Bringing together four articles he published between 2013 and 2022, Jason Baird Jackson broadens and shifts our approach to examine the settings, expressions, actors, and conjunctures that are at the heart of folklore studies. Formulated in the polite and circumspect idiom that is his hallmark, Jackson first promotes the term “concept” as a lens and instrument to bring analytic attention into conversation with what are focal concerns in the present. Second, Jackson engages in each chapter, thoroughly and carefully, extant folkloristic, anthropological, and ethnological scholarship to honor what it meant in its time, to evaluate how it might still serve to understand newer hot spots, and to suggest how it might be coaxed to being refigured. Some of the chapters build extensively on Jackson’s deep familiarity with a number of Native North American groups as well as his second intellectual home, anthropology, particularly the Boasian tradition; in others, his more recent research collaborations with Chinese colleagues extend the ethnographic and museum-related base.
In his writing, Jackson is careful to keep the reader informed on which steps he is taking, which roads he opts not to take, and where he permits himself alternative or additional perspectives from those whom he is citing. The first chapter illustrates this style well. He examines the “oxhide purchase,” a narrative accounting for the white man’s trickery in acquiring much more land from Indigenous peoples than was ostensibly agreed upon. He places his “new scheme for thinking about this story” (22) in a chapter titled “A Story of Colonialism and Its Lessons.” While he gives proper due to the instruments of classic folk narrative analysis by citing motif and type numbers and acknowledging the historic-geographic trail that would lead one back to the legend of ancient Carthage’s founding, he embraces close textual reporting of Native North American versions, both from historical sources as well as from more recent witnessing, including his own. Jackson is not devaluing prior efforts at tracing a motif-cluster through time and space, but he regards the questions such work posed (where did the story come from? what is the oldest version one can find?) to be oddly unfinished in a present where the oxhide purchase story continues to be shared intensively among those affected by the truths it contains. In heading toward an interpretation foregrounding the lasting experience of colonialism with the losses of land, livelihoods, and lives, and the intercultural undermining of trust, Jackson arrives at emphasizing both Noyes’s context-sensitive philology (a needed rephrasing of Dundes’s “oral literary criticism”) and the necessity of acknowledging the oxhide narrative’s paradigmatic role in characterizing the history and present of the colonized and colonizers.
A great deal of cultural and social science research has addressed tradition and innovation as a pair of terms, with folklorists for a good part of the discipline’s history working on documenting, characterizing, and protecting tradition. With Hermann Bausinger’s Folk Culture in a World of Technology (1990 [1961]) as well as Richard Dorson’s conference proceedings Folklore in the Modern World (1978), the intermeshed nature of tradition and innovation took hold and was pursued avidly in the field. In chapter 2 (co-authored with Johannes Müske and Lijun Zhang), the rise of the concept of heritage and the discussion of the metacultural genesis of heritage practices occasion an evidence-based discussion of innovation and heritage’s relations against a baseline of habitus, Pierre Bourdieu’s immensely useful label for all the practices that together come to form a particular way of life (Bourdieu 1977).
Of all the chapters in the volume, this one is the most immediately applicable. More than thirty years after Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett introduced the term to the field, "metaculture" proves a helpful characterization of both discourse about and management of particular cultural traits and artifacts, not just in terms of heritagization of extant practices but also, and this is the authors’ useful expansion, when a practice or artifact is newly conceived and considered for incorporation into the habitus. The authors develop a model where habitus dwells in the realm of low metacultural awareness, but innovation and heritage by contrast are made visible—with different registers—due to high metacultural awareness. The model can serve as heuristic for innumerable historical or present-day bodies of data, illustrating a common dynamic in social life. It allows for, as the authors urge on their colleagues, “renewed attention to…invention, innovation, diffusion, the nature of everyday and quotidian cultural forms, revitalization, revival, endangerment, obsolescence, traditionalization, and grassroots heritage-making processes” (59).
Chapter 3 is an enormously valuable, multipart discussion and reflection on cultural appropriation. Jackson begins by framing the concept with its conceptual antecedents. “Culture contact” and ensuing changes have been studied practically since the inception of ethnographic work, and in tracing both the insights and the concepts developed to label them, Jackson succeeds in making visible the differential power relations entailed in such changes. Within mainstream social discourse, cultural appropriation may or may not have crossed its zenith already; certainly, the regimes currently in power in the largest nations of the globe have little regard for debates on cultural appropriation, as they pursue a politics of homogeneity within which difference is persecuted in its lived form and turned into a commodity in its materialized representation.
