Toward New Perspectives in Folklore

ed. Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman xxi + 232 pp.

Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Ed. Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman. Reprint edition, with new preface by Richard Bauman. Bloomington: Trickster Press, 2000. Pp. xxi + 232. Index, biographical glosses. $16.95 paper.

This reissue of a folklore standard comes at a welcome time. As folklorists continue to discuss just what to call themselves and the discipline, and as departments in the humanities generally are struggling to position themselves in a changing academy, this volume permits us to take a step back and see where we were thirty years ago. And the years seem to have gone by quickly. As Richard Bauman says in the new preface, "the new perspectives are no longer quite so new" (ix), but many of them still ring resoundingly current.

The book has been reprinted in its entirety and includes a foreword by Paredes and an introduction by Bauman, as well as chapters by Dan Ben-Amos, Roger D. Abrahams, Bauman, Dell Hymes, Elli Köngäs Maranda, Kenneth S. Goldstein, Robert Jerome Smith, Brian Sutton-Smith, Alan Dundes, Brian Stross, Dennis Tedlock, Heda Jason, and Gary H. Gossen.

New in this volume is a preface by Bauman that, rather than try to reintroduce the articles from the perspective of thirty years, instead offers a poignant tribute to Américo Paredes and what he hoped to accomplish with this book and indeed much of his scholarly life: a meaningful dialogue between folklorists in North America and Latin America. Bauman invites the participation of a new group of scholars (indeed, some of them were involved in the publication of this book, as Trickster Press is run by graduate students), and we are left to wonder why American folklorists still do not have a working, lasting relationship with Latin American folklore theory.

The book is largely theory-based, though what were cutting-edge theoretical standpoints fighting against diffusionist theory and the Finnish method in the early seventies are now not only second nature but the very ideologies by which folklore has come to be defined. The folklore theory practiced today in America's graduate schools looks very much like that laid out in the essays in this collection. In his original foreword, Paredes laments that "[m]any of our theoretical confusions arise from the fact that we cannot agree on the definition of basic terms; and we, therefore, often find it difficult to talk to each other. This, more than broad theoretical concepts, has been the cause of many of our disagreements" (xiii). Surely that statement is as true about contemporary disagreements and disciplinary rifts today as it was in 1972.

The thirteen essays presented in Toward New Perspectives in Folklore serve to remind us who paved the way for much of our current study and also provide readers with a context from which to judge how far the field of folklore theory has developed. Hymes's contribution, for example, outlines the place of folklore in the development of sociolinguistic research, and he calls for a greater analysis of "verbal performance in terms of genres and expressivity," which has been and continues to be answered by performance-centered approaches pervasive in folkloristics today.

Articles by Abrahams, Bauman, and Ben-Amos discuss definitions of folklore and were influential in many scholars' conceptualizations of the field and disciplinary practice. Again, the book seems especially timely as many worry about changing the names of academic departments or the discipline itself in an effort to garner respect from colleagues. The book makes concrete a moment in folklore theory during which methodological concerns were changing and a group of scholars all found similar answers to very different questions. In that sense, practitioners and scholars can read the working-through of these problems in one place, in a book that seems less artifact than field guide.

This reissue means that folklore students and scholars can finally throw away their photocopied, outsized, dog-eared copies of Toward New Perspectives and replace them with this beautiful new edition.

Christie Fox
Indiana University, Bloomington