Smithsonian Folklife Festival Research Articles

Food as Folklife: Public Folklore Practice in the Museum and Archive

This article examines folkloristic methods for collecting and presenting foodways in museum and archival settings. Drawing on the author’s experience as a public folklorist and exhibit curator, the article offers two case studies on foodways collection and presentation. The first case study explores the Smithsonian Center for Intangible Cultural Heritage’s annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., in which the author presented in 2023. The second case study highlights the Kentucky Folklife Program of Western Kentucky University’s exhibit, “A Culture Carried: Bosnians in Bowling Green” (mounted at the Kentucky Museum 2017–2019). As the then-folklife specialist for the Kentucky Folklife Program, the author served as a co-curator for the exhibit and associated programming. Through these case studies, the article aims to provide concrete ideas and methods for documenting and presenting foodways for museum professionals and archivists.

Mick Moloney (1944–2022)

Mick Moloney (1944–2022)

The Smithsonian’s soft power: how foreigners engage the US national museum

ABSTRACT Foreigners’ engagement with the Smithsonian provides clues to understanding what is attractive about America. There are two main draws -American science and technology and America’s immigrant community. For foreign visitors the National Air and Space Museum is the most popular. Foreign experts are especially drawn to the Institution’s science research and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The Soft Power Rubric uses the volume and direction of observable social interactions to measure the social connection between countries. Whether foreigners feel endearment for another country and wish to emulate it is an essential distinction between soft power and hard power.

Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

From cultural showcases to public diplomacy agents: Basque-American festivals in the United States

ABSTRACTBasque festivals in the United States have a long history. Among the festivals organized, there are festivals with different objectives. The objective of the first festivals was to unite the Basque community in the United States, as some Basques were from the Spanish side of the Basque Country and others from the French side, the objective was to unite all of them as Basques to a one-time two day festival to celebrate together and meet each other. The Western Basque Festival organized in 1959 in Sparks is an example of this. Annual Basque National Festival in Elko also wanted to have an internal joint celebration: still not focused on inviting non-Basques, but yes promoting positive image to Elko Basques. Inter-community Basque festivals have a history of over 100 years with Basques in New York in the early 1900s and western Basques since the 1920s. After that, ones Basques were united and almost settled in the United States, they started organizing festivals with another objective: invite the non Basque public and be accepted in the American society. The Boise Jaialdi Festival and Smithsonian Folklife Festival break the mould by specifically inviting the non-Basque public. What we would like to show with this research is how Basques and Basque American festivals, thanks to Public Relation activities as the festivals organized in the United States, have become public diplomacy agents and help in the relations between the United States and the Basque Country.

A Lesson in Presenting: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival Model

Abstract This essay addresses issues of framing, first voice, and authority in presenting culture in public programs. It examines a cultural presentation at the First Americans Festival inaugurating the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the manner in which a “presented” artist appropriated the presenter’s role for dialoguing with the visitors about who they were and what they did.

AAA's Migration Initiative Featured at the 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival

AAA's Migration Initiative Featured at the 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Cultural Heritage Policy in Colombia: A Case Study

AbstractAs Colombia began to develop its Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) policy, it signed an agreement with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to collaborate on a Smithsonian Folklife Festival of Colombia's national living traditions, to be shown on the National Mall in 2011. This essay addresses the role of the Smithsonian Folklife Center in advocating for a cultural heritage policy grounded in cultural democracy and intercultural dialogue, as well as its collaboration with UNESCO in crafting the 2003 convention for the protection of intangible cultural heritage. We focus on the Center's signature collaborative program, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and on our experience with the 2011 Festival program, Colombia: The Nature of Culture. We examine the relationship between the Festival and Colombia's intangible cultural heritage communities, policies, and practices, through intercultural dialogues that contribute to shaping Intangible Cultural Heritage policy from the bottom up.

