Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Bainbridge Island, WA

Preface

As a professionally trained folklorist recently retired after over 35 years in higher education, I shall focus my thoughts here upon salient ideas and images that help me define and better understand my university-based career as a teacher and senior administrator. What follows here is not an academic article in the normal sense, although quotations, references to scholarly works, and footnotes can be found. What follows is not entirely original, as I borrow freely from predominantly folklorists who were my professors and colleagues at University of Pennsylvania and whose works and visions have significantly shaped my own, although in unpredictable ways. I muse freely upon their writings, recollections on and conversations with them, inspiring lectures, and conference notes scribbled on faded paper sheets – some going back 45 years.

The ‘context’ for the details brought forth in this ‘text’, after anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, is in part invisible, mental, and infused with unusual ideas that envelop and color concepts and personally meaningful events. The context fuses with my professional yearnings, life-changing meetings, and moments of non-discursive learning, – all enveloped by emotional affect. The affective apparatus of my project is used to tell a story that formulates experiences, insights, and images as a personal way of ordering and drawing meaning from my life. I bring discrete ideas, images, methods, and memories into a set of intimate association as part of a meaningful context that is part historical, part psycho-emotional.

This novel memoir shapes those associations into personal learning and meaning. As to the question of accuracy, I look to Aristotle who distinguished two means – counting and sculpting. This text in its emotional and psychic accuracy is my personal ethnography, a ‘sculpting’ of experience, an argot of soul. It serves as a ‘science’ in the realm of the affective, the indefinite, the imaginal, and the undefinable. I want my text to present rich images, so as to be a transit to other life experience, my own and that of others, communicating the conservative nature of my subversive work in folklore.

My research into the folklore of high strangeness ran against the grain of the discipline’s conventions by considering the question of reality behind truth-claims of experiences of the deep weird. In addition, my research on noetic trans-rational knowledge critiqued the discipline in particular and higher education in general, as education is currently centered on the techno-sciences of STEM curricula. Even as a student of the informal folk arts and their performance in context, I held positions of professor of humanities and chair of Liberal arts at The Juilliard School, an elite arts conservatory and later served as Dean of The School of Holistic Studies at John F. Kennedy University, responsible for formal MFA , MA and BFA programs focused on art and consciousness. Finally, it is worth noting, that while I am not an analyst, I am a strong Jungian studies advocate who studied and taught at the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, New York. The point of tension here is that folklore looks to cultural specificity and variation; Jung, on the other hand, sought the common ground of the human mind inherent in systems of interest to folklore: mythology, alchemy, fairy tales, ritual, healing, shamanism, and indigenous wisdom systems.

Among the images woven into the warp and woof of this text are those related to margins and amalgams. I hope to make it obvious to any reader that I have served the academy as a scholar-teacher-artist straddled on the ‘edge’ of academic disciplines – poetry, literature, mythology, comparative religions, philosophy, depth psychology, arts education, art making, folklore and folk life – and teaching, administrating, and accreditation. My story will make clear in ways affective and factual, how my research, scholarship, and professional employment placed me outside the center and to the far frontier of the discipline. It is from that frontier I have throughout my career sought to think and work creatively on the edge of meaning.

Introduction

As an academic field of study that arose out of the nineteenth-century cross-currents of romanticism and European nationalism, folklore and folk life is to be understood as a border phenomenon. This is so, first, by nature of its discrete discipline. Folklore lies “betwixt and between” the humanities and social sciences. It mediates spheres between knowledge and understanding, observation and participation, and discovery and creation. Secondly, folklore’s intermediate position is also based upon its intellectual history, since folklore’s historical focus first landed between so-called ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘educated’ peoples; preindustrial, industrial, and postmodern groups; colonizers and indigenous peoples; and scholar-teachers and artist-practitioners.

