Public folklore dialogism and critical heritage studies

Abstract

Public folklore’s dialogic engagement with communities incorporates methodologies for sharing representational and interpretive authority, collaborative programme development, mutually constructed modes of presentation and stakeholder participation in policy-making. While recognising that heritage interventions inevitably involve power asymmetries, public folklore seeks to mitigate and diminish these imbalances as it develops approaches to enable communities to present their culture on their own terms. This paper explores dialogic public folklore practice through community self-documentation projects, folklife festivals, government folk arts funding programmes and a project promoting places of local cultural significance. It provides examples of the integration of multiple roles of public folklorists as scholars, administrators, producers of folklore presentations and government heritage officers. Public folklore praxis achieved through the integration of these roles is seen as a potential model for critical heritage studies praxis for scholars who are advisors and researchers in intangible cultural heritage (ICH) initiatives. Critical heritage scholars involved with ICH can learn from how public folklorists engage with communities and foster cultural self-determination. For public folklorists, collaboration and increased dialogue with critical heritage scholars could foster greater awareness of hegemonic discourses, reconceptualisation of the social base of ICH and recognition of the pitfalls of fostering economic development through heritage.

Keywords:

• Intangible cultural heritage
• public folklore
• dialogism
• critical heritage studies

Introduction

The field of critical heritage studies is rapidly expanding alongside an upsurge of initiatives spurred by the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). Scholars who critically interrogate and analyse government intervention in heritage often find themselves enmeshed in heritage policy-making and practice. They serve on national and regional heritage commissions, act as policy advisors, develop protocols for inventorying intangible cultural heritage (hereafter ICH), document traditions for the UNESCO lists and create frameworks for safeguarding ICH. Through these multiple roles, heritage scholars experience at first-hand issues of mediation, intervention in ongoing cultural processes and community self-determination in heritage matters. These experiences shape the empirical foundations of their research but also engender role conflicts. Bortolotto (2015, 252) discusses the ‘difficult position of being both an agent in and an observer of the implementation of ICH policies’, an ‘uncomfortable situation’ that ‘complicates the relationship between the discipline of anthropology, which scientifically investigates cultural transmission, and the policy field regulating this process’.

Integration of these multiple roles can enable heritage scholars to tangibly address concerns expressed in their critical scholarship through collaborations with communities to develop heritage practices, programmes and policies that advance cultural self-determination. Such a praxis would respond to objectives stated in the manifesto on the website of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) as ‘democratizing heritage by consciously rejecting elite cultural narratives and embracing the heritage insights of people, communities and cultures that have been traditionally marginalised in formulating heritage policy’, as well as the 2003 Convention’s expectation of community participation. The 2003 Convention, as Neyrinck (2014, 319) notes, incorporated a ‘deeply participatory approach in cultural work’ and ‘urged for the involvement and – prior and informed – consent by ICH practitioners, by individuals, groups or communities concerned’ (see UNESCO 2014).

For the past three decades, public folklore has addressed key issues of current concern for critical heritage studies and engaged in a praxis of dialogic engagement with communities. It has developed methodologies for sharing representational and interpretive authority, carrying out collaborative programme development, creating cultural conversations through mutually constructed modes of presentation, enabling stakeholder participation in policy development and equipping communities to present and safeguard their traditions on their own terms.

In contrast with critical heritage studies, public folklore does not generally address hegemonic heritage discourses and divergences between government authorities and communities. Rather, public folklorists integrate multiple roles as scholars, producers of programming, administrators and government cultural officials. The inherent dialogism of public folklore diminishes power asymmetries and fosters participation through its distinctive approaches to mediation, intervention, representation and community cultural self-determination.

While public folklorists uncritically embrace participation of communities in programmes that represent their traditions, many heritage scholars are critical of the ICH participatory paradigm. Adell et al. (2015, 10) report that the ‘inherent ambivalence of the participatory paradigm’ is widely acknowledged, stating that, ‘on the one hand’, the ‘taking over of bureaucratic paternalism by civil society has encouraged debate and activism as a counter-hegemonic approach towards radical social transformation’. On the other hand, ‘numerous critical analyses’ have ‘demonstrated’ that the participatory paradigm has been ‘re-politicized’ from earlier conceptualisations ‘inspired by the emancipatory pedagogy of Paolo Freire and based on the Marxist-oriented Participatory Action Research’. They see it as serving a ‘neoliberal agenda as a self-help technology’ that ‘legitimizes marketization and state retrenchment’, domesticating ‘their potential for radical political opposition, contributing to the commodification and depoliticization of the cultural field’ (Adell et al. 2015, 11).

Some heritage scholars who work within the participatory paradigm are exploring new approaches for collaboration among scholars, heritage professionals and community members. They seek to advance cultural self-determination through incorporating the expertise and perspectives of community members. Jean-Louis Tornatore’s involvement in the design and implementation of an ICH policy for the Ballons des Vosges Regional Nature Park in France entailed creation of a ‘citizen’s jury’ to select ‘cultural asset[s]’ to ‘transmit and promote’ (Barbe, Chauliac, and Tornatore 2015, 207). It was viewed as a method to ‘“bend” the Convention by redistributing expertise’, with the scholar becoming ‘less a content specialist, with the kind of jurisdiction over an object that an ethnologist usually has, than a guide’ (Barbe, Chauliac, and Tornatore 2015, 203). This approach involved ‘bucking the dominant practice of documentary expertise and promoting the idea of participatory expertise, or, at the very least, a sharing of cultural and heritage expertise’ (Barbe, Chauliac, and Tornatore 2015, 204). Such sharing of expertise and authority is much less common in ICH programmes than in US public folklore. Neyrinck (2014, 334) contends that it should be widespread in ICH programmes, calling for the ‘co-production’ of ICH, with professionals and the groups with whom they work, to be engaged in a ‘continuous problem-solving process, implying negotiation, deliberation and joint learning’.

While public folklore provides important models for heritage theory and practice, the current global discourse on ICH has largely elided public folklore scholarship and practice, which is primarily associated with the US. Flemish heritage scholar, Marc Jacobs (2014, 279), notes that public folklorists have ‘years of experience’ with ‘participatory methods, theoretically informed practices and brokerage’ that could meet ‘an international demand for appropriate methods and good practices for safeguarding’ ICH. Unfortunately, as Jacobs (2014, 270) indicates, an ‘intercontinental link’, which previously encompassed ‘institutional and intergovernmental bridges’, is ‘drifting apart’. Jacobs (2014, 279) attributes this drift to the current US refusal to fund UNESCO. The US Government has not ratified the 2003 Convention, isolating US-based public folklorists from the global conversation about ICH.

