‘Folkloristics’

While folklore is a relatively new academic field, it has interested people for millennia

Photo courtesy of IU Archives
Stith Thompson anthologized Native American tales from ethnographic literature; his most notable work was published in 1929. He was honored for this work by Michigan tribesmen in the mid-1950s.

That spring, he was one of three IU professors to be awarded the newly established rank of Distinguished Professor, and at the same time, he saw his efforts to birth a folklore program at IU rewarded when one of his students, a Maine native named Warren Roberts, earned the first doctorate in folklore ever awarded at IU or in the United States.

In the second year of his graduate study, Roberts was assigned to teach the undergraduate courses in folklore. After earning his doctorate, he was invited to become a professor at IU, where he remained for a career spanning 45 years. Folklore did not get its own department at IU until 1963.

In recognition of the 50th anniversary of Roberts’ doctorate, the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology next weekend (June 6-8) will commemorate a half century of scholarly achievement by hosting a conference in Bloomington, “Words and Things and Music: Modes of Cultural Production.”

“The conference is not a commemoration in itself,” said John McDowell, chairman and professor of folklore at IU. “What we want to do is showcase the range and quality of research that is happening in this field, which in some sense has its origin with the 1953 dissertation.

“Warren was one of several people who, when we look back to them, are kind of our ‘demi-gods,’ our mythical ancestors. They were quite an impressive batch of people,” McDowell added. “So many of the early graduates of this program took the folklore concept and established it elsewhere, and that continues to happen today.”

One of those graduates, Wayland Hand, went on to found the Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore and Mythology at the University of California at Los Angeles, which established a library in his name. Another alumnus, Alan Dundes, became the first American to win the Pitre Prize, the top international prize in folklore and ethnomusicology, while at the University of California at Berkeley. One of Roberts’ former students, John Vlach, is now the director of the folklife program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Today, the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology is home to internationally recognized scholarship on the music and culture of African-America, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently awarded it a grant to create an online digital archive of video world music recordings and a searchable database for research and teaching.

McDowell observed that it’s ironic that folklore as an academic discipline is relatively new.

“What we call folklore has been of interest to people for centuries and indeed millennia,” he said. “It often got subsumed under other labels. If you think about it, the curriculum that we have today in the American university is fairly recent. It wasn’t too long ago that people were studying subjects such as rhetoric and metaphysics.

“It took a while for folkloristics—we sometimes call it folkloristics to distinguish it as a field of study, like linguistics—to kind of separate out into a unique field of study, to locate art in a social context, to expand it out beyond the boundaries of the museum and the concert hall, to recognize the creativity that is in every person.”

The conference will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, June 6, with a presentation, “Public Folklore, Public History and the Politics of Representation” and will continue the next day, ending with a keynote lecture by Bruno Nettl, an IU classmate of Roberts and now a professor at the University of Illinois. The public is invited to events taking place at Reed Center, which is located at 125 S. Jordan Ave. in Bloomington.

Each night, the schedule will conclude with informal musical sessions featuring whomever wishes to participate, a tradition going back to Thompson. McDowell notes that folklorists are peculiar in that they actually do the stuff that they study.

“Stith Thompson liked to play the guitar. Whenever they had these folklore institutes, apparently in the evenings there would be what came to be known as a hootenanny. Time would be given over to singing songs,” he said. “We want to continue that tradition and keep it alive, and it seems most appropriate that it would be part of this conference.”