Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Accepted Paper:

Mutual engagement and theorization of practice in American public folklore  
Robert Baron (Goucher College)

Paper short abstract:

As scholars and practitioners, public folklorists engage with issues and methods of intervention, mediation, safeguarding strategies and cultural brokerage. Their approaches are suggestive for articulating and integrating critical heritage theory with heritage policies and practices.

Paper long abstract:

Public folklorists in the United States have developed methods to enable communities to safeguard and represent their traditions on their own terms. Their dialogical practices foster mutual engagement with communities and facilitate access to resources. Critically reflexive about the impact of their interventions upon ongoing cultural processes, they are aware that they contribute to constructing and reframing heritage while also assisting communities to sustain valued traditions.

Issues of intervention, mediation, objectification and cultural brokerage are central to public folklore discourse. In the U.S., public folklorists may be policy makers, practitioners and scholars. While critical heritage theory tends to dichotomize theory as the domain of scholars, counterposed against policy as the domain of distanced public officials and practice as the realm of producing and programming practitioners, America public folklore suggests models for the integration of theory and practice and closer articulation between the academy and public practice. Unfortunately, critical heritage theory has overlooked the theorization of public folklore practice, and American public folklore has not engaged with global intangible cultural heritage discourse.

I will draw from scholarship generated in both the academy and among practitioners, illustrated through exemplary programs. While recognizing the achievements of the programs I will describe, I will also acknowledge the persistence of power asymmetries and academic privilege. Examples will be drawn from observation, publications, and my own experience as director of a state folk arts program, as a public folklore scholar and as a producer of programming.

Panel P46
Critical heritage studies and the circuits of power: inclusion and exclusion in the making of heritage
  Session 1