On Not Becoming a Folklorist: Field Methodology and the Reproduction of Underdevelopment

Abstract

World. The earliest folklorists were missionaries, traders, explorers and colonial administrators. Their achievements were often remarkable, but their unavoidable linkages with the sources of imperial power helped to create a pattern of investigation which reified the roles of knowledgeable investigator and backward informants.' This was underpinned by a world view which, in the words of Richard Dorson, interpreted 'folk customs and beliefs as evidence of the unswerving evolutionary climb of man from savagery to civilisation'.2 In addition, though colonial folklorists were not necessarily more guilty of cultural theft than other imperial officers, the fact that they were influential in the evaluation of Third World art also brands Folklore Studies with a kind of original sin, given the cultural looting which took place in Asia and Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The problem with colonial sins is that even when they have been identified and confessed, their stigma tends to continue, through the dialectics of psychological reproduction. For example, the image of primitivism and savagery which informed most early Folklore Studies has been negated by a compensatory nostalgia for the wisdom of the griot and sage. This romanticism derives from a binary model of world development, where an over-civilized, industrial, literate world which has abandoned its rural patrimony is contrasted with a Third World which maintains an oral culture, linked to the wellsprings of human spirituality. According to Wauthier, for example, the main question for African intellectuals is that 'of writing down an exclusively oral folklore literature, saving it from the oblivion which threatens it when the Negro societies lose their own traditions through contact with Western civilizations'.3 Much of the cultural policy of independent African governments and of UNESCO has reaffirmed the need to preserve at all costs the endangered species of the African oral sage. The need to conserve the remnants of past cultures is clearly urgent, but I believe it can lead to a type of 'rescue syndrome' which is potentially restrictive. The compulsion to preserve the manifestations of a pre-lapsarian past, 'the shards and shreds, leftovers and relics of a departed age'4 can distract attention from the requirement which Third World cultures face to renew themselves and mediate the modern world. This orientation to the past and the static relates all too easily to commercial exploitation of reified African 'culture'. The debasement of folklore is, of course, not unique in Africa. 'Folklorismus' has been deprecated in Europe for many years as an artificial