Public Folklore
Robert Baron
Public folklorists collaborate with communities to enable them to sustain their traditions on their own terms. They engage in activities designed to both safeguard traditions locally and present them to new audiences. Like public historians, public folklorists facilitate self-representation by communities of their own history and culture, engage in collaborative documentation projects, and produce interpretive programming. For history museums and other historical organizations, embracing public folklore opens up remarkable opportunities to combine documentation of living traditions with presentations by traditional practitioners and collection of the material culture of groups underrepresented in the historical record.
All folklorists today take an expansive approach to the social base of folklore. It is practiced by groups that share a common identity such as ethnicity, occupation, region, and gender. They acquire folklore informally, typically through oral tradition and by example. Practitioners of folklore create innovations within the conventions of their traditions. Folklorists learn their academic discipline of folklore studies in masters and doctoral programs in a number of North American universities. During the late twentieth century, folklore studies shifted focus from concentration upon recorded texts to a view of folklore as contextually shaped and emergent. Public folklore embodies this more dynamic approach through programming that represents the customary contexts of performance and emphasizes folklore as living tradition.
Dialogism and Shared Authority
Public folklore is dialogical in character. Like public history that champions “shared authority,” public folklore embodies ideas that have been closely associated with the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. He contended that meaning is constructed through a multiplicity of voices. Dialogism is an open, ongoing practice, in sharp contrast to the fixed meanings of monologism.[i] Public folklorists engage in “cultural conversations,” which Nick Spitzer defines as the negotiation of mutual representations between folklorists and the communities represented “in the media, on the festival stage or in the text.”[ii]
In public folklore as in oral history, narratives provide distinctive perspectives about historical experiences and events. They contest, corroborate, or provide alternative evidence about history. The Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston project, for example, countered media representations of survivors of the 2005 hurricanes as victims and criminals. Hurricane survivors relocated to Houston were trained by folklorists to collect each other’s narratives in a field school. The project was presented to the public through an exhibition and website featuring compelling narratives. While folklorists Pat Jasper and Carl Lindahl framed the overall organizational and programmatic structure of the project and provided technical direction for the use of