Public folklore work has been part of our field since its inception, and in the last 50 years or so public-oriented folklorists have grown to be half of the membership of the American Folklore Society, as they have made new homes for their work across the spectrum of government agencies and the nonprofit world. Somewhat more recently—and in a way that ought (finally) to end the supposed division of our field into academic and public-sector camps—public folklorists have been making professional homes in universities, where they are doing culture work based on models of collaboration, expanding our understandings of useful theory and practice in the field, and training students to thrive in a wide variety of professional contexts, all guided by principles of community service and partnership. Culture Work, an admirable set of case studies of contemporary public folklore work in and outside the academy, makes clear the importance of these principles to our field.
Most of Culture Works’s essays are by Wisconsinites, or at least those trained at the University of Wisconsin’s folklore program, and feature examples drawn from Wisconsin communities, cultures, and traditions. This is not at all coincidental, since as co-editors Tim Frandy and B. Marcus Cederström note in their introduction, the orientation toward serving the public good in folklore studies can be seen as one way of articulating what is known as The Wisconsin Idea. In 1905, University of Wisconsin President and native Wisconsinite Charles Van Hise, who is generally credited with this idea though it predates him, expressed it succinctly as follows: “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every home in the state.”
The Wisconsin Idea is a variation on the general theme of applying the benefits of higher education and research to the commonweal that has informed the creation and work of all land-grant universities (including Wisconsin’s) since 1862, when the US Congress passed the Morrill Act. And as I’ve said, The Wisconsin Idea is consonant with The Public Folklore Idea or The Culture Work Idea, since the principle of community service underlies them all. As the editors and several contributors note, successful culture work also involves a reverse version of the idea: knowledge and experience from the people and communities of the state also benefit the university and other state institutions.
Wisconsin is not alone in this respect: a number of other states also have robust folklore-studies networks of people, communities, and institutions across their maps. But it is fair to say, however, that from the start, the mission and activities of the University of Wisconsin’s folklore program have been shaped by a strong sense of service and partnership. Long-time University of Wisconsin folklore faculty members Jim Leary (a native of the state) and Janet Gilmore, both of whom have essays in the volume, appear frequently as mentors for and participants in the case studies it presents. This also is not accidental, since for many years they have been at the center of the community-service ethos that characterizes the research and public collaborations that their program has supported and that Culture Work in great part comprises.
One aside: several of the book’s essays are by authors outside the Wisconsin orbit or examine people, cultures, or institutions from elsewhere—though other Midwestern states are prominently featured. I was curious whether these essays would distract from the admirable local focus of most of the book, but I found on the contrary that they demonstrate that The Wisconsin Idea has successfully been applied outside the state—strengthening the consonance of that idea with the ethos of culture work and folklore studies generally.
Following an introduction by the editors, the book’s thirty-four case-study essays are organized into six sections, each preceded by a brief contextualizing piece from the editors:
Public Folklore, Cultural Equity, and Collaboration: Jim Leary’s contribution traces the course of a long-term working relationship between a folklorist and a musician. Cheryl Schiele describes the scope and impact of the National Endowment for the Arts’ 40-year-old National Heritage Fellows program. David Olawuyi Fakunle’s essay narrates the development and effects of a project focused on the therapeutic benefits of storytelling among at-risk people in Baltimore. Mary Twining Baird provides a history of her long-term relationship with people and artists of South Carolina’s Sea Islands. Claire Schmidt tells the story of the occupational culture of corrections work in Wisconsin through the lens of her family’s long-time participation in that work. Carmen Beaudoin Bombardier, Kim Chase, Robert Desrosiers, Andy Kolovos, and Lisa Ornstein offer an essay on their group project to revitalize Franco-American community singing in Vermont’s Champlain Valley.
Beyond Preservation and Conservation: Nicole Saylor of the American Folklife Center, trained in Wisconsin, outlines the opportunities and challenges of archiving and making available ethnographic records of our nation’s cultural heritage. Terri Van Orman follows with an essay that attends to many of the same considerations, but at a smaller scale: that of an active, modestly sized Wisconsin nonprofit organization. Nathan D. Gibson and Anna Rue tell the story of the making, survival, and discovery of an important collection of informal audio recordings of Wisconsin Norwegian-American old-time music-making, and of the preservation and contextualizing work that has been done to make it accessible. Robert Teske recounts his professional roles in several Wisconsin cultural institutions and the ways in which those in positions of leadership can powerfully shape cultural programming. Janet C. Gilmore reflects on the maritime field and documentary work she accomplished over a career, and on the ways past projects can inform future ones. Diana Baird N’Diaye narrates the history, presentational practices, and community effects of the Smithsonian Institution’s annual Folklife Festival, now in its sixth decade.
Amplifying Local Voices: Thomas A. DuBois and volume co-editor B. Marcus Cederström begin this section by detailing a long-term partnership they and a group of musicians and others from Upper Midwest Finnish communities have undertaken to revitalize a body of songs of the Finnish migration to the region. Richard March introduces Down Home Dairyland, the Wisconsin rural music radio program he has produced for many decades. Lisa L. Higgins tells the story of the state public folklore program in Missouri, of which she’s been a part for some twenty years. Jared L. Schmidt traces a history of the creation and museum interpretation of a pair of women’s pumps enhanced by the artwork of a traditional Wisconsin Norwegian rosemaler. Hilary-Joy Virtanen explains and interprets the presentation of workers’ worldviews in the musical repertoire of Wisconsin performer Oren Tikkanen.
