention was no longer limited to the isolated artifact, but extended to include the artifact embedded in an active cultural environment. One early proponent was Alan Dundes with his essay "Texture, Text and Context", first published 1964. A public presentation in 1967 by Dan Ben-Amos at the American Folklore Society brought the behavioral approach into open debate among folklorists. In 1972 Richard Dorson called out the "young Turks" for their movement toward a behavioral approach to folklore. This approach "shifted the conceptualization of folklore as an extractable item or 'text' to an emphasis on folklore as a kind of human behavior and communication. Conceptualizing folklore as behavior redefined the job of folklorists..."

Folklore became a verb, an action, something that people do, not just something that they have. It is in the performance and the active context that folklore artifacts get transmitted in informal, direct communication, either verbally or in demonstration. Performance includes all the different modes and manners in which this transmission occurs.

Tradition-bearer and audience
Transmission is a communicative process requiring a binary: one individual or group who actively transmits information in some form to another individual or group. Each of these is a defined role in the folklore process. The tradition-bearer is the individual who actively passes along the knowledge of an artifact; this can be either a mother singing a lullaby to her baby, or an Irish dance troupe performing at a local festival. They are named individuals, usually well known in the community as knowledgeable in their traditional lore. They are not the anonymous "folk", the nameless mass without of history or individuality.

The audience of this performance is the other half in the transmission process; they listen, watch, and remember. Few of them will become active tradition-bearers; many more will be passive tradition-bearers who maintain a memory of this specific traditional artifact, in both its presentation and its content.

There is active communication between the audience and the performer. The performer is presenting to the audience; the audience in turn, through its actions and reactions, is actively communicating with the performer. The purpose of this performance is not to create something new but to re-create something that already exists; the performance is words and actions which are known, recognized and valued by both the performer and the audience. For folklore is first and foremost remembered behavior. As members of the same cultural reference group, they identify and value this performance as a piece of shared cultural knowledge.

Framing the performance
To initiate the performance, there must be a frame of some sort to indicate that what is to follow is indeed performance. The frame brackets it as outside of normal discourse. In customary lore such as life cycle celebrations (ex. birthday) or dance performances, the framing occurs as part of the event, frequently marked by location. The audience goes to the event location to participate. Games are defined primarily by rules, it is with the initiation of the rules that the game is framed. The folklorist Barre Toelken describes an evening spent in a Navaho family playing string figure games, with each of the members shifting from performer to audience as they create and display different figures to each other.

In verbal lore, the performer will start and end with recognized linguistic formulas. An easy example is seen in the common introduction to a joke: "Have you heard the one...", "Joke of the day...", or "An elephant walks into a bar". Each of these signals to the listeners that the following is a joke, not to be taken literally. The joke is completed with the punch line of the joke. Another traditional narrative marker in English is the framing of a fairy tale between the phrases "Once upon a time" and "They all lived happily ever after." Many languages have similar phrases which are used to frame a traditional tale. Each of these linguistic formulas removes the bracketed text from ordinary discourse, and marks it as a recognized form of stylized, formulaic communication for both the performer and the audience.

In the subjunctive voice
Framing as a narrative device serves to signal to both the story teller and the audience that the narrative which follows is indeed a fiction (verbal lore), and not to be understood as historical fact or reality. It moves the framed narration into the subjunctive mood, and marks a space in which "fiction, history, story, tradition, art, teaching, all exist within the narrated or performed expressive 'event' outside the normal realms and constraints of reality or time." This shift from the realis to the irrealis mood is understood by all participants within the reference group. It enables these fictional events to contain meaning for the group, and can lead to very real consequences.

Anderson's law of auto-correction
The theory of self-correction in folklore transmission was first articulated by the folklorist Walter Anderson in the 1920s; this posits a feedback mechanism which would keep folklore variants closer to the original form. This theory addresses the question about how, with multiple performers and multiple audiences, the artifact maintains its identity across time and geography. Anderson credited the audience with censoring narrators who deviated too far from the known (traditional) text.

