Contribution short abstract:

My intention in this paper is to question how we choose whose voices we will present, give them the right to speak, and how archival material (folkloristic and non-folkloristic alike) can help us to eventually develop new feminist-oriented methodological and classification approaches.

Contribution long abstract:

Although research into personal narratives as life stories, oral autobiographies, or stories of personal experience, among others, have been affirmed and have become part of folkloristic genres since the 1960s and 1970s when they were admitted into the folkloristic canon, they still carry a certain research discomfort. The very (non-existent or undeveloped) terminology for (fragments of) life stories in folkloristics points to a gap that stems not only from narrow definitions of the discipline, but also from epistemological and methodological "blind spots" that I will address in my presentation. Namely, although we are somewhat sensitized to the asymmetrical power relations that ethnographic research carries, the focus of folkloristic research, even when we investigate personal stories, is selective – not all stories are worth recording, researching, or publishing, and although we research the so-called "vulnerable groups," we marginalize many others, as evidenced by the archival materials of the Institute of Ethnology and Folkloristics in Zagreb. Contemporary research that has focused on war ethnography, the ethnography of earthquakes and other disasters, migrants, and minority groups, although valuable and important, points to mechanisms for selecting who has the right to the story, which feminist criticism can perhaps deconstruct. Therefore, my intention is to question how we choose whose voices we will present, give them the right to speak, and how archival material (folkloristic and non-folkloristic alike) can help us to eventually develop new feminist-oriented methodological and classification approaches.