Afterword: The Journal of American Folklore and Americanist versus Canadianist Traditions

It seems remarkable, given their relative paucity in recent issues of JAF, that Canadian materials, and to an extent Canadian or Canadian-based researchers, were pivotal to the American Folklore Society's early years. Cross-border intellectual activity has always been significant both in American folkloristics and Canadian folklore/ethnology. The work of Edward D. Ives in the northeast exemplifies this tendency among American scholars. However, recent Canadian folklore/ethnology scholarship has been much more extensive in its recognition of bordercrossing than its American counterpart.¹

An anonymous reader of this special issue faulted the issue's editors for talking more about "who" than about "what." And, yet, particularly in discussions from marginalized or subaltern perspectives (see Appadurai 1996; Bannerji 1993; Haraway 1988; Spivak 1988), "who" speaks becomes a pivotal issue. Canadians recognize and wrestle with a profound American ignorance about Canada, its people, and its scholarship.² Too many American academics see Canada as nothing more than a region, with the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland (the only Canadian folklore/ethnology institution of which most American folklorists are aware) a kind of branch plant of the head offices at Indiana University and the University of Pennsylvania. ³ We argue instead for a series of perspectives and ideologies about Canada and Canadian folkloristics. Although none may be unique to Canada, we believe the mix is distinctively Canadian.

For example, what is the story that American folkloristics, as represented by the first 100 years of JAF, has told about Canada (as described in the introduction)? The narrative begins with a secure location for Canadians and their traditions, in an internationalist context where Canadian folklorists and Canadian materials were part of a more or less undifferentiated world inventory. It ends with Canadians marginalized in a society that has become professionalized within the American academy with its distinctions between elite and nonelite institutions. Canadian institutions, if they are considered at all, are numbered in the latter.⁴ The contents of the journal do not focus on North American materials. On the rare occasions they do appear, Canadian traditions remain part of a global mass, yet clearly in a context in which American folkloristics defines the field and sets the standards.

Stories American Folkloristics Tells about Itself: The Americanist versus the Canadianist Traditions in Folklore/Ethnology

Many English Canadian scholars of folklore/ethnology (whether Canadian born or not) find the hegemony of American perspectives problematic, along with the ways that American practices seamlessly become the study of folklore in toto.⁵ For example, in "Folklore's Crisis"-note, this article's title and abstract signify the field in general, not American folkloristics specifically-Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett discusses American practices and developments,⁶ but includes the founding of the Laval program in 1944 (1999:291) and the naming of the "folklore" program at Memorial University (1999:292), in her discussions of American public sector folklore and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Note that MUN and Laval's folklore/ethnology departments have nothing to do with the place of the discipline or material in NEA or NEH-different countries, different political systems, different institutions for the support of research and the arts. Indeed, it could be argued that British perspectives have been as formative of Anglo-Canadian folkloristics at MUN as American ones.⁷

The American-ness of folkloristics is so integral for some writers that discussions of the discipline can include comments on "new icons . . . being imported from abroad" (Stern 1991:24, emphasis added). Where the intellectual center is securely American, influences from outside the country become foreign.⁸ Later, the same writer comments on "a world without autocracy-Richard M. Dorson is gone-without definitional boundaries" (1991:25). Once again, the entire globe is made to revolve around America, Americans, and American scholarship. To be fair, many American folklorists seem admirably conscious that the discipline itself extends beyond their national boundaries or that they ought to be precise about their subject-folkloristics versus American folkloristics; indeed, it is at times more difficult to convince the colonized...