Back to the Future: Questions for Theory in the Twenty-First Century (Francis Lee Utley Lecture, sponsored by the American Folklore Society Fellows, October 2017)
- Back to the Future:Questions for Theory in the Twenty-First Century (Francis Lee Utley Lecture, sponsored by the American Folklore Society Fellows, October 2017)
"The trouble is, you can never know if you're right or wrong, and until you do you must pull your nose and scratch your ear and ask the question some other way, in a predictably futile but inescapable search for certainty."
Agathon strongly disagreed. "False! Sir, what is certainty to me? I'm a Seer. Truths move through my mind like fish. I watch them, follow them into the gloom, turn indifferently to nearer fish, tapping my fingertips, marveling at the grace of their fins, and brooding, alarmed, on the emptiness of their eyes."
—John Gardner, The Wreckage of Agathon
folklorists regularly complain that their work is ignored, misunderstood, or discounted by other academic disciplines, by governmental and non-governmental agencies, corporations, the media, and perhaps even by God Almighty. Certainly when we publish an article on some particular tradition or group, someone in another discipline who is working with similar materials or with the same group is likely to become aware of, read, and perhaps even reference our own work. Nevertheless, the overall assessment has been bleak: folklorists "do not get the respect … [they] deserve" (Pimple 1996:19). "The reception of folklore studies outside the discipline remains poor" (Bendix 2002:113n1). Other disciplines are "gaining ground that we should be occupying," and we lack visibility in national debates on matters of culture and politics (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:282). In the academy, folklorists are "frequently marginalized" and have "only grudging acceptance" (Beck 1997:129, 131). Folklorists have "a public relations problem" (Haut 1991:65) and find themselves in a perennial state of having to explain themselves "in different styles to different audiences … while avoiding oversimplifying or undervaluing the academic rigor of … [their] work" (FOAF 2017:13).1
Such views precipitated Alan Dundes' Invited Presidential Plenary Address to the American Folklore Society in 2004, less than 6 months before his death (see Dundes 2005). Dundes wanted to account for the discipline's marginalized status. His main diagnosis was the field's lack of a current body of native theory.2 Unfortunately, rather than outlining a theory or theories for the discipline, Dundes spent a good portion of [End Page 137] that lecture criticizing Joseph Campbell, whose works, Dundes complained, seemed to fill the shelves marked "Folklore and Mythology" in virtually every bookstore.3 Dundes thought Campbell had captured attention that should properly have gone to academic folklore studies.
Dundes criticized Campbell for his indifference to genre distinctions, his adherence to the notion of archetype, his belief in a collective unconscious, his assumption that certain myths were universal, and ultimately, I suppose, for his enduring popularity. He equally condemned folklorists for not having previously produced an interrogation and definitive refutation of Campbell's work (Dundes 2005:393-400).
Years ago, I asked Henry Glassie why his writing about Irish countrymen seemed excessively Romantic and sentimental. His answer was that all folklorists are Romantics (see also Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:286), and, consequently, he wanted that Romantic perspective to be explicit rather than concealed in his work. I could agree that if one were to operate according to a particular ideology, it was probably best to make that ideology explicit rather than allow it to remain tacit, perhaps even hidden from oneself. I did not agree, however, that all folklorists were Romantics. I was pretty sure that I was not one and that there were other folklorists, both contemporary and bygone, who were not Romantics either. I suppose that, if we must use labels, I would consider myself an Enlightenment rather than a Romantic folklorist. That is to say, I am concerned with understanding and explaining the kinds of expressions and behaviors that had come to fall under the rubric folklore. What were they? How did they come to be? What did they mean? What were their effects? How and why were they maintained? Under what conditions did they disappear? The point was to collect materials, categorize them, analyze them, and generate principles to explain them—principles that extended beyond the individual case. The Enlightenment...