Any performance is a two-way communication process. The performer addresses the audience with words and actions; the audience in turn actively responds to the performer. If this performance deviates too far from audience expectations of the familiar folk artifact, they will respond with negative feedback. Wanting to avoid more negative reaction, the performer will adjust his performance to conform to audience expectations. "Social reward by an audience [is] a major factor in motivating narrators..." It is this dynamic feedback loop between performer and audience which gives stability to the text of the performance.

In reality, this model is not so simplistic; there are multiple redundancies in the active folklore process. The performer has heard the tale multiple times, he has heard it from different story tellers in multiple versions. In turn, he tells the tale multiple times to the same or a different audience, and they expect to hear the version they know. This expanded model of redundancy in a non-linear narrative process makes it difficult to innovate during any single performance; corrective feedback from the audience will be immediate. "At the heart of both autopoetic self-maintenance and the 'virality' of meme transmission... it is enough to assume that some sort of recursive action maintains a degree of integrity [of the artifact] in certain features ... sufficient to allow us to recognize it as an instance of its type."

Context of material lore
For material folk artifacts, it becomes more fruitful to return to the terminology of Alan Dundes: text and context. Here the text designates the physical artifact itself, the single item made by an individual for a specific purpose. The context is then unmasked by observation and questions concerning both its production and its usage. Why was it made, how was it made, who will use it, how will they use it, where did the raw materials come from, who designed it, etc. These questions are limited only by the skill of the interviewer.

In his study of southeastern Kentucky chair makers, Michael Owen Jones describes production of a chair within the context of the life of the craftsman. For Henry Glassie in his study of Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, the investigation concerns the historical pattern he finds repeated in the dwellings of this region: the house is planted in the landscape just as the landscape completes itself with the house. The artisan in his roadside stand or shop in the nearby town wants to make and display products which appeal to customers. There is "a craftsperson's eagerness to produce 'satisfactory items' due to a close personal contact with the customer and expectations to serve the customer again." Here the role of consumer "... is the basic force responsible for the continuity and discontinuity of behavior."

In material culture the context becomes the cultural environment in which the object is made (chair), used (house), and sold (wares). None of these artisans is "anonymous" folk; they are individuals making a living with the tools and skills learned within and valued in the context of their community.

Toelken's conservative-dynamic continuum
No two performances are identical. The performer attempts to keep the performance within expectations, but this happens despite a multitude of changing variables. He has given this performance one time more or less, the audience is different, the social and political environment has changed. In the context of material culture, no two hand-crafted items are identical. Sometimes these deviations in the performance and the production are unintentional, just part of the process. But sometimes these deviations are intentional; the performer or artisan want to play with the boundaries of expectation and add their own creative touch. They perform within the tension of conserving the recognized form and adding innovation.

The folklorist Barre Toelken identifies this tension as "a combination of both changing ('dynamic') and static ('conservative') elements that evolve and change through sharing, communication and performance." Over time, the cultural context shifts and morphs: new leaders, new technologies, new values, new awareness. As the context changes, so must the artifact, for without modifications to map existing artifacts into the evolving cultural landscape, they lose their meaning. Joking as an active form of verbal lore makes this tension visible as joke cycles come and go to reflect new issues of concern. Once an artifact is no longer applicable to the context, transmission becomes a nonstarter; it loses relevancy for a contemporary audience. If it is not transmitted, then it is no longer folklore and becomes instead an historic relic.

In the electronic age
Folklorists have begun to identify how the advent of electronic communications will modify and change the performance and transmission of folklore artifacts. It is clear that the internet is modifying folkloric process, not killing it, as despite the historic association between folklore and anti-modernity, people continue to use traditional expressive forms in new media, including the internet. Jokes and joking are as plentiful as ever both in traditional face-to-face interactions and through electronic transmission. New communication modes are also transforming traditional stories into many different configurations. The fairy tale Snow White is now offered in multiple media forms for both children and adults, including a television show and video game.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Folklore


text:
Fusion cuisine

Fusion cuisine is a cuisine that combines elements of different culinary traditions that originate from different countries, regions, or cultures. Cuisines of this type are not categorized according to any one particular cuisine style and have played a part in many contemporary restaurant cuisines since the 1970s.

The term fusion cuisine, added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002, is defined as "a style of cookery which blends ingredients and methods of preparation from different countries, regions, or ethnic groups; food cooked in this style."

