Using ethnography to ease the transition from cynical to jaded.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin- scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Despite the fact that we had class tonight, I am not writing specifically to fulfill class requirements. In fact, the fact that it was to be reflective of class topics came a something of a surprise to me. But just as well, this semester is one long class to me anyway. And this is a good thing.

You know my take on tourism. Jaded though it us, it is bolstered by Dean MacCannell's "The tourist" or rather, what Christie has read of it to me. It is built on observations of my own that I made while pondering the question "why are so many people interested in being Irish". This idea of using tourism as a way to bolster our place in the faceless machine of capitalism works because it dovetails nicely with the one impugnable concept of capitalism: That Capitalism exists to propagate capitalism. Just as Tim's* terrible cover band exists to allow beautiful but small minded women to meet equally vapid future procreation partners who will marry in tradition bound and ultimately tacky weddings to have a few pointless children before divorcing in a fit of pseudo-autonomy that exists as a manifestation of the frustration caused by knowing that at some level they are all "neo's" who took the blue pill instead of the red one.

We as folklorists (applied especially but ultimately all of us) fill an insidious role in all this, we codify authenticity, we manufacture it. We validity of our work is due to the breadth and scope of authenticity that we demand of our areas of study. More than sociologist anthropologists and especially historians, we seek out and demand the "real deal" and at the risk of aggrandizing the discipline, we define "historic reality". When the "tourist" rejects Amish life in favor of modernity, it is we who have convinced him that he has seen all that there is to see. I've joked with Christie that we could "sell" authenticity stamps like some sort of Zagut's scale for historic sites, but indeed that is what we do. Isn't a folklife festival basically an exercise in historic re-creationism?

A non-descript bearded man, obviously a UNC professor, brought up this point at the "Folklore: What is it good for?" panel. He said that—though we don't intend to—we elevate those we choose to study. We give them agency, which also means commercial value; or at least the ability to enter the marketplace. It is a short trip from commodity to exploitation and we must —as he said "be careful not to serve them up on a silver platter ". In the larger capitalist scheme of things, this may be our actual value to "big brother".

*I should apologize to Tim for bestowing ownership of that band on him. I can see a bevy of solid reasons to be in that band, it's just that the music isn't one of them.

At this point I suppose I need to apologize to Mackenzi Johnson, who — as I began the nascent phase of this line of thinking last year— struck me as the only one who was both hip and close enough at the time to lay this doctrine on. In reality, the girl has already demonstrated heroism in the battle for day to day existence and has no need for my revelations nor my need to drag anyone else outside the cave with my semi-enlightened self.

um, aristocrats... again.

In Tim Evans' Folk Art class Christie Burns reviewed a book called Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives by Margaret Morton and Diana Balmori, —A great book about the assemblages of homeless people in lower Manhattan, written by a photographer (Morton) and an architect (Balmori). "The Aristocrats" is a film by Penn Gillette and Paul Provensa, who are, respectively, a magician and a stand-up comedian. True, only a comedian (or a magician who works on the fringes of professional stand-up) would be inside enough to elicit and reveal an emic viewpoint, and we have certainly often looked outside of our discipline for scholarship (usually in anthropology). But what bothers me is this: Having spent a month in Indiana officially searching for folklore using the wrong definition, it's terribly troubling to see something this well done by "untrained outsiders"*. Vulgar as it is, it is a 90 examination of a classic folk tradition. Because of its obscenity, "The Aristocrats" has remained a form of oral transmission. It has remained outside of the homogenizing deluge of television, nearly free of it.

Dundes says** "everyone is folk" and that "folklore is everywhere", but many of those things today exist well outside mainstream America. Today finding folklore may mean getting outside of wide bright beam of televised culture, scouring the dark places in our cities, our towns and ourselves to find the gritty places where folklore lives. This is where we find the things that reveal the larger truths about our culture and our society.

Besides, do we really need another book about chairs?****

*Untrained in the stoic ways of modern ethnography, they're still wicked smart.
**Dundes said a lot of things.
***David Whisnant's "All that is native and fine", read the part about Morris Dancing (in chapter 3). Yeah, we really suck sometimes.
****Actually, MoJo's book is a really good example of what I'm talking about.