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DOI: 10.7330/9780874218992.c07 7 And the Greatest of These Is Tradition The Folklorist’s Toolbox in the Twenty-First Century Lynne S. McNeill I clearly recall the moment when, in an Advanced Folkloristics graduate seminar, a classmate of mine gave in to her mounting frustration, slammed her book shut, and demanded to know how she wasn’t an anthropologist . As a class, we were reading the works of several anthropologists, learning the techniques of ethnographic writing and research, and seeking to understand and explain the cultures of diverse groups of humans; what about our experience was setting us apart from anthropology students, other than the name of the department in which we studied? “Good question,” I remember thinking. Folkloristics and anthropology are close cousins, often treading the same academic ground despite the fact that folklore studies are just as commonly connected to the humanities as to the social sciences. Many of the qualities that once seemed to distinguish folklore studies from anthropology in the past—a focus on the researcher’s own culture, a focus on smaller groups, a focus on the mundane or everyday aspects of lived experiences—now seem less unique to folklore as anthropologists increasingly turn to the same kinds of scholarship. Since that class, I have witnessed many a graduate student (and several perceptive undergraduates) note the perplexing similarities between the two fields, and I find myself exceedingly grateful to have taken that Advanced Folkloristics class from Diane Goldstein who, as it turned out, was more than ready to clear things up for us. Almost twenty years ago, Goldstein presented a paper she later published that sought to illuminate this very relationship: distinguishing And the Greatest of These Is Tradition 175 folklorists from anthropologists. She wryly notes that “saying that folklorists are smarter and nicer people only goes so far” (Goldstein 1993, 15) and proposes an examination of the unique skills and perspectives that a folklorist brings to the study of culture.1 Through a consideration of the methods and approaches of folkloristics, Goldstein identifies three concepts that together formthe“reallysignificantcomponentsofthedistinctivenessof[afolklorist’s] skills and training”: genre, transmission, and tradition (Goldstein 1993, 19). In her seminar, she described these three concepts as the “tools in the folklorist’s toolbox,” an explanation that has guided me through many trials of clarifying the field’s distinguishing characteristics. And yet, twenty years after the article’s original publication, the question remains. The work of folklorists continues to resemble the work of anthropologists and students of folklore continue to yearn for a clear-cut explanation of their own unique contribution to academia. It is time to reconsider the folklorist’s toolbox. In the following section, I revisit Goldstein’s analogy in an effort to reestablish her definitional efforts and demonstrate their continued applicability for our conceptualization of folkloristics (especially tradition) in the twentyfirst century. The Folklorist’s Tools The first tool in the folklorist’s toolbox is genre, which serves as a “framework for the production of and interpretation of communication” (Goldstein 1993, 19). The concept of precise or culturally objective generic classification has been called into question numerous times in the field of folkloristics (see Ben-Amos 1976; Bennett 1984; Harris 1995), but as far as distinguishing factors go, genre (especially the historical focus on the narrative genres of folktale, legend, myth, and even ballad) ties folkloristics as much to the humanities as it does to the social sciences; it provides folklorists with interdisciplinary methods of textual analysis and literary criticism that clearly separate their work from that of anthropologists. More than that however, even the nonnarrative genres of folklore clearly emphasize one of our main disciplinary boundaries: lore. While folklorists are certainly interested in folk culture in general, the discipline rests on a long history of studying specific enactments of expressive culture, which 1 Goldstein was originally addressing the specific comparison of medical folklorists to medical anthropologists. In the classroom setting, she extended this to folklorists and anthropologists in general. And the Greatest of These Is Tradition 176 always come to us in the frames of various genres, whether ethnically or analytically determined. Folklorists know that the communicative choice of one genre over another provides insights into a teller’s or performer’s motivation, identity, and worldview. The simple fact that folklorists seek to delineate such discrete expressive forms from within the wider cultural milieu—and acknowledge that those forms reveal much about what is being expressed—is another way in which they differ from anthropologists...

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