Another Look at Canadian Folklore; Another Look at These Papers

AFTERWORD Another Look at Canadian Folklore; Another Look at These Papers PAULINE GREENHILL Since at least the mid- I980s, studies of sociocultural configurations by academics in English-speaking North America have been dominated by concerns about relations between self and other, as well as by an interest in the politics of scholarly practice.1 In such analyses, an individual 's identity cultural as well as personal - is pivotal; it becomes a stance from which one's opinions and ideas are formed and expressed. Such is true both of academics and of their subjects of study. Since the personal and cultural identities of folklorists and those peoples with whom they work tend to differ radically, yet in predictable patterns, in such areas as religion, class, ethnicity, race, and gender, many folklorists have begun to characterize the very relationship between themselves and those they study as a dialogue.2 These views are evident both explicitly and implicitly in the papers included in this special issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies on folklore and its study in Canada. Even more recently, theorists of culture and society have begun to question not only their relationships to their "subjects," but also their own place in knowledge production, and by extension, their complicity in its hegemony.3 Such actions have Jed, inevitably, to yet another series of dialogues among academics: on "political correctness," as well as on theory and methodology. Again, these concerns are manifest, or latent, in the analyses here. The organizers of this issue are folklorists and ethnologists by training, as are its contributors. Our primary topics are the communicative and expressive forms deployed by sociocultural groups; thus, issues of difference must be central. Hence, I offer here a counterpoint, rather than a single unified statement, to enter into a series of alternative, but I feel imminent, possibilities for understanding the patterns of the academic tradition of folklore studies. Folklore has certainly been seen as a mirror for cultural configurations and its study as a discovery of their contents. But folklore is also a strategically and contingently negotiated re-creation by active subjects and its study a selective reification of aspects of that invention. Articles by Del Giudice, Guilbert, and Tye examine the multitude of identities whose voices indicate the manipulation of different materials - folk.songs, folktales, and personal narratives; as well they consider the varying stakes individuals may hold in the communication of such Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 29. No. I (Print~mps 1994 Spring) 135 traditional cultural forms. Even more specifically Rosenberg's and Ferguson's papers focus upon the complicity of scholars in the representations - and sometimes selective misrepresentations - of groups of people, too often those groups marginalized by race, class, and/or region. The essays of Bergeron, Dupont, Noel, and Simard, in contrast, are more concerned with empirically constituting and reifying a cultural group - Quebecois - than with criticizing the premises and ideological foundations that might underlie such a process. It will not go unnoticed that the variations in perspective above very closely match the linguistic group of the researcher. The francophone- and anglophonetrained folklorists and ethnologists whose work appears here tend to hold radically different views on folklore and on their own roles as its analysts. To be sure, these theoretically based distinctions cannot be predicted exclusively on the basis of the writer's language or place of training. But the rifts which some perceive between French and English folkloristics are not entirely illusory and have developed, like so many other social divisions, in the context of the relative isolation of the two groups from one another. Mutual misunderstandings have often resulted from lack of linguistic fluency by members of both groups. This special iss~e has provided a rare opportunity for French and English folklorists to work co-operatively and collectively, and is thus, clearly, a progressive development. Moreover, recently, through the agency of fluent bilinguals such as Gary Butler and Laurier Turgeon (editor of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada/Association canadienne d'ethnologie et de folklore (FSAC/ACEF) national journal Canadian Folklore canadien), a process has begun which I sincerely hope will be continued. Further, I hope that in the near future these individuals will no...