Keynote Speakers

Abstract

The Vernacular Ground and the Field of Folklore

This talk revisits the age-old squabble over folkloristic keywords in an age-old effort to reframe the debate and get on with our lives. Revisiting the lineage of the “vernacular” in historical linguistics to develop recent claims for its utility to folklore scholarship, I propose to understand the term as the everyday ground of cultural practice in social interaction. Upon this ground, diverse inputs and actors come into recurrent contact, sometimes casually, sometimes intensely. In knots of intense engagement, the ground of ordinary practice may give rise to performances, valorized traditions, codified procedures, ideologies, projects, and other focused cultural forms, occasionally culminating in durable institutions. Attention to these dynamics highlights the dependence of institutional forms of knowledge and registers of expression upon vernacular foundations. It also reminds us of the temporal contours of institutions: their emergence, transformation, and decline. Systematic attention to such interactions debunks the binary thinking that credits the “official” with too much power and the vernacular with too much virtue. Especially in this moment, a more nuanced approach to cultural power will serve us better.

Understanding the vernacular as uneven, shifting ground can also help us to map the range of conversations across the notoriously uneven, shifting field of ethnology and folklore studies. Building humble theory around the how-questions of cultural process (Noyes 2016) and the “particular analytical challenges that arise from [our] empirical research” (Panchenko 2023) makes room for a wide range of conceptual frameworks that illuminate their own ground and allow us to be useful to those upon it. Conversely, so decentralized a field will struggle to achieve anything beyond this situated usefulness. But this is why we have societies, journals, and conferences. Our large forums are best used not to dispute the identity of the field or, at the other extreme, to exchange rich ethnographic reports (I myself have regularly used them for both purposes). Instead, we can cultivate mutual awareness by presenting our analytical frameworks and what they seem able to accomplish in situ. An academic field conceived as relational can develop its intensity over time as we grow increasingly aware of complementarities, overlappings, family resemblances, and contradictions in our approaches. From these observations, we can work towards more consensible frameworks, through which we can make more robust claims. At a minimum, when we return to our own piece of ground, we will be more aware of its positioning in the ever-changing ecology of the vernacular.

Bionote

Dorothy Noyes (PhD, Folklore and Folklife, University of Pennsylvania) is University Distinguished Scholar, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies  at the Ohio State University. She studies folklore theory, the traditional public sphere in Europe, the careers of policy concepts, and performance and ritual in international relations. Among her books are Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016); and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy (coauthored with Regina Bendix and Kilian Bizer; University of Illinois Press, 2017). Exemplarity in Global Politics, coedited with Tobias Wille, will appear in November 2025 from Bristol University Press. She is a past President of the American Folklore Society, and was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University of Tartu in 2018.

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