Folklorists’ struggle to define their field in academic terms, apparent in this weeks reading, speaks to the rigidity in some of academia. The methodologies necessary to study not just oral tradition but folklore in traditional written sources as well are inherently interdisciplinary. The debates concerning the name and the defining characteristics of the discipline seem to contradict the very essence of what folklorists do and where they look for folklore. I understand folklorists’ pragmatic need to justifying their field separate from other disciplines. In Latin American history, for example, folklore easily falls under the cultural historian’s scope of study as well as the anthropologist’s. Thus some folklorists consider these debates necessary to ensure their field’s academic survival.
Folklorists overly concerned with naming and distinguishing their field and ridding it of the “anthropological-impact,”[1] are expressing an academic rigidity incompatible with their field of study. Folklorists necessarily need to draw from various fields of cultural study to examine the “folklore” in songs, oral stories, written stories, jokes, works of art, and much more. Many cultural historians, benefitting from an already established discipline, adamantly espouse the need to blur the lines between disciplines in order to explore the history of non-elite individuals or popular culture. Folklorist cannot expect to produce meaningful studies of folk culture without relying on the training and knowledge of scholars in other fields, thus blurring the lines between disciplines. These blurred lines are what caused the insecurities among some folklorists who pushed to distinguish their field. I argue (as some other student have) that these debates should be secondary, at best, to debates over the value of studying folklore in general. While I understand that these articles do not represent what I am sure are numerous debates over the value of folklore studies, in the context of these readings, the specific significance of the field seems a more pertinent topic for debate. How do studies of folk culture advance our understanding of society?
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