The diminished awareness of public folklore outside of the US can also be ascribed to the negative valence of folklore as a retrograde term for many scholars in other disciplines unaware of contemporary folklore scholarship. During the late twentieth century, folklore studies reconceptualised its subject of study as an emergent in performance possessed universally, by any cultural group in any social strata, within and among communities constituted on the basis of any kind of shared identity and association (see Bauman and Paredes 1972; Shuman and Briggs 1993). Such an approach contrasts with prior views of folklore as associated primarily with marginalised peoples, studied by a discipline centred upon texts abstracted from social interaction. Folklorists are acutely aware of the problematic resonances of the term folklore, especially pernicious legacies of romantic nationalism that their discipline discarded long ago, but remain inaccurately associated with it. Folklorists recurrently ponder substituting other names, but they stick with the term folklore, historically associated with their discipline and familiar to laypersons. While ICH and folklore encompass many of the same domains of culture, folklore remains a term widely accepted in its eponymous discipline, within its communities of practice and among heritage agencies in the US. In contrast, ICH is a term limited to academic discourse. Therein lies a gulf between the US and much of the rest of the world, where ICH, according to Jacobs (2014, 267), presents a challenge for folklore studies as a ‘paradigm that is whipped into shape by avoiding the central concept in the name of the discipline itself’.

Public folklore addresses key concerns of the global movement to safeguard ICH, and its approaches should be articulated with the new global discourse on heritage theory, ideology, policy and practice. Greater involvement of public folklore with critical heritage studies and the new global heritage discourse would be mutually beneficial. It would bring public folklore into the international heritage arena and sharpen its critical discourse while providing models for dialogically constructed representational practices and modes of presentation, as well as integration of the multiple roles of heritage scholars within the public sphere.

This article describes and analyses public folklore dialogism through an overview of US public folklore practices and methodologies, drawing from examples of several innovative programmes. It examines its intrinsically dialogical modes of presentation, initiatives to equip communities to represent their traditions on their own terms and government programmes directed by public folklorists that integrally involve community stakeholders. I explore power asymmetries between heritage specialists and the communities they represent, strategies for diminishing imbalances, and ways to share authority while acknowledging that imbalances will inevitably persist to some extent.

Public folklore’s inception in the dialogic turn

From its beginnings in the 1970s, public folklore has been predicated on dialogism. In contrast with an older paradigm of applied folklore that applied and disseminated expertise and scholarship in a unidirectional manner, public folklore entails mutual engagement and collaboration, eschewing a ‘top down’ approach that assumes that expertise and interpretive authority resides only with the folklorist designing programmes on behalf of a community (Baron 2010, 71).¹ While public folklorists in the 1980s previously called themselves ‘applied folklorists’, professional self-identification shifted to a new term consonant with collaboration and the recontextualisation associated with the ‘representation of folklore and application of folk traditions in new contours and contexts within and beyond the communities within which they originated’, as stated in the introduction to the edited volume, Public Folklore (Baron and Spitzer [1992] 2007, 1). The performance-based approach that transformed the study of folklore informed the concern with recontextualisation. The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, established in 1967, and state folk arts programmes developed through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) beginning in the late 1970s, were highly influential in the development of new approaches to the public presentation of recontextualised traditions and collaborations with communities. Public folklore has also been shaped by the premise that it is, as David Whisnant (1988, 233) states, ‘unavoidably interventionist’, with inevitable impacts upon the traditions documented and presented. Whisnant’s (1988) words appeared in The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector, which like Public Folklore, contained critical reflexive case studies about the implications of the work of public folklorists for traditional practitioners and their communities.

The paradigm shift associated with the emergence of public folklore paralleled late twentieth century developments in anthropology. Indigenous cultures were challenging anthropological research, asserting control over whether they would be studied and how they would be represented, and challenging the epistemological authority of the anthropologist. At this time when folklore studies turned from a text-centred to an increasingly performance-based approach, anthropology was moving away from positivism, adopting a constructivist approach that views culture as emergent and constantly in the making, while rejecting static representations of cultures as ideal types maintained out of time in the ethnographic present. Anthropology’s dialogic turn was also in motion, incorporating critical reflexivity within ethnographies and using the first person while attempting to situate the anthropologist transparently in the research account, approaches which influenced folklore studies. As Clifford (1988, 84) notes, ethnography was now viewed as a ‘dialogical enterprise in which both researchers and natives are both active creators or, to stretch a term, authors of cultural representations’.

At this time, the humanities and social sciences discovered Mikhail Bakhtin, the most important proponent of dialogism. His ideas on dialogism as the construction of meaning through a multiplicity of voices, and the contrast of heteroglossia with fixed meanings and monologism, have been highly influential. He saw it as an open, ongoing process that is not finalised within a particular interaction. Bridges and divides coexist in dialogic social interactions (Bakhtin 1981).² As Fernandes, Carvalho, and Campos (2012, 96) indicate in their discussion of educational action as dialogism, it is an ‘interactive process which presupposes encounters and collisions of ideas with polyphonic movements and enunciative positions’.

Solicitous listening and narrative ownership

‘Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston’ was a project lasting from 2005 to 2009 that enabled survivors of these hurricanes to interpret their experiences through learning how to document and present each other’s narratives, constructing meaning in dialogue with one another. The survivors of these 2005 disasters, which devastated the US Gulf Coast from Alabama to Texas, consisted in large part of lower-income African Americans. They came to ‘own’ their experiences of the disasters through the narratives they possess that were presented to new audiences, countering distortions in the mass media that represented them as victims and/or criminals in the wake of disaster. Their narratives tell of being marooned for days on bridges, acts of mutual support and kindness by strangers, resilience and the experience of being surrounded in their homes by rising waters. Folklorists Pat Jasper and Carl Lindahl designed the project to present these narratives to the public through audio productions, exhibitions and a website with compelling narratives and still photographs taken by a survivor.³ Their work fulfills the ideal of the ‘emancipatory potential of folklore as praxis’, viewed by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett ([1988] 2007, 33) in her influential essay, ‘Mistaken Dichotomies’, as ‘how what we do as folklorists can be of socially redeeming value in ways that go beyond celebration’.

While Lindahl and Jasper framed the overall organisational and programmatic structure of the project, provided technical direction in the use of equipment and enlisted specialists to design the formal structure of the exhibition, audio production and website, they took a decidedly hands-off approach to the interpretation of survivors’ experiences. Survivors were told that they are the experts, and the folklorists practiced what Lindahl (2012, 157) calls ‘solicitous listening’, in contrast to oral history methodologies that set the narrative agenda through directed interviews.

For Lindahl (2012, 153), ‘sovereignty over one’s story is a guiding precept’. These stories consist of ‘natural narratives’ shaped by the survivors. In contrast to the evidentiary requirements of history, these folklorists accepted disaster legends that might not have a factual basis for historians. The folklorists accepted them because they were believed to be true by the survivors. Lindahl (2012, 143) contends that they are an ‘essential vernacular tool for expressing how the tellers feel about the prevailing social order and for helping their communities seek explanations that squares with their convictions’. His views embody a different understanding of what historian Michael Frisch (1990) calls ‘shared authority’. Frisch (1990, 20–22) stresses the mutual construction of meaning by historian and interviewee in the course of the oral history interview, and acknowledges the value of local knowledge, but maintains the historian’s interpretive authority. This approach, although considerably more dialogical than conventional historical scholarship, emphasises the distinction between ‘vernacular understandings’ and professional scholarship, while allowing for dialogue between the two and recognition that historians are not the sole interpreters of events (Frisch 2011, 128). Public folklorists may also exercise their interpretive authority in the mutual construction of meaning, but they will often defer to the expertise of community members as they let them drive the interpretation of public programmes.