Folklore lies on an ontological frontier. As an academic discipline, folklore is balanced between fact and fiction; the known and the unknown; objectivity and subjectivity, the personal and the cultural; the concrete and abstract, and product and process. It reveals ongoing traditional sequence and pattern amidst simultaneity and creative emergence. Folklore exists on a discernible perimeter by nature of its methodology. The discipline holds ground between science and art, utilizing data that is quantitative and qualitative, metaphoric and denotative. The study-objects of folklore include abstract field laboratory reports, material cultural artifacts, and art.

Folklore traffics along a buffer zone by nature of its primary value relation. Decisions as to which objects to study and how to explicate them result from by knowing what value-relation is at stake (Glassie). The essential value-relation for folklorists is the aesthetic (self) and ethical (others) relation. Folklore always, in various ways and to various degrees, links individuals and groups. People seek the satisfaction of their senses through aesthetics. People seek concord through the ethical ordering of social life (Glassie).

Artifacts (objects) and communication acts (behavior) that provide pleasure for the self without a connection to others isn’t folklore, serving rather as a definition of individual genius in art history. If a material product or communication process provides pleasure for the self and connection with others, it’s folklore. So, the storyteller or basketmaker fashions a personal version of a tradition’s collective style (Glassie, Spirit, p.95). * (ftnte: Goldstein argued for the need to distinguished between ‘folklore’ in the historical sense as collected objects, ‘folkloric’ on the performance sense as behavior, and ‘fokloristics’ as the human science that studies folklore).

Folklore has formed part of the ground of my professional authority. Trained at the University of Pennsylvania, I earned my PhD in 1984. I entered Penn’s doctoral program in 1980 with an MA in English literature, and so I would join my background in the humanities to the social sciences, as folklore itself is a humanistic social science. At Penn, and throughout my career, I researched and taught university courses on folk fairy tales, cultural beliefs, customs, rituals, legends, first personal narratives (memorates), stories, and anomalous experiences to disclose the creative process used by people in ways that they do. I have sought to learn if the creative intentions inherent in stories, performances, and all forms of cultural expression reveal a common basis to the human mind (Freud, Jung, Campbell) and its embodied experiences across the world.

As a folklorist who is humanist committed to the study of folk and popular belief systems, I am deeply interested in questions of personal and communal meaning. I have asked myself, ”What significance do supernatural folk and anomalous popular beliefs and experiences have in peoples’ lives? Do they integrate them or not into their attitudes, beliefs, and world views? Do personal supernatural or psychic events serve as sources of growth, understanding and well-being or are they detrimental to health and social living? My interest in shared values, group cooperation, unique humanity, and cultural struggle necessarily occurs at the interface of borders, margins, and edges.

Folklore as a Humanistic Social Science

While English speaking people make distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities, they are both referred to as ‘sciences’ in German – Naturwissenschaften (i.e., natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (i.e., sciences that are general in nature, such as math, logic, ethics, religion – the humanities). This classification stems from the word wissenschaft translated as ‘knowing’ and ‘making’. While ‘science’ in that context is understood a rigorous process of knowledge generation, each perspective has its unique methods, injunctions, and professional standards to generate knowledge.

Statistics are not favored by folklorists. Texts are our version of statistics, containing tale types and motifs. The issue with statistics is that one can stand safely behind the data data and thereby distance oneself from the contradictions inherent in the work. Folklorists are themselves written into their ethnographic texts. Transcriptions of an event must be exact enough to be comprehended as an ‘event’. It is the accuracy of the text that convinces people by a sense of its wholeness. Arguments center around textual interpretation of transcripts, translations, and not statistics. Texts are our rhetorical event (Glassie).

