Studies in Utah Folklore

Studies in Utah Folklore

By GUEST EDITORS DEIRDRE PAULSEN, POLLY STEWART, COLLEEN WHITLEY

The connections between folklore and history in Utah scholar ship are cordial and deep; this will be the sixth time the Utah Historical Quarterly has hosted a special folklore issue. The five previous issues include Summer 1961 on the folklore of Utah’s Dixie, with Juanita Brooks as guest editor; Fall 1976 on Mormon folklore, with William A. Wilson as guest editor; Winter 1984 on Utah ethnic folklore, with Margaret K. Brady as guest editor; Winter 1986 on Utah vernacular folklore, with Peter L. Goss as guest editor; and Fall 1988 on material culture, with Thomas Carter as guest editor.

Beyond hosting special issues on folklore, the Utah Historical Quarterly has published significant studies by folklorists. Austin Fife, a Fellow of the Utah Historical Society, contributed “Folklore and Local History” in the Fall 1963 issue, and a decade later William A. Wilson contributed “Folklore and History: Fact Amid the Legends” for the Winter 1973 issue. Conversely, over the years many Utah historians have shown strong support for folklore, including not only Juanita Brooks, editor of the Quarterly’s first special issue on folklore, but also Everett Cooley, Jay Haymond, Claire Noall, Philip Notarianni, Helen Papanikolas, Charles Peterson, and Melvin Smith. And for a number of years the Utah State Historical Society held its annual meetings jointly with the Folklore Society of Utah.

The five articles in this issue are informed by three major theoretical positions about folklore: first, relations between the writing of folklore and the writing of history; second, ethnographic theory and practice; and third, the classical organization of types of folk expression. The first and third of these are quite venerable, but the second is relatively new.

Folklore has its own disciplinary practice, but because the subject matter of the discipline parallels that of other disciplines, folklore inevitably looks at (or through) history, art, architecture, music, literature, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. Both history and folklore look at the past and try to put it in perspective, yet—not unlike siblings—the two disciplines take different approaches. Historians use documentary sources and living-memory accounts, trying always to read these sources critically in a search for objective truth, rejecting where necessary accounts that do not support that aim. Folklorists are, by and large, less concerned about establishing historical truth and more concerned about artistic expression— concerned, that is, with what their informants find worth remembering and recounting over and over. When folklorists publish their findings, it is not necessarily or primarily to support historical truth claims but to offer analyses of traditional expressions about a historical matter that reflect a variety of individual and group responses to the event. In combination, the fruits of the two disciplines enrich both disciplines. William A. Wilson, in his article, “The Folklore of Dixie–Past and Present,” the lead essay in this special issue, discusses the collaborative initiative of folklorists and historians. There is synergy and methodological overlap between folklorists and historians. While folklorists, like the scholars in their sister discipline, anthropology, are inclined to privilege participant-observation and field collected materials over the study of documents as a source for primary knowledge, they are no more likely to spurn paper documents or historical artifacts than are modern historians to eschew taped interviews as a component of oral-history documentation.

Pace’s ranch, Castle Valley.

SHIPLER COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Recent developments in ethnographic theory point up one area in which folklorists and historians may differ markedly: the ongoing scholarly discussion about objectivity. In the past two decades virtually all ethnographic researchers, including folklorists, have become “reflexive”—inclined toward subjectivity (principled and theorized, but undisguised)—in their response to their material. The movement toward reflexive ethnography, as this approach is called, was prompted by the publication of two groundbreaking works of theory—the first in 1986 a joint effort by James Clifford and George Marcus, who edited Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography and the second a solo work by James Clifford in 1988 The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. No ethnographic writer today remains unaffected by reflexive-ethnography theory. It has become the coin of the realm, and today most folklorists unhesitatingly include themselves in any ethnographic picture they paint, enriching the scene by providing multiple perspectives. Some ethnographic work is represented as an almost entirely personal odyssey of discovery, as may be seen in Mark Thomas’s essay on Salt Lake Valley orchards, but to one degree or another almost all the pieces in the special issue show the influence of reflexive ethnography.

With respect to the organization of folklore according to type, scholars in the discipline have long recognized the convenience of making a broad categorization, in an otherwise hopelessly unruly field, of folk expression according to its form, classically what people say, what they make, and what they do—or, to use noun phrases instead of verbs, oral (or verbal) folklore, material folklore, and customary folklore. Our colleague William A. Wilson, in his lead article here, eloquently expounds on the classical tripartite formulation verbal, material, and customary, in his story of the folklore of Dixie.

Despite certain obvious problems of logical overlap, the analysis of folklore into oral, material and customary is standard, and we have arranged our essays in that spirit. Following a generous overview from Professor Wilson that provides both theory and examples, we offer two pieces exemplifying oral folklore, one by Polly Stewart using oral history to look at the folk music revival in Utah during the 1960s,and the other a personal experience narrative by Mark Thomas, “Grafts from a Lost Orchard”; we then move to material folklore, as represented by a photo essay on Navajo and Ute basketmaking traditions by Carol Edison; and finally to customary folklore, specifically ethnic customs in Carbon County, in an essay by David Stanley.

We honor the past collaborations of folklorists and historians within the Utah State Historical Society and are grateful for the opportunity to continue in that tradition.