I debated whether to read Six Reasons Not to Produce Folklife Festivals by Camp and Lloyd before or after I attended Tucson Meet Yourself. I ultimately decided to postpone reading the article until after I spent adequate time at the festival, allowing myself to absorb TMY on my own terms before having it thoroughly deconstructed (a phenomenon not unusual in my home discipline of anthropology). On Saturday, after I took some photos of Occupy Tucson, I walked around the folklife festival as a casual attendant, and on Sunday, I completed the task I set out for myself for the midterm paper by sitting with the rancher and riata (lariat) maker Dick Schorr near the courthouse for an hour and a half. There, I talked with him about his experience at the festival, and observed how individuals who approached his table talked to him about his craft, and cowboy culture in general. After I was done, I went home and read Camp and Lloyd's article and the rest of Cantwell’s book. Reading Camp and Lloyd’s article so shortly after having been to a folk life festival myself led me to problematize the critique the authors posed. I may have been apt to agree with many of their points if I had only un-critically spent time at the festival on Saturday. Yet the significant time I spent in one location, with one folk-life source, on Sunday resulted in my realization of the somewhat insubstantial claims made by Camp and Lloyd in their article. I will just mention a few of these realizations briefly, because I want to engage with them more deeply in my midterm.
The two concepts I think Camp and Lloyd fail to mention, or at least critically explore, are the notions of space and objects. First, throughout the article, Camp and Lloyd discursively create a mental map of a typical folklife festival, one that includes stages, booths, and other fragmented spaces. The map they create is full of rigidly defined spaces that serve to display folk groups as, according to Camp and Lloyd, exotic, not fully actualized, or not represented authentically. Their point regarding the out-of-place-ness of the folk activities performed at a given folklife festival is an important one, especially in discussions of the every-day reproduction of folk culture. However, with folklife festivals existing as such prominent conduits of representation for folk groups in the United States, wouldn’t a folklife festival become just another aspect of the every-day? Camp and Lloyd's attempt at separating a “natural” folk space from a “constructed” festival space seems too essentialist. Their argument does not take into account the ways space, and the practices of folk groups within a space, is a non-rigid category that can be flexed to fit a group’s needs.
Secondly, Camp and Lloyd make no real mention of the objects involved at a folklife festival in their article. As I sat down to observe the riata maker on Sunday, I expected some of the qualities that Camp and Lloyd lamented were inherent in a folklife festival to emerge as myriads of individuals passed by the rancher's table. However, what I noticed throughout the course of my hour and a half of observation were the social qualities of the objects at the riata maker’s table, qualities that embedded these objects with the power to shape social interactions. This concept is one that I will write on more critically in my midterm, for it was one of the observations I found most interesting during my time at the festival. But in regard to Camp and Lloyd’s article, I saw no mention of the power of things at a festival, only the people who operate those things. What of the actual food and drink, the outfits worn by traditional dancers, the riatas lying on the rancher’s table? These are all things that allow folk groups to have a tangible connection to the person standing on the other side of the booth. Objects facilitate conversation in a more meaningful way than if they were not present, and are thus mitigators of the potential exotification or reification of folk groups warned of in the article. By critically examining the spaces and objects at folklife festivals, we can avoid the overly pessimistic conclusions that Camp and Lloyd draw.
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