A virtual dialogism

Dialogism does not just occur in immediate face-to-face communication. It also involves, as Bakhtin (1984, 1986) stressed, the anticipation of dialogue with others not present at the moment, as well as in non-oral situations. Contemporary virtual communication through the Internet and social media is dialogical, both through synchronous and asynchronous communication and the anticipation of responses in cyberspace. There is now an ‘electronic vernacular’, expanding the channels for transmitting folklore, with online vernacular discourse seen by folklorists as distinct from institutional electronic communication (Blank 2009, 7).

Public folklorists utilise the Internet as a source for folklore, as a medium of professional communication and as a platform for communicating with communities and promoting their work. For the Place Matters and City of Memory programmes of City Lore, a folklife organisation based in New York City, the Internet is a means of eliciting and sharing vernacular knowledge, as well as a mode of presentation that is both institutional and vernacular. Since 1998, Place Matters has identified places in New York City of local vernacular significance, paying particular attention to places at risk of destruction. Its public programmes and websites serve as a documentary record of these sites and promotional tool to foster public awareness and protection. The general Place Matters website uses both user-generated nominations by any visitor to the site, as well as documentation of places identified through research by City Lore’s staff. Hundreds of places are included on the website, including a beloved luncheonette, public spaces appropriated as neighbourhood gathering places, a Chinese general store, a Latin dance club, a storefront mosque and a neon sign company. City Lore advises potential contributors about methods to help ‘identify, promote and protect places that you care about’ through its online Place Matters Toolkit, which it describes as a ‘guidebook’.⁴ It has also organised workshops in New York City neighbourhoods to instruct community members in documentation practices.

City of Memory, another City Lore project, contains an ‘interactive urban story map’ consisting of accounts of places in New York City contributed by visitors to the website, as well as field research by City Lore.⁵ The contributed accounts on City of Memory are vetted by City Lore and appear on the website in ‘curated’ form, an approach that City Lore founder and Executive Director, Steve Zeitlin (2011, 35), views as incorporating both curation and broad based participation. The site includes film clips, slide shows and narrated tours of neighbourhoods and places of local significance throughout the city, narrated mainly by local residents.

As in ‘Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston’, we see in the Place Matters and City of Memory sites folklorists framing the form, overarching interpretation and technical dimensions of the mode of presentation. The Houston project promotes the authority of all of the narrators in interpretation and the strong role community members play in shaping the direction of the project. City Lore acknowledges that their curatorial role involves selectivity in choosing narratives to preserve and present, minor editing of the narratives selected and ongoing curation of the website. Zeitlin (2011, 43) considers City of Memory as an ‘open-ended cultural work – having all the elements of a book or film, but with endless potential to change and grow and yet still retain the vision we had for a virtual home’ for the stories of New Yorkers. This open-endedness anticipates and invites ongoing dialogue.

Community scholars documenting and interpreting

Both ‘Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston’ and Place Matters train community members to identify and document their heritage. Other US public folklore programmes, including the Smithsonian Centre for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and New York Folklore Society have organised institutes and field schools for ‘community scholars’ to learn how to carry out field research and interpret their research in public programmes.⁶ The Community Scholars Program of the Kentucky Arts Council ‘trains members of a community in documentation, interpretation and dissemination of their unique local cultural resources and traditional art forms’ so that they can ‘support and promote the traditional arts and culture’ at the local level. Such intensive community involvement in cultural research and documentation resonates with UNESCO’s participation mandate for ICH. While local stakeholders may be involved in advocating inclusion in the implementation process for the 2003 Convention, their participation in the inventorying process is typically limited to serving as research subjects. They may be informed about the research process, but excluded from undertaking field research, which is regarded as the province of academically credentialed ‘experts’ (Bendix, Eggert, and Peselmann 2013). Bortolotto (2013, 269) indicates, with particular reference to France, that the ‘majority of academic or heritage experts and professionals’ regard the ‘new definition of expertise in the heritage field’ that ‘entrusts communities with key responsibilities in the safeguarding process’ as ‘a dangerous hyper-relativistic and populist instrument’.

In contrast with ICH programmes based upon field research by academically trained ‘experts’ who do not incorporate lay fieldworkers in the documentation process, many public folklore projects view the carriers of traditions as ‘experts’ empowered with the authority to document and interpret their experience on their own terms. Community scholar programmes epitomise the differences between the attitudes of ICH experts and authorities described by Bortolotto, and those of US public folklorists carrying out community scholar programmes with regard to privileging the authority of conventionally credentialed experts. Diana N’Diaye, Project Director of the Smithsonian Centre for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s African Immigrant Folklore Program, describes its community scholar programme as developing ‘interpretive voices and paradigms of representation’ by ‘cultural insiders from their own unique perspectives rather than those of professional researchers who were outsiders to the community cultures’. Even with the ‘best intentions’, these outside researchers were ‘apt […] to regard Africans as “Other”, to use and to privilege paradigms shaped by their experience’ (in Thompson 2008, 111).

Cultural conversations and presentation methods at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

Dialogically constructed modes of presentation mutually engage folklorists, community members and audiences in representations of heritage to the public. They are designed to embody the sharing of authority through what Spitzer ([1992] 2007, 99) calls ‘cultural conversations’, where the communities represented and the folklorist ‘negotiate mutual representations in the media, on the festival stage, or in the text’. Cadaval (2000, 191) views successful presentations at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (formerly known as the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife) as entailing the modelling of behaviour for the audience, as well as an ‘ethnographic encounter’ involving collaborative construction of representations between the presenter and the participant.

At public folklore events, such as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, audience members are invited into the cultural conversation, with modes of presentation designed for dialogical engagement. This dialogue – actually, a trialogue – among folklorist presenters, practitioners of the represented traditions and audience members is especially marked in modes of presentation designed to diminish the distance, both physical and psychic, between the presenter/participant and audience members. The presentations act as spatial, psychological and interpretive framing devices, distinguishing them from ongoing community life, shaping the representations of culture and enabling audience members to experience the traditions of other cultural groups through interaction with participants (Baron 2010, 68).

Folklorists design festival workshops to frame demonstrations and performances by traditional practitioners and conversations among practitioners, audience and presenter. Discussions in workshops cover the backgrounds of the practitioners, characteristics of the cultural practices they are demonstrating and the sustainability of these practices in their community, among other topics. Narrative stages, another type of mode of presentation, involve the sharing of stories among narrators and the exchange of points of view about cultural issues among audience members interacting with the presenters and narrators.

