Concept Work: Constructing Frameworks for Folklore Studies

Folklorists study the richness of customary forms of cultural expression and the everyday social worlds in which all people interact and communicate. They use a range of methods―literary, ethnographic, philological, visual, historical, comparative, artifactual―to engage with and learn from diverse peoples, but they also rely on a stock of key concepts that have grown up within their discipline, including tradition, performance, genre, text, context, community, and identity. But folklorists and their interlocutors live in an ever-changing world in which making sense of new social dynamics requires additional foundational concepts.

In Concept Work, folklorist and ethnologist Jason Baird Jackson illustrates scholarly concept work in folklore studies through fresh accounts of four concepts that are significant to the field but not yet richly explored by its practitioners―colonization, cultural heritage, cultural appropriation, and the place of folklore and folklore studies within the capitalist world system. Jackson closes the volume with a reflection on teaching and doing concept work with his students-turned-colleagues.

Concept Work is an essential introduction to the current work being done within folklore studies for teachers and students alike.

Jason Baird Jackson is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community and Yuchi Folklore: Cultural Expression in a Southeastern Native American Community and the editor of Material Vernaculars: Objects, Images, and Their Social Worlds. A former museum curator and director, he has curated more than twenty exhibitions, and he remains active in museum anthropology and museum-based folklore studies.