Making Meaning on the Mall: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival as a Constructivist Museum

AbstractGeorge Hein, museum education theorist, asserts that there are five qualities a “constructivist exhibition” must have (1998, 35). The authors, assembling observations of visitor engagement and qualitative data from the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, compare the event to Hein's constructivist exhibition criteria, to assess whether the Festival allowed visitors to “make meaning,” and to see whether visitor meaning‐making meshed with the goals of the curators. The answers have the potential to help improve visitor experiences and learning outcomes at museums and other curated cultural events.

Cultivating Connectivity: Folklife and Inclusive Excellence in Museums

AbstractToday there is a growing global awareness of the need to address issues related to the safeguarding and use of both tangible and intangible heritage. By engaging with communities in the documentation of local cultures—especially their folklife, or in other words, their traditional intangible cultural heritage—museums can create collections that will serve as foundations for museum research, exhibitions, and programs that have more resonance with and relevance for those communities. Interactions of these kinds—in particular those of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the Michigan State University Museum, home of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program, as well as collaborations between the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the Great Lakes Folk Festival, and other programs around the world—have served as important platforms for public discourse about a variety of issues and have produced programs and exhibitions both at home and around the world.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Museological Perspective

AbstractThe Smithsonian Folklife Festival began as a four‐day event held over the Fourth of July holiday in 1967, outdoors on the Mall. The impulse for it came from Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley. The form of it came from Ralph Rinzler, field research director for the Newport Folk Festival and a documentarian who sought out authentic, grassroots American musicians. The Festival was conceived as giving voice to the less known and under‐represented, a philosophy that quickly expanded to encompass the world of what is now called intangible cultural heritage. The Festival's museology has as its core the foregrounding of the cultural exemplars and the primacy of their voices in the presentations. It has energized new possibilities for what can be done in the Smithsonian and on the National Mall, and in the lives of people, communities, and institutions well beyond.

Music and Cultural Rights (review)

Reviewed by: Music and Cultural Rights Rachel Tollett (bio) Music and Cultural Rights. Edited by Andrew Weintraub and Bell Yung. Chicago; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. ix + 313 pp., photographs, charts, music, Chinese language glossary, index. ISBN: 9780252034732 (Cloth), $70.00; ISBN: 9780252076626 (Paperback), $25.00. Andrew Weintraub and Bell Yung, both known for their extensive work on musics in Southeast and East Asia, center their edited volume, Music and Cultural Rights, on carving a discursive space between official policies on human rights and real-life encounters between governments and musical communities. Formed from papers presented at a conference at the University of Pittsburgh in 2005 with funding from the Human Rights Division under the Peace and Social Justice Program of the Ford Foundation, the volume contains many chapters of interest to readers of this journal, including three essays concerning the People's Republic of China, and others examining music of the Philippines, Tibet, Hawai'i, Ukraine, Peru, and Brazil. Collectively, these case studies explore eight viewpoints on cultural rights, particularly the elements of musical activity not explicitly protected by current international resolutions. Throughout the eight chapters, all authors consistently express some form of discomfort with the formalized protection afforded to human rights and cultural rights provided primarily by the United Nations Resolution on Human Rights (UNHR) and the UNESCO conventions on Indigenous Peoples and Intangible World Heritage. Both the UNHR and the resolutions from UNESCO on Indigenous Peoples and Intangible Heritage receive repeated criticism in this volume for running counter to the aims and desires of musicians present in the nations. In his introduction Weintraub carefully constructs the history of cultural rights, beginning with Charles Seeger's desire for a "cultural democracy" and Seeger's statements that music acts as a commodity and musical structures are the controlling forces trading that commodity. Furthermore, Weintraub delineates immediately that cultural rights cannot be limited to copyright laws concerning individual ownership, and he further defines cultural rights as the right to any form of expression that "asserts one's cultural identity and heritage" (3). The questions Weintraub poses at the end of his introduction set the tone for the rest of the volume: What do cultural rights on a global scale mean and how [End Page 140] does this affect their definition? Thus, Weintraub contends that the goal is to create a space for universal rights to be placed in dialogue with cultural specifics. Ricardo Trimillos follows Weintraub's introduction with an essay on the representation of the Philippines at the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This essay dovetails with the dialogic space Weintraub invites in his introduction as Trimillos lays out three categories: right to access, right to steward, and right to control. Within this schema are several subheadings, and these methods of access, stewardship, and control are used as frameworks in the subsequent essays ensuring methodological consistency throughout the volume. Many of the issues the authors raise, ranging from ownership to rights of representation, already exist in the ethnomusicological literature, for example, in Nettl's Encounters in Ethnomusicology: A Memoir (2002) and Barz and Cooley's Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2008). While the presence of dialogues circling the issue of cultural rights exists in other volumes, by reframing these issues as part of a larger dialogue on music and cultural rights, political lines of persuasion that are often relevant to many of these situations become clear. Following Trimillos's essay, Helen Rees, Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, and Javier Leόn all devote some portion of their essays to the delineation of cultural rights as often targeted toward the individual and not the group. Here various charters, lists, and resolutions from the United Nations are criticized for clearly supporting the role of the individual—particularly those recognized as artists by the nation-state—more than the role of group creators in group-focused societies. Within the collection of essays it is clear that the representation of minorities, both individuals and groups, is a constant struggle between the rights protected by the various charters and the rights restricted by the nations in which those minorities reside. Isolating the essays dealing with cultural rights in China, it...

