Center for Folklore Studies

Conference

Culture Archives and the State: Between Nationalism, Socialism, and the Global Market

The Center for Folklore Studies Spring Colloquium

Abstracts

Ahmadzada and Sakata

The Archives of Radio Afghanistan was established in the early 1960s. As an official organ of the premier State media, Radio Afghanistan, and later, Radio-Television Afghanistan, its policies and direction have always been guided, if not determined, by politics. Mr. Ahmadzada will give a brief historical background of the institution from its inception through the various governments including a constitutional monarchy, a socialist and later a communist republic, a government of various Mujahiddin factions, and the infamous Taliban. Lorraine Sakata will discuss current efforts to preserve and make internationally accessible, the rich musical and historical tapes in the Archives.

Branda

My paper will focus on the Archive of Folklore in Cluj (situated in Transylvania, western Romania), founded in the interwar period (1930) by Ion Muslea. I will concentrate on the period between 1949 and 1989, decades of deep ideological pressure and control. I am going to analyze the strategies adopted by the totalitarian state in order to impose certain research topics as well as the particular application of ideological censorship to this field. The paper also focuses on the strategies of survival the researchers adopted in such conditions. First of all, I will focus on the period 1949-1964, with its specific difficulties, then 1964-1989, explaining such a split approach.

Chatterji

The paper examines the relationship between history, folklore and the constitution of national identity viewed from a location in one region - Bengal. In the first section I discuss the significance of folklore as a historical source for modern Bengali intellectuals and its role in constituting Bengal's national culture. In the second section I examine some of the controversies around the texts whose 'discovery' in the early decades of the 20th century continues to trouble the notion of a linear and progressive history that is associated with the development of a national literature out of folklore. I conclude by considering some of the ways in which the folklore archive may address its subjects. I suggest that in India as in most other parts of the world, contemporary folk culture has been shaped by the practices of folklorists and it is no longer possible to study practices without locating them within self-reflexive circuits of knowledge and power.

Gao

I’ll talk about the relationship between Chinese intellectual and political elites and common people, ideological sphere and everyday life, based on a brief narration of two transitions of everyday life and cultural survivals in China: one is the modern transition of the Chinese traditional everyday life which was narrowed into the conception of folklore (1840-1950), and then left as survivals after the socialist purification of “outdated” folklore (1950-1976); another is the postmodern transition of the survivals which was revived as the folklore of peasants and then reinvented into everyday life as public(since 1976). My main data are from the history of Chinese traditional festivals from disappearing as degenerative cultural survivals to re-appearing as intangible heritage.

Harvilahti

My intention is, to begin with, to give an idea about the ideological background of Romanticism as an impetus for collecting of folklore materials at the beginning of the 19th Century. The romantic trends that spread throughout Europe began to be felt more and more strongly in Finland too. At that time Finland was an autonomous grand duchy under the Russian tsar (from 1809). Romanticism arose a need for recreating or reconstructing mythical past, poetic landscapes of golden age. In the latter half of the 19 Century the romantic, nationalistically inspired movement aimed mostly (as in the case of Finland) at supporting the nation-state status.

The organized collection of folklore began in the first half of the 19th century. The major milestone in the history of collecting and protecting the Finnish traditional heritage was the founding of the Finnish Literature Society in 1831 by members of educated circles. Elias Lönnrot (the Society's first secretary) compiled the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, on the basis of traditional folk poetry. The first edition appeared in 1835, the second and greatly enlarged edition in 1849. Lönnrot also edited lyric poetry, proverbs, riddles and spells for publication. The poems and charms in Kalevala meter were joined at the end of the century by collections of folktales. In the 1870s researchers already thought that everything of any importance had been collected, and around 1900 the folklore archive of the Finnish Literature Society had already about 200,000 "items" of folklore.

Finland gained its independence, finally, in 1917 during the First World War. In a civil war that followed in 1918, the socialist forces were defeated, and Finland became a parliamentary republic. The large-scale collection work of oral tradition did not, however, end up together with the weakening national romantic current. By 1930 the figure of the archived folklore items already stood at more than 500,000. The wide-scale collection work continued in the new ideological setting in the 1930s by legends, and encompassed gradually all fields of agrarian folklore, proverbs and riddles, the belief tradition, laments. In 1934 the Society's folklore collections were consolidated into a research institution known as the Folklore Archive. The first director, Martti Haavio, organized a major collection campaign on prose genres. Since then, collecting campaigns have been a productive channel for collecting folklore materials. Various target groups have been encouraged to write their responses to the archive. The collecting campaigns have tended to focus on some previously unexplored area of the life of the people. In 1965, a collection of material associated with the events of the 1918 Civil War was organized. This was the beginning of a rapidly growing tendency of gathering material related to oral history and autobiographical research, a collecting method that is still, among other methods, used in our Archives.

