Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the collaboration of Soviet folklorists and their informants among the Nenets, an Arctic indigenous community. Focusing on one case, the paper discusses the complex positions of the collaborators and the possibilities that folklore gave them in realizing their aims.

Paper long abstract:

Folklore, conceptualized as the genuine voice of the (working-class) people, was actively collected, recreated, archived and published in the Soviet Union. As an aesthetically and culturally regulated expressive form, oral traditions were equated with written ones, especially when the linguistic and ethnic communities with no written literature were considered. Folklorists not only collected folklore; they also encouraged people to reformulate Soviet folklore focusing on the development of Soviet society.

This paper discusses the role of folklorists and ethnographers in the creation of folklore about Lenin and Stalin among the Nenets, an indigenous people living in the Arctic Russia and Western Siberia. I will especially focus on the collaboration between folklorist Anna Ščerbakova and hunter-politician-artist Tyko Vylka in 1940s and 50s.

I will draw a parallel between state ethnographers and folklorists and discuss the multifaceted and cumbersome positions of the folklorists and their Nenets collaborators in the shifting ideological atmosphere of the Stalinist Russia. These include e.g. the repressions that took place in the institute where Ščerbakova was working together with the forced relocation of Tyko Vylka from his home. Moreover, I will discuss the role of folklore in these complex processes as an ambiguous form of knowledge that at the same time reflects modernity’s Other – the traditional, non-written – and demonstrates its urge to take part in the contemporary discourses. Additionally, I will reflect what kind of public space folklore made possible for the folklorist and her collaborator and how they both manipulated this space for their own purposes.

Paper short abstract:

There's a remarkable long history of Austrian researchers being fascinated by the north and the artic. One of the first was the Austro-Hungarian ethnograpy-enthusiast Rudolf Trebitsch. He visited the „land of his longing“ Greenland in 1906 and brought home rich harvest of knowledge and materials.

Paper long abstract:

Shortly after the death of the Viennese ethnologist Rudolf Trebitsch (1876-1918) more than 500 photographic images came into the collections of the "Museum of Austrian Folklore" in Vienna. In a mixture of adventurousness and scientific curiosity, Trebitsch had devoted himself to various remote European regions where ethnological and primitive archetypes were suspected to exist and supposed to be documented and saved.

Mentioned photographic objects are but one outcome of this expedition to Greenland in 1906 that brought the arctic and the nordic to the capital of the Habsburg Monarchy and its diverse institutions. Others were the (now) oldest preserved Inuit language recordings, noteworthy numerous ethnographic-anthropological objects and especially Trebitschs most famous publication, the book " With the Eskimos in West Greenland“.

The paper reflects on scientific and societal processes and contexts that motivated and favoured Austrian and Central European interests in the arctic and northern territories. It alsoasks about narratives and imaginaries of (arctic) primitivism or „norientalism“ and their connections to Vienna´s Zeitgeist. Trebitschs expedition as well as the objects he brought to Vienna are material and immaterial nodes that connect the nordic fascination of these years with patriotic duties and objectives of the young discipline of ethnography in the Habsburg Monarchy. The paper links the images associated with the north/arctic to later ideologised intellectual and popular trends like the germanic „Nordforschung“, the Viennese School of Mythology or the „World Ice Theory“ that all became important and promoted by the Nazi SS Ancestral Heritage.

Paper short abstract:

American folkloristics practice with its emphasis on public scholarship owes a debt to the overlooked research of African American HBCU scholars who collected narratives of the formerly enslaved in the 1920s, ten years before the New Deal. This paper acknowledges their work and traces its influence.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1920s, African American scholars based at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), most notably Lawrence Reddick and Ophelia Settle Egypt, began to collect personal narratives from Americans who had survived enslavement. These were for the most part unpublished and overlooked but Reddick brought his work to Harry Hopkins, a New Deal advisor to Franklin Roosevelt, who in turn took the idea to Washington. There, Ben Botkin, director of the Federal Writers Project, launched and directed the Slave Narrative project, the most extensive collection of testimonies of the formerly enslaved in American history, edited the multivolume publication series, and published his own anthology, Lay My Burden Down. This was also the first major project of what Botkin termed “applied folklore,” which has led to the distinctive practice of folkloristics in the U.S., later called “public sector folklore” by Archie Green. This paper argues that the reason U.S. folklore practice looks as it does, with fully half the work taking place outside of universities, is because of the forgotten research of these African American scholars working outside the mainstream of predominantly white American research universities, of which many had themselves been alumni before establishing careers at the HBCUs. We must re-examine the politics that kept this work unpublished and unknown. The obscuring of Black scholarship is a major shortcoming of our teaching and training in the history of American folkloristics.

Paper short abstract:

Italian folklore studies, reoriented after WWII on Gramscian or, alternatively, Idealist basis, have been object of a storytelling that until recently neglected the compromission with Fascist regimen, leaving space to an ambiguity that neonationalist growing era requires to be explored and cleared.

Paper long abstract:

Italian folklore studies history as narrated by renowned scholars such as Giuseppe Cocchiara and Alberto M. Cirese, the latter having been the most influent theoretician who by the 60's renovated Italian folklore theory on Gramscian basis, have insisted on the primary roots -idealism and Romantic approach- but both have neglected the impact and the legacy of Fascism regimen, which invested folklore field and folklore scholarship.

Notwithstanding the post WWII democratic turn, the continuity with Fascism institutional legacy prevailed and brought to a simplifying narrative about the regimen itself, overshadowing also the fascistization of folklore studies.

Barely noticed so far, the problem of fascist legacy is now coming to the fore owing to the neo-nationalistic political trends and to the activism of openly neo-fascist forces.

Some attempts to recruit Gramscian oriented scholars, such as Ernesto de Martino or Alberto M. Cirese, re-interpreting their youth' writings have been made by neo-fascist actors, active online and within the international neo-fascist network.

An open, clear revisitation of such a crucial and critical moment of Italian folklore studies, is now fortunately open and the folklore prisma will reveal many facets of the compromission between politics aims, Instutions logic, State expectations, and the scholars' theoretical or methodological options.

Rethinking the Fascist compromission, then, far from being a scandal search or a useless late damnatio memoriae of folklore studies masters, is a way to remind to us that folklore science has always to be alert about the Institutional invitations to be functional, productive, positive, operative and compliant.