The Making of Ethnic Yunnan on the National Mall

This article looks at Yunnan’s theatrical, overly professionalized minority folksong and dance performances at the 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. Yunnan’s presentation presents an opportunity to explore the way a provincial government culturally and spatially imagines its governed administrative territory through ethnic performing arts on a global stage. The article argues that Yunnan’s image crafting is not only structured by the politics of international artistic exchange. It can also be viewed as a global extension of the Yunnan provincial government’s provincial identity project and economic development scheme back home. Its strategy, described as “the artifying of politics” by one of Yunnan’s cultural officials, reveals how ethnic performing arts are programmed to aestheticize Yunnan as a place and economic–cultural brand in this context, and, thus, how the Yunnan government manages both the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics in order to carry out its economic agenda by way of aesthetic experience.

“Connecting Cultures“: The Mekong River at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, 2007

Each summer, the world-renowned Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, mounts a huge, ten-day-long festival on the National Mall, showcasing the folk arts of selected US states, communities, occupational groups, foreign countries, and/or transnational regions. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival has run every year since 1967, organized as “an annual display of living cultural heritage” (Kurin 1997:111) that typically features musicians, dancers, ritual specialists, craftspeople, storytellers, food preparers, specialized workers, learning opportunities, and discussion sessions. The emphasis is very much on “grassroots” culture, and on “foreground[ing] the voices of tradition bearers as they demonstrate, discuss, and present their cultures” (ibid.: 113). The festival is simultaneously an opportunity for the chosen locales and communities to raise their profile on an international stage, and for hundreds of thousands of Americans and overseas tourists to learn about places and cultures they might never otherwise encounter. Entrance to all events is free of charge, and annual attendance averages over one million.

“From Timbuktu to Washington”: Reflections on the 2003 Mali Program at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

During all of Mali's negotiations with the Smithsonian over its participation in the 2003 Folklife Festival, Mali retained full control of its representation and took the principal role in shaping its image and developing the key messages to be communicated to visitors in Washington. The Malian government had a twofold objective for participating in the 2003 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. It saw the festival as an opportunity to raise Mali's profile within the United States to increase international investment and promote tourism to Mali. It also intended its participation in the festival to be an occasion within Mali to build a sense of national belonging and national pride among its own citizens.