Kirin

Besides the archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU), the Ethnographic Museum and the Dept. of Ethnology at the Faculty of Humanities in Zagreb, the Documentation of the Institute of the Ethnology and Folklore Research is the most important archive of folk heritage and popular culture in Croatia from 1947 until present day. My contribution examines the changes of its content, organizational scheme and utilization according to the changes of theoretical approaches, fieldwork methodology, research topics and the notion of fieldwork per se, having in mind the post-socialist, democratic transformation of Croatian society burdened with the aggression, the war induced nationalism and the destructions of material and cultural heritage during the 1990s. The communist’s censorship in the former Yugoslavia does not mean the direct interfering of the ideological apparatus into the research policy of a marginal scientific institution. More important for cultural advocacy was the epistemological confinement and "cognitive control" over the ethnographic documents following the discipline’s immanent shifts and changing priorities – from national, folk or autochthonous to popular, quotidian and mass culture, from ethnographic objects in situ to communicational phenomena in context. As a matter of fact, during 1940s and 1950s, the institute was the state-sponsored ‘shelter’ for nationalist and clerical intellectuals, writers and musicologists, and for a long time it did not even have the three Communist party members to meet that minimum demand for making a party cell. Having broad, humanistic education, Croatian folklorists and ethnologists accepted the Marxist critique of new mythical beliefs, religion and ethnocentrism, but they rejected the notion of specific "proletarian" culture and continued to record all kinds of oral genres, costumes and performances within "the drama of quotidian" with their capacity to signify ethnic, religious or local identities. Just like their colleagues in the Eastern Bloc they remained dead to political rituals, ceremonies, commemorations, entertainment industry and propaganda activities that built up the coherent symbolic universe of the fragmented social body of the federal Yugoslav state.

The fact that the IEF Documentation – besides its abundant resources of 2,000 manuscripts, 3,466 audio-recordings, 1,316 video-recordings and 60,000 photographs – offers next to nothing to those interested in popular subjects of the cultural history of socialism – the development of tourism and consumerism in socialist Croatia, its educational policy, its public/private religious practices, its internal migrations and emigration, gender roles in everyday practices, ethnonationak identifications, political symbolism and rituals – does not reflect some Croatian ethnographic curiosity. It rather bears witness to the fact that the cultural archive produces as much as it records cultural artefacts and that researchers’ self-censorship as well as their "disciplinary blindness" determines the structure of the archivable content in its relation to the past and future. The structure of the IEF archive demonstrates that the socialist period was not the era of big revolutionary changes and social shifts, but a short, disturbing episode in a centuries long life of the small (rural more than urban) communities in constant search for their imagined collective identities, integrity and heritage that can be displayed, performed or celebrated in the new global market of cultural products, often under the roof of the ruined but protected "industrial heritage".

Kolovos

For the past four and a half years the Vermont Folklife Center has been working to digitize parts of our collection for preservation and access purposes. After much hard work, several false starts and a great deal of grief, we have completed a prototype of our Online Digital Archive. The Digital Archive currently provides access to audio, images, transcripts and metadata from a single archival collection. In this presentation Vermont Folklife Center archivist, Andy Kolovos will provide an overview of the project and present the current resource and describe our future directions.

Sánchez-Carretero

In the aftermath of March 11th attacks in Madrid train stations, a group of anthropologists from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) started a project that documents and analyses the public performances of grief conducted after the attacks. In addition to the testimonies, photographs of the shrines and other materials produced by the research team, CSIC and Madrid’s regional train system (RENFE) signed an agreement in 2005 allowing for the donation to the Mourning Archive of materials that citizens have left in the train stations. This project has a twofold goal: First, the organization of these materials that document acts of mourning. The second objective is the analysis of collective responses to the violence, utilizing as sources the most immediate expressions of mourning in the aftermath of the attacks and in-depth interviews with diverse groups involved in the event. In the case of Madrid, the mourning rituals performed at various train stations, together with public anti-terrorist demonstrations, constituted an arena for public debate and political change. In this presentation, I will analyze to what extend spontaneous shrines are creating a space for the intertwinment of religion and political debates; by whom the performance of grief--as a tool for social cohesion—is controlled; and what is the level of the performers' agency to provoke actual change.

