Excerpt from Folklore Research Around the World: A North American Point of View
By its very nature the study of folklore requires an International breadth of vision. The materials of folklore transcend all barriers of language and culture, traversing continents and spanning oceans in vast leaps and drifting across borders in easy stages. "Cinderella" has circled the globe. The "Shanghai gesture," popular among American schoolboys as a thumb and finger wiggle of derision, roamed all over Europe in the past four centuries. One extended family of water goblins unites the Japanese kappa with the Scottish kelpie. In ballad and legend, romance and epos, the same protean hero performs the same sequence of marvelous exploits. Proverbs and riddles glide from one tongue to another to settle comfortably in a new idiom.
Yet in seeming paradox folklore studies have developed most energetically along national lines. Individual scholars of eminence, such as Archer Taylor and Stith Thompson in the present volume, have pursued their researches in a truly international spirit, following their materials wherever they wander. But the galvanic force behind concerted, subsidized, and firmly organized folklore studies is the force of nationalism. Folklore has served national interests of various sorts: the anxious pride of the small country seeking its cultural identity; the hubris of the racist state, glorying in the solidarity of the Herrenvolk; the aspirations of an emergent nation, hoping to crystallize its myths; the ideology of the socialist state, extolling the creative powers of the anonymous masses. The same impulses that have led to the self-study of national history and national literature have urged the pursuit of national folklore. Today the well-equipped political state possesses its accredited historical records, its approved literary masterpieces, and its classified folklore archives.
The present collection of essays builds a picture of the international folklore scene through successive comments on the status of folklore research in various parts of the world. At the summer 1958 Folklore Institute of America held at Indiana University, the writer arranged a seminar on "International Relations in Folklore," in which visiting and resident faculty members spoke on folklore scholarship in countries and continents of their special interest. This volume is an outgrowth, with additions, of those lectures. The seminar was designed to pool information gathered by American folklorists abroad, and to examine the character of folklore studies as they have developed on the five continents. Thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Senator Fulbright, and the State Department, American professors, including folklore scholars, have enjoyed unprecedented opportunity for foreign residence, study, and travel, in a dispersion recalling the Victorian age of the British Empire. England's colonial administrators, missionaries, and travelers are now matched by America's cultural attaches, visiting professors, and specialist lecturers. While the Victorians produced many volumes of collected texts, made possible by their long tenures overseas, Americans stay usually one or two years abroad, and cannot undertake comparable fieldwork. Furthermore the situation has radically altered in countries where Englishmen were once pioneer collectors, and the American visitor today is confronted by an impressive pile of publications and a mass of archival manuscripts. The problem now is to locate the folklorists, not the folklore.
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