Categories
Fusion food is created by combining various cooking techniques from different cultures to produce a new type of cuisine. Although it is commonly invented by chefs, fusion cuisine can occur naturally. Cuisines which get fused can either come from a particular region (such as East Asian cuisine and European cuisine), sub-region (such as Southwestern American cuisine and New Mexican cuisine) or a country (such as Chinese cuisine, Japanese cuisine, Korean cuisine, French cuisine, Italian cuisine).

Asian fusion restaurants which combine the various cuisines of different Asian countries have become popular in many parts of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Often featured are East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian dishes alongside one another and offering dishes that are inspired combinations of such cuisines. California cuisine is considered a fusion culture, taking inspiration particularly from Italy, France, Mexico], the idea of the European delicatessen, and East Asia, and then creating traditional dishes from these cultures with non-traditional ingredients – such as California pizza. In Australia, due to immigration, fusion cuisine is being reinvented and is becoming increasingly the norm at numerous cafes and restaurants, with Asian-fusion restaurants like Tetsuya's in Sydney ranking highly in The World's 50 Best Restaurants.

In the United Kingdom, fish and chips can be seen as an early fusion dish due to its marrying of ingredients stemming from Jewish, French, and Belgian cuisines.

Filipino cuisine is sometimes characterized as the "original Asian fusion cuisine", combining native culinary traditions and ingredients with the very different cuisines of China, Spain, Malaysia, Thailand and Mongolia, among others, due to its unique colonial history. Food in Malaysia (also Indonesia) is another example of fusion cuisine which blends Malay, Javanese, Chinese and Indian and light influences from Thai, Portuguese, Dutch, and British cuisines. Oceanic cuisine combines the different cuisines of the various island nations.

Types
Another form of fusion food can be created by utilizing ingredients and flavors from one culture to create a unique twist on a dish from the different cultures. For example, a taco pizza is a type of pizza created using taco ingredients such as cheddar and pepper jack cheese, salsa, refried beans, and other common taco ingredients, fusing both Italian and Mexican cuisines.

Similar approaches have been used for fusion sushi, such as rolling maki with different types of rice and ingredients such as curry and basmati rice, cheese and salsa with Spanish rice, or spiced ground lamb and capers rolled with Greek-style rice and grape leaves, which resembles inside-out dolmades. Some fusion cuisines have themselves become accepted as a national cuisine, as with Peruvian Nikkei cuisine, which combines Japanese spices and seasonings and Peruvian ingredients like ají with seafood. A quintessential Peruvian Nikkei dish is "maki acevichado" or "ceviche roll", consisting of ceviche with avocado rolled into maki.

Saudi Arabia has been investing in resources to preserve their culture. In Jeddah, different cultures from Africa and Asia have used the combination of Saudi Arabia's spices to create new fusion foods found throughout the region and the country.

History
Fusion cuisine has existed for millennia as a form of cross-cultural exchange, though the term was only defined in the late 1900s. Mixtures of different cultures' cuisines have been adapted since the 16th century.

Colonialism
A lasting legacy of colonialism is fusion food. Colonial trade resulted in the exchange of ingredients, such as bánh mì originating from French ingredients used in French Indochina, Jamaican patties combining the turnover with spices and peppers from the British Empire's possessions in Asia and Africa, and ramen originating as "shina soba" or "Chinese noodle" from the Empire of Japan's occupation of China's island territories in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Indigenous domestic servants were active participants in creating fusion foods by mixing ingredients and techniques.

Alongside the creation of new dishes, colonialism also introduced class dimensions of food as cultural capital that modified consumption patterns. Indigenous practices of eating guinea pigs in Peru were banned and considered savage until recent movements to reclaim food practices, resulting in the erasure of much traditional knowledge in indigenous communities. These hierarchies are argued to be present in modern fusion food, which has been criticised for being portrayed as European cuisines 'elevating' other cuisines into modernity. Colonial debates also extend into discourse about the authenticity of foods such as the origins of Chicken tikka masala, and orientalist critiques of immigrant food being gentrified as ‘ethnic’ food.

