Five Times I Wasn’t a Folklorist, and One Time I Was

Abstract

This essay thinks deeply about the wide variety of responses the author receives when she when she tells people outside the discipline what she does for a living. Following Elaine Lawless's call to write personally and creatively, the essay recounts five specific instances in which the author was told that what she studied was either "too much" or "not enough": too urban, too white, not white enough, too young, too insubstantial, too literary. Five times, that is, that she was told she needed to go study real folklore. The small case studies she explores engage discussions of class, race, and cultural privilege to delve into the complicated questions surrounding the tension between public and academic understandings of the field of folklore.