Visits to South American Folklorists

Abstract

DURING THE past fourteen years I have had the opportunity to make several trips to South America to find what our South American neighbors are doing with folklore studies and to establish a cordial relationship with them. Our first trip, in I947, came as a result of an invitation from the Venezuelan Government to act for some months as technical advisor to the Ministry of Education in the establishment of a Service for National Folklore Investigations, in Caracas. Taking advantage of a half year of sabbatical leave, my daughter, Mrs. Thompson and I first traveled to Colombia, where, with the help of John Campbell, the Cultural Attache of our Embassy, I was able to see something of what the Ministry of Education in Colombia was doing to teach the pupils of the schools about their national customs and traditions. The children in the public schools were not asked to collect songs and dances, but they were taught how to perform them. I found that there had been a very considerable collecting activity of songs and dances in the past, and that the Minister of Education was more interested in propagation than in investigation. There is a Division of Popular Culture which undertakes to spread this knowledge in the schools by means of phonograph records and moving pictures, as well as by traveling exhibitions of photographs. In Bogota the Museum of Ethnology has now established an archive of folklore. This has been done largely through the influence of Paul Rivet, the great French ethnologist who spent the war years in Bogota. They seemed to have a very good beginning of an archive of folklore, with good filing systems and a clear-cut plan of action. I found a most interesting plan being elaborated whereby a team of investigators was going out to one of the remote Indian tribes to make a joint study of their ethnology, their tales, legends, songs, dances, and other aspects of their traditional life. This, I understood from Sefior Luis Alberto Acufia, who visited us later in Bloomington, turned out to be a most successful expedition. Some of the results have been published in a journal of folklore issued at Bogota.1 Our next real stop was at Lima, where we remained for a good month. This month gave me the opportunity to meet practically all those in Peru interested in folklore. I had had some correspondence with Federico Schwab, of the library of San Marcos University, and he was very helpful in making me acquainted with the folklorists and their activities. Much of the work of the Museum of Culture in Lima concerns all aspects of the life of the Quechua and Aymara Indians, and much that we know about the ancient Inca civilization comes from that museum. The work among the Indians was done mainly by linguists, who incidentally collected much material that interests the folklorist, and, since it happens that several of them studying these indigenous groups had at least a considerable admixture of Indian blood, they were valuable interpreters of the Indian cultures. There was also a folklorist from Arequipa, Miguel Ugarte, who knew a great deal about children's rhymes, and games, songs and folktales of old Spanish tradition.