Voicing Folklore: Careers, Concerns and Issues: A Collection of Interviews

Products of contexts and instances these interviews are nonetheless ultimately artifacts of reflections on what it means to do folklore or to be engaged in the broad field of culture. Conjuring the promise of personal histories intersecting with national histories and disciplinary engagements of their time these interviews chart out an alternative cartography of the discipline. Set in the mode of personal narratives public programming, engagement with other cultures, multiculturalism, intellectual foundations of folklore, cultural identity, issues of cultural finding, nation building and negotiating cultural otherness become issues of current interests in these interviews. As colleagues in conversation the interviewees expand the discipline of folklore to have valuable bearing on cultural studies. Perhaps this volume will stand as an eccelectic testimony to the fact that folklorists are the new public intellectuals of twenty-first century addressing issues of integrity and representation, cultural freedom and justice, aesthetics of tradition and change and contributing to the development of civic republicanism.