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  • Aliens:The Perils of Ignoring "Outside" Theory (A Response to Elliott Oring)
  • John D. Dorst (bio)

displaying characteristic erudition and sharp logic, Elliott Oring uses his Francis Lee Utley Lecture to take us on an instructive excursion to our disciplinary past, with the goal of recovering some neglected fundamentals of our field. It behooves us, he argues, to remember such things if we wish to reverse the long-standing dilemma that our work as folklorists has little purchase in the larger world of scholarly conversation. The familiar sentiment that folklore studies is not given the respect it deserves is due at least in part to the absence, famously articulated by Alan Dundes, of an "indigenous grand theory" to call our own (2005:387), a body of guiding concerns and concepts widely applicable to the research domains that folklorists inhabit and that we could rally around in claiming both academic and public relevance. Or so the argument goes.

In search of a remedy for this perceived problem, Oring finds particular guidance in the core preoccupations of the British Victorian folklorists, intellectually rigorous non-academics for the most part, whose names echo only dimly for many of us from distant graduate school seminars. Oring argues that their lively but "gentlemanly" debates over three key questions provide touchstones we should revisit: folklore origins, the nature of tradition, and mechanisms of transmission. In being distinctly folklorists' issues, they offer possible paths toward that elusive goal, a bespoke folklore theory.

Oring ranges widely in his elaboration of these ideas, and his big-picture thinking is certainly welcome in a scholarly landscape so dominated, however inevitably and appropriately, by particularistic investigations of specific groups, genres, performances, and so forth. In the interest of the sort of genuine critique Oring calls for, as opposed to the familiar carping of conference hallway chatter, I want to consider just a couple of the premises underlying his argument. In doing so, I am led to reflect on the question of what theory is good for in the first place, apart from its supposed importance to academic and institutional legitimacy. Inevitably, asking what theory is good for entails considering what theory is. That is a huge question in itself, of course, and I won't presume to try to answer it, but only bring it up glancingly.

My entry point here is where, except for a concluding paragraph, Oring exits. Since the onset of the backlash against the pervasive influence of High Theory (or French Theory, as some would have it; see Cusset [2003] 2008) on the humanities and social [End Page 157] sciences of the 1980s and 1990s, there has emerged a convention of disparagement directed at a perceived epidemic of superficial theory envy. The idea that there is a pervasive, facile chasing after every new, shiny object coming out of the theory mill—that is, coming from "the outside"—has by now achieved the status of an academic trope. Never mind that in many of the scholarly regions where various species of "Big Theory" once roamed the land, we now inhabit something of a post-heory moment, or at least an academic ecology of more modest, locally adapted theory creatures.

Oring allows that "there is nothing inherently wrong" with the tendency of folklorists to seek theory outside our own field. It leads, however, to running after "what is deemed to be in vogue" (Oring 2019:148) and then applying these apparently free-floating notions to "one's own folklore materials." Perhaps, he suggests, this is understandable as a "practical strategy" (Oring 2019:148) for claiming legitimacy in the far-flung locations where folklorists find employment, a kind of going native by dressing in the ceremonial garb of the various scholarly tribes we end up living among.

Following this line of argument, folklore scholarship should be awash in the trendiest ideas drifting around the halls of literature departments, the proliferating precincts of fill-in-the-blank cultural studies programs, the increasingly influential and institutionalized areas of minority and ethnic studies, and the familiar abodes of cultural and social anthropology, to mention just some of the most obvious candidates for the "outsides" where folklore scholars might find professional homes.

The problem...

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