In participatory folklife festival modes of presentation, audiences gain embodied knowledge through making a craft or dancing, complementing knowledge acquired verbally. Through crafts demonstrations, audience members engage craftspersons in discussions about the objects they make and their cultural contexts, with audience members at times referring to their own culture and experience. Visitors may try their hand at making the craft being presented, an affective and cognitive experience that engages dialogue with the artist. Dance concerts integrally involve dancing by audience members, often with instruction by members of the community whose traditions are represented. Musicians perform on a stage of low elevation, which enhances the quality of interaction by diminishing the distance between performer and audience. The musicians frame their performances with introductions to the songs they sing and the cultural context of performance. Dialogue entails sensorial response as audience members become participants, moving to the dance floor in front of the stage and dancing to the music being performed.

These interactions involve the interplay of bridges and divides among participants, presenters and audience members. Ricardo Trimillos (2008), an ethnomusicologist who consulted for the Philippines programme at the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, discusses a ‘fascinating dynamic of cross-cultural encounter’ at the Filipino American day of the Festival, ‘in which homeland Filipinos and diasporic Filipinos found how they were both similar and yet different’; ‘dance (with music)’ was a ‘major forum for reconciliation’. The American Filipino dancers performed in a style influenced by the Bayanihan dance company, which has been ‘frequently criticized and accused of overstylizing and theatricalizing traditional dance forms’. Often, ‘exchanges between the dance directors and the traditional artists were […] burdened with notions like “showbiz versus authentic” and the tensions that they generated’. Reconciliation occurred as artists from the Philippines ‘offered suggestions for change and correction to their US-based colleagues. Since these exchanges were face-to-face, the commentary tended to be initially laudatory with substantive points of criticism deeply embedded or delivered through the diplomatic strategy of the kuwento storytelling’ (Trimillos 2008, 75).

While cultural conversations at the Festival often involve members of a diaspora and practitioners from the homeland, presentations are more frequently observed and experienced by outsiders to the cultures represented. Presentational frames have had varying degrees of success in achieving engaged participant-audience interaction, enabling representation of participants’ voices and avoiding negative objectification. Cantwell ([1991] 1994) provides an extensive comparison of presentations at the 1985 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife. A ‘cornrowers’ exhibit’ of hairstyles created by local African and African-American hairdressers was the most successful presentation. Festival staff designed it as a ‘kind of informal “hangout” on the [National] Mall’, situated in a ‘small, “embracing” semicircle at a height of six inches’ (Cantwell [1991] 1994, 172). Cantwell ([1991] 1994, 175) reports that the presentation became a ‘genuine living’ place where visitors, especially children, congregated. They asked questions, talked with the hairdressers and had their hair braided in an atmosphere of ‘tender, sensuous intimacy’, all the while expressing their ‘opinions and personalities’.

At the other end of the dialogic spectrum, Kmhmu traditional practitioners were placed in a ‘compound’ of a ‘garden, blacksmith shop and small platform shaded by a tent’ (Cantwell [1991] 1994, 172). Most of the artists ignored the visitors. Communication with visitors was ‘difficult’, and only children, ‘unburdened by stereotypes and undaunted by language barriers they could not anticipate’, tried to communicate (Cantwell [1991] 1994, 176). In the Kmhmu area, the presentational frame inhibited interaction, reinforcing distance between performers and audience members who lacked common grounds of discourse. Interaction between artists and audience members was not effectively mediated by Smithsonian presenters, which would have diminished negative objectification.

Over the years, Smithsonian Folklife Festival curators have self-critically revised and refined presentational frames. They concentrate upon enabling agency by participants and fostering fruitful engagement among participants, presenters and audiences. A forthcoming volume, Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, discusses the relationships of Smithsonian Folklife Festival curators with Festival participants during its planning and production. The curators describe participants exercising substantial agency in reframing and asserting authority within presentational frames, which enabled them to shape dialogue with audiences on their own terms (Cadaval, Kim, and N’Diaye, 2016).

Cadaval, one of the editors of Curatorial Conversations, discusses ‘developing a process for a collaboration base with participants that contribute to greater cultural democracy by distributing and reordering curatorial authority’, which ‘deepens the quality of the emerging cultural conversation’. For Cadaval, the Festival’s ‘discursive potential’ depends ‘most importantly on the participants sense of their own authority over their representation and over the event’. While over time Cadaval has ‘honed curatorial collaborative approaches to ethnographic research, presentation formats, site design, and sponsorship/authority structures […] these strategies are constantly dialogically negotiated with the different players as the program develops’ (Cadaval et al. 2016). For the Festival’s quincentenary programmes, Cadaval engaged in intensive collaborative planning with indigenous communities to develop representations that constituted a counter narrative of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, and emphasised an emergent creolisation process. As an example of her negotiations with participants, Cadaval notes that Maroon and Kumina Jamaican participants initially insisted on ‘only presenting social music and dance because they feel it is inappropriate to present rituals in a public setting’. However, after observing Vodou ceremonies at this festival, they decided to ‘present some of their own ritual practices. Scholars further negotiate[d] with participants to break into the performance frame with commentary’ (Cadaval et al. 2016).

At times, participants disrupt or appropriate curatorial planning with remarkably effective results welcomed by curators. Cadaval’s essay describes how Rastafarians at the 1989 Festival temporarily appropriated spaces for impromptu performances unplanned by the curator. The Rastafarians negotiated the use of these spaces with Jamaican Maroon and Ghanaian Ga participants, acting on their own initiative. Shua participants from the Ecuadorian rain forest appropriated the interpretive framework by engaging issues of cultural rights and exploitation of subsoil mineral resources while distancing themselves from ‘wild Amazon head-reducers’ stereotypes. Conscious though she is of the importance of distributing and reordering curatorial authority, Cadaval acknowledges that Smithsonian staff members retain overarching authority for the whole of the event. The curator, she states, ‘always has in the balance the larger context that gives meaning to the whole effort and touches on the larger social polity’ (Cadaval et al. 2016).

Power asymmetries are intrinsic to the relationships between heritage specialists producing programmes and the community members represented. These asymmetries are diminished when authority is shared or turned over to the community, as the examples of the cornrower, Rastafarian and Shua participants demonstrate. Some public folklore programmes have been designed from the outset for folklorists to eventually disempower themselves by turning over responsibility for representation entirely to local communities. In all but a few cases, however, power asymmetries persist along with the assertion of the interests of both the representer and the represented (see Baron 1999, 195; 2010, 85; 2012, 310). These asymmetries should be acknowledged, as Cadaval does in indicating that she had overall authority for designing and producing the heritage programmes she describes.

Heritage specialists also shape the means and character of mediations, with mediation in the Smithsonian examples referring to both the medium of communication structured through a mode of presentation (such as a crafts demonstration or narrative session), and mediated interactions among participants, presenters and audience members.

As Cantwell ([1991] 1994) demonstrates, these mediations vary in their degree of reciprocity, dialogic character and participant agency. In his analysis of the 1985 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife presentations, Cantwell ([1991] 1994, 173, 174) indicates that the

palpable substance and intrinsic forms of representation shape both that which is represented and the awareness to which it is represented – even though the aim of representations is ultimately to dissolve itself and its frame, bringing the visitor and the participant into a kind of mutual imaginative absorption.

