Contextualizing the Archives

Abstract

Notions of context have become profession-defining elements of theory and practice for both folklorists and archivists.For archivists, the idea that the records in their care do not exist in a cultural vacuum but rather emerge from a variety of individual, social, cultural and institutional contexts, has been fundamental to professional practice since the middle of the 19th Century.For folklorists, a theoretical focus on the context of folklore, and folklore as a context-situated event, came to the fore during the 1960s and 1970s, eclipsing earlier text-and item-based approaches.The ideas of context described above emerge from two different intellectual traditions and have been applied to distinct sorts of materials.However, within the conceptual and physical confines of folklore archives over the last 150 years, they have gradually come together.This paper explores a variety of topics related to context and archives, and through it I take my first baby steps in a larger dissertation project aimed at "contextualizing" folklore archives.By "contextualizing" folklore archives, I refer to my efforts to do a number of things.In one sense, I place folklore archives within the context of the broader history of the archival profession.I explore the development of ideas of context in historical records archives and how these ideas gradually became applied to materials in folklore collections.In another sense, I place folklore archives within the context of the broader history of folkloristics.I examine the impact of contextual and performance-based theoretical shifts in the field of folklore and discuss how these theoretical changes affected the relevance of and practices in folklore archives.Finally, I hope to gain a greater understanding of what I can best describe as the archival context itself.I am interested in how the meanings of research materials change when they enter an archival frame-how a body of materials shifts from being a hodgepodge of writings, recordings and images that

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