In truth, there are many ‘sciences’ – some dedicated to subjectivity, intersubjectivity, objectivity, and inter-objectivity. They all make substantive contributions to knowledge (Integral Ecology, p.43). Natural sciences do not acknowledge, must less study, selfhood, interiority, culture, and morality, since sensory empirical inquiry is best suited for study of material phenomena, not for personal (subjective) and cultural (intersubjective) factors (Int Psyc p.23). The humanities handle historical and theoretical forms of knowledge that disclose the contingencies of existing social arrangements and inspire people to become their own best authorities by rigorous critical and noetic thinking (Rojcewicz 2021). They engage in qualitative human science research and sense-making of the issue of our humanity. When considering the social and human sciences, the fundamental issues are culture and humanity.

The humanities are more concerned with product, content, and artifact. The social sciences are more concerned with process, production, distribution, and consumption. Literary scholars study humanity in its multiple manifestations through texts (i.e., artifacts). Social scientists study humanity in the real time of social experience (i.e., socio-facts). The quest of the social sciences is knowledge sought by methods and theories that impose categorical schema (i.e., paradigms) from outside a context and then abstract elements from a range of cases that are then analyzed in a more or less statistical way. The quest of the humanities is to uncover purpose and human understanding sought by methods that include, among them, metaphor and story. The goal is to learn as much about a particular phenomenon analyzed holistically (Glassie). Rather than using holistic models, the social sciences use probability models. Both approaches study culture and so both are necessary. These discrete but related, separate but not separated methods of study prevent the splitting of folklore into either an object to be collected, or a process of communication to be studied; folklore is indivisibly both.

Scholarship Is Not Proof

Fortified with our method, folklorists take to the field where in the living laboratory of specific cultural settings, we conduct our field study of others, write up our ethnographic notes, produce our scholarship, and in some cases teach or otherwise share our findings with others in places like institutes, cultural centers, or museums. No one ethnography captures the entirety of truth of a people and their lives. Each provides a viable but partial slice of their reality. Our scholarship is never proof, so much as a passage linking the concrete with the abstract, and the human with the more-than-human worlds of experience. Scholarship is never dogma to be uncritically swallowed, so much as information upon which to carefully chew.  We call on colleagues to evaluate, improve, and extend our findings toward richer and more nuanced portrayals of how people creatively struggle in a difficult world. In that way, folklore is an indirect form of social change.

Because it aspires toward the unknown, folklore is a preparation endeavor; a dismantling of classicist concepts regarding hegemonic principles and universal values. Our scholarship serves as foot stones to be stepped over, rather than a sacrosanct platform to be held forever firm. Folklorist who are artist-intellectuals commit to the purpose of keeping issues open and contested, so that we need not become removed from the varieties of life. We are impelled by the soul of our discipline to make known the unknown, filling in with rich life experience, if not with answers, the gaps in our understanding of cultural peoples, often unheard and oppressed.

To make one’s way forward along the twisting road of the human adventure means, in part, to openly acknowledge knowing you don’t know. In this way, we can with humility avoid inflicting suffering upon others by claims to certainty and control. Folklore is rich in noetic content and practices that are non-discursive, experiential, aesthetic, intuitive, informal, tacit, non-rational, indigenous, and quickly rendered invalid by the dominant culture on the grounds they lack scientific verifiability. Folklorists recognize that for centuries healers in traditional societies and shamans of indigenous cultures trafficked in wondrous unknown realms, mapping realities between human and more-than-human worlds, gaining insights used successfully for restoring health to the afflicted through their visions, trances, ecstasies, dreams, psychic journeys, and insights into nature.

For many good reasons, logic and reason are among the most celebrated of human faculties, but they are not the only ones of value to life. The creative spirit becomes ‘demonic’ when it’s confined to narrow areas of expression. Often we need to enlarge the portal of the mind to what is mysterious, unpredictable, and indeterminate on the edge of meaning, beyond the altar of the calculable and measured. Folklorists strive to engage in open conversations with multiple and diverse others, wherein the paradoxes of culture might be effectively framed within the soul. We avoid both bitterness and solipsism through group commitment and praxis, not because we believe we have absolute answers or know what is right but by learning things of value from diverse, unfamiliar peoples.