Despite the authority residing with the heritage specialist in shaping an event, participants may appropriate space, reframe interpretation and select the aspects of their culture that they choose to represent to outsiders, as Cadaval shows with her Rastafarian and Shua examples. The power balance thus shifts, with participants asserting greater control. Whether or not authority shifts so palpably, mediation through heritage programmes, as in any social process, should be seen as involving the exercise of agency by all parties, including choices by participants about how – and whether – they engage in mediation. Agency may involve the assertion of participants’ authority in reshaping a presentation, active participation within presentation frames developed by presenters, or reluctance to participate. Such agentive range can also be seen in ICH programmes, where communities may alternatively choose to participate in UNESCO’s international list nominations and inventorying processes, substantially reshape safeguarding approaches at a local level, or decline to be considered for the Representative List (Ballacchino 2013). Any mediation that occurs involves what Williams (1977, 97–100) views as an ‘active process’ of mediating structure and agency, entailing ‘the making of meaning and values, in the necessary form of the general social process of signification and communication’.

Autonomy, shared authority and national infrastructure among government public folklore programmes in the US

Critical heritage studies scholars underscore the importance of government authorities in determining cultural and heritage policy, allocating funds and intervening in ongoing cultural processes to develop local heritage initiatives. Until recently, critical heritage studies viewed government heritage mediations as highly centralised. Coombe (2013, 379) underscores the need to ‘break down the image of government as the preserve of a monolithic state operating as a singular source of power’. Heritage studies scholars now see government heritage engagement as entailing multifaceted horizontal, vertical and transversal relationships among government agencies, non-governmental organisations and community stakeholders (da Silva 2013, 61).

US public folklore programmes, like other cultural activities in the US, have an exceptionally high degree of autonomy from the central government, in contrast to comparable programmes in many other nations. The major federal folklife programmes at the American Folklife Centre of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Centre for Folklife and Cultural Heritage have specific missions that oftentimes involve collaborations with state and local public folklore programmes, but they are by no means superordinate to them with regard to the exercise of authority over policy and programming. The Folk and Traditional Arts Program of the NEA provides vital support to many state and local programmes, but its guidelines are open ended; it is reactive in response to requests for funding and has no statutory authority over folk cultural policies in states and localities. As with other government arts funding programmes, the NEA’s Folk and Traditional Arts Program makes funding decisions based upon recommendations of peer review panels composed of specialists representative of its field.

In its first two decades, the NEA Folk and Traditional Arts Program acted proactively to create a national infrastructure of state folk arts programmes, most of which have been situated in, or exist in relationship to, state arts agencies (see Hawes 2008, 150–154). State folk arts programmes directly engage in or support ongoing field research concerning local traditions and produce programming in collaboration with ethnic, regional, occupational and Native American tribal communities. They also carry out joint initiatives with other government agencies and fund local non-profit organisations to carry out folk arts projects of their own.

Most directors of state folk arts programmes are academically trained folklorists. They fulfil multiple roles, sharing their expertise about folklore, acting as administrators and government officials, and, in many cases, also carrying out field research and producing programming. As stakeholders of the NEA Folk and Traditional Arts Program, they contribute to policy development. The state folk arts programmes peer group of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies meets biennially to consider issues of policy and professional practice and attend workshops to enhance their abilities as producers of programmes, grant-makers and field researchers. In 2011, confronting concerns about future directions for the national state folk arts programmes infrastructure and NEA support, the peer group convened a series of meetings to dialogue with NEA officials and conducted a needs assessment survey of its membership. A report resulted from this initiative contained a number of policy recommendations for sustaining the national infrastructure.⁷ These recommendations stressed the indispensability of continued NEA support, the importance of professional direction for state programmes provided by folklorists or specialists with related backgrounds, and the value of field research. The report included a number of ideas for technical assistance, resource sharing and professional development that could be enhanced to benefit traditional artists, constituent community-based organisations and state folk arts programmes.

The ecology of public folk arts programmes in the US consists of a highly reticulated, mutually reinforcing and supportive network linking federal, state and local programmes. The principal forums for these programmes are the annual meetings of the American Folklore Society and Publore, the public folklore listserv.⁸ Their collective conversation includes folklorists working primarily within the academy, as well as those employed as staff or freelance consultants with government agencies or non-profit organisations. Many ‘academic folklorists’ situated in colleges or universities consult with public folklore programmes and serve on funding panels, and public folklorists, employed in the public sector, often also teach in universities. While at one time some academic folklorists criticised applied folklore as compromising the work of scholars (Baron [1992] 2007; Green [1992] 2007, 55–57), very few now object to public folklore. Nearly all academic folklore programmes offer public folklore courses, and the field of folklore is now constituted as both an academic discipline and practicing profession.

At the local and regional levels, publicly funded folklore activities are preponderantly carried out by non-profit organisations and individuals, rather than by government entities. The Folk Arts Program of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), which I direct, supports community-based non-profit organisations, such as Los Pleneros de la 21, performers of Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba and Plena music, as well as folklorist-directed organisations, such as City Lore. Our annual funding for over 80 applicants includes support for projects that comprise concerts, exhibitions and festivals, general support for the ongoing administration and programming of folk arts organisations, and funding for apprenticeships that bring together master and apprentice artists from the same cultural community for the teaching of a traditional art or practice. In New York, as in other states, apprenticeships represent a highly effective means of passing on the knowledge, skills and meanings of traditions in situations where the customary chains of transmission have been weakened. We also support regional and countywide programmes directed by staff folklorists who engage in ongoing field research, programming, assisting individual artists in obtaining opportunities for presenting and marketing their work and support to other cultural organisations developing folk arts programmes.

Each year our programme organises the New York State Folk Arts Roundtable with the New York Folklore Society. The Roundtable is a forum for public folklorists and community scholars to present their work to each other in a mutually supportive and constructively critical manner, as well as participate in workshops on topics that have included the curation of exhibitions, marketing folk arts, narrative theory and techniques for presenting traditional storytelling, video, audio and photographic documentation, and production of performing folk arts presentations. During the Roundtable, participants discuss and develop positions on state-wide policy issues and engage in dialogue with the NYSCA Folk Arts Program about its funding policies, contributing to the direction of the programme. The Roundtable is planned through a series of conference calls open to all participants, who collectively plan the structure and content of each year’s convening.

Our partner in organising the Roundtable, the New York Folklore Society, is a nonprofit organisation whose activities complement the work of the NYSCA Folk Arts Program. It acts as a parallel, non-governmental organisation with a state-wide mission. It organises workshops for educators, publishes a journal for lay and academic readers, operates a gift shop of New York State traditional crafts and produces programming of traditional artists from its Capital District region in upstate New York. Its partnerships with the NYSCA Folk Arts Program include, in addition to the Roundtable, an internship programme for folklore graduate students at folk arts programmes in the state, and a Mentoring and Professional Development Program that provides technical assistance designed to enhance the organisational, programmatic and technical capacities of artists and organisations.

