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  • Questions about Questions:A Response to Robert Baron, Dorothy Noyes, and John D. Dorst
  • Elliott Oring (bio)

i wish to thank the editors of the Journal of American Folklore not only for publishing my 2017 Frances Lee Utley Fellows Lecture, but also for following up on my suggestion that they solicit responses to the lecture from a number of folklorists. I appreciate the willingness of Robert Baron, Dorothy Noyes, and John Dorst to take the time and effort to formulate those responses.

The responses, for the most part, take off in different directions, although there are definite points of overlap. One point is whether the field of folklore is doing as poorly as the quotations I cite suggest. Dorothy Noyes even contends that my characterization of the field is not only wrong, but unscientific (Noyes 2019:176). Of course, it is unscientific; the lecture is not a research report stemming from an empirical investigation of the state of the field. I do not doubt that individual folklorists have had good experiences in exchanges and collaborations with scholars in other disciplines, but the central question is not whether such networking occurs, or even whether it has been fruitful, but what the image of the field of folklore is in the scholarly community more generally. If there is a body of published quotations affirming the elevated stature of our field, they should be produced. But I did not invent the quotations in my lecture. Were I also to cite unpublished anecdotal statements from students, scholars, and practitioners, I am sure I could produce quite a few more negative assessments. But I would merely point to Noyes' own admission that folklorists labor under the "stigma" or "stain" of "the F-word" and "suffer from status anxiety" (2008:38, 39). Whenceforth comes this stain, and what is the source of this anxiety? Is it strictly self-inflicted, or is it an introjection of the images of others?

Robert Baron also feels that the widespread influence of public folklore and performance theory speaks well for the discipline and not to its marginality. Of course, if that influence is as "diffuse, indirect, and underacknowledged" as he maintains (Baron 2019:163), his view approaches those expressed in my quotations about the way the field of folklore is regarded. It is not I who, in citing these folklorists, is creating the image of the discipline's marginality. Even so, the question of theory in folklore does not fundamentally hinge on whether the status of the discipline is directly related to a lack of theorizing. The questions are independent, although they may well be [End Page 185] causally related, as Alan Dundes argued (2005). (Gary Alan Fine also maintained that theory is critical to the status of a discipline [2008:16-7], but as far as I know, no one criticized him for it.) The questions I raise would remain no matter how the field is regarded.

When it comes to the nature of public folklore theory, I am still in the dark since Baron doesn't really tell us what public folklore theory looks like. Yes, there is an "emic making sense of the world" (Baron 2019:164), and any good ethnographer will strive to master as much of that sense as they can. It is conceptual work, and it can be hard work. It comes only with long residence in a local environment, and it is probably never complete. It is an attempt to comprehend how people in some local setting conceptualize the world and operate within it. The process involved in gaining this emic understanding has analogies with that of formulating hypotheses and theories, but what I would call folklore theory would have to transcend the single case.

When public folklorists cooperate with local actors in the mutual construction of theory, they do not necessarily produce better theory. Such activities may produce better local relationships—hardly an unimportant matter—and perhaps better policy, but why better theory? Nor does it help to be told that all practice is informed by theory (Baron 2019:171) if there is no elucidation of what the theory is that guides practice.

The fact that folklore perspectives have influenced UNESCO's...

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