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Folklore Institute refers to the folklore studies program of Indiana University Bloomington (USA). The Folklore Institute, together with the Ethnomusicology Institute, constitute the larger Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. The Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology is a unit of the College of Arts and Sciences. [1]
Prior to the establishment (c. 2000) of the parallel Ethnomusicology Institute and the renaming of the paired units as The Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, the name "Folklore Institute" served as the overarching designation for what was already a full-fledged academic department. This unit had roots going back to the 1940s and was fully established in 1962. [2] [3] After the name change to Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, the designation Folklore Institute referred to the department's folklore faculty, the folklore graduate students that they supervised, and the folklore studies-specific teaching, research, and outreach projects that the department's folklorists pursued. [4] Many generations of professional folklorists (and some ethnomusicologists) earned their degrees (B.A., M.A., and/or Ph.D.) from the unit when it was known as the Folklore Institute and in informal discourse the name remains synonymous with the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology.
Prominent scholars in the history of the Folklore Institute include the following distinguished rank faculty: Stith Thompson, Richard M. Dorson, Linda Dégh, Henry Glassie, Richard Bauman, Beverly J. Stoeltje, and Hasan M. El-Shamy. [5]
Over its history, the Folklore Institute has trained very large number of professional folklorists. A small sample of its prominent alumni includes: Alan Dundes, Michael Owen Jones, Dorthy Noyes, Bill Ivy, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Sabina Magliocco, Regina Bendix, Ronald L. Baker, Simon J. Bronner, Jan Harold Brunvand, Dan Ben-Amos, and Edward D. Ives.
Like the Ethnomusicology Institute, the Folklore Institute is led by a Director. One of these two Directors typically also serves as Chair of the department as a whole. Among the long-term projects of the Folklore Institute are Traditional Arts Indiana (a statewide public folklore agency) and the Journal of Folklore Research . The Folklore Institute has long organized focused conferences in folklore studies and neighboring fields. Some of these were later published by the institute or in partnership with other publishers. [6] [7]
Folklore is the whole of oral traditions shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture. This includes tales, myths, legends, proverbs, poems, jokes, and other oral traditions. They include material culture, such as traditional building styles common to the group.
Folklore studies is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. It became established as a field across both Europe and North America, coordinating with Volkskunde (German), folkeminner (Norwegian), and folkminnen (Swedish), among others.
The American Folklore Society (AFS) is the United States (US)-based professional association for folklorists, with members from the US, Canada, and around the world, which aims to encourage research, aid in disseminating that research, promote the responsible application of that research, publish various forms of publications, advocate for the continued study and teaching of folklore, etc. The Society is based at Indiana University and has an annual meeting every October. The Society's quarterly publication is the Journal of American Folklore. The current president is Marilyn White.
Richard Mercer Dorson was an American folklorist, professor, and director of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Dorson has been called the "father of American folklore" and "the dominant force in the study of folklore".
Stith Thompson was an American folklorist: he has been described as "America's most important folklorist".
Henry Glassie College Professor Emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington, has done fieldwork on five continents and written books on the full range of folkloristic interest, from drama, song, and story to craft, art, and architecture. Three of his books -- Passing the Time in Ballymenone, The Spirit of Folk Art, and Turkish Traditional Art Today -- were named among the "Notable Books of the Year" by The New York Times. Glassie has won many awards for his work, including the Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for a distinguished career of humanistic scholarship. A film on his work, directed by Pat Collins and titled Henry Glassie: Field Work, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019.
The Journal of Folklore Research: An International Journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology is a triannual peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on folklore, folklife, and ethnomusicology. It was established in 1942 and is published by Indiana University Press.
Richard Bauman is a folklorist and anthropologist, now retired from Indiana University Bloomington. He is Distinguished Professor emeritus of Folklore, of Anthropology, and of Communication and Culture. Before coming to IU in 1985, he was the Director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas and a faculty member in the UT Department of Anthropology. Just before retiring from Indiana, he was chair of the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, as well as an important member of the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Communication and Culture.
Pravina Shukla is an American folklorist who is Provost Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington and serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, Department of American Studies, the Dhar India Studies Program, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is also a consulting curator at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures.
Jason Baird Jackson is an American anthropologst who is Professor of Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. He is "an advocate of open access issues and works for scholarly communications and scholarly publishing projects." At IUB, he has served as Chair of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and as Director of the Folklore Institute. According to the Journal of American Folklore, "Jason Baird Jackson establishes himself as one of the foremost scholars in American Indian studies today."
John Holmes McDowell is a Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. He also serves as Director of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT) headquartered at Indiana University. Broadly speaking his work is centered on performance and communication as well as the interplay of creativity and tradition. Geographically most of his fieldwork has been in Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Ghana. His interests include Speech play and verbal art; the corrido of Greater Mexico; music, myth, and cosmology in the Andes; ecoperformativity; commemoration; folklorization; ethnopoetics; Latin America; the United States.
Sandra Stahl Dolby aka Sandra K. D. Stahl is a professor in Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and the American Studies Program.
Beverly J. Stoeltje is a professor in both the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University (Bloomington). She also serves as Affiliated Faculty in African Studies, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and at the Russian-East European Institute.
Hasan M. El-Shamy is a professor of folklore (folkloristics) in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the African Studies Program at Indiana University. He received a B.A. with honors in Arabic and Islamic studies from Ain-Shams University in Cairo, Egypt in 1959. He then completed an intensive graduate program in psychology and education from Ain-Shams (Heliopolis) University in 1959–1960. Later he received an M.A. in folklore from Indiana University in 1964, as well as a Ph.D. in folklore with interdisciplinary training in folklore, psychology, and anthropology from Indiana University in 1967. El-Shamy is retired and professor emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington.
Dan Ben-Amos was an Israeli-American folklorist and academic who worked as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he held the Graduate Program Chair for the Department of Folklore and Folklife.
Invented traditions are cultural practices that are presented or perceived as traditional, arising from the people starting in the distant past, but which in fact are relatively recent and often even consciously invented by identifiable historical actors. The concept was highlighted in the 1983 book The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Hobsbawm's introduction argues that many "traditions" which "appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented." This "invention" is distinguished from "starting" or "initiating" a tradition that does not then claim to be old. The phenomenon is particularly clear in the modern development of the nation and of nationalism, creating a national identity promoting national unity, and legitimising certain institutions or cultural practices.
The Motif-Index of Folk-Literature is a six volume catalogue of motifs, granular elements of folklore, composed by American folklorist Stith Thompson. Often referred to as Thompson's motif-index, the catalogue has been extensively used in folklore studies, where folklorists commonly use it in tandem with the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU), an index used for folktale type analysis.
William Hansen is an American academic who is a professor emeritus of classical studies and folklore at Indiana University Bloomington.
Deborah Kapchan is an American folklorist, writer, translator and ethnographer, specializing in North Africa and its diaspora in Europe. In 2000, Kapchan became a Guggenheim fellow. She has been a Fulbright-Hays recipient twice, and is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. She is professor of Performance Studies at New York University, and the former director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Ellen Stekert is an American academic, folklorist and musician. Stekert is a Professor Emerita of English at the University of Minnesota and a former president of the American Folklore Society.