While the NYSCA Folk Arts Program provides essential funding for its constituents, catalyses new programmes through interactions with cultural organisations and engages in service activities for the professional field, the actual production and administration of public folklore programming and field research is carried out by our non-profit constituents. This is not the case in countries where governments initiate most ICH programmes. In New York State, stakeholders from non-profit organisations shape the development of NYSCA funding policies at the Roundtable, in public forums and in advisory panels that also evaluate and recommend applications for funding through peer review. The funding panels are made up of folklorists, ethnomusicologists and practitioners of traditions broadly representative of the ethnic and regional diversity of the state. During the evaluation of applications, a running discussion of policy emerges, which is reflected in the revision of application guidelines.

While the programme aims for stakeholder involvement on multiple levels, I am mindful of persistent power asymmetries. The NYSCA staff and governing board make the ultimate decisions on funding policies and the draughting of application guidelines. While they take into account policy recommendations by stakeholders, the staff and board follow general agency policy. These policies were developed in consultation with the broader arts community through meetings and surveys during long range planning processes. Fortunately, NYSCA’s overall mission emphasises cultural and aesthetic diversity, inclusiveness and participation, which mesh perfectly with the objectives of the public folklore field.⁹

My daily work involves cultural brokerage, as is the case for other public folklorists. In interactions with the folk arts field through inquiries from applicants, presentations at workshops and the Roundtable, I provide information, professional advice and access to funding opportunities and other resources. In these activities, my dual roles as administrator and folklorist converge. I try to be mindful that these mediations entail the exercise of professional and bureaucratic authority. As a funder, my ideas and recommendations carry a weight for applicants dependent upon my government agency for funding, which represents a persistent power asymmetry. Endeavouring to be an honest broker of culture, I try to always be mindful of the need to mitigate and diminish these asymmetries.

What can public folklore and critical heritage studies learn from one another, and how can this dialogue be accomplished?

The late twentieth century saw the beginning of a fundamental realignment of relationships between ethnographers and the cultural groups they study. In anthropology, the onset of dialogical approaches created a methodology for distributing epistemological authority and more equitably representing community perspectives in its scholarship. Concurrently, the field of folklore incorporated dialogism in both its scholarship and public practice. From its beginnings, public folklore dialogism has been predicated on mutual engagement with communities, designed to enable them to present and safeguard their culture on their own terms within suitable modes of presentation.

The 2003 Convention has created new challenges, opportunities and responsibilities for scholars to put dialogism into practice in the public sphere. Just as the dialogic turn in anthropology brought about new methods for relating to the cultural groups studied and rendering this relationship in publications, involvement in ICH initiatives as policy advisors and researchers requires dialogism with communities represented in these programmes. Most evidently, this can include collaboration with community members in the documentation process, interpretation of research jointly undertaken by scholars and communities and inclusive stakeholder involvement in policy-making. While the 2003 Convention encourages community involvement in safeguarding, it does not specifically indicate how this is to occur. Heritage scholars have not yet, in most cases, satisfactorily articulated their multiple roles as scholars, advisors and researchers through critical reflexivity and a praxis addressing issues expressed in their critical scholarship through engagement in ICH programmes.

US public folklore dialogism points to how ICH scholars, professionals and heritage authorities can integrate their multiple roles to foster community involvement that is empowering and represents a community’s perspectives. Public folklore has developed practices to renew and validate traditions while enabling the voices of community members to be shared more widely. Innovative public folklore approaches for sharing authority could be productively replicated in ICH programmes elsewhere, with acknowledgement of the power asymmetries that inevitably persist.

Power asymmetries in heritage work of all kinds persist amidst other, supra-local contexts of authority structures, social injustices and hegemony. A few public folklorists directly address hegemonic discourses in their advocacy for an activist public folklore concerned with social justice. Their approach articulates a praxis that would be especially consonant with critical heritage theory. In 1988, Whisnant called for ‘public sector folklorists’ to turn to a ‘tougher politics’. He contended that ‘like most reactionary regimes’, such as Franco’s in Spain, ‘the current [Reagan] administration is attempting to legitimize and sell its program under the very banner of tradition through appropriating symbols of “school, home, church, flag” and words like “tradition”, “freedom” and “democracy”’. A tougher politics would consist of a ‘structural approach to change’ addressing ‘social, political and economic structures as central and primary in every policy and program consideration’. It would also develop ‘more substantial mechanisms of change’ and ‘understand, analyse, and interpret culture … in relation to power’ (Whisnant 1988, 241–245).

‘Public interest folklore’, advocated by Debora Kodish (2011), is consonant with Whisnant’s (1988) call for a ‘tougher politics’ devoted to a ‘structural approach to change’. She sees ‘activist, responsible and engaged practice’ as ‘concerned with what is equitable, where power lies, and how people in situations of inequality make significant art and change’ (Kodish 2011, 32, 33). Kodish (2011, 39) emphasises programming ‘traditions that come out of engagement with systems of oppression’. Citing Archie Green’s (1983, 351) statement that ‘only a handful of folklorists during the past century have identified with radical theses challenging majoritarian consensus’, Kodish (2011, 51) contends that Green ‘may still be right’ about the acceptance of American folklorists of ‘dominant ideology: empiricism, pragmatism, individualism, parliamentary reform, free market economics’. Similar themes were sounded in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s ‘Mistaken Dichotomies’ essay, which challenged public folklore to examine the ‘ideology, national political interests and economic concerns’ of the entire ‘folkloristic enterprise’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett [1988] 2007, 32).

Public folklorists work with many groups experiencing marginalisation or oppression, but relatively few explicitly identify as activists focusing upon social and political justice issues. Even if most public folklorists do not articulate the activist ideology and critique of power structures advocated by Whisnant and Kodish, their practice is inherently counterhegemonic, like much of folklore itself. Many of us may work for government cultural agencies that could be viewed as hegemonic, but we support and advocate for counterhegemonic cultural practices. Folklore serves as a means of resistance, whether as overt protest or by its mere presence. For Antonio Gramsci (in Lombardi-Satriani 1974, 104, 105), folklore is 'a "concept of the world and of life" … in contraposition … to the “official” conceptions of the world’. Luigi Lombardi-Satriani (1974, 103) extends a Gramscian notion of folklore as counterhegemonic, seeing it as ‘other, opposing testimony that the folk world provides against the “official” ideology … sustained by the dominant class’. This testimony is seen as ‘contesting at times only with its own presence, the universality, which is only superficial, of the official culture’s concepts of the world and of life’ (Lombardi-Satriani 1974, 104).

