Reflections On The Folklife 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.

"This handbook surveys the materials, approaches, contexts, and applications of American folklore and folklife studies to guide students and scholars of American folklore, culture, history, and society in the future. In addition to longstanding areas in the 350-year legacy of the subject's study and applications such as folktales and speech, the handbook includes exciting fields that have emerged in the twenty-first century such as the Internet, bodylore, folklore of organizations and networks, sexual orientation, neurodiverse identities, and disability groups. These studies encompass cultural traditions in the United States ranging from bits of slang in private conversations to massive public demonstrations, ancient beliefs to contemporary viral memes, and a simple handshake greeting to festivals encompassing multiple genres and groups. Folklore and folklife studies include material traditions such as buildings and crafts as well as oral and social genres of dance, ritual, drama, and play. Whereas the use of lore often emphasizes speech, song, and story that all people express, the rhetoric of life draws attention to tradition-centered communities such as the Amish and Hasidim, occupational groups and their workaday worlds, and children and other age groups. Significant to the American context has been the cultural diversity and changing national boundaries of the United States, relative youth of the nation and its legacy of mass immigration, mobility of residents and their relation to an indigenous and racialized population, and a varied landscape and settlement pattern. The handbook is a reference, therefore, to American studies as well as the global study of tradition, folk arts, and cultural practice"--

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.

The National Mall in Washington, D.C., has held an important place in the American psyche since the early nineteenth century. Home to monuments and museums dedicated to the ideals upon which the United States rests, the Mall serves as a gathering place for public protest and celebration. But as the nation ages and the population diversifies, demands for additional structures and uses have sparked debates over the Mall's future and the necessity of preserving its legacy and the vision of its designers. The National Mall addresses these issues with a novel and compelling collection of essays, the work of leading design professionals, historians, and social scientists. Supplemented by eye-catching illustrations and photographs, this cross-disciplinary examination follows the discussion over the Mall's design and use, from its conceptual origins as part of Pierre Charles L'Enfant's vision for the capital to the 1902 McMillan Plan to the present day and beyond. It assesses how architectural, societal, and political changes have altered the park-like space between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial and explores the influence that disparate interest groups and creeping corporatism have already had on—and are likely to exert upon—America's public square. The National Mall presents an overarching account of how a democratic society plans, creates, and expands a national ceremonial space, opening the way for a broadly based inquiry into the Mall as it was, is, and will become. Urban planners, architectural and design historians, and engaged citizens will be challenged and well served by the thoughtful essays collected by Nathan Glazer and Cynthia R. Field.

Folklore Recycled starts from the proposition that folklore—usually thought of in its historical social context as “oral tradition”—is easily appropriated and recycled into other contexts. That is, writers may use folklore in their fiction or poetry, taking plots, as an example, from a folktale. Visual artists may concentrate on depicting folk figures or events, like a ritual or a ceremony. Tourism officials may promote a place through advertising its traditional ways. Folklore may play a role in intellectual conceptualizations, as when nationalists use folklore to promote symbolic unity. Folklore Recycled discusses the larger issue of folklore being recycled into non-folk contexts, and proceeds to look at a number of instances of repurposing. Colson Whitehead's novel John Henry Days is a literary text that recycles folklore but does so in a manner which examines a number of other uses of the American folk figure John Henry. The nineteenth-century members of the Louisiana branch of the American Folklore Society and the author Lyle Saxon in the twentieth century used African American folklore to establish personal connections to the world of the southern plantation and buttress their own social status. The writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about folklore to strengthen his insider credentials wherever he lived. Photographers in Louisiana leaned on folklife to solidify local identity and to promote government programs and industry. Promoters of “unorthodox” theories about history have used folklore as historical document. Americans in Mexico took an interest in folklore for acculturation, for tourism promotion, for interior decoration, and for political ends. All of the examples throughout the book demonstrate the durability and continued relevance of folklore in every context it appears.

An unprecedented number of folklorists are addressing issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality in academic and public spaces in the US, raising the question: How can folklorists contribute to these contemporary political affairs? Since the nature of folkloristics transcends binaries, can it help others develop critical personal narratives? Advancing Folkloristics covers topics such as queer, feminist, and postcolonial scholarship in folkloristics. Contributors investigate how to apply folkloristic approaches in nonfolklore classrooms, how to maintain a folklorist identity without a "folklorist" job title, and how to use folkloristic knowledge to interact with others outside of the discipline. The chapters, which range from theoretical reorientations to personal experiences of folklore work, all demonstrate the kinds of work folklorists are well-suited to and promote the areas in which folkloristics is poised to expand and excel. Advancing Folkloristics presents a clear picture of folklore studies today and articulates how it must adapt in the future.