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, antiwar, 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, while 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, Ferrell and Goldstein explore how folklorists navigated questions about inequities that existed within the field and the potential adverse effects of those inequities 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 our responsibility, as individual folklorists and as a field, to those we study and the communities in which we live and work.

The Soul of a Folklorist examines 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.

Ann K. Ferrell is Associate Professor of Folk Studies at Western Kentucky University. She is author of Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century.
Diane E. Goldstein is Professor Emerita in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. She is author of Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception and (with Sylvia Ann Grider and Jeannie Banks Thomas) of Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore. She is editor (with Amy Shuman) of The Stigmatized Vernacular: Where Reflexivity Meets Untellability and (with Ben Bridges and Ross Brillhart) of Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID.