Reading Selection: Folklore’s Pathetic Fallacy by Robert Cantwell
If you click here, I linked Cantwell’s article for your reference. The quotes I talk about specifically are both located on page 59.
“…some think of folklore as in some fundamental ways directly or indirectly connected to their lives… Where the connection is absent, folklore is something either archaic, fanciful (and therefore trivial), politically suspect, or contemptible; where it obtains, folklore is immediate, actual, intensely personal, inherently and powerfully oppositional or revolutionary, and passionately defended, protected and loved.”
Cantwell continues on to say that “the office of the public folklorist is, first, to make for others the connection she has already made for herself…”
When I read this article before arriving at Goucher for our MACS residency, I immediately fell in love with its meaningful words and profound sentiments about the importance of preserving and sustaining folklore. Granted, I interpreted “folklore” to be a very loose term, instantly relatable to the work all of us are striving to assign meaning and relevance to as a part of this graduate program.
As Cantwell discusses, what we decide to do with the material, information, and knowledge that we absorb is entirely up to us. Ultimately, our actions are determined by the degree to which we have become invested in our subject matter (he refers to this personal investment as a “connection”). I was immediately struck by this insightful interpretation and I believe its validity within my own work is quite predominant. Fostering this connection with “folklore” (or history, community, language, song, dance, artifacts – whatever it is that surfaces as our, for lack of a better term, subject matter) is something I struggle with daily. A lot of my work in this class is based on my difficulty of communicating to others the importance of folklore’s direct connection to our own lives. This fundamental concept is crucial in our ability to sustain and preserve.
For example, the Archives can have access to every resource imaginable, but if those resources aren’t delivered and communicated to the public, then everything contained within the institution is rendered completely useless. My dilemma of how to attract the attention of the students, encourage community involvement, and highlight our archival holdings on a wider scale (hopefully making them known and available to those outside our local community) without being viewed as overly-pushy, utilizing commercialized advertisement campaigns, or coming across with a pompous “us/them” attitude is also something I continue to grapple with as I go along.
I wrote down three words – “protect, preserve, communicate” – after reading this particular section of Cantwell’s article. I feel as though the Archives places an incredible amount of emphasis on the first two words, but the last word, “communicate,” is a concept that is oddly foreign. I still don’t know the answer of how to effectively “make for others the connection [we] have already made for [ourselves],” but I’m hoping that I’m taking some of the steps to get me closer to finding a solution.
So, I have three questions that I would like to pose to all of you:
1. How do we encourage our peers (and the greater public, in general) to explore a subject matter that they do not feel directly connected to?
2. How do we become a part of “folklore’s” transformation from being viewed as old and insignificant to something which is embraced as “immediate, actual, intensely personal, inherently and powerfully oppositional or revolutionary, and passionately defended, protected and loved?“
3. How do we present our subject matter in a way that people are able to relate to its message/meaning by situating it within their own lives and assigning it a modern relevance?
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