What We Should Have Learned from Américo Paredes: The Politics of Communicability and the Making of Folkloristics

Critically revising genealogies of folkloristics to reflect how Américo Paredes attempted to reorient the discipline half a century ago entails grasping how he radically redefined folklore and repositioned folklorists within complex generic, social, and political networks. This article uses a new theoretical framework, based on the notion of communicability, that analyzes the vernacular models used by performers, audiences, and folklorists in projecting the production, circulation, and reception of cultural forms. It suggests that Paredes brilliantly grasped that these cultural models are as multiple, contested, materially grounded, and consequential as the folkloric forms whose circulation they chart.