Sins of Objectification? (R Baron)

Robert Baron
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Sins of Objectification? Agency, Mediation,
and Community Cultural Self-Determination
in Public Folklore and Cultural Tourism
Programming
Critics claim that by objectifying culture, public folklorists limit or deny the agen-
cy of the practitioners of traditions whom they represent. This article analyzes how
public folklorists engage dialogically with community members to mutually shape
frames of representation, while facilitating community cultural self-determination.
Arguing against a view of objectification as categorically exploitative, I demonstrate
how agency is pursued and accomplished through cultural representations that
may entail objectification but generate benefits for community members as well
as for folklorists.
Is public folklore programming inherently objectifying? Do folklorists represent par-

ticipants in public folklore programs and their cultures as objects when they are pre-
sented to outsiders, with the participants unable to provide their own perspectives on
their traditions? Or are folklorists able to effectively collaborate with community mem-
bers to enable them to represent their traditions on their own terms and to act in their
own interests? Some American academic critics of public folklore contend that its ob-
jectifications of cultures embody inequities of power between folklorists and the com-
munity members whose traditions are presented. Here, representational power is seen
as residing in the hands of the folklorist, who constructs presentations that substan-
tially alter traditional culture while limiting or denying the agency of practitioners.
Anthropologists and folklorists writing critically about public folklore see it as ob-
jectifying both the community members and the cultures that are represented. For
example, in Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec, Richard Handler contrasts
“unconscious lifeways” with “objectified ‘tradition’” (1988:55). He sees folklorists as
contributing to the “demise of folk society” by creating traditions that, while “imagined
as authentic,” are in fact “objectifications of traditional culture” (63) and that make
culture into an object, a “thing . . . bounded, continuous, and precisely distinguishable”
(15). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that the fact “that we objectify culture has
long been recognized; festivals, however, also objectify the human performers and
implicate them directly in the process” (1991:428). And Richard and Sