Tucked away behind two imposing wooden statues in the Hearst Museum of Anthropology is the UC Berkeley Folklore Archive. The archive began as a collection of student assignments for an anthropology course, which still opens each spring with the seemingly simple question: what is folklore? Most people might answer something along the lines of “fairy tales,” but Professor Tim Tangherlini, director of the archive, defines folklore more broadly as “informal culture circulating on and across social networks.” He gives the example of a birthday party: how do guests know to give gifts in exchange for slices of cake? There is no need to read a book on the subject; the tradition has pervaded every aspect of US society. As such, the archive contains everything from legends to jump rope rhymes, songs to rude jokes. By assigning students to collect as many as 50 pieces of folklore, the original creator, Dr. Alan Dundes, was able to amass a sizeable collection that now contains over a million documents. Most of the collection is American, but students were able to find bits of folklore from around the globe, including Japan, Italy, the Philippines, and many other countries.

This is a magazine devoted to scientific research, so you may wonder how any of this archive, however interesting, relates to the topic at hand. But folklore and science are two different ways of understanding the same world. For a long time, scientists dismissed folklore as superstition, while anthropologists deemed it too mundane to be closely examined. However, researchers now realize that folklore is a very effective means of communication. This is true not only within a population at any given time, but also over multiple generations. Stories stick, and songs help us remember what would otherwise be too complicated to stay long in our minds. There are countless examples.

A former Berkeley archivist is writing his master’s thesis on the folklore of snow after working as an interpretive park guide and ranger at Glacier National Park for a few summers. After reading The Secret Lives of Glaciers, Danny Benett was inspired by the author’s way of combining climatology and human relationships with the ice. He now collects folklore such as ski stories, which “in a structured way, convert experience into memory for the clear purpose of empirically getting better at exploring a dangerous space, like the snowy mountains where there’s avalanches and you can die.” Overall, Benett has “tried to turn people’s stories of playing in the snow into a way of understanding how people relate to snow, this particular natural resource that exists in the present and might in the future, too.” He is not alone, either. Another UC Berkeley graduate student in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management is currently working on a similar project on the folklore of aquaculture, studying the stories surrounding fishing.

There are other connections between science and folklore. Professor Tangherlini points out that scientists themselves are a folk. “One lab does it one way, another lab does it another way. Why? That’s just the way we’ve always done it.” Another example is in computer programming, “Look at the way people comment their code—’I don’t know what this does but don’t delete it, because otherwise this program won’t work.’” Sure enough, that seemingly useless section of code is essential, but the program is only maintained through the informal comments of other coders—in other words, through the folklore of computer scientists.

As science continues to be politicized and misrepresented in the media, it is more important than ever that people realize science is, at its core, a way to look at and understand the world around us. Scientific research can come from anyone, and folklore has the power to spread the resulting knowledge in an incredibly effective way. It is easy to divide fields of research into social sciences versus physical and life sciences, humanities versus STEM, but we must recognize that there will always be connections. Tangherlini argues, “If you want to understand what people think, what they believe, and what’s holding community together, then you’d be remiss if you weren’t considering … the folkloristic dimensions.” Oke Iroegbu, who earlier this year received his master’s degree in folklore from UC Berkeley, puts it another way: “[Folklore] offers traditional bases for critical inquiry into the origins of life and living, what we christen today as science … [it] is used to teach.” Trying to separate science from the context of the world that it attempts to explain hurts both. After all, what is the point of research if new findings never reach those they are meant to help?