Editor's Introduction

If scholarship may be viewed as an ongoing conversation between experts, then the role of an academic journal is to facilitate that conversation. As an international journal, the mission of the Journal of Folklore Research is to bring more people into the folkloristic conversation. In these pages you will hear from some of those outside speakers, firstly, scholars in disciplines other than folklore or ethnomusicology who have things to say about our field that we feel you ought to hear, and, secondly, folklorists and ethnomusicologists from outside the United States, where the boundaries of the discipline are drawn differently.

Our mission is not only to publish the best research and writing by American folklorists and ethnomusicologists, but also to expand American academic horizons to include the best research and writing about folklore from other parts of the world. This goal amounts to a translation project. Although the foreign contributions we receive come to us in English, their language, theoretical assumptions, discourse style, and even method of argument often depart from the academic conventions we have become accustomed to in the United States. In preparing these contributions for publication, our goal is to preserve the style and logic of the originals as far as possible, while avoiding serious error and also editing the language so that it is readily comprehensible. We do not try to force foreign contributions into an American academic style: to do so would defeat the purpose of translation; instead, we seek to preserve the flavor of the original. The results of this process that appear in our pages may demand more effort on the part of the reader, but we hope that the extra effort will be worth while in terms of expanding our notions of what constitutes folklore and folklore study.

Dialogues

It is our intention, and fervent hope, that the work published in our pages stimulates thought, criticism, and debate among our readers. On occasion, some readers are prompted to send us their thoughts and criticisms in written form, and, also on occasion, we will publish some of those written responses while also giving the original authors the opportunity to make their rejoinders. We conceive of these published responses and rejoinders as belonging to a different genus than our peer-reviewed articles and encounters with folklore. For this category of contributions we will eschew substantive editorial interventions, leaving each contribution to stand or fall on its own merits in the spirit of free debate.

Thus, we introduce a new occasional department of the journal, Dialogues, opening with Guntis Šmidchens' response to Sergei Kruks' article (JFR 41/1) about the Latvian epic hero Lāčplēsis, and concluding with Kruks' rejoinder. We hope that this lively exchange will stimulate further enjoyment and reflection on the interpretation of folklore.