Public Anthropology “at the Fair”: 1893 Origins, 21st‐Century Opportunities

ABSTRACT What have been the connections between anthropology and public fairs and festivals in the United States? Anthropologists have been involved in public fairs and festivals in the United States for over 100 years. Back in 1893, members of the new discipline of anthropology played a major role in the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, both in the huge Anthropology Building and on the sprawling Midway Plaisance. Today, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., is in many ways a modern laboratory for research and experience in public anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore. In this essay, I examine the profound changes in the control of voices and discourse surrounding the activities at these types of fairs and festivals. I challenge anthropologists to observe and participate in this expanding discursive field and ask how sites like YouTube can aid in the process and enable critical future developments in pubic anthropology.

Music and cultural rights

Preface: Bell Yung Acknowledgements Introduction: Andrew N. Weintraub 1. Agency and Voice, The Philippines at the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Ricardo D. Trimillos 2. Use and Ownership, Folk Music in the People's Republic of China: Helen Rees 3. Access and Control, A Key to Reclaiming the Right to Construct Hawaiian History: Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman 4. National Patrimony and Cultural Policy, The Case of the Afroperuvian Cajon: Javier Leon 5. Historical Legacy and the Contemporary World, UNESCO and China's Qin Music in the 21st Century: Bell Yung 6. Representation and Intracultural Dynamics, Romani Musicians and Cultural Rights Discourse in Ukraine: Adriana Helbig 7. Representing Tibet in the Global Cultural Market, The Case of the Chinese-Tibetan Musician Han Hong: Nimrod Baranovitch 8. Music and Human Rights, AfroReggae and the Youth from the Favelas as Responses to Violence in Brazil: Silvia Ramos/Ana Maria Ochoa 9. In Search of a Cross-Cultural Legal Framework, Indigenous Musics as Worldwide Commodity: Felicia Sandler Bibliography Glossary of Chinese Characters for Chapters By Baranovitch, Rees, and Yung Notes on Contributors Index Preface: Bell Yung Acknowledgements Introduction: Andrew N. Weintraub 1. Agency and Voice, The Philippines at the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Ricardo D. Trimillos 2. Use and Ownership, Folk Music in the People's Republic of China: Helen Rees 3. Access and Control, A Key to Reclaiming the Right to Construct Hawaiian History: Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman 4. National Patrimony and Cultural Policy, The Case of the Afroperuvian Cajon: Javier Leon 5. Historical Legacy and the Contemporary World, UNESCO and China's Qin Music in the 21st Century: Bell Yung 6. Representation and Intracultural Dynamics, Romani Musicians and Cultural Rights Discourse in Ukraine: Adriana Helbig 7. Representing Tibet in the Global Cultural Market, The Case of the Chinese-Tibetan Musician Han Hong: Nimrod Baranovitch 8. Music and Human Rights, AfroReggae and the Youth from the Favelas as Responses to Violence in Brazil: Silvia Ramos/Ana Maria Ochoa 9. In Search of a Cross-Cultural Legal Framework, Indigenous Musics as Worldwide Commodity: Felicia Sandler Bibliography Glossary of Chinese Characters for Chapters By Baranovitch, Rees, and Yung Notes on Contributors Index

Selling Alberta at the Mall

This article examines the representation of the Canadian province of Alberta at the 2006 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Through a close analysis of the site layout of the festival, the author points to a conflict between the anthropological goals of the Smithsonian Institution and the political/industrial goals of the province. The article draws upon scholarship from the fields of anthropology, museum studies and cultural studies, using Gramsci’s notion of folklore and a comparison between the Folklife Festival and World’s Fairs.

