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Neat divisions into traditional and revival practices of dance frequently obscure often complex relationships to the past and present. A particular case is English morris dancing, a dance type that boasts six hundred years of recorded history, although in some quarters it is believed to date from prehistoric times.1 In serious decline by the end of the nineteenth century, morris dancing underwent documentation and revivification in the early 1900s, within the framework of the national English Folk Revival . This movement included song, music, drama, and other dance forms that were designated by the collectors as authentic folk practices worthy of being recorded for revival.2 A handful of the older teams of morris dancers that had not disbanded by the early 1900s performed throughout the twentieth century, continuing to the present day. Such long-established morris teams, together with those that had died out, and other pre-twentieth-century folk performance arts, became collectively categorized as the Tradition. In order for a dance to be judged traditional, a key criterion was an origin that predated the folk revival movement of the early twentieth century. The oppositional category of the Revival was used to designate those folk activities, including 199 9 Being Traditional Authentic Selves and Others in Researching Late-Twentieth-Century Northwest English Morris Dancing    teams of morris dancers, that largely owed their inception and existence to the program of national recovery. These constructs of the Tradition and the Revival were thus created by the collectors of folk material and employed by those who took up performance of the nationally delineated folk repertoire to distinguish between the existing practitioners and contexts of performance and those inspired by a national, selfconscious movement of revivalism. The concepts of the Tradition and the Revival exist through mutual and exclusive definition, signaling dichotomies of old versus new, authentic versus invented, and genuine versus spurious.3 They also signal different aspects of the past. The Tradition is usually accorded a mythic past, as the origins of most customary practices are deemed to lie beyond living memory and written and iconographic records. The Revival, on the other hand, demonstrates a documented past, since the origins of revival practices, deriving their inspiration from the folk collections of the early twentieth century, are demonstrably retrievable through the typical written and oral memory-type source material of history. The late twentieth century witnessed some revisionism of this once accepted distinction, however. Scholarly investigation of nineteenthcentury records and, where available, earlier source material sometimes revealed a starting point for some customs much later than popularly held. Since the 1980s, the disclosure that a so-called traditional practice is actually a comparatively modern phenomenon has been the fate of a number of British annual customs.4 Similarly, in the critical discourse on dance that examines the uses of tradition in legitimizing performance, it has usually been the researcher’s role to interrogate these tensions between the mythic past and the documented past, exposing dances with assumed credentials of extreme longevity to be more recent creations than hitherto believed.5 Revelations about the presumed antiquity of certain morris dances do not, however, provide the principal focus for the historical and ethnographic exploration in this chapter; for other pasts are at stake in this discourse, not least of which is the past of myself as researcher. I wish, instead, to challenge the neat division into mythic and documented histories through the complicating factor of a personal history created through memory and reflection upon my own documentation of morris dancing. In this respect , aspects of this chapter fall between the categories of ethnographic writing characterized by sociologist Amanda Coffey as “tales of the self ” and as “partial/autobiographical.”6 200    John Lofland and Lyn Lofland, in their guide to qualitative observation and analysis in ethnography, observe that “the norms of scholarship do not require that researchers bare their souls, only their procedures .”7 Revelation and re-evaluation of my past procedures as a researcher, quite obviously, make public the pitfalls of my former training in older models of ethnographic and historical inquiry.8 The return to my past as researcher and to the intertwined pasts of those I researched has, more awkwardly for me, also highlighted my frequently unconscious construction of discrete selves and others as essential to pursuing the investigation. In carrying out the research, I had unwittingly drawn upon different versions of my own self, versions that drew upon personal experiences and senses of identity that I failed to realize profoundly...

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