Folk culture and folk consciousness aren’t quantitatively provable. Folklore moves toward what is unproven, affective, emotional, and psychic, seeking to explore what the nineteenth-century founding member of Britain’s Folklore Society Edward Sydney Hartland once called “the mental and spiritual side of humanity.” Folklore ‘s vocation then was “To reconstruct a spiritual history of man…as represented by the more of less inarticulate voices of the folk.” (Alexander Haggerty Krappe, p.xv, The Sci of Folklore). Folklorists sought to analyze unrecorded traditions, so as to “reveal the common life of the human mind,” apart from its recordings in formal and official cultural records.

Embracing the Unknown

By making their way toward deeper insight into what it means to be a human being among cultural men and cultural women on this more-than-human planet, folklorists rejects logical positivism and utopianism, as both are aberrations (P. Berger). Positivism and utopianism are short-cuts, easy ways out of messy cultural complexity. Both provide psychological relief by offering to move us outside the tension of opposites inherent in everyday life. Moving willingly toward what is unknown includes seeing one’s work as an attempt to honor common or disenfranchised peoples and their cultures through their texts, performances, nonverbal documents, and material artifacts, as tangible evidence of their creative consciousness, seeking to prevent their slippage from historical awareness.

Taking inspiration from Hartland and Krappe mentioned above, I have throughout my career eschewed both logical positivism’s claim that that only those thoughts and experiences that abide by analytical proof and number-based logic are worth entertaining, and as such constitutes a dismissal of much of folk and indigenous wisdom. * (PMR on noetic literacy). Many times in my life I have learned or come to understanding through left-hand paths of cognition. I have rejected any utopian vision of an ideal society that views cultural paradox, oppositions, and contradictions as aberrations to be ignored. My research of UFOs, Men in Black, fairy lore, the devil of tradition, and the continuum of human encounters of high strangeness, as well as my challenge to STEM curricular and practices via noetic trans-rational learning, position me toward a vision of what Glassie once referred to as an ‘intellectual outlaw’.

Folklore moves toward the direction of what is unknown but important in oneself and others. What folklore knows is a movement that human beings traditionally make through their expressive lives. Such knowledge requires an onto-existential pivot toward the mysterious issues of being, creativity, and un-concealment of self and cultural others.

Folklore’s Early Days

Folklore was a new field of learning in the nineteenth-century when antiquarians in England and philologists in Germany began to closely examine the ways of the lower economic classes. Awareness of folklore was closely associated with the nineteenth-century intellectual currents of literary Romanticism and political nationalism. This was a time of the “glorification of the common man.” From the French Revolution, “the people” as a mass conception emerged. Theorists of law, literature, language, customs, folksong, and folktale advocated for the doctrine of the spontaneous growth of folklore “from the heart of the people.” In law, Frederich Karl van Savigny (1779-1861) asserted that law is something that grows by sheer power unfolding itself in human miscengenated conscious states. * (ftnte)

In language, Jacob Grimm, a student of Savigny, held that language is born from the soul of primitive society and therefore has a social emergence. Grimm advocated for a “common language family heritage,” meaning folktales were an inheritance from a common Indo-European antiquity. A distinction deriving from Grimm’s view arose between the literary kuntspoesie, that is the artificial products of an individual and the naturpoesie that is, the spontaneous creation of the people that is folklore. * (ftnte) Despite its critics, language was viewed, as by the psychologist Wundt, a s a product of a communal mind.

This remained the orthodox view from the nineteenth-century to circa 1940 in England and America. A decline in this view occurred in the wake of more reserved thoughts about human nature and the waning of the Romantic passion for Hegelian sociological notion of a collective ‘over-soul’ and a psychology of humanity ‘en masse’. Nineteenth-century England underwent influence from the “cultural evolutionists” who maintained that humanity evolved in a single, unilateral evolutionary path of three stages depicting humans from a racist perspective as 1) ‘primitives’ or ‘savages’ (i.e., indigenous peoples like the Australian Aboriginal); 2) ‘barbarians’ or peasants (i.e., folk); and 3) sophisticate or ‘civilized’ (i.e., Victorian Englishmen – cf Krappe, pxvii-iii). Cultural evolutionists held that all humans evolved through those three stages. It was believed then that the ancestors of nineteen-century Englishmen must have been savages, like the Aborigines. That supposition was crucial to folklore, since it arose during the stage of savagery.