Creating Community: Anne Pryor recounts her documentation of the culture of her Madison, Wisconsin, curling community, undertaken with an eye toward identity-building within that group. Mirva Johnson portrays the architectural restoration and maintenance efforts carried out by an outdoor museum in Oulu, Wisconsin, as part of a larger effort to create a community-directed center for the area’s cultural expressions and landscape. Sallie Anna Steiner describes the building of an emergent community of Scandinavian-descended communities in northern Minnesota. Rhonda R. Dass offers a study of the ways in which an arts community on Minnesota’s Iron Range has built and communicated its identity, in a continual balancing of local understandings of heritage and tourist appeal. Yvonne R. Lockwood traces the development and change of a community-based maritime food festival in Michigan’s Thumb region. Ayako Yoshimura makes a case for considering grocery stores serving ethnic or nationality communities as sites for cultural understanding, and outlines a research methodology for doing so.
Engaging With the Past: Troy Reeves’s essay examines the inreach and outreach dimensions of several Wisconsin oral history projects, and the ways in which the execution of such projects shapes our understanding. Mark L. Louden provides a history of scholars’ work to describe, and communicate accurate information about, Pennsylvania German culture and folklife in contrast to the popular representation of the area and culture. Rebecca J. Keyel’s essay characterizes scholarly work in archives as a form of craft knowledge and examines the relationships between research and craft. Jennifer Gipson’s study of a hoax concerning a supposedly petrified French voyageur opens doors into an understanding of the uses of history in both maintaining and challenging cultural powers of definition and significance. Guha Shankar describes Alan Lomax’s work in film documentation, and adds a case study on his and James Leary’s use of some of these materials in an Upper Midwest music-focused project. Colin Gioia Connors closes this section by recounting his project to produce an e-book representing Icelandic sagas.
Creating the Future: Musician and scholar Bucky Halker outlines the processes through which he identifies, shapes, and presents labor songs to contemporary audiences. Jamie Yuenger’s case study of StoryKeep, the business she founded to create private family folklore podcasts and film products for families, calls into question the folklore studies field’s prejudice against for-profit options for folklorists. Based on his work on the “heritage languages” of immigrant groups for the Wisconsin Languages Project, Joseph Salmons outlines some of the dialect features that mark a body of jokes told among (and about) Norwegian communities in the state. Hilary Morgan V. Leathem’s essay provides a capsule history of the complicated involvements of ethnographers in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a description of a current community effort to tell the stories of Oaxaca culture from within. Christine Garlough traces her efforts to create a digital archive of homemade signage from the 2017 Women’s March as a documentation of this event intended to advance future understanding.
A list of works cited, and brief biographies of the contributors, close the volume.
Even from these brief descriptions, the reader will have noticed a few recurring themes that connect these essays—which I want to abstract here as articulations of at least four of the elements that need to be in place, or created, for a body of effective culture work to be done. None of these, broadly speaking, is news to folklorists, but at this time in the development of our field it is particularly important for those principles to again be brought forward in this way.
The first of these, directly dealt with in several of the book’s essays, are the paired spirits of community service and collaboration. The effective culture or folklore work of today and tomorrow needs to be designed, led, carried out, and evaluated not just by culture workers or folklorists but also by members of the communities whose lives, places, occupations, traditions, and art are at the center of the work, in a spirit of mutual service and partnership. This orientation requires the negotiation of numerous complexities of identity, authority, and perspective, but it is more than worth the effort. Lasting work also requires the development over time of a collaborative network of colleagues and partners from many walks of life and places of work throughout an area, each of whom can provide her or his particular contributions to the greater whole.
The next two of these elements—a relatively modest geographical spread, combined with a long timeframe of engagement, leading toward deeper knowledge, familiarity, and mutual trust—remain critical to the success of culture and folklore work. The Wisconsin focus of most of Culture Work’s case studies, and the Wisconsin backgrounds of most of its authors, reinforce the principle that deep understanding requires long and intense involvement in partnership with people and communities in a comparatively small space.
The last of these elements is a robust ecology of institutions. Folklorists sometimes shy away from consideration of the histories and roles of institutions, and—possibly for connected reasons—our field remains comparatively under-institutionalized. But lasting culture work requires institutions of all kinds and at all levels—local organizations, archives and libraries, museums, publishers, media, nonprofit organizations, universities—to provide the means through which the work of people and communities of all sorts can be realized, amplified, and preserved. Places that have built such institutions can accomplish much and be sustained; those without them often fall short or do not last long. As a whole, Culture Work makes clear the ways such a community of people and institutions across Wisconsin have worked together over many years for the common good. Finally, this last element suggests the importance of strengthening institutions, and of encouraging the development of institution-building skills among ourselves and our partners, to maintain a healthy field—and a healthy culture and society.
I very highly recommend Culture Work for a number of uses. The book as a whole is an admirable summing-up of the current state of practice in our field, and can serve as a foundational work for courses on that topic or in the application of theory to practice. Particular essays or groups of essays (e.g., on music, material traditions, archives, museums, or the Upper Midwest generally) can be useful case-study elements of syllabi for several kinds of courses. Of course, it stands as a testament to the body of locally focused work that has been created over many years by the university’s folklore program and its collaborators across the state and region. As time goes on and the field continues to develop, Culture Work will come to be a valuable portrait and assessment of the state of the field at this moment. Finally, through its almost three dozen concrete examples, Culture Work makes an articulate contribution to the ongoing project of evidencing, in emphatic and broadly understandable terms, what the humanities and humanistic social sciences are (good) for.
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[Review length: 2229 words • Review posted on February 27, 2023]