FOLKLORE and LOCAL HISTORY BY AUSTIN E. FIFE
The topic which your program chairman has given me, "Folklore and Local History," presents a challenge. And I am delighted to have had him propose it since it has stimulated me to define more accurately my role as a regional folklorist in relation to the role that you are playing as local historians in a score or more communities. Each community, I am sure, offers the most dramatic, the most adventuresome, and the most intense resources of local history that one could hope to find anywhere. The first problem is to define the role of the local historian. Never having been such a person, I am in a better position than any of you to dive right in and make definitions which are so clear and so unequivocal that you will know exactly what your role is. "Folklorists" step in where "historians" fear to tread. In defining this important mission of the local historian, I take my departure from the obvious truth that man is a gregarious animal, that he lives by choice in groups, and that the most obvious groups of human beings that live together do so in a definable geographic setting — a locality. This process of group life involves a thousand devices whereby the efforts of each are combined with the efforts of all to form the whole life of a community. Among the most obvious Dr. Fife is chairman of the Department of Languages, Utah State University. A revival of the Utah Folklore Society, of which Dr. Fife is program chairm a n , is in progress and a regional meeting of the American Folklore Society, co-sponsored by the Utah State Historical Society, was held in July at Utah State University. This article appeared in the Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Conference of California Historical Societies, and is reprinted with the editor's permission.