While public folklorists recognise that folklore may be possessed by any social group, they concentrate upon traditions and communities that would otherwise be neglected by cultural institutions representing what Smith (2006) calls the ‘authorised heritage discourse’. The creation of the folk arts programmes at the NEA and NYSCA came about as a result of advocacy led by folklorists, who countered claims by these agencies that folk arts was already adequately served by existing arts disciplines and did not require a programme recognising it as a discrete, autonomous cultural field (Baron 2002, 69; Hawes 2008, 122–128). The establishment of the American Folklife Centre of the Library of Congress was a result of years of lobbying the US Congress, led by folklorist, Archie Green ([1976] 1988). Throughout the US, state and local folklife programmes devote substantial ongoing resources to immigrant groups and political refugees. Extensive involvement of US public folklore with immigrants and refugees contrasts with European ICH programmes, which are preponderantly concerned with the legacy traditions of long established communities (Baron 2015, 479). In many rural areas of the US, which may have few if any non-profit cultural institutions, state folk arts programmes provide the largest source of support for cultural activities of any kind. Public folklore initiatives frequently engage marginalised groups, such as prisoners,¹⁰ featured in the Oregon Folklife Network’s Hooks, Yarns and Bars project, as well as groups whose creativity has been insufficiently recognised, such as the women artists featured in the Brooklyn Arts Council’s ‘Half the Sky Festival: Women In Traditional Performance’.¹¹

Public folklorists maintain a dual focus of sustaining traditions within their source communities – an approach comparable to ICH safeguarding – and providing opportunities for diverse communities to experience one another’s culture, thus fostering intercultural understanding. Noyes (2015, 171), commenting on the articles in UNESCO on the Ground: Local Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage, notes that ‘applied and public folklore agencies’ in the US ‘have been extensively concerned with facilitating artist- and community-determined agendas’. Drawing from her experience and knowledge of the Philadelphia Folklore Project (founded by Kodish), she relates that the activities of these agencies include ‘not only access to grant funding and performance venues but matters of material and social infrastructure such as the defense of neighborhoods against gentrification and the cultivation of workable intergroup relationships within urban populations under pressure’ (Noyes 2015, 171). While the Philadelphia Folklore Project is relatively unique in its involvement with countering gentrification, cultivating positive intergroup relationships is widespread among public folklorists.

The Philadelphia Folklore Project, while exceptional in the extent of its organisational engagement with activism, is not alone in public folklore with regard to critically addressing social issues and public policy. Noyes describes several public folklore programmes which ‘drew broader attention to social issues through the apparent safety of folklore, and revealed the pretty forms to be modes of social action’ (2012, 28). These include ‘an exhibition on New York City street play [that] noted the pressures on communal sociability created by real estate development and zoning laws’ (Dargan and Zeitlin 1990); ‘a project on West Virginian sense of place [that] produced early evidence of mountaintop removal coal mining’ (Hufford 2003), and a ‘conference on Italian-American hip-hop [that] opened up heated community debate on the whiteness of “white ethnics”’ (Sciorra 2000).

Although ethnic traditions dominate many public folklore programmes, public folklorists also work with a wide variety of other types of groups, including occupational and religious communities, children and regional groups. They increasingly represent how folklore is shaped by influences from popular culture, recognise that Americans maintain multiple cultural identities and present creolised forms that are shaped by the interactions of two or more cultures. Public folklorists embrace an expansive notion of ‘community’ characterised by various kinds of social bonds and associations, shared interests and common identities. ‘Community’ tends to be the default term for the groups with whom they work. Since public folklorists generally defer to how a community chooses to represent itself, public presentations of ‘a community’ generally elide internal differentia within a group presenting its traditions to outsiders. Public folklorists who present communities relatively monolithically would benefit from greater awareness of critical heritage scholarship examining divisions within communities responding to nominations for ICH representative lists and heritage site designations (see Bendix, Eggert, and Peselmann 2013).

Many heritage scholars criticise the absence of a definition of community in the UNESCO ICH participation mandate. According to Hertz (2015, 35), the 2003 Convention and the UNESCO’s 2006 Expert Report on Community Involvement ‘propose … in effect [,] contradictory understandings’ of what communities, groups and individuals means in the participation mandate. The Expert Group, consisting of anthropologists, folklorists, heritage practitioners, museum curators and heritage administrators, viewed communities, groups and individuals for UNESCO ICH definitional purposes as ‘networks, contingent, practice- or performance-based collectives’, a conceptualisation they see as ‘similar to Lave and Wenger’s “communities of practice”’ (see Lave and Wenger 1991). Hertz (2015, 35) considers this as contrasting with the 2003 Convention’s effort to ‘grant if not rights at least claims to ethnicized, historically constituted minority groups and populations’, representing a ‘move away from fixist notions of communities or groups and towards performative, contingent, network based models for understanding collective action in the area of cultural heritage’. Drawing from Noyes’s analysis of the social base of folklore (Noyes 2012) she sees this movement of thought as ‘largely identical to folklore scholars’ centuries-old attempts to understand where and what “the folk” is or are’ (Hertz 2015, 27).

While the notion of community employed by public folklorists is closer to the ‘fixist notions’ to which Hertz refers, in practice public folklorists work with a broad spectrum of social and cultural groups connected in various kinds of ways. Public folklore embodies the two notions of community incorporated in heritage processes identified by Groth (2015, 78): ‘One accepts the political necessity of quasi-essentialization and calls for collective rights to cultural heritage and property; the other, in a relational approach to cultural heritage, stresses social dynamics and relations of cultural heritage rather than its objects’.

Public folklorists, activist and otherwise, should know – and participate in – critical heritage scholarship that considers the relationships of local communities and heritage programmes to structures of power. While public folklore policy and programmes are highly decentralised in the US, public folklorists could more broadly engage in critical examination of governmentality and power structures within and among the multiple levels in which they operate.

Both public folklore and critical heritage theory have explored how heritage initiatives transform the form, content and performance contexts of traditions. Public folklore’s critically reflexive examinations about cultural interventions, and case studies from both fields about the local impact of heritage programmes, provide a strong foundation for dialogue and joint research projects about the transformation of traditions. Studies of the impact of ICH safeguarding on traditions and communities are proliferating at a rapid pace, warranting close attention by public folklorists. Folklorists trained in the US and writing about ICH in other countries analyse these transformations within the grounds of discourse of ICH while overlooking US public folklore scholarship about intervention. Hafstein (2015, 148, 149), providing a ‘critical assessment’ of the fine grained empirical studies by folklorists in UNESCO on the Ground, recognises negative impacts of ICH intervention that other ICH scholars note while also trenchantly identifying three kinds of impacts when ‘safeguarding’ is ‘successful’:

When successful, safeguarding (1) reforms the relationship of subjects with their own practices (through sentiments such as ‘pride’), (2) reforms the practices (orienting them through display through various conventional heritage genres) and ultimately (3) reforms the relationship of the practicing subjects with themselves (through social institutions of heritage that formalize previously informal relations and centralize previously dispersed powers).

