Folklore: Illuminating Then and Now (review)

The L. Tom Perry Special Collections area at Brigham Young University is probably every archivist's dream of a facility, underground yet with a bright, airy feeling and a lot of state-of-the-art storage space. Just off the wood-paneled entry area is a meeting room, and on the opposite side, a small gallery for exhibits based on archival holdings. This gallery was home to "Folklore: Illuminating Then and Now," an exhibition using materials from the William A. Wilson Folklore Archives, along with supplementary artifacts. The exhibit was compact, fitting a remarkable number of artifacts and information into the small space.

I attended the exhibition during BYU's "Building Bridges with Folklore Archives: Pedagogy, Fieldwork, Collective Memory" conference, and the curators had added a small exhibit on Wilson's career outside the entrance to the gallery. This included copies of some of his publications, mentions of some of his honors, like the Americo Paredes Prize and the Utah Governor's Award in the Arts, and many unlabeled photos.

At the entrance to the gallery was a case containing a mixture of unidentified Christmas decorations. The text discussed how holiday traditions are one area of study in folklore. The gallery itself was arranged with exhibits (mostly free-standing cases with wall-mounted text panels above them) all around the perimeter of the room and a central island with four faces for additional artifacts and text. Facing the entryway from this island was an unlabeled African birthing chair.

The idea-to-idea flow of the exhibit was not always clear. One could enter and go clockwise or counterclockwise around the room. According to the curators, the beginning was to the left (which was counter-intuitive for me) and the exhibit flowed clockwise, beginning with a panel briefly discussing Herder, the Grimms, early folktale collecting, and the coining of the term "folklore." The next set of panels and cases was called "Exploring Ethnography," and discussed early ethnographers, though it did not define ethnography. Family folklore was the topic of the next section, with a small kitchen-like display that included a refrigerator whose door was filled with magnets, wedding announcements, children's art, and family photos.

One of the nicest features of the exhibition was the display at the back of the gallery, which had as a backdrop a mural-sized photo of two teenagers talking in front of a bank of school lockers. Some real school lockers were placed next to it, and were decorated with photos, notes from friends, and so forth. This section and the one on family folklore were based on student collecting projects that are now housed in the archives. Another student project that focused on the neckties with which men refuse to part was illustrated with a rack of ties. Text panels provided interpretive content from the projects.

The next panel and case dealt with the archives' collections of folklorists' and ethnographers' papers. The text briefly addressed the changing technologies for recording and displayed Wilson's old reel-to-reel tape recorder and portable typewriter. The Louise Pound Collection (1908-1953) included a letter to Pound from Phillips Barry in which he asks whether she has found any versions of "Lord Randall" in Nebraska.

The Kalevala and Finnish folklore were the topics of the next section, reflecting the work of Wilson and showing some of his Finnish publications and awards, including the Aimo Turunen Medal from the Kalevala Society.

The exhibit finished with a panel titled "Archives: Collecting and Preserving." Here, some of the genres of folklore were listed (without definitions) and two student collections were shown. The central island focused on four more student projects. The most striking artifact in the exhibition was here—a long white veil in a tall case. The veil was the subject of a student project on family folklore that documented the use of the same wedding veil by the brides in...