Jill Terry Rudy writes in her introduction that this edited volume of William A. “Bert” Wilson’s articles is neither a “greatest hits” compendium nor a comprehensive documentary of a complete career. Although it aims to show the scope of Wilson’s scholarly pursuits, it can only present a few highlights, seventeen essays clustered around three themes: the importance of folklore as a disciplinary construction, Finnish nationalism, and Mormon and family lore. The organization of the book is from general to specific--from folklore as an abstract, academic discipline engaged in dialogue with history, literature, the arts, and the general public, to the very personal application of folklore methods in appreciating individual life experience in one’s own family and religion.
Most of these articles were first presented as lectures to specific audiences before being published in scholarly journals. To contextualize the setting of these articles, each is introduced with an essay from either a former student or a respected colleague, including Richard Bauman, Margaret Brady, Simon Bronner, Henry Glassie, David Hufford, Michael Owen Jones, Elliott Oring, Steve Siporin, David Stanley, Beverly Stoeltje, and Jacqueline Thursby. These introductions not only help orient the student in space and time, but also comment on the significance of the articles in the larger field of folklore scholarship. The tone of these introductions varies, but every author also shares a personal connection with Wilson’s life and works. Although Wilson retired from academia in 1996, many of these essays were published at a later date, showing how he has continued to engage in folklore research even after his retirement from academic and public service.
A biographical sketch written as a personal essay by Wilson’s daughter Denise Jamsa adds to the feeling of personal connection within the work. Shorter sketches on contributors, a full bibliography of Wilson’s published works, and a comprehensive Works Cited and an index conclude the volume.
The Importance of Folklore
The first group of six articles highlights the role folklore as a discipline can play in strengthening curricula in humanities education and in affecting cultural policy. The opening essay, entitled “The Deeper Necessity: Folklore and the Humanities,” was originally given on the twenty-fifth anniversary of UCLA’s Folklore & Mythology program in 1986. Speaking as a member of the Board of Directors for the Utah Arts Council, Wilson argues that art does not just emerge after basic survival needs are met but is actually an integral part of human survival, as it meets our species’ need to create and communicate and therefore should be at the center of public education. Henry Glassie’s introductory essay calls this a message of hope that grants folklorists a leading role in the humanities because of our attention to commonalities of artistic expression beyond a fixed canon.
The hope of the preceding essay is tempered in “Building Bridges: Folklore in the Academy,” in which Wilson warns his colleagues at Indiana University that unless folklorists reach beyond disciplinary boundaries to engage their colleagues in other disciplines, the successes gained for folklore in higher education in the days of disciplinary formation may be lost because administrators do not recognize the breadth of folklore’s contribution. Beverly Stoelje organized the 1995 symposium at Indiana where this paper was first given. She describes in her introduction the many ways that Wilson exemplifies bridge-building through his academic and public service.
Examples of that service are highlighted in “Arts and Cultural Policy,” which combines three short pieces introduced by Elaine Thatcher. Thatcher describes the scenario in the 1980s-1990s culture wars surrounding the National Endowment for the Arts and the subsequent attack in the press on Wilson’s promotion of ordinary, family traditions. In challenging his opponents, Wilson again highlights the artistic impulse of all humanity and calls for an equal valuation of traditions outside the canon. As current director of the Utah Folk Arts Council, Thatcher notes that Wilson’s candor in these essays is a useful example of how public folklorists can write about the value of what they do and so influence broader audiences.
The relationship between folklore and historiography is taken up in the last three essays in this section. “Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall” comes from an address given at a combined meeting of the Folklore Society of Utah and the Utah Historical Society. “The Folk Speak: Everyday Life in Pioneer Oral Narratives” was addressed to another audience of historians studying life in pioneer Utah. “Documenting Folklore” describes Wilson’s commitment to archives as a way of capturing both folkloric texts as well as the social and cultural contexts in which folklore is performed. In each of these essays, Wilson highlights what each discipline can learn from the other: historians demand rigorous documentary evidence of fact in order to interpret the past; folklorists would do well to attend to the details of performance events and record them as accurately as possible. Folklorists pay greater attention to attitudes, values, and beliefs, and can therefore help historians recognize the constructed nature of historical narratives.
Folklore and National Identity
The next four essays describe Wilson’s early research in Finnish nationalism and his continued work on national identity formation among Finnish Americans. Wilson’s dissertation, published in 1976 as Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland, predates Hobsbawm’s and Ranger’s “invention of tradition” thesis. Thomas DuBois notes that Wilson certainly raised eyebrows as he effectively demonstrated how nineteenth-century Finnish romantics, spurred on by Herderian notions of national character, crafted a national epic that could then be used to justify independence from both Sweden and Russia. Richard Bauman introduces “Herder, Folklore, and Romantic Nationalism” by saying that his first encounter with the article in 1973 was for him “a threshold experience, the true source of an extended engagement I have had with Herder ever since. When I read that article, lights went on all over the place.”
Published nearly twenty years after his dissertation, “Sibelius, the Kalevala, and Karelianism” demonstrates Wilson’s continued engagement with the topic by providing an overview of the artistic and social context in which Sibelius was composing his music. The essay was first published in The Sibelius Companion,making it another example of bridge building between disciplines. Dubois remarks that the essay shows the interdisciplinarity and the emotional investment so much a part of folklore scholarship.
Wilson returns to his research on Herder in “Folklore, Nationalism, and the Challenge of the Future,” a speech given in Latvia to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Herder’s birth. After describing some of the negative outcomes of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Wilson advocates both a celebration of diversity and a recognition of our common humanity. The title of the present volume comes from his passionate appeal to look beyond national identities and “remember that in the final analysis, folklore is cut from the marrow of human experience…. Like all good literature it confronts again and again those enduring human problems which have neither time nor place.”
