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  • AFS Now and Tomorrow:The View from the Stepladder (AFS Presidential Address, 28 October 2000)
  • Joan N. Radner (bio)
Abstract

Drawing its themes from a traditional North Carolina Jack tale, this address posits that memory, taste, and truth telling designate the challenges that lie before the American Folklore Society at this point in its history. We must remember our disciplinary history, maintain a membership with divergent interests and careers, and acknowledge two difficult truths: first, that for survival, the profession of folklore needs more diverse practitioners and, second, that the profession of folklore, under the leadership of the American Folklore Society, is ready to achieve increased public, academic, and scholarly influence in the United States.

Back in 1996, when I spoke at the Candidates' Forum, I was trying to imagine what the job of American Folklore Society President could possibly be like. I saw in AFS a diffuse collection of members, none of whom, even the Board members, felt central to the organization-and no one I talked to could even identify who was central (Shalom Staub, perhaps).1 I remember that I yielded to rhetorical temptation and called AFS "eccentric by nature, marginal by choice, and postmodern without having been modern." As I tried to imagine the challenge of being President of an organization eccentric in its bones, I imagined that the AFS President has a kind of borrowed centrality; for a few years she or he climbs a shaky stepladder that affords a wider vision.2

So today I am making a report from the stepladder. What I have seen from that perch is akin to the views of other recent presidents, but I think it bears personal restating. So I am going to report to you today, my friends and colleagues, informally and from my heart.

Members of the American Folklore Society have extraordinarily divergent views of the organization. This was dramatized early in the weekend meeting of the Long-Range Planning Committee in January of 1998. We were gathering ideas, identifying our own perspectives, building a foundation for working together. At one point early in the meeting, each of us took a piece of paper and drew on it a personal representation of the American Folklore Society. (What would you draw? What is your personal mandala of the Society?) No two pictures were alike. Some were structural: one, [End Page 263] as I recollect, was an elaborate organizational diagram showing the interdependence of the elements of the Society; another, a map of this country crisscrossed with lines representing the complex webs of our members' networks; another, a rainbow spectrum of circles, some overlapping, some detached, in an energetic centrifugal universe.

Other drawings emphasized not the constituencies of AFS but the Society's relationship with the field and the world. In one, AFS was a house with people and ideas bursting out of its windows-a container that needed to expand. In another, it was an emblem reminiscent of a medieval schema of the Trinity, spokes in a rotating wheel symbolized the unity in diversity of Academic, Public, and Applied folklore within AFS-but the circumference of the spinning circle was a barrier, outside of which floated green clouds representing elements AFS was not including, such as grassroots movements, community development projects, diverse constituents. Another drawing depicted an even stronger barrier: AFS was a cluster of people behind a high fence, outside of which was the world (countryside, city buildings, other nations, etc.); occasionally, objects were lobbed in one direction or another over the wall, but no real communication took place. There was one dismaying picture of a barrier within AFS: a view of a long, long table with heads sticking up behind it-the dais of the annual business meeting, representing a perception of the Executive Board not as active people engaged with the members who have elected them, but rather as separated individuals playing formal, meaningless roles.

When we finished drawing and compared our pictures, we were startled-not so much at the differences between our images, as at the fact that we could understand and see the truth in all of them. We had been portraying Proteus. You remember that legend: Proteus the Greco...

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