Folklife and Museum Practice: An Intertwined History and Emerging Convergences: (American Folklore Society Presidential Address, October 2011)

folklore and museums have had a long and intertwined history. Among those responsible for the founding of the American Folklore Society (AFS) in 1888 were museum-based anthropologists, curators, and collection managers. Since that time, folklorists have worked in and with museums in a variety of ways—work that has reflected intellectual and political shifts in folklore studies as well as changes in museum practice. As cultural heritage work in the twenty-first century seeks simultaneously to document, interpret, present, preserve, and protect tangible and intangible heritage while at the same time address the needs of civil society, the logical interfaces between folklore and museum work have increased.

As an individual who has spent almost 40 years as a folklorist and museum professional, I have had many opportunities to reflect on that work and how it mirrors, supports, or even contests changes what I have seen in the fields of folklore and museum practice. I hope to elucidate some of my own reflections set in the context of a review of American folklore and museum professional practice since the late nineteenth century. My comments will also reflect the insights of a group of folklorists that I have interviewed over the past two years in preparation for this address; I am deeply indebted to them for the insights they have shared.

Therefore, this presentation will provide a brief history of the intersections of museum and folklore practice, highlight some of the significant global shifts in museum practice, examine some of the challenges and opportunities folklorists have encountered in museum practice, and finally suggest ways in which more interaction between folklorists and museums can advance the respective work of each domain. I want to note that the emphasis in this paper will be on shifts in museum theory and practice and as well as on shifts in folklore practice in more applied contexts; I will not be providing a parallel examination of folklore theory and practice.

Museums and the American Folklore Society: Historical and Philosophical Connections

I would like to begin by reviewing some historical and philosophical connections between museums and the American Folklore Society. The American Folklore Society was founded in 1888, an era in which private individuals were amassing collections of objects, books, specimens, and—for folklorists—information about traditions. Of the folklore collecting of that period, Simon J. Bronner has written, “the collection of traditions was similar to the methods of natural history, with specimens gathered through fieldwork and compared to specimens from other locales” (Bronner 1988:18). Like other learned societies that were established during the 1880s, the American Folklore Society attracted “not only faculty but also writers and museum curators” (Bronner 1988:19). Among those who founded the AFS were Francis James Child, William Wells Newell, Daniel G. Harrison Brinton, Stewart Culin, and Franz Boas—all were collectors, and the latter three held significant museum-based positions. Bronner has also noted that Culin once called “for museums to form collections that would convey the ideas of folklore to the public. As folklore deals with ideas, so it would be the mission of the folklore museums to collect, arrange, and classify the objects associated with them” (Bronner 1988:19).

As the society moved into the twentieth century, the numbers of AFS members whose research focused on the object began to dwindle. Bronner has also observed: “Where many museum professionals with a natural interest in artifact collection joined the American Folklore Society in the early years, more academics with less concern for objects later took up the rolls” (Bronner 1988:40). Folklorist John Michael Vlach speculates the reason for this shift is that “scholars of oral forms, being generally employed in English departments, found tales, lyrics to be compatible with their academic homes. … Material culture scholars, by contrast, were connected to museums where they had little access to students and hence little opportunity to instill an appreciation of artifacts in subsequent generations of potential folklorists” (Vlach 1998:19).

Although the numbers of...