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¶ … Jay Mechling has to say about folklore, students, folklorists, mediating structures and megastructures.

Before discussing megastructures and mediating structures, the first thing Jay Mechling makes clear in his essay (p. 340, Folk Groups, Folklore Reader), and he is one-hundred percent accurate in his assessment, is, that there is a built-in prejudice within the public's understanding of "folklore"; indeed, folklore is often seen as a synonym for "superstition" and "false belief," he writes.

He is indirectly alluding to the number 3 definition of "folklore" found in Merriam-Webster Online ("an often unsupported notion, story, or saying that is widely circulated..."). "Rumor" might fit into that number 3 definition, too. But what Mechling is talking about when he teaches and writes about folklore is closer to Merriam-Webster's number 1 definition of "folklore" ("traditional customs, tales, sayings, dances, or art forms preserved among a people...").

And a further problem that goes along with folklorist studies, he continues, is that they tend to "seem unimportant" when stacked side-by-side with opera or novels - plus, professors of folklore face the credibility problems created when some less-than-academically competent folklorists "violate the revered scientific norm of objectivity..."

Meanwhile, he's involved with the kind of university folklore research that is fun inquiry, putting forth topics that seem non-academic yet are culturally dynamic, and researching social groups for their use of slang and their customs and rituals, which are authentic and original to that particular collection of individuals; he's talking about groups like softball teams and gaggles of friends who hang out at parties, bars, or in a musical ensemble.

Mechling makes it clear (341) that the folklorist study of the use of specific "slang" used by a softball team may be "every bit as important" as other "more traditional" university subjects. That is because folklorist research is looking into the topic of what it really means to be a "citizen" in this American pluralist society, not some esoteric and pseudo-intellectual topic that professors typically assign to students.

And the pivotal concept at work in folklorist research of this genre, Mechling continues, is "mediating structures" - which are "those institutions standing between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life." Mechling mentions that mediating structures is not a new concept, that indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville talked about "voluntary organizations" in the 1830s when the French writer and journalist was touring America.

Indeed, in his well-known and highly quotable work, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that "Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations." Whether they gather in associations to repair a village road or to battle drunken behavior, Tocqueville observed, voluntary associations were the solution to social ills in America. Tocqueville observed that private, voluntary associations are the perfect avenue through which people form bonds, helping each other, as members of society, to learn to trust one another: "the morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be in as much danger as its commerce and industry if ever a government wholly usurped their place," he wrote. And his approach is nearly identical to what Mechling is saying, and gives legitimacy to the need to employ folklorism as a way to learn about American society.

Meanwhile, far apart from mediating structures (aka, voluntary organizations), out in the public world, there also exist what Mechling calls "megastructures," which are institutions such as universities; and they are "far beyond the size conducive to face-to-face interaction," Mechling writes (341). A megastructure such as a university promotes and prizes "efficiency, specialization, 'moralized anonymity', procedural justice, orderliness, impersonality," along with other similar values.