The Soul of a Folklorist: Historical Moments, Political Representation, and the Weight of Social Responsibility

In the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, the US saw a growing awareness of representational politics following the civil rights, women's, gay and lesbian, anti-war, and environmental justice movements, and, like most fields, folklore became increasingly cognizant of these cultural and political shifts. The Soul of a Folklorist chronicles the growing pains folklorists felt as the field engaged in these new and different ways of thinking about expressive culture, inequality, and political representation.

Grounded in primary sources including archival documents and interviews with members of the field, authors Ann K. Ferrell and Diane E. Goldstein examine the discussions that arose during this period among folklore scholars. Some folklorists explored progressive social change initiatives as part of their professional work, but others questioned the scholarly appropriateness of applied or political engagement, at times challenging this professional engagement in contemporary political issues. In a series of case studies from the 1970s and '80s, we see how folklorists navigated questions about inequalities that existed within the field, the potential adverse effects on what and whom they studied, the push and pull of scholarly and public folklore work, the location of the line between research and advocacy as well as the wisdom of crossing that line, and the nature of responsibility as individual folklorists and as a field.

The Soul of a Folklorist shows how, as folklorists moved toward a perspective that increasingly explored the responsibility of presentation and representation of gender, race, class, and other areas of inequities, the discipline gradually came to understand both the power of its own subject and structures of subordination within the field.