One discipline among others

In the United States as in France, schoolteachers and theorists chatter about ‘ethnography’ as though anyone can do it. Maybe anyone can ; in any case those educators feel so immersed in the culture of children that they might as well be field ethnographers. The term ethnography, if not the practice, no longer belongs to a professional cadre. French anthropologists have every reason to be concerned about the leakage of terms and concepts. It is part of the everyday life of the American researchers who call themselves ‘folklorists’. The fact that every American thinks he or she knows what folklore is does not help folkloristics, the scholarly study of folklore. But the leakage does not herald the death of a discipline ; rather it prevents its recognition. So the issues around disciplinary boundaries — faut-il briser les barrières disciplinaires, et comment ? ou les garder, mais en les transformant, en les transgressant ? — are quite real to American folklorists. So is the examen de conscience de la discipline, which never stops among us, and which evokes several parallels between our two disciplines.

Terms are inherently problems ; clarifying them helps mark the disciplinary boundaries. Without making a severe separation between non-Western and Western cultures, American folklorists pay most attention to communication, especially its aesthetic features or elements. If in France le folklore means bits of culture surviving from the past and folklorique means quaint, then la folkloristique (if the word existed) would mean a sort of social or cultural history that is inherently marginal. In the United States, where the words are not burdened by the connotations carried by le folklore in French or by Volkskunde in German, folkloristics is simply the systematic study of the artistic in human communication, whether in developed or in less developed societies.

During the years when ethnology in France was developing out of folklore, American folkloristics lost the distinct national character it had drawn from its early attention to Native Americans and its later work with immigrant and enclaved populations. Its distinct national character today is an eclecticism that dismays French anthropologists, when they find it in their discipline. Well-financed American folklorists have done research in Thailand, Alaska, Japan, Seychelles, and India, as well as in Indiana and Mississippi. Their intellectual space has become as international as their field terrain. They have taken methods from anthropology, literary criticism, sociology, philosophy, and history. As to any deference to structuralism, they looked neither out far nor in deep, but their deference to linguistics bore more fruit : the object of study became not a text but a moment of situated communicative interaction.

The discipline is small enough to feel deeply the deaths of senior colleagues and to worry about the small number of posts that will be available to new Ph. Ds. Many now become ’public’ folklorists, finding new audiences for traditional arts. American folkloristics was never excessively influenced from abroad, in the period when American literary criticism was prospering from the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. As in France, folklore fieldwork has been taken up in other disciplines. American folklorists reserve the right to criticize public presentations like ‘Riverdance’ that are folklorique. Yet a substantial number of them are producers of public presentations.

Always, American folkloristics has been obliged to look at its own threatened death : university training programs are reduced or eliminated (though others also rise up), and members of other disciplines persistently assume that if folklore by definition is a vanishing subject, folkloristics must be too. In fact the opposite is true : promising ideas in theory and method are being born. Some of these might appeal to French anthropologists.

One possibility would be to begin deliberately breaking the boundaries between disciplines. Are the inherited disciplines, which have been created by drawing boundaries around them, really sustainable today ? American anthropology is notorious for its fragmentation. Perhaps a systematic search through other disciplines for methodological and theoretical insights would lead to some profitable raiding. For example, one discipline offering much to the study of culture is cognitive linguistics, which asserts that using metaphor is a cognitive mental process. Since metaphor is fundamental to all cultural activity, this new discipline, supported by experiment, may some day be ready to provide an empirical base for a new anthropology, which would embrace psychology and aesthetics. Another possibility for folklorists and anthropologists would be to adopt and nurture a fully international intellectual space, through more participation in international congresses of course, but more purposefully through the Internet.

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