Eleuterio, Susan

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CHALLENGES 89 
see folklorists belittling the other side out of self-defense as they play an 
adult version of "they started it." My vision is for this unproductive spat to 
end. We ought to acknowledge how the various approaches to folklore 
complement and deepen our own areas of expertise so that we can move the 
discipline forward. The focus for the field, after all, should not be on us but 
on the people and the cultural forms on which we base our livelihood. 
Visibility, Functionality and Proactivity : 
Visions for the Future of Public Folklore 
Susan Eleuterio 
My vision for public folklore is that it will become more visible, more 
functional, and less reactive than it's been for the last part of this century. Many 
of public folklore's current activities, such as education at the K- 12 level and for 
teachers at the college level, festivals, and public programs, are only visible to 
their creators and participants. We reinvent the wheel too often in public folklore 
partly because we lack visibility even to ourselves. It's often difficult for us to 
function well in the face of time constraints, lack of funding, and ineffective 
means of communicating both to ourselves and to others. 
The last twenty years has brought us some security in the form of 
nationally based and state level folklorists. But even as we've become a part 
of formal culture (i.e., the government) we have continued to suffer from a 
lack of visibility and from a reactive rather than a proactive approach to our 
dreams, goals, and objectives. In addition, our functionality as a community 
seems limited to me. State level folklorists meet with each other at national 
conferences, but those of us who work as independent contractors suffer 
from a lack of means to get together (except in the corners at the American 
Folklore Society, when we can afford to go to the meetings). Our national 
folklorists, based in Washington, D.C., have made efforts to draw the rest of 
us in-but their efforts and publications do not often seem designed to serve 
the needs of those of us who are not attached to an organization. 
New technologies, such as e-mail and the Internet, have begun to help 
us achieve greater visibility. At the same time, creative use of older 
technology-particularly radio-has raised the public's level of awareness 
of folklore as a field, and folklorists as professionals. For the cost of a local 
phone call, we can reach across the nation-and even outside its borders- 
to raise issues, ask for help, and plan our work together, improving our ability 
to function over time and space. 
My last concern, reactivity, remains a problem for us to solve as the 
calendar turns towards the "twenty hundreds." How often do we allow 
ourselves to take time to plan, reflect on, and evaluate our work? 
90 Folklore Forum 3 1 : 2  (2000) 
Folklorists can become more visible and less reactive if our national, state- 
level, and university-based folklorists spend more time drawing us together 
through regional projects that are based on solid research and planning. This 
needs to be done in alliance with those who do similar work, but don't call it 
folklore. At the same time, all of us need to continue to make use of both 
technology and non-technology based opportunities to improve our ability to 
function in a world that often denies the existence of folklore, at the same time 
that it is being buffeted by its belief systems, attitudes, and traditions. 
Next Steps 
Burt Feirrtrlch 
University of New Hampshire 
Recognizing that visions of the future are always contingent and nearly 
always wrong, I offer one that is utopian. Here is what I would like to see 
the future hold. 
First, the trivial: We need a new name, replacing, "public folklore" with 
some formulation that makes sense to newcomers and does a better job 
rallying people. 
Second, the methodological: We need an articulation of dramatically more 
ambitious principles for the public folklore enterprise. This articulation should 
lead to the development of practices that move the world toward those principles. 
Although public folklore continues to make incremental strides, it seems that 
it-like much work in other realms-it is bound up in a variation of infinite 
regression, spinning out new possibilities from old models, wonying about old 
issues, lapsing inward, and making less difference in the world than it should. 
This, in my view, has to do with a reluctance or inability to engage large issues 
of economics, class, and other structures of power and influence. That, in turn, 
denies the radical potential of our work to influence human relations. And that 
needs to change. 
Third, the consequential: A genuinely progressive public folklore should 
help end the destructive craziness that truncates social bonds, denies creativity, 
keeps people from acting in concert, and constantly gets in the way of 
accomplishing human society. . 


Visibility, Functionality and Proactivity: Visions for the Future of Public Folklore

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Visibility, Functionality and Proactivity: Visions for the Future of Public Folklore

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