As peoples evolved into the stage of the barbarian, they left behind their folklore. Humanity evolved, but folklore devolved. From the cultural evolutionist view, decayed fragments of folk speech, manners, customs, and art were passing out of existence. What ostensible ‘fragments’ remained in civilized times became known as ‘survivals’ and the “last leaves of tradition.”  * (ftnte: It was once believed that folklore thrived best among isolated, homogeneous and uneducated societies, but in addition to ‘survivals’, much folklore appears today as ‘living traditions’ of interest groups in high states of sophistication and education, such as university professors and corporate leaders.) Those fragmented ‘survivals’ required a process of historical reconstruction and comparative method in order to attempt to understand them. The technique of studying a European custom was to seek the fuller form presumed to exist in savage culture, past and present. This theory also explained why folklore was believed to exist primarily among the peasants or folk, one step above the savages and removed from ‘civilized’ Victorian Brits. ‘Folk’ was the mean term or the intellectual link between civilized and primitive evolutional stages.

During this time, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began publishing their influential “Household Tales” (1812) and the multi-volume “Teutonic Mythology.” The word they used for their study content was volkskunde. The Grimm laid down the early scientific foundations of folklore in the West. The word ‘folklore’ was later coined in 1846 when an Englishman William John Thoms (using the name Ambrose Merton) sent a letter to the journal “Athenaeum” suggesting the term replace “popular antiquities” and “popular literature.” And so, the word “folk- lore,” understood as the “accumulated traditional wisdom of the peasants,” took hold in the public imagination.

British nineteenth-century folklorists engaged in a creative flurry of theory, philosophical discussion, and high order polemics (Dorson, in Zumwalt, Am Folkl Schlorship p.11). Folklore was then a rich, multi-disciplined ‘chaos’, integrating numerous methods and approaches, openly engaging broad questions of whither and whence humanity. However, refraining from the central folkloric mode of interpretation through the coordination of multiple theories with our study-objects (e.g., ballads, customs, stories) and field methods, on the one hand, and goals and philosophical methods, on the other, folklore, during my time at Penn (1980-1984), drifted close to becoming a single discipline, threatened from within by a comfortable, near static efficiency.

Glassie voiced concern that folklore had unwittingly lapsed from its courting of the unknown. Still, in the 1970s, the discipline received vitality of depth and breadth by looking to cultural anthropology’s interests with acts of performance in cultural contexts. * (fnte Paredes book). As a result, folklore’s moribund concern for origins and definition was replaced by a concern for functions through performance studies. That is, folklorists now asked what did a folktale mean and ‘do’ for members of the community among whom the tale was found and when it is told artfully in small groups (Ben-Amos). Nevertheless, discussion regarding the multiple aspects of the definition of folklore – oral tradition, circulation, versions, etc., – still dominated. Folklore had matured as a stable professional field of study but was no longer frightening.

Becoming the Other – Jean Paul Sartre

Three folklorists on Penn’s faculty in the Department of Folklore and Folk Life played material roles in supporting my movement toward the unknown that lay out the center and beyond the margins of the discipline, removed from the seduction of safe efficiency. Henry Glassie introduced me to the works of Jean Paul Sartre, particularly “A Plea for Intellectuals” and “The Progressive-Regressive Method. Sartre’s work and Glassie’s insights showed me that the essence of “the folk” and all social science is ‘culture shock’, an existential fear of displacement into the unknown.* (ftnte: Recently, I’ve authored an article capturing the meaning of Sartre’s work to me as a folklorist and human being  – Rojcewicz 2025 in press). As Sartre’s progressive-regressive method of conscious self-comprehension by “becoming an other” requires active social participation, it overcomes self-alienation caused by the fear of losing ones’ identity vis-à-vis encounters with others. The ‘other’ is understood as whatever is ‘not-I’, that is to say, different people, perspectives, institutions, alliances, causes, relationships, or the more-than-human world of nature.

