Search

This collection provides a benchmark that helps secure the position of collaboration between Native American and non-Native American scholars in the forefront of study of Native oral traditions. Seven sets of intercultural authors present Native American oral texts with commentary, exploring dimensions of perspective, discovery, and meaning that emerge through collaborative translation and interpretation. The texts studied all come from the American West but include a rich variety of material, since their tribal sources range from the Yupik in the Arctic to the Yaqui in the Sonoran Desert. This presentation of jointly authored work is timely: it addresses increasing interest in, calls for, and movement toward reflexivity in the relationships between scholars and the Native communities they study, and it responds to the renewed commitment in those communities to asserting more control over representations of their traditions. Although Native and academic communities have long tried to work together in the study of culture and literature, the relationship has been awkward and imbalanced toward the academics. In many cases, the contributions of Native assistants, informants, translators, and field workers to the work of professional ethnographers has been inadequately credited, ignored, or only recently uncovered. Native Americans usually have not participated in planning and writing such projects. Native American Oral Traditions provides models for overcoming such obstacles to interpreting and understanding Native oral literature in relation to the communities and cultures from which it comes.

The End of Folklore* The 1998 Archer Taylor Memorial Lecture Archer Taylor was not only an exemplary folklorist, but more importantly he was a generous and supportive teacher who believed one of the most important things we can do is to encourage our students and to urge them to go beyond our own work. Like many people in this audience, I have been the beneficiary of Archer Taylor's encouragements, which most often came in the form of postcards in his crabbed writing, informing me of some possibly useful note he had found in the 1907 Hessische Volksblatt or the Delmenhorster Hus un Heimat newsletter. He was always at work helping other scholars find the details they needed. So of course I am honored to be asked to present this lecture in his memory@and I am not unmindful of the many distinguished colleagues who have preceded me on this platform: along with Taylor, they are the leading folklorists of their day, and I am flattered to be in their company. In the spirit of Archer Taylor's conviction, I would like to dedicate this lecture to my past and present students, for they have given me ample reward for having chosen this field. Beyond that, I want to extend this dedication to all of our students, and in this connection I wish to thank the California Folklore Society for its unfailing generosity and collegiality to students in our field; they have consistently played an intellectually vigorous role in the Society's meetings, and our profession has benefitted immensely from their involvement. I want to discuss "The End of Folklore" because the topic has been a common point of conversation and argument during the past few years in American Folklore Society invited panels, A. E S. presidential addresses, student publications (see the 1997 Folklore Forum for some very thoughtful examples) and even in that sometimes incisive watchdog publication, Lingua Franca (see the "FieldNotes" column in the October, 1997, issue). In spite of the fact that the discussion has become quieter (and indeed may have played itself out), students come fearfully into our offices to inquire about the advisability of boarding a ship whose captain and first officers have been fighting over the lifeboats. What's happening? It does not seem possible to me that professionals and academics who have just spent the last forty or so years proving that folklore is important would be inclined suddenly to forget what it's all about and give it up. It puts me in mind of an anecdote passed on to us by Roger Welsch, who recalls trying to convince an elderly Lakota, Fool Bull, to record his traditional medical knowledge so that it would not be lost. The old man refused, saying "Roger, if a treasure is lost, it isn't gone. It's still there, where it has always been. It just so happens that at the moment no one knows where its place is. The knowledge isn't lost. We are. The truth never sleeps. If everyone were to forget for a moment that aspirin cures a headache... does that mean that aspirin no longer cures headache? No, it simply means that for a moment we don't know that aspirin cures headache. Aspirin would still cure headache if we knew about it, but for a moment we don't know about it-just as it was when we had the willow but didn't know about the willow. [Several Native tribes chew on willow to relieve the pain of toothache or headache; the salicin in the inner bark is metabolized by human saliva into salicylic acid, the basic ingredient of aspirin] The knowledge is still there to be found again [Fool Bull said]. The truth never sleeps." (Welsch 1990:50-51). The drift of my contribution to the current eulogistic symphony of our field will be more readily understood if you put quote marks around the title,-"The End of Folklore"-for I believe the idea-like most millennial panics-contains more anxiety than substance. It reflects a lapse in our critical attention and a soft spot in our intellectual fortitude-as if we had momentarily lost our knowledge about willow trees. …

Folkloristics: An Introduction. By Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Pp. ix + 336. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) The Study of American Folklore: An Introducti By Jan Harold Brunvand. (New York: Norton, 1997. 4th Edition. Originally published 1968. Pp. xxiv + 640. $31.95 cloth) The Dynamics of Folklore. By Barre Toelken. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996. Revised and expanded edition. Originally published 1979. Pp. xiv + 439. $21.95 paper) Amerikanische Folkloristik. Eine Einfuhrung. By Regina Bendix. (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1995. Pp. 267. DM 44 paper) The fortunes of our discipline in the American academy and in the world of publishing seem to be moving in opposite directions. Witness the appearance of one new and two revised introductory folklore textbooks joining other still standard, and still in print, texts compiled by Alan Dundes (1965), Richard Dorson (1972), and Elliott Oring (1986a), just as most graduate degree granting folklore programs come under increasing threat from university administrations. Perhaps these two phenomena are not unrelated. With de-institutionalization, the undergraduate folklore curriculum will increasingly become a part-time occupation of faculty dispersed over a variety of departments. The comprehensive textbook serves this constituency well. Rather than keeping abreast of all the current trends in folklore journals and of the latest monographic studies, the folklore instructor who must first answer to other disciplinary interests can rely on one of these outstanding overviews. Ironically, Richard Dorson answered the question "Is Folklore a Discipline?" (Dorson 1973:199) in part by noting that "surveys and textbooks indicate the coming of age of a subject" and "the subject [of folklore] has sufficiently established itself so that several textbooks... have found ready markets in the United States." Whether they mark the establishment or re-ordering of a discipline, the impact of such textbooks on defining our field should not be underestimated. Thus these new publications merit scrutiny, just as the appearance of earlier readers generated professional discussion (cf. Goldstein, et al, 1966; Ketner 1980). We can only hope, however, that the texts themselves do not too quickly become artifacts for a future archaeology of disciplines. In Folkloristics, Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones, long-time denizens of the Folklore and Mythology Program at UCLA, offer the most ambitious attempt to date at synthesizing the discipline. As such, the volume belies the goal, professed by its title,1 of serving as an introductory text; it is also an attempt to demarcate a field of study, with its own perspectives on expressive culture, as distinct from other forms of inquiry. Notably, this effort coincides historically with the attrition of the UCLA folklore faculty and discussions about re-defining and re-naming the Program founded by Wayland Hand and D. K- Wilgus.' Georges and Jones begin with a brief overview and definition of the materials studied by folklorists, the methods employed in this study, and the significance and situation of folklore in our world. To the authors, The word folklore denotes expressive forms, processes, and behaviors (1) that we customarily learn, teach, and utilize or display during face-to-face interactions, and (2) that we judge to be traditional (a) because they are based on known precedents or models, and (b) because they serve as evidence of continuities and consistencies through time and space in human knowledge, thought, belief and feeling (1, italics in original). Folklore thus defined is pervasive-it crops up in everyday speech, in film, fiction, advertising, and comics-and varied. This means of defining folklore pervades the text, even where the approaches discussed might not rely on the same definition. Study of these materials, Georges and Jones continue, relies on fieldwork, "the act of inquiring into the nature of phenomena by studying them at first hand in the environments in which they naturally exist or occur" (15). …