Reflections on the Folk

Keeping with our theme, "Uses of the Folk," we asked three scholars from different disciplines to reflect on the uses of folklore as historical source material. We prompted them to explore the topic from any angle they found useful: theoretical intervention, personal anecdote, or methodological concern. It was our hope that such an open-ended invitation might uncover a significant common ground among the different academic approaches to folklore, as well as among the ways in which scholars with different training grapple with the disciplinary and methodological fault lines that have developed over decades of academic attempts to grasp vernacular culture. Folklorist Regina Bendix, musicologist Ronald Radano, and historian Daniel Walkowitz rose to the occasion. Each offers insightful, often pointed, commentary on the state of the field, the politics of scholarship, and the necessity to keep people's lived experience at the center of the story.