Festival Of American Folklife

Since its origins in 1967, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival has gained worldwide recognition as a model for the research and public presentation of living cultural heritage and the advocacy of cultural democracy. Festival curators play a major role in interpreting the Festival's principles and shaping its practices. Curatorial Conversations brings together for the first time in one volume the combined expertise of the Festival's curatorial staff--past and present--in examining the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage's representation practices and their critical implications for issues of intangible cultural heritage policy, competing globalisms, cultural tourism, sustainable development and environment, and cultural pluralism and identity. In the volume, edited by the staff curators Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N'Diaye, contributors examine how Festival principles, philosophical underpinnings, and claims have evolved, and address broader debates on cultural representation from their own experience. This book represents the first concerted project by Smithsonian staff curators to examine systematically the Festival's institutional values as they have evolved over time and to address broader debates on cultural representation based on their own experiences at the Festival.

This first ethnographic study of a folklife festival focuses on festival participants--the dancers, musicians, storytellers, and artisans at a public display of folk culture. These essays investigate the contention by supporters of these events that this form of folkloric representation is as intellectually legitimate as scholarly research.

Katherine S. Kirlin and Thomas M. Kirlin. With more than 275 recipes beginning with Native American cooking and moving from region to region across the country, this cookbook celebrates the diverse flavors that together make American cooking.

The Japanese say that ‘folk song is the heart’s home town’. Traditional folk songs (min’yo) from the countryside are strongly linked to their places of origin and continue to play a role there. Today, however, they are also taught as a quasi-art music, arranged for stage and television, quoted in Westernized popular songs and so forth.

Wide-ranging and provocative, this book will fascinate all those intrigued by how we create and perpetuate our representations of folklife and culture. Ethnomimesis is Robert Cantwell's word for the process by which we take cultural influences, traditions, and practices to ourselves and then manifest them to others. Ethnomimesis is an element of ordinary social communication, but springing out of it, too, is that extraordinary summoning up that produces our literature, our art, and our music. In the broadest sense, ethnomimesis is the representation of culture. Using such diverse cultural artifacts as King Lear and an eighteenth-century English manor garden to deepen our understanding of ethnomimesis, Cantwell then explores at length the representation of culture in our national museum, the Smithsonian, focusing especially on the Festival of American Folklife. Like many other such exhibitions, the Festival enacts presentations of culture across the boundaries of rank and class, race and ethnicity, gender and the life cycle. Like the concept of 'folklife' itself, Cantwell argues, the Festival stands where ethnomimesis finds its creative source, at the cultural frontier between self and other. That boundary, and the energy that accumulates there, runs through the many, varied 'exhibits' of this book.