Shankar and Kruesi (Friday)

A legislative act of the US Congress established the American Folklife Center in the National Library in 1976. In addition to its extensive collections from the US, the Archive of the American Folklife Center holds ethnographic archival materials from cultures around the world, dating from the late nineteenth century to the present. Through discussion of case studies of Center activities, this presentation will examine some of the challenges confronting the Center in its mission to advocate for traditional cultural expressions and folklore in national and international arenas. Examples range from the Center’s ethnographic documentary surveys of cultural communities to preservation of archival materials and their dissemination, to participation in policy-making fora such as the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Shankar and Kruesi (Saturday)

This workshop will survey a range of challenges that staff in the national folklore archives face in maintaining and preserving ethnographic documentary collections with specific reference to the integral issues of accountability and ethics in disseminating the results of our work to community collaborators and fellow scholars. The workshop presenters will discuss the American Folklife Center’s initiatives in such areas as repatriation of cultural heritage collections to communities of origin and the development of faceted controlled vocabularies and cataloging standards for the benefit of the scholarly community and local archives. These examples raise important concerns in a number of areas especially the promise and problems of emerging digital technologies in documenting, preserving, and safeguarding cultural heritage collections. In the interest of exchanging comparative perspectives on national initiatives in these and other areas, it is requested that workshop participants come prepared to discuss their own experiences with regard to topics ranging from ethics to rights management to processing, preservation, and repatriation.

Stere

My paper is focused on archiving a special type of creations on folkloric pattern, namely those songs created by the communist regime in order to convey ideological messages concerning the collectivization process in Romania. The texts I am talking about are sheltered by the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore in Bucharest. Therefore, I will start presenting the Institute’s scientific activity from its beginning, emphasizing the research and archiving method. Then, I’ll refer to the process of creating and archiving the ideological texts, trying to decipher the creation mechanisms and the contexts in which they were performed and transmitted. These texts contained political concepts and showed the "correct" way of acting, according to the requirements of the new social and political context. Thus, the analyses will allow me to deconstruct a method used by the Romanian communist regime to manipulate the masses towards the socialist transformation of agriculture.

Västrik

Several large-scale collecting campaigns of Estonian folklore were initiated since the end 1880s as a part a Estonian nation-building project. Central folklore archive in Estonia, the Estonian Folklore Archives, was founded in 1927, nine years after the establishment of the Republic of Estonia. All hitherto separate folklore collections were accumulated then into the same depository and a staff of university trained folklorists started systematization of the archive’s holdings. However, certain changes emerged in the collecting agenda after the institutionalization of the state funded archive. In addition to Estonian lore, attention was started to be paid to the folklore of minority groups in Estonia (Russians, Swedes, Gypsies, Jews, Finns, Votians, Latvians, etc.) and neighboring peoples. For example, the first director of the archive Oskar Loorits (1900-1962) amassed in 1920s a bulky corpus of folklore of Livonians residing in Latvia. This change was obviously connected with national policy of recently born republic, claims of influential historic-geographic approach as well as the idea of linguistic and cultural affinity between kindred Finno-Ugric peoples. Separate manuscript series were established in the archive in order to store folklore of "other" ethnic groups; a fact that stresses national bias in archival practices. Initiator of many minor ethnic series in 1930s was a folklorist and linguist, later professor of Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Tartu, Paul Ariste (1905-1990) who also played central role in directing Estonian researchers’ interests towards traditional culture of kindred peoples in Russia. Respective folklore collections were assembled into the archive during the Soviet regime since 1940s when Estonian scholars had possibility to make research trips in Russia. This political change, however, brought along in 1946-1951 censoring of all manuscript collections where all national, anti-Soviet, anti-Russian, anti-Semitic, obscene, etc. materials were removed. Stalinist "cleaning" touched both archive materials collected by Oskar Loorits, who had emigrated to Sweden in 1944, as well as by Paul Ariste, who was imprisoned by Soviet regime in 1945-1946, but continued his work as an university professor soon after.