Editor's Introduction
For a number of years I participated in a cultural theory seminar with colleagues from various departments: we were drawn together by an interest in the same theorists. For me, doing the reading and reflecting on it was the best part of the endeavor, for the talk about the reading almost always revealed our collective inability to leave our own disciplinary perspective behind, even to explain why this or that theorist was interesting to us individually or how we anticipated moving the theory into praxis. This phenomenon is a familiar one, often exacerbated in an international context. In this issue of JFR, the article by Utz Jeggle and the responses by Alan Dundes and David J. Hufford—each coming out of a particular reading of certain Freudian, psychoanalytic texts and particular cultural and academic contexts—illustrate the difficulty of the inter- and transdisciplinary contexts as well as an international divide. In doing so, they point to the importance of opening up a space and a place for this dialogue.
The Journal of Folklore Research has always sought to provide
a space for international communication, but we only now introduce
that adjective into the subtitle of the journal, which reads—an
international journal of folklore and ethnomusicology.Emphasizing our
international hopes and aspirations enables us, at this juncture, also
to point to the other part of that subtitle—ethnomusicology. Long
linked together under folklore at Indiana University, the two are now
explicitly and equally billed in the title of the department out of which
this journal comes, the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology.We see
then the subtitle as a way of expanding and underscoring the materials
we seek to publish and the space we seek to occupy.
—MEB
