Culture Work

Culture Work: Folklore for the Public Good is devoted to reflexive accounts of public folklore-related practice by folklorists and scholars from allied disciplines. Most of the 34 contributors have associations with the University of Wisconsin and/or research the Upper Midwest. The essays discuss actual and prospective public-sector activities, research about folklore in the public sphere, and projects centered in the academy but aspiring for wider audiences. The six sections of the volume encompass a broad spectrum of contemporary public folklore topics. Themes within these sections and interwoven throughout the book include collaboration and cultural equity, archives and museums, amplification of local voices, “dialogue with the past . . . as a creative construction of the present” (p. 255) and folklore as an “agent of change for the future” (p. 313).An animating concept is the Wisconsin Idea—a long-standing mission of the University of Wisconsin to disseminate knowledge and apply academic expertise in the state's service. What Janet Gilmore calls a “public folklore twist” entails “collective knowledge-building” and a “sense of exchange” (p. 332). This approach is consonant with contemporary efforts in folklore and related disciplines to share and yield epistemological authority.Many contributors discuss shared authority, positionality, community engagement, and socially ameliorative objectives. Reflecting on decades of research and her family's association with prisons, Claire Schmidt calls for collaborative research with prison workers, alongside documenting the surrounding community and the folklore of correctional workers. She contends that dialogue through presenting prison workers’ folklore may identify problems and catalyze positive change (p. 65). Emphasizing reciprocal learning with communities, linguist Joseph Salmons directs the Wisconsin Language Project, which studies dialect performance through jokes to understand how ethnicity is performed and how heritage languages shape Wisconsin English. Linguistic stereotyping and discrimination are countered through activities that include students connecting with their communities on issues of immigration, refugees, and Indigenous languages. Mary Twining Baird discusses her pioneering 1960s work conjoining activism with research in the South Carolina Sea Islands. She used folkloristic knowledge to help War on Poverty workers understand local culture as a “cultural translator,” and she helped community members navigate social services and participate in civil rights and voting rights efforts (p. 53). All were key to understanding local perspectives about Sea Islands culture.Jamie Yuenger runs an innovative business producing documentaries for families who participate in production planning, writing, and editing. She limns ethical, entrepreneurial, and methodological guideposts for “business folklore.” While seeing “private-sector folklore” as a “third career option” (p. 331), she doesn't mention other kinds of private-sector engagement, including management consulting and cultural tours, as well as 1980s organizational folklore, which generated controversy about the ethics of business involvement.Hilary Morgan Leathem's chapter—the only one extensively discussing “power disparities”—highlights the graphic representations of local historic and archaeological sites by residents in Oaxaca, which “co-constituted knowledge production” (p. 345). Here, as elsewhere in Culture Works, there could be greater recognition of fundamental power asymmetries based upon a folklorist's authority for originating, framing, and publishing the results of projects. Candor about such power imbalances may help folklorists guard against virtue signaling, cultural-savior syndrome, and projection of the folklorist as hero.Community collaborators share authority as coauthors of the chapter on the Vermont Folklife Center's Franco-American song project initiated by Andy Kolovos and Lisa Ornstein. Their essay and the chapter by Thomas DuBois and B. Marcus Cederström on a transnational Finnish migration songs project describe fresh approaches for utilizing archives, collections, and past publications for cultural revitalization, which is an overarching objective of the entire volume. Both projects use adaptations and English translations of folk songs to restore them to active repertoire. The Vermont project adds contextual details based on fieldwork and organized singing schools. DuBois and Cederström's translation of a Finnish anthology of migration songs includes information on the migration experience. Their project also includes performances, music videos, and online resources.Guha Shankar discusses the American Folklife Center's preservation of 1930s film footage of ethnic music recorded by Alan Lomax in Michigan and subsequent presentation of a new film incorporating the footage to receptive audiences that included descendants of the performers. Nathan Gibson and Anna Rue probe the challenges of making public Norwegian American music recordings found in the home of deceased lay recordist Arnold “Charlie” Munkel. They faced issues of selectivity in sorting private and irrelevant materials along with ethical dilemmas of dealing with a collection left with no ownership instructions. The Munkel family warmly responded to the recordings, which have substantial potential for sustaining these traditions.The past work of many folklorists badly needs preservation and access. Nicole Saylor makes a compelling case for preserving and archiving late twentieth-century collections produced at a time of growing governmental support.Contributors are keenly attuned to change and transformation regarding the dynamics of folklore, how communities represent their folklore, and their own reflections on past work. James Leary and Janet Gilmore each self-critically reinterpret projects produced decades ago. Richard March and Robert Teske provide clear-eyed views of institutional constraints they have faced in non-folklore associated organizations. March describes oscillations in public radio station receptivity to his Down Home Dairyland series. Teske makes a strong case for folklorists serving as directors of non-folklore institutions in his reflections on challenges to his expertise in staff positions he held prior to becoming an arts center and museum director.Tourism figures in many chapters. Jared Schmidt discusses how hot-pink pumps decorated with rosemaling in a Norwegian American museum embodied heritage production and the reinvention of tradition. They reflect the community's changing views of its ethnic identity and projection to tourists. Diana Baird N'Diaye sees initiatives to develop self-representation by craftspeople at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which led to post-Festival community-driven tourism, as a “model” for the “technology of development” of “cultural heritage tourism” (p. 140).Yvonne Lockwood looks at 70 years of change in the Fish Sandwich Festival in Bay Port, Michigan, including how it became a tourism destination, and adaptations that were for the tourist market. In describing the products of a folklorist-led 4-H documentation project, Lockwood notes that their community collaborators decided not to have a presentation and exhibition at the festival. Her chapter is noteworthy in alluding to differing views of a project's direction. As Tim Frandy and Cederström emphasize in this volume's introduction, there needs to be folklorist humility, consensus in constructing common meaning, and co-creation through deep collaboration with communities.Public folklore case studies should consistently consider differing stakeholder views. Related issues, associated with power asymmetries, include who determines what is the public good, and divergent ideologies. Differing views of project direction frequently appear in other public folklore and heritage studies scholarship, which this volume could have cited. Likewise, lacking are references to relevant scholarship about cultural brokerage, intervention, cultural sustainability, academic/public folklore interrelationships and dichotomies, cultural representation, objectification, and agency, thereby limiting engagement with decades of prior scholarship.Nevertheless, Culture Work contributes significantly to public folklore scholarship, which has too few case study collections. It generously includes multiple generations of folklorists. Containing an extensive range of reflexive accounts, it provides much food for thought about future directions for public folklore, community engagement, and the transformative power of public practice

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