Disciplinary Identity Crisis (Natasha)

For all that the field of folklore studies does to name and describe human phenomena, the field itself seems to be, paradoxically, in a state of constant debate about its own identity. The essays we read for class this week illustrate the ongoing negotiations that take place within the field to determine what constitutes “folk” and “folklore.” The essays also reveal a certain insecurity that surrounds the discipline. Several of the authors devoted ample time to justifying the field’s very existence and delineating the distinctions between itself and anthropology, literary, and cultural studies. However, I argue that there are more pertinent existential questions the field should be debating.

Bayard clearly states that folklore studies should be a “purely documenting activity” and the implication is that those doing the documenting are not members of the folk group being studied. His attitude highlights two major concerns I had about folklore studies as it was presented in this week’s readings. First of all, while the authors argued their perspectives on the parameters of folk and folklore, not a single one considered who should be studying the folk. There was no mention of a folk group documenting its own oral traditions, foodways, etc. The implication, then, is that those with access to higher education are the ones doing the documenting and studying of the folk, replicating a colonial power structure that has long haunted related disciplines, anthropology being the closest analogy. Even the field of anthropology, however, has recently embraced the autoethnography in which members of a group are recognized as legitimate documenters of their own lifeways.

Kirschenblatt-Gimblet does acknowledge the inherent power structures that exist in folklore: “Folklorists, like other professionals, are an elite; their knowledge is a source of power; and like Orientalism, the study of folklore is ‘a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary [and] scholarship.’” However I feel that these power structures should not just be acknowledged but rather incorporated into the self-critique of the discipline and used as a platform for reforming.

My other major concern is the lack of a social justice component to a discipline that has had a history of studying marginalized peoples[1]. While occupied by the question of what folklore and folklore studies is, folklorists seem far less concerned with justifying why folklore and folklore studies is. In a world filled with social and environmental injustice, poverty, corruption, illness and power structures that make marginal peoples more vulnerable to these maladies, what is the purpose of a field that documents the music, art, and food of these peoples in a way that isolates it from the troubling contexts that threaten the people and their traditions? Is it purely for the edification of the reader as Thomas and Enders state or is there some other value? If another value does exist, do folklorists not have some ethical obligation for the value to in some way benefit the people they study? 
 In sum, I hope folklorists engaged in the debate about who and what they study can soon look beyond these debates and begin addressing some of the other questions of power and ethics that are indeed central to the discipline.

---

[1] Although all the authors acknowledge that every individual can be a member of a folk group, authors Thomas and Enders affirm the discipline’s tendancy to study marginal groups.