American aloha: cultural tourism and the negotiation of tradition

At the 1989 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, throngs of visitors gathered on the National Mall to celebrate Hawai'i's multicultural heritage through its traditional arts. The edu-tainment spectacle revealed a richly complex Hawai'i few tourists ever see and one never before or since replicated in a national space. The program was restaged a year later in Honolulu for a local audience and subsequently inspired several spin-offs in Hawai'i. In both Washington, D.C., and Honolulu, the program instigated a new paradigm for cultural representation. Based on archival research and extensive interviews with festival organisers and participants, this innovative cross-disciplinary study uncovers the behind-the-scenes negotiations and processes that inform the national spectacle of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Intersecting the fields of museum studies, folklore studies, Hawaiian studies, performance studies, cultural studies, and American studies, American Aloha supplies a nuanced analysis of how the carefully crafted staging of Hawai'i's cultural diversity was used to serve a national narrative of utopian multiculturalism--one that collapsed social inequities and tensions, masked colonial history, and subordinated indigenous politics--while empowering Hawai'i's traditional artists and providing a model for cultural tourism that has had long-lasting effects. Heather Diamond deftly positions the 1989 program within a history of institutional intervention in the traditional arts of Hawai'i's ethnic groups as well as in relation to local cultural revivals and the tourist industry. By tracing the planning, fieldwork, site design, performance, and aftermath stages of the program, she examines the uneven processes through which local culture is transformed into national culture and raises questions about the stakes involved in cultural tourism for both culture bearers and culture brokers.

Whose Mission Accomplished? Alberta at the 2006 Smithsonian Folklife Festival

In the summer of 2006, Alberta became the first ever Canadian province to be featured at the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Festival seeks to celebrate cultural diversity and promote awareness of cultural traditions, but in this case, these goals were overshadowed by the province's commercial goals. With rising gas prices and concerns about reliance on foreign oil, the timing was just right to introduce Alberta and its rich energy supply to Americans. As a Canada-phile who has spent the better part of her academic career studying Canada, I was eager to examine the Alberta program more closely to see how American institution conceives of a Canadian province. This article seeks to uncover the tensions at play in the representation of Alberta at the 2006 Folklife Festival by analyzing the central preoccupations of the two main institutions involved--the Smithsonian and the government of Alberta. A close analysis of the discourse surrounding this event--specifically, the collection of utterances made by these two institutions and their representatives--reveals that the central discursive preoccupation of the Alberta program was the promotion of the province's oil industry. Moreover, this goal appears to conflict with the anthropological goals of the Folklife Festival. My primary sources, in addition to the Alberta program itself, include the Smithsonian Institution's Festival website and its 2006 program book, as well as the government of Alberta's press releases before, during, and after the Festival, and its Final Mission Report, published at the conclusion of the Festival. Before examining the discourse, I provide some background on the Festival to establish a prediscursive frame for the 2006 Alberta program. Smithsonian Folklife Festival Festival began as the Festival of American Folklife in 1967. Thirty-one years later, the name was changed to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to reflect its scope as an annual exhibition of cultural heritage from across the United States and around the world. (1) Although its organization has changed over the years, its underlying philosophy has not. Richard Kurin, director of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, which puts on the Festival, states, The most distinctive feature of the Festival is the attempt to foreground the voices of tradition bearers as they demonstrate, discuss, and present their cultures. At the Festival, tradition bearers, scholars, and Smithsonian curators speak for themselves, with each other, and to the public. (2) Festival is based on a living history model, with each featured nation, region, or program having its own outdoor museum space on the mall. Booths staffed by people from the participating regions are supplemented with stages for musical performances, a food tent, museum-quality signs and text panels, and a glossy program book. According to folklorist Laurie Kay Summers, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is informed by a philosophy that grew out of the New Deal's conceptions of folklife as a grassroots, bottom-up form of culture. (3) As conceived by founder Ralph Rinzler and folklorist Alan Lomax, the Festival is attempt to support this form of culture in the face of growing commercialism and cultural elitism. (4) two immediate goals of the Festival are: [t]o honor the participants and the cultural groups they represent through display of their traditional arts, skills, and knowledge-- and thereby encourage their efforts, and to make a broader public aware of the rich variety of cultural traditions, the value of cultural diversity and its continuity, and the obstacles impinging on traditional cultural practice. (5) At its birth in 1967, the festival focused on Texas; three years later it added a Native American program. Every state in the United States has been featured, including the District of Columbia. …