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, trained also as a folklorist but writing as a pioneering critical heritage scholar, decisively sparked a paradigm shift in heritage studies through her theorisation of heritage as metacultural, involving the creation of new cultural products as a ‘mode of cultural production that has recourse to the past’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 150), and frequently involving the display orientation to which Hafstein refers. As Whisnant (1988) turned the attention of folklorists to their impact upon traditions and communities, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was instrumental in shaping current perspectives of heritage scholars about heritage as new and transformed cultural products.¹²

The extensive critical heritage scholarship on cultural tourism’s impacts on communities, as well as the commoditisation of culture, offers important critiques and insights that could be applied to public folklore programmes involved with economic development, community revitalisation and tourism. Paradoxically, while critics of neoliberalism may view the US as its epicentre, expectations of cultural tourism and related corporate involvement associated with public folklore are relatively limited. In other countries, the designation of cultural practices and expressions as ICH is eagerly sought for economic benefits that would hopefully accompany international prestige and recognition (see e.g. Ballacchino 2013; Fournier 2013; Leblon 2013). According to Noyes (2015, 170), ‘local authorities or activists frequently pitch UNESCO as a deux ex machina that will rescue the regional economy. Practitioners hold the more immediate hope that UNESCO will raise their income’. However, according to Noyes (2015, 170), these ‘expectations are routinely disappointed’.

Critical heritage studies of tourism, economic development and other topics embody the approaches of multiple disciplines of the social sciences. As Jacobs (2014, 290) highlights, heritage studies scholarship is ‘open and broad enough to bring together the inheritances of the classical scholarly disciplines that deal with the past, heritage and actors involved’, and ‘allows … interesting methodologies and applied sciences’ to be combined. Citing Roderick Lawrence, he views heritage studies as engaging transdisciplinarity, which ‘tackles complexity and heterogeneity, challenges knowledge fragmentation, and accepts local contexts’ (Jacobs 2014, 290). Folklore studies, both academic and public, can benefit from greater transdisciplinary engagement, which could diminish stigmatisation and increase awareness of its scholarship by other disciplines.

Dialogically speaking, public folklorists and critical heritage scholars need to engage with each other much more frequently in academic discourse and joint initiatives. Publications such as this represent a positive step towards greater interactions. Unfortunately, the failure of the US government to ratify the 2003 Convention is a major constraining force, limiting professional engagement of US public folklorists with heritage scholars and practitioners based in other countries. Although the US is represented at international ICH meetings by national and federal folklife programmes, there is an absence of broad-based engagement in such ICH activities by US public folklorists who work at state and local levels.

Many public folklorists who are aware of the 2003 Convention would like to see it ratified by the US Government, but apparently reluctance, or a lack of interest by senior State Department officials and opposition to international treaties in US Congress, may make any movement towards ratification impossible. Ratification of the 2003 Convention could provide an infusion of funds for field research, help to raise awareness of the importance of ICH traditions, and broadly engage public folklorists in the vibrant global conversation about safeguarding ICH. Nonetheless, at present, the robust infrastructure of public folklore programmes creatively engages the safeguarding of traditions in a decentralised, highly grounded manner distinguished by fruitful collaborations with communities and successful modes of presenting traditions. As such, if ratification is ever achieved, implementation of the 2003 Convention would need to respect the highly decentralised character of ICH support structures already in place, with federal agencies playing a supportive and coordinative role. These agencies would need to maintain the high degree of autonomy for state and local programmes and serve to bring these programmes into global ICH policy and programming discourse.

Regardless of whether or not the US ratifies the 2003 Convention, initiatives should be undertaken to create greater interaction among US public folklorists and heritage scholars and practitioners from other countries. This could include professional exchanges to observe and participate in public folklore and ICH programmes, joint panels and workshops at professional conferences, such as the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) and the American Folklore Society (AFS), reciprocal technical assistance and workshops for community-based programmes and publications about both practice and theory. We have much to learn from each other, with substantial mutual opportunities and benefits to be brought about when US public folklore theory and practice enters global ICH networks and discourse.

Notes on contributor

Robert Baron is the founding director of the Folk Arts Program of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). Baron also directs the Music Program at NYSCA and is on the faculty of the Master’s Program in Cultural Sustainability at Goucher College. He has also served as folklore administrator of the National Endowment for the Humanities, senior research Specialist in the Education Division of the Brooklyn Museum, a fulbright senior specialist in Finland and the Philippines, a Smithsonian Museum Practice Fellow and Non-Resident Fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African-American Research at Harvard University. He received the Benjamin A. Botkin award for significant lifetime achievement in public folklore from the American Folklore Society. Baron’s research interests include public folklore, cultural policy, the history of folklore studies, creolization and museum studies. His publications include Public Folklore, edited with Nick Spitzer; Creolization as Cultural Creativity, edited with Ana Cara, and articles in Curator, Journal of American Folklore, New York Folklore, Western Folklore and the Journal of Folklore Research. Baron holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvaniaurse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Pertti Antonnen for starting me on the path towards relating public folklore to heritage studies and Michelle Stefano along with the anonymous reviewers for incisive critical readings of this article. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Helsinki in 2012, 2013 Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore, 2013 annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, 2014 Intangible Cultural Heritage: An International Dialogue gathering of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Safeguarding and Representing Traditional Arts as Intangible Cultural Heritage: East Asian and American Perspectives conference at Honghe University in 2014 and at East China Normal University in 2015.

Notes

1. Some folklorists who practice folklore in non-academic contexts continue to self-identify as ‘applied folklorists’. They now see their work as entailing collaboration with communities. In a 1999 issue of the Journal of Applied Folklore, ‘Notes from the Editors’, David Shuldiner and Jessica Payne, acknowledge the ‘contribution of public folklorists’ to the ‘growing legitimation of applied folklore’, which includes ‘collaborating with, rather than simply “on behalf of” community members’ (1999, 2).

2. See Mary Hufford’s article in this issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies for a consideration of the application of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of dialogism for community-based fieldwork. Merleau-Ponty conceptualises how dialogue creates a common ground which Hufford sees as undermining ‘the ideal of an “objectivity” that strictly separates subject from object’.

3. See http://www.survivortosurvivorstories.com/#!surviving-katrina-and-rita-in-houston/cmbo

4. see http://www.placematters.net/node/13

5. see http://www.cityofmemory.org/map/index.php

6. see N’Diaye 1997; http://www.nyfolklore.org/progs/educ/esc08.html; http://artscouncil.ky.gov/Opportunities/CommScholars.htm.

7. This report was compiled and published by State Arts Agencies Folk Arts Peer Group Planning Committee in association with the American Folklore Society, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, and the NEA Folk and Traditional Arts Program; see AFS 2011.

8. Publore is the most accessible and frequently updated resource for participating in discourse with the public folklore field and learning about its current activities. Heritage scholars and practitioners can join Publore at https://list.unm.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=PUBLORE&A=1

9. See http://www.arts.ny.gov/public/about/mission_values.htm

10. See http://ofn.uoregon.edu/hooks-yarn-and-bars/

11. See http://www.brooklynartscouncil.org/documents/1880.

12. It is striking that US trained academic folklorists writing about critical heritage studies elide public folklore scholarship, which is about concerns similar to critical heritage studies scholarship about ICH. While Kirshenblatt-Gimblett famously decried over a quarter century ago the ‘mistaken dichotomies’ between applied and academic folklore (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1988) 2007), and public folklore is well integrated within most academic programmes and the American Folklore Society, nearly all American academic folklorists writing about ICH reference and address their work entirely within the ICH discourse.