Sartre holds that is only through choosing open, intimate encounters with those with whom we have issue that we learn to trust and affirm them in ways that enable them to be themselves and use their voices that may move our views and our sense of authority, control, privilege toward a responsibility for others. Being responsible for others and for all humanity means assuming people’s needs and a willingness to be called to account for them. It requires we surrender our desires in defense of Others with no certainty of the outcome resulting from our opening up to them. As such, our intentional choosing to live out the roles of others as our social projects result in our own differentiation and integration, enlarging our capacities for self-transformation and social change.

Sartre purports that everything across society must be subjected to ongoing interrogation, including the project that is oneself. That is to say, the progressive-regressive inquiry of Artist-Intellectuals, and all who work in good faith, reveals not only positive attributes about themselves but also points to where they act complicit with racism, sexism, colonialism, and xenophobia. Sartre (1974, 249) avows, “The intellectual’s labour will come to nothing, even if he demonstrates the aberrant character of racism, unless he constantly returns to himself to liquidate the traces of racism within him leftover from childhood, by a rigorous investigation of the ‘incomparable monster’ that is his self.”

The life of the other must challenge us. Assuming responsibility for others means we respect, safeguard, and learn from the singularity of people despite the risk of ontological shock of identity loss. Folklorists utilizing Sartre’s progressive-method of becoming the other is akin to American anthropologist Franz Boas’s vision of fieldwork as a means of “overcoming our separation” from others with whom we share the earth. Like our very selves, the other comes into being only when affirmed and welcomed by our actions.

Assuming new roles to live as our social praxis, as explained by Sartre, leads to questions of great relevance as to how one studies people. Studying people is different from methodology; its approach is more akin to literary criticism. The genre of literary studies that focuses on individuals is biography and biographical information cannot be imagined outside social life set in time and space. And so, biography addresses issues of social structure, geographical location, and information about character and the human psyche. Sartre wrote a multi-volume biography of Flaubert since Flaubert was radically other than Sartre who sought to enlarge his self-consciousness by assuming the strengths and attitudes of the French novelist. Sources of our study of people, following Sartre, should proceed from our needs, as Sartre chose Flaubert whose taciturn, fastidious nature was polar opposite to Sartre’s social action and intellectual confidence. Sartre’s biography project was a dialectical engagement with Flaubert as an other.

Sartre’s dialectic operations of the progressive-regressive method assume everything carries their opposite, and that this tension of contrasts leads to further change. When Flaubert declared, “I myself am Madam Bovary,” Sartre (1968, 141) saw him acting to “metamorphose himself into a woman artistically,” and thereby overcoming his historical conditions of a petite bourgeois male and refusing misogyny in favor of a richer human possibility (Sartre 1968, 147).

Intellectual Outlaw

My literary studies background (BA and MA degrees) deepened my love of words expressed as texts and the scholarly criticism that engenders meanings. My folklore and folk life studies opened my eyes to the art of small group performance of non-literary texts to audiences that serve as their immediate cultural critics. So, with backgrounds in literature and folklore, I see myself as a amalgam, a humanistic social scientist. The humanities and social sciences likewise focus their primary attention upon humanity. Humanities scholars in literary studies focus upon humanity in its multiple manifestations through texts (artifacts). Scholars in the social sciences study humanity in the realtime of lived experiences (sociofacts). As a poet and folklorist, I’ve been much influenced by Henry Glassie, whose scholarship reads like so many ostensible prose poems on previously unexposed aspects of culture and the human condition. His scholarship is the study of people and their creative expressions in the U.S., Ireland, Appalachia, Afghanistan, Turkey, India, and Bangladesh.