Adaptation to local palates
In a climate of increasing globalization, where cultures and cuisines frequently cross-borders, cooking and food evolves to cater to the palates of the local communities, a phenomenon known as "glocalization", a portmanteau of "localization" and "globalization".” Fusion cuisine is sometimes created by multinational restaurants, especially fast food chains. A primary example of this corporate globalized expansion is in the case of McDonald's regional menus which are adapted to "reflect different tastes and local traditions for every country in which we have restaurants". In addition to catering to the regional food traditions, McDonald's also takes an additional consideration for religious beliefs and laws, as seen in the absence of beef and pork items on Indian menus.

Beyond accounting for the cultural or religious differences in cuisine, some fusion foods have also been created to fit the taste preferences of local communities when ethnic or cultural foods from abroad were introduced. A hallmark example of this adaptation is in the popular sushi roll, the California roll, which was created in America in the latter half of the 20th-century. A popular myth behind its composition containing crab, vegetables, and rice on the exterior cites the American aversion to foreign ingredients such as raw fish and seaweed.

These adjustments to foreign cuisines have both corporate and historical origins. In the example of McDonald's, the creation of regional menus can be seen as an economic choice to cater to the local palates and traditions. Another example of popularized fusion foods is the Korean stew budae-jjigae, which was created by combining American ingredients of Spam, Vienna sausages,and sliced cheese, in a kimchi stew in the wake of the Korean War during which American tastes and influence were prevalent in Korea.

Role of immigration
Immigrants play a significant role in shaping modern fusion cuisine. Food can often be a form of cultural expression that fosters a relationship with one's heritage, and fusion can emerge from creating foods from immigrant's adaptation of their own cultural food to the ingredients available in the host country or region. Immigrants may adapt the use of their cultural ingredients to local culinary traditions. For example, Vietnamese immigrants in the Southern United States used Vietnamese condiments in traditionally Creole cuisine, while adhering to Southern cooking methods. Similarly, the establishment of American Chinese cuisine has origins in Chinese-owned small businesses in American ghettos and Chinatowns, with many of these restaurants responsible for the adaptation of Chinese cuisine to American paletes.

Immigrants may also adapt their cultural flavors to the availability of ingredients in the host country: Indian-Chinese cuisine shaped by Chinese immigrants to British-ruled India often uses Indian spice and flavor profiles such as garam masala and turmeric. As such, immigrant-founded fusion cuisines also play a role in shaping food culture in the host country by introducing new flavors and ingredients.

Indian-Chinese cuisine is an example of how gradual migration and exchange across shared international borders contributes to fusion cuisine. Similar cases are Sino-Korean food emerging from Chinese diasporas in Korea and shared borders between Korea and Northeastern China, and Mexican-American cuisine influenced by Mexican immigration to the Southwest United States that combines Mexican, Indigenous American, and European flavors.

The convergence of two or more immigrant groups in a different host country can also lead to the emergence of fusion cuisines. Chinese and Latin American immigrants to the United States have collaboratively founded fusion restaurants, serving dishes such as Chinese dumplings filled with traditional slow-roasted pork from the Yucatàn Peninsula. In the United States, Asian fusion cuisine can constitute pan-Asian multi-ethnic ingredients such as rice, leading to a newfound form of "American" Asian food unfound in Asia. One popular example of pan-Asian fusion food found in North America is the rice bowl, often with ingredients commonly used together in Asia such as garlic with chili, stir-fried vegetables with tofu. This illustrates the dynamic process between fusion food and its relationship with intercultural solidarity, influenced by both local and other immigrant cultures.

Modern fusion food
Japanese cooking techniques were combined with French techniques in 1970s France to create nouvelle cuisine.

Wolfgang Puck is attributed as one of the pioneers of fusion cuisine, with some dispute. However, his restaurant Chinois on Main was named after the term attributed to Richard Wing, who in the 1960s combined French and Chinese cooking at the former Imperial Dynasty restaurant in Hanford, California.

Chef Norman Van Aken was the first person to use the term "fusion cooking" as he delivered a speech at a symposium in Santa Fe in 1988. Soon journalist Regina Schrambling wrote about Van Aken's work and the term spread around the globe. Norman Van Aken ended his speech by discussing the history of fusion cuisine, such as the use of coffee in Italian cuisine. Van Aken related this to coffee being used in different desserts such as Calabrian ricotta with chocolate mousse.

title: Fusion cuisine