States of the Folklore Profession in China and the United States: A Trialogue

china and the united states possess two of the most vibrant folklore professions in the world, at a time when the field of folklore has substantially declined in many countries. The series of exchanges between folklorists in China and the United States initiated in 2008 has revealed great mutual interest among participants in how folklore is studied, conceptualized, and publicly practiced in each of our countries. As we participated in these exchanges, we realized that there is much that we do not know about the fundamental characteristics of the folklore discipline in each country and its relationship to the public sector. This trialogue among Chinese scholars Wang Dun and Kang Baocheng and American folklorist Robert Baron explores the states of the folklore profession in China and the United States through discussions building upon a detailed description of Chinese folklore studies today. Through this trialogue, we hope that both American and Chinese scholars will deepen their understanding of folklore’s disciplinarity, approach to graduate training, theoretical concerns, cultural policies, and public practice in each of our countries, which will contribute to collaborations already underway.

This trialogue compares and contrasts a number of dimensions of folklore scholarship and academic training. We look at ethnographic, textual/literary, and historical approaches to scholarship and academic training, curricula and pedagogy for both graduate and undergraduate folklore students, and the training of students for public folklore practice and intangible cultural heritage management. When we turned to the public sector, we considered how folklore is safeguarded through the intervention of folklorists, the roles and relationships of various levels of government and the nonprofit (nongovernmental organizations; NGO) sectors, the development and implementation of policy, methods for engaging communities, and modes of presentation and preservation. Our trialogue also discusses mutual engagement with communities in the production of scholarship and collaborative programming, including research and safeguarding by folklorists studying their own minority, ethnic, or regional culture, and relationships with local “community scholars” in each of our countries.

The preservation and utilization of traditional culture should always be situated within the context of the contemporary. In this regard, contemporary China, which has undergone remarkably rapid and accelerating modern cultural transformations, needs two sets of mirrors to examine its transformative trajectory. One is the mirror of “historical reflection,” and the other is what we can call the mirror of reflecting the “other,” that is, to better know oneself from seeing the image of the cultural other. The experiences of American folklorists can provide their Chinese colleagues with the mirror of an American “other,” The authors of this text wish to offer heuristic perspectives of Chinese folkloric experiences to American folklorists, and vice versa, engaging a productive trialogue of mutual illuminations.

This running discussion among Wang, Kang, and Baron, conducted electronically, spanned the course of a year. Kang, a pre-eminent folklorist, is a professor of Chinese language and literature, Sun Yat-sen University, with extensive expertise about Chinese folklore and public practice. Baron is the Folk Arts Program Director of the New York State Council on the Arts and teaches in the Master’s Program in Cultural Sustainability at Goucher College; he is both an administrator and a scholar of public folklore. Wang, who received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, is an associate professor of Chinese literature on the faculty of Renmin University of China.

The trialogue begins with a conversation between Kang Baocheng and Robert Baron, translated by Wang Dun, and it is followed by a conversation between Wang Dun and Baron:

baron:

Like other American folklorists who became acquainted with Chinese folklore studies during visits to China in recent years, I returned to the United States impressed and envious of the robust situation of the discipline. While in a number of other countries of the world, folklore studies has lost ground or even disappeared as an autonomous academic discipline, in China, there are a substantial number of thriving graduate doctoral and master’s programs as well as...