This theme of transcending bounded identities is taken up again in “Finns in a New World: A Folkloristic Perspective,” as Wilson describes in 1993 to an audience of Finnish Americans how efforts to forge links to the Old Country through artifacts, music, and language can generate criticism that they are corrupting older, more authentic forms. Wilson then responds that such criticisms are ideologically motivated by what Simon Bronner identifies in his introduction as “the devolutionary premise” in folklore theory. Wilson argues that Finnish Americans, like all Americans, should be free to see their own traditions, including adaptations of Old World culture in new environments, as valid building blocks of individual and collective identities.
Folklore, Religion, and Who We Are
The final section of seven essays moves from a critique of “Mormon” as a regional, homogenous cultural unit to a self-reflexive inquiry into the role of the folklorists in documenting their own cultural traditions, ending with a research agenda that involves recognizing the value of life experience as passed down in one’s own family novel. Jacqueline Thursby introduces the section by calling attention to Wilson’s “constant emphasis on the importance of the individual regardless of geography or religion.”
In “The Concept of the West and Other Hindrances to the Study of Mormon Folklore,” Wilson describes the historical particulars surrounding a regional notion of Mormonism, and then appeals to Jack Santino’s 1982 article, “Catholic Folklore and Folk Catholicism,” to argue for an expansion of inquiry from regional folk religions to include a more universal religious folklore. His tone is somewhat defensive, though in the next article, “The Study of Mormon Folklore: An Uncertain Mirror for Truth,” Wilson acknowledges his own part in perpetuating stereotypes by describing to a Mormon audience what his view of the religion might be if he had only the evidence gathered from 1971-1988 in the BYU Folklore Archives (now renamed the Wilson Folklore Archives). In his introduction, David Hufford mentions a companion paper, “Folklore, a Mirror for What? Reflections of a Mormon Folklorist” that was published in Western Folklore six years after “The Study of Mormon Folklore.” Both pieces together end by saying that more could be done.
The next three essays move back in time and give us examples of Wilson’s work on Mormon lore from 1980-1987. “On Being Human: The Folklore of Mormon Missionaries” shows how missionary cautionary tales, jargon, and initiation pranks parallel folk group practices of others in high-stress professions. Michael Owen Jones adds that this essay also points to a flaw in the concept of folk group by extending the logic of group to include all of humanity. “The Seriousness of Mormon Humor” describes the role jokes can play in delineating sensitive issues within the culture group. Elliott Oring expands on this to show how the jokes in the essay balance one another to delimit a field of rational behavior. “Freeways, Parking Lots, and Ice Cream Stands: Three Nephites in Contemporary Mormon Culture” gives us a snapshot of Wilson’s exhaustive work over many years proving that Three Nephite stories are not just a rural, regional legend cycle, and showing how legends can function as a source of strength in the lives of individuals. Steve Siporin’s introduction says that work on Three Nephite legends ultimately led Wilson to consider what genres he had failed to collect in his quest for this marked form. Altogether the three articles demonstrate the usefulness and limitations of folkloristic theories of group, genre, and functional analysis when applied to one’s own culture.
“Teach Me All That I Must Do” brings us back to Wilson’s reflexive mode. Given at the Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society in 1998, the essay is Wilson’s attempt to heed his own advice in “Folkore, a Mirror for What?” by outlining a new research agenda for Mormon folklore that includes documenting narratives of everyday service. David Allred interprets this agenda as being in line with current performance-centered folklore analysis because it urges the researcher to look ethnographically at the practice of belief.
The final essay in the volume, “Personal Narratives: The Family Novel,” continues Wilson’s emphasis on documenting everyday experience instead of marked genres. He describes documenting his mother’s life history over a ten-year year period as a storytelling tradition akin to a novel published within the context of the family. Margaret Brady calls this essay a performative work in which “the article actually is the story it professes to examine.” In subject matter and delivery, Wilson is candid and passionate. He describes how he grew closer to his mother as he heard again the stories she had told him in his youth. He ends with the call, “It is time at last to celebrate ourselves. We all have stories to tell.”
The value of Rudy’s collection as a resource for beginning folklore students is clear. In one volume students can find accessible answers to the very first questions of any folklore course: “What is folklore and why does it matter? What can you do with it, anyway?” Wilson’s ideas on the importance of folklore in the academy to help bridge disciplinary divides, on the role of folklore in promoting nationalism, on methods for doing folklore research, and especially on the personal conviction that we are all folk and have something of value to contribute to the world--all are messages that any introductory course in folklore hopes to convey. Here they are presented in one place, in an accessible, conversational tone with notes and commentary from additional luminaries in the field.
I commend the collection to advanced students as well. Students in courses on disciplinary history, reflexivity in the academy, and fieldwork methods can use Wilson’s ideas as points of reference as they consider current themes and best practices in the field. They can also gain insights into the directions their careers might take them—in academic departments of language and literature, history, or anthropology; in grant writing, public sector, or journalistic work; in libraries, archives, or museums; into family history or creative writing.
As with its subject matter, the audience for this volume need not be limited to academics; its tone and content are well-suited to a general audience who can relate through personal experience to the messages of celebration and caution surrounding folklore, both as a discipline and as a phenomenon in our contemporary world.
Of course the volume must be selective, and I was disappointed in not seeing some of my favorite essays reprinted for easy reference, most notably “Folklore: A Mirror For What?” and Wilson’s 1969 collection of Three Nephites stories. But I can also appreciate the need for brevity in creating an accessible work. As Rudy explains, Wilson’s career, like any scholar’s, is ongoing and dynamic, so while a book must meet publication deadlines, we can appreciate that much more has been and will yet be published by this senior scholar.
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[Review length: 2296 words • Review posted on January 16, 2008]