Participatory research is typically defined as a form of research which combines three things: research, education, and action. Strongly linked to social action, participatory research is largely becoming the norm in many fields which folklorists sometimes see as competitors in the fight for departments and funding such as Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Pan-African Studies, and American Studies to name a few.
Folklorists, however, have yet to embrace participatory research even though much of what folklorists do has many similarities with its core concepts such as:
1. Recognition that the interviewee is the owner of their own knowledge and narratives and is the authority on their own life story.
2. Recognition that the individual and the larger culture are involved in a dynamic relationship (Toelken’s Twin Laws of Folklore comes to mind here).
3. The job of the fieldworker is to listen….not just hear what words are coming out of the interviewee’s mouth, but to attempt to really hear what the interviewee has to say and how their narrative fits into a larger cultural picture.
4. The research process, when done well, is lengthy and basically always ongoing.
5. Knowledge belongs first and foremost to the community/communities from which it came
There are probably a great deal more similarities, but those are a few that come to mind.
With so many similarities already in place, I am curious about the potential of a combination of folklore research and participatory research. While the end goal of participatory research is to reach solutions that address social problems, the beginning, and most important, step is dialog.
While folklore shares many similarities with fundamentals of participatory research, what folklore typically does not do is take the above beleifs and apply them to larger social problems such as poverty, racism, environmental pollution and so forth. Folklorists work locally and this is their strength. This can sometimes be a weakness however in that we miss how regional problems link to larger national or even global problems. For example, what does the depletion of water in central Arkansas have to do with the culture of farming and how does this link up to workers’ rights in immigrant communities in the same area? This may seem like a huge question, but I think at its core, the question tackles issues of culture. When fieldwork embraces participatory research perhaps…perhaps… a dialog can begin.
The Public/Academic Split: Participatory Research as Public Folklore Theory?
Folklorists often discuss the split between academic and public folklore. Some say it exists and is a hue problem. Others say too much is made of the supposed gap. My question is what lies at the intersection between academic folklore and public folklore? Where do theory and practice meet?
I think the models of participatory research offer some possible models for moving forward for public folklore models.
Public folklorists often see themselves as advocates for the communities in which they work. However, public folklorists are not often engaged at critical examination of the underlying problems that cause, a failing regional economy for example. While advocacy is good, not examining the underlying problems which create a need for advocacy in the first place falls short of working toward sustainable solutions to problems. I believe the models of participatory research which bring together theory and action could and should be a part of public folklore programs. Maybe this is the possible link that Davis Whisnant said was missing in All That is Native and Fine.
I have recently been considering how participatory research might connect to the field of ethnomusicology (sometimes defined as “the study of music as culture” or “the study of the way humans negotiate culture through music”). Ethnomusicology is considered by some to be a branch of folklore; like folkore, it deals with expressive culture and involves some of the same core methodologies. Unlike the broad field of folklore, however, ethnomusicology has a very narrow focus.
Indeed, the focus of ethnomusicology seems sometimes to be so limited that one wonders whether it presents any benefit to the people who are the objects of its study. I ask: in what ways can ethnomusicology be brought to bear on questions of social justice? Does ethnomusicological scholarship present opportunities for anything beyond the accumulation of descriptive knowledge, and if so, can it be turned into a vehicle for social change?
Ultimately, the debate may be over the centrality of music. Is it true that music reaches to something fundamental about the relations between members of a society? Or is music just a facet of a “superstructure” above a more important “base”? And if music is not central, why study it?