Ethnological Knowledges and their Political Contexts

The following is a comment on Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik’s essay “Slovenian Folk Culture: Between Academic Knowledge and Public Display,” published in this special issue on Ethnological Knowledges

(Journal of Folklore Research 47/1–2, 2010).

Inquiry into the production of ethnological knowledge raises questions of what we view as valid knowledge, how we formulate this perspective, and what kinds of motivations drive it. In her article “Slovenian Folk Culture: Between Academic Knowledge and Public Display,” Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik presents an overview of Slovenian folklore research, tracing its historical development through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and ending with an epilogue about the post-1991 period of independence. Her historical outline is an expansion of the very limited English-language scholarship on Slovenian folklore research and so represents a welcome contribution. In many respects, Slavec Gradišnik’s disciplinary history reminds the reader of well-known trends in folklore research across Central Europe. On closer examination, her presentation also asks the reader to consider representational paradigms in the context of their development and, by extension, to reflect on the validity of ethnological knowledges created in differing political arenas.

In Slovenia, the field known in North America as folklore, folkloristics, or—as I find useful—folklore studies shares a pattern of historical development with other regions of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. As Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik points out, key elements in this development included the conception of the folk as an ethnically and linguistically defined peasant community; an early philological research focus; and, from the mid-nineteenth century on, implication in nation-building projects. She outlines how, over the course of the nineteenth century, ethnic Slovenians created a diverse body of folklore scholarship as they worked from both academic and nonacademic perspectives, published in several languages, and were active locally as well as in distant imperial centers. By the early twentieth century, like folklore research in the broader region, Slovenian scholarship had evolved along two lines, one focused on material culture studies (etnologija) and a second concentrating on philological endeavors (folkloristika)—each of which would retain a presence well into the twentieth century. Although Slavec Gradišnik does not linger on the fact that a significant majority of folklorists hailed from a linguistically bounded community (that of Slovenian speakers), she draws attention to a dynamic, heteroglossic knowledge production that stemmed from these scholars’ varying professional and geographical positions over time.

Looking beyond the details of her historical outline, a clear point that emerges in Slavec Gradišnik’s discussion is her embracing of analytic categories—folk, folk community, and genre—that differ significantly in definition from those used in North America, as well as her very different conception of disciplinary history. Her statements that “the meaning of folk in the continental European ethnological/folkloristic tradition differs from its use in American folkloristics” and that “the meaning of genre as it is used here also diverges from the meaning of folklore genre used in American folklore studies” reveal this contrast in high relief. As many scholars have already explored the meanings of these constructs, here I wish to focus on the questions raised by multiple understandings and applications of classificatory terms.

An outline of contemporary North American scholarly trends can remind us of the position from which we in North America produce knowledge. North American scholars seldom acknowledge alternative definitions of folk and genre; similarly, research into knowledge production has largely followed set lines. Exemplified by works like David Whisnant’s engaging study of early twentieth-century folklore work in the American South (1983), North American folklore scholarship today most frequently addresses disciplinary histories and knowledge production through the lens of the politics of culture. That is, in examining these topics scholars focus on the spoken and unspoken political motivations, personal allegiances, relationships, and social implications surrounding scholarly moves. Their work thus stems from and contributes to the North American social sciences, where knowledge formats have insisted that scholars turn their gaze inward since Paul Rabinow’s seminal 1977 fieldwork reflections and James Clifford and George Marcus’s 1986 volume on ethnographic writing...