Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century (AFS Invited Presidential Plenary Address, 2004)

Abstract

Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century (AFS Invited Presidential Plenary Address, 2004) Alan Dundes, Professor of Folklore and Anthropology (bio) The state of folkloristics at the beginning of the twenty-first century is depressingly worrisome. Graduate programs in folklore around the world have been disestablished or seriously weakened. The once-celebrated program at the University of Copenhagen no longer exists. Folklore programs in Germany have changed their title in an effort to become ethnology-centered (Korff 1996). Even in Helsinki, the veritable Mecca of folklore research, the name of the graduate program at the University of Helsinki has been changed. According to the website, "The Department of Folklore Studies, along with the departments of Ethnology, Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology, belongs administratively to the Faculty of Arts and the Institute of Cultural Research." The latter title sounds suspiciously like "cultural studies" to me, and cultural studies consists of literary types who would like to be cultural anthropologists. I hate to think of folklorists being grouped with such wannabes! Here in the United States, the situation is even worse. UCLA's doctoral program in folklore and mythology has been subsumed under the rubric of World Arts and Cultures, and the folklore doctorate has been reduced to one of several options in that expansion of what was formerly a department of dance. The doctoral program in folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania has virtually collapsed and may not recover unless there is an infusion of new faculty members. Even Indiana University, the acknowledged bastion and beacon of folklore study in the United States, has seen fit to combine folklore with ethnomusicology into one administrative unit. As a result, there is no longer a purely separate, independent doctoral program in folklore per se anywhere in the United States, a sad situation in my view. Some may feel that these administrative shifts are nothing more than a reflection of the name-changing discussion arising from those among you who have expressed unhappiness with the term "folklore" as the name of our discipline. Regina Bendix was quite right when she made the astute observation that the very coining of the term "folklore" by William Thoms was itself a case of name changing (from "popular antiquities," the Latinate construction, to the Anglo-Saxon "folklore"; 1998:235). However, I believe she was sadly mistaken when she claimed that part of the disrepute of the field was caused by using the same term "folklore" for both the subject matter and the name of the discipline. This is, in my opinion, a red herring, a nonproblem that was perfectly well solved by several nineteenth-century folklorists, including [End Page 385] Reinhold Kôhler (1887), who distinguished between "folklore," the subject matter, and "folkloristics," the study of that subject matter. The term "folkloristics" goes back to the 1880s at the very least. In 1996, Eric Montenyohl informed us, "Of course the term 'folkloristics' is quite modern in comparison to 'folklore.' The distinction between the discipline and the subject material and the appropriate term for each came into discussion in the 1980s. Until that time, folklore referred to both the subject and the discipline which studied it—one more reason for confusion" (1996:234n2). Montenyohl probably is referring to Bruce Jackson's equally uninformed note in JAF in 1985 in which Jackson complains about the term "folkloristics" and proposes that it be banned, as if anyone could possibly legislate language usage. Jackson quotes Roger Abrahams's claim that I invented the term as a joke. I certainly did not. On December 7, 1889, American folklorist Charles G. Leland (1834–1903), in an address greeting the newly formed Hungarian Folklore Society, spoke of "Die Folkloristik" as one of the most profound developments in history (Leland 1890–1892). So folkloristics is the study of folklore just as linguistics is the study of language, and it has been for more than a century, even if parochial American folklorists are not aware of the fact. Yuriy Sokolov's textbook Russian Folklore, first published in 1938, recognizes the distinction, and the valuable first chapter of the book is entitled "The Nature of Folklore and the Problems of Folkloristics." The Sokolov usage was pointed out by...

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