Center for Folklore Studies

Past Activities

Ethnicity, Migration, and Heritage Interdisciplinary Seminar

Seminar Rationale

A large number of ethnic communities operate institutions, which we generally refer to as "heritage schools." The term "heritage schools" refers to community-based initiatives requiring grass-root support and extended volunteer services for their function. They usually involve after-school and weekend classes for the purpose of instructing their children in various aspects of their native cultures: language, religion, dance, food ways, and other forms of expression and knowledge. Heritage schools are a primary means by which immigrant communities institutionalize themselves as ethnic groups for both outsiders and for their children born in the United States. Other forms of preservation include compilation of ethnic histories and the production of videos documenting particular folk practices (storytelling, making of folk art, music, dance, and so forth). We refer to these native forms of cultural expression, social practice and knowledge as "native systems of knowledge."

Heritage schools and native systems of knowledge contribute to urban cultural diversity in Ohio and the nation in general, through their participation in festivals, exhibits, and folk performances among other milieux. Yet they have been a neglected resource in fully documenting urban cultural richness. Besides the seminal initiative "The Ethnic Heritage and Language Schools Project," sponsored by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to describe several ethnic language schools in the nation (see Bradunas, 1988), there has been no other systematic research effort to document the nature of preservation programs and the manner by which heritage preservation contributes to the urban cultural fabric. One of the most important findings of the project was that these schools practice the conscious transmission of culture from one generation to the next, organizing "cultural transmission around specific regular, and formal activities" (Bradunas, 1999:5). This finding is not surprising, but it is provides the basis for a research question. Although we might hypothesize that these programs share formats and methods of cultural transmission in their shared response to the contemporary United States’ context, we do not know whether this is the case. Further, we do know that the groups have very different histories and face very different problems (especially in their different relationships to the "homeland") in conceptualizing their ethnicity.

Studies of ethnicity, diversity, and migration have overlooked heritage schools because, instead of providing raw cultural material for scholarship and social intervention, they create their own systematic knowledge and have their own agendas. Thus, the definition of authentic culture in a heritage school often responds to new criteria and draws on new cultural forms and content. Therefore, this project focuses on these inventions as key to understanding how groups conceptualize both their American-ness and their foreignness. The production of cultural identity is part of a group’s self- positioning in political, economic, and religious networks both in the U.S. and internationally. We understand the heritage schools as a form of coalition building in new sites that will help us to understand the complex interactions of globalization and localization in both social networks and cultural identities.

This seminar proposal grew out of several other research initiatives on heritage study at Ohio State University. We have discovered several areas of shared interest, and the seminar will provide an opportunity to begin what we intend to be an ongoing conversation across disciplines and area studies. The interdisciplinary seminar will bring together colleagues whose interests intersect but whose disciplinary affiliations prevent much interaction and conversation. In addition, the seminar will provide an interdisciplinary framework for graduate students working in this area.