While engaged with creating a dissertation proposal, I had a transformational conversation with Kenneth S. Goldstein who was Chair of the Department. Kenny asked me if I had locked down a dissertation topic, and I told me I had. Months earlier, I enrolled in a course in “Folklore and American Civilization” taught by Richard M. Dorson who was a highly renown Visiting Professor from Indiana University, Bloomington. Dorson passed out some prompt topics for the course research paper, and on the list I found “UFOs as American Folklore.” Despite never having thought in a positive way about the UFO phenomenon (wasn’t it all too kooky?) at anytime in my life, I nevertheless landed there on the topic for Dorson’s course research paper and eventually my dissertation.

When I informed Kenny of my topic selection, he immediately asked if I intended to address the issue of whether a reality existed behind the belief. I told him I was simply going to collect personal narratives of UFO experiences and look at them in regards to motifs and narrative typology. I could read disappointment on his face. He said the discipline needed to explore the ontological basis for belief materials and their related traditions. He put his hand on my left shoulder and with his warm smile said, “You can do it, m’ boy.” With a week’s deliberation, I told Kenny I decided I would take up the reality issue. Soon after, Kenny introduced me to the work of David Hufford, a faculty member in the department whose acclaimed folklore fieldwork and scholarship focused on an experience-centered approach to the study of belief (Hufford). To my good fortune, David’s dissertation load wasn’t full, and he agreed to chair my committee.

Whereas nineteenth-century folklorists moved daringly toward unprovable entities and alternative realities, such as banshees and fairy realms, folklorists of the 1980s, and I suspect some today, shied away from the bold question of why, when confronting the perplexing phenomenology of extraordinary folk beliefs and encounters on the basis that such claims to truth “lack strict scientific verification’.” As I conducted folklore research and published articles on extraordinary encounters with phenomena of high strangeness throughout the 1980s and ’90s, I faced the rigid disciplinary position that folklorists should restrict their involvement with anomalous lore to “narrative studies and contexts.” It was absolutely assumed that folklorists were “unprepared to address directly” the reality issue of anomalous claims.

This prohibition in my view was highly hypocritical, since folklorists studying every other folk genre were allowed and expected to consider the question of the reality of their subject matter. For examples, folklorists studying folk food ways were expected not only to collect recipes, but also to sample the food. Folklorists studying material culture were expected to visit standing houses, sheds, and barns depicting folk vernacular architecture. During invited presentations and in my scholarship, I made the claim that it was incumbent upon folk belief scholars as humanists to use our knowledge concerning truth claims to help our informants distinguish between things ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ (Abrahams 1986, p.65 in Turner & Bruner).

Blinded by the discipline’s injunction against examination of the question of reality behind truth claims, as well as their own belief (cf., Hufford on reflexivity)) that anomalous folklore is not credible knowledge, most folklorists left out of consideration the the folk who are often overwhelmed or pained by their experiences. From the position of applied folklore, it is our ethical and professional responsibility to help our informants see themselves through such aftermath, whether they result from veridical anomalous encounters or from attachments to illusions or misperceptions (William A Wilson 1988, p.166). I pushed back on both the prohibition of folklore against a consideration of the question of reality behind anomalous truth claims and positivistic and reductionist thought of society – the position that only a physicalistic view of reality is credible and that only instrumental reason can disclose what is true. I became a ‘minor irritant’ to the discipline by interrogating disciplinary norms regarding folk belief studies (J of UFO Studies).

Folklore begins to subvert when it applies to social conditions its unique way of seeing the world and adhering respectfully to the worldview of others we study. This is true regardless of whether a folklorist intends to subvert. Folklore must necessarily be at odds with its discipline, as folk life experience is larger than our ‘folkloristics’ * (Goldstein). Still, we witness the existence of the “false scholar” who adds to our cultural storehouse of knowledge without questioning the conventions of his discipline or the values of his society (Glassie, Ballymenone). Those who are “true scholars” learn some positive and some negative things about themselves through their careful considerations of the lives of others.