Nonetheless, cultural appropriation is a practice that warrants attention. There are profound experiential differences between appropriating instances about which, as in one of the subheading quotes, it is “hard to work up much in the way of outrage about” (79), and other instances where essential knowledges and aesthetics are appropriated and/or turned into anything from personal style to sellable goods. For scholars—and hopefully for some legal experts and international institutions—Jackson carefully unfolds the historical succession of the concepts of diffusion, acculturation, assimilation, and appropriation, abstracted into a schematic visualization that works with variables such as group size and the equality or lack thereof in how cultural traits are exchanged, incorporated, or unilaterally taken. From there, the essay turns to assess the potentially disempowering international cultural heritage and property regimes. Most potently, Jackson argues for attention to the metacultural “discourse of aggrievement” (91) that reveals, more than the appropriated dance or dress, the immense breaches of respect, the lack of seeking communication, and the infringement of rights.
Concept Work is intended foremost for folklorists, and yet one would want chapter 4, in which Jackson grapples with Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis, to be brought to the attention of other so called “small disciplines.” Jackson describes and reckons with Wallerstein’s call for a reconfiguration of the social sciences, and to an extent the chapter addresses, as a subtext, the recurring efforts in folklore studies to reposition and rename itself. Acknowledging that we live no longer in nation-states requires, from a world-systems perspective, to let go of the big-container disciplines: economics, political science, and sociology, with history as a lone humanities field considered as relevant to a mix suitable for tackling the big problems. Jackson observes the absence of folklore studies and European ethnology in Wallerstein’s academic assessment, where anthropology appears to receive but a few somewhat awkward remarks (Jackson crafted the article initially during a stay in Estonia, hence the broadened attention to European articulations of folkloristics). Yet, as Jackson points out, folklorists have fruitfully engaged with foci that world-systems theorists consider central, such as “households, nationalism, colonialism, and decolonization, but also identities and movements for social change (e.g., popular resistance, labor rights struggles, antisystemic movements, alter-globalization)” (124).
Folklorists, too, have deconstructed the nation-state as a shape-giving imagined community, to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase, for the field during close to two centuries of disciplinary coagulation. The argument here grows from Jackson’s sense that folklorists have time and again returned to the micro level, and have preferred an interactional focus over a systemic macro lens. He points to worthwhile avenues where folklorists have gotten the ear of dominant (and, I would add, often normative) fields. One might consider here anthropologists who have, without world-systems theory, opened themselves to the question of scale and reach. Arjun Appadurai comes to mind, from the “public culture” initiative (started in 1988) to his work on Ethnoscapes and other “scapes” started in his Modernity at Large (1998) and continued in Fear of Small Numbers (2006). Some European ethnologists have connected more with Bruno Latour and other assemblage thinkers (which has opened a door to the more-than-human perspective via Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing). Others have reached toward the remnants of Birmingham’s Cultural Studies and an interest in uncovering the sociohistorical conjunctures that bring forth particular figures (in the sense of Norbert Elias) or popular phenomena, drawing on Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, and going back to Antonio Gramsci and others (e.g., Ege 2013; Reznikova 2023). I share Jackson’s sense that ours is a powerful and distinctive field that warrants attention and has gained it in such fields, to name just two, as public health, with scholar activists such as David Hufford and Charles Briggs with Clara Mantini-Briggs, and the governance of heritage, where Valdimar Hafstein and Kristin Kuutma have combined scholarly analytical practice with practice in international bodies on behalf of their nation-states.
Seeking to make folkloristics matter beyond our own scholarly community is arguably not the only goal, but certainly an important one of Concept Work. There are many roadblocks one encounters when trying to walk that path, one of which Jackson cites in footnote 17 of this essay, attributed to one of the reviewers of the initial article: “Disciplinary legacies are inseparable from institutional legacies” (129). This observation provides a good segue into a consideration of the fifth chapter of this collection. Having read (and in some cases brought to good use in my teaching) the four core chapters in their prior versions, I will confess that I first turned to chapter 5, “Teaching Concepts in Folklore Studies.” This chapter offers a close analysis of the changes Indiana University’s core graduate seminar, F516, has undergone, particularly from the permutations taught by Henry Glassie to those taught by Jackson in alternation with Ray Cashman—and here indeed the institutional legacy can be felt deeply (probably particularly by readers who did not train at IU).
When I started my graduate training in Bloomington as a member of the first post-Dorson cohort in 1982, Mary Ellen Brown took us through that course which I recall as being driven strongly by “theories,” much as was Alan Dundes’s 250B at UC Berkeley which I had taken in the spring term before coming to Bloomington. The 250A had been a country-by-country survey, for as Jackson notes of Dundes as well, “[for him] folklore studies is a single international discipline” (4). What I learned in my last year in Berkeley likely shaped my career like little else. Nonetheless, I applaud the distance Jackson creates between “theory” as a formative and discipline-legitimating term from Dorson’s era and the concept work he allows us to explore with him instead. During the many years I have co-taught the Göttingen lecture course on culture theories, I have always opened by pointing to the—truly humble—meaning of the Greek term θεωρία (theoria): a way of looking at something. Academics prefer ways of speaking and especially writing in complex sentences with arcane vocabulary, particularly when new theoretical ground is to be broken.
It takes a newly emerging theory a few permutations to reach formulations that can be taught, and at that point the new “way of looking at something” approaches being a toolkit one might be able to use (much as chapter 2 of this volume allows us to do). Although not all contributions to Toward New Perspectives in Folklore (Paredes and Bauman 1972) were equally readable to me back in my graduate school days, the term “perspectives” made it work for me, and I often wondered whether any of our teachers in Bloomington might have been more inclined to assign it had the title been “toward new theories in folklore.” Perhaps Dorson’s labelling of those who were part of New Perspectives as “young Turks” kept it from the MA reading list in my day (Dorson’s phrase is unimaginable today; and that time span of 65 years, plus the nearly two decades before when Dorson built the program, allows us to acknowledge that IU’s departmental legacy is impressively long).
I had to smile when I realized that this title does not surface in Jackson’s chapter 5 or his book, though of course some of the individual articles are cited as they appeared first in the 1971 special issue of the Journal of American Folklore. Indeed, Toward New Perspectives and its participants’ impact on the field, far more so than Dorson’s, are present in F516 as Jackson teaches it, in particular in placing Richard Bauman’s definition of performance as taking responsibility to an audience as the most prominent theoretical framing of the course (151). Jackson has expanded and refined it further, and I will add that it is my favorite insight from Verbal Art as Performance too, and year after year of teaching in Germany I keep hoping that students might come to share that sentiment. While this F516 contains continuities, Jackson’s emphasis on concepts, albeit also introducing “theory writ large,” is convincing not least based on his assessment of what motivates graduate students of the present: “gathering intellectual and scholarly tools and ideas,” which Jackson considers, coupled with Dorothy Noyes’s humble theory (2008), conducive “for the many more-than-idiosyncratic, less-than-all-encompassing and intellectual-practical projects” students might come to pursue (152-3).
Works Cited
Appadurai, Arjun. 1998. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
___. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bauman, Richard. 1975. “Verbal Art as Performance.” American Anthropologist 77: 290-311.
Bausinger, Hermann. 1990 (1961). Folklore in a World of Technology. Translated by Elke Dettmer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977 (1972). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dorson, Richard, ed. 1978. Folklore in the Modern World. The Hague: Mouton.
Ege, Moritz. 2013. Ein Proll mit Klasse: Mode, Popkultur und soziale Ungleichheit unter jungen Männern in Berlin. Frankfurt: Campus.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1995. “Theorizing Heritage.” Ethnomusicology 39: 367-80.
Noyes, Dorothy. 2008. “Humble Theory.” Journal of American Folklore 45: 37-43.
Paredes, Américo and Richard Bauman, eds. 1972. Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Reznikova, Olga. 2023. Wut der Fernfahrer: Ethnografie eines sozialen Protests in Russland. Frankfurt: Campus.
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[Review length: 2388 words * Review posted on April 6, 2026]