In Glassie’s view, scholars who study humanity serve their own societies by arguing in their scholarship for their own definition of humanity. Glassie’s definition is open, inquisitive, capable of appreciative inquiry and self-critique. When cultures, for whatever reasons choose to constrict themselves around a narrow vision of what constitutes humanity, some scholars push back against the dominant, tightening view, believing there is still much more to learn and know. I saw myself then and still today in that role, pushing back on behalf of people who report personal confrontations with UFOs, angels, devils, Men in Black, and fairy entities. This does not mean I have to agree with an informant’s beliefs, say about the extraterrestrial nature of ‘flying saucers’. It does mean, however, that I do not a priori dismiss or ridicule them.

The moment Glassie used the term “intellectual outlaw,” I immediately felt a deep resonance. Hadn’t I always enjoyed seeking to learn by means of what is ‘deviant’, distasteful, and bizarre? The fantasy vision of myself I long held depicted me as thinking at the limits of academic disciplines, an ‘outlaw’ snatching truths from all scholarly categories, moving conventional perspectives out toward the borders where no knowledge is excluded. I privately saw myself as one who questions narrow definitions of creativity, breaks reductive models of reality, and openly admires people who live differently. As such, I was an annoyance to many, even as I built bridges between oppositions. A generalist, I recognized no ultimate incompatibility between the arts, sciences, and humanities. To implicate my somatic intelligence, I taught, wrote, and showed up in life powered by heart-felt reason. Pursuing an epistemological wholeness, my metaphoric and rational faculties granted me an unified sense of the multiplicity of life. My failure to achieve that imagined status beyond small deconstructions is a simple matter of not having the “horses to pull’ my professional cart.” (ftnte: One folklorist who most certainly had powerful horses pulling his cart was Alan Dundes who rocked the discipline with his abiding commitment bringing Freudian psychodynamics to his folklore studies).

The discipline of folklore is a humanistic social science that interrogates existing conditions through its description and analysis of cultural accomplishments of people who might otherwise be forgotten or mistreated. Folklore asks us to consider whether we think we’re superior to people not holding incumbency status of what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘good’, and whether it is not possible to learn from societies whose values, practices, economies, arts, and norms do not reflect our own. Folklore also asks us to know ourselves and bracket our understanding when engaging others in their cultural settings, so as not to miss the unfamiliar (Glassie). Folklore points to pressure points in dominant society.

Today’s political climate threatens scholars and academic disciplines that study those pressure points – ethnicity, immigration, gender, colonialism, political refugees, NEA support, international student enrollment, and DEI. Grant money is cut off. Renowned faculty members are leaving U.S. universities for schools in other countries. Foreign science organizations plan now to employ U.S. scientists fired from federal jobs or who had their research stopped due to the administration’s withholding of grant funding.

The crisis demands our performance of the noble role of folklorists as irritants to the body politic, through scholarship supporting those who are impeded or ‘othered’. Folklore subverts hatred by adhering respectfully to the worldview of those we study. We must teach and write in ways people realize society is makable, reality flexible. We must act meaningfully to overturn the xenophobia and racism that dehumanize people. Through a via negativa, that is, an improvement by subtraction, folklorists contribute to positive causes through careful considerations of the lives of others. This moment calls for nothing less.

All folklore, according to Henry Glassie, leads us at the end of the day to consider the question of superiority. The ugly argument for superiority fossilizes into nationalism, borders, asylums, xenophobia, racism, holocausts, mistreatment of people in gender transition and people with disabilities. So, folklorists, or perhaps some small number, must necessarily be at odds with their discipline and society. Folklore’s intellectual outlaws stand ready.

(To Be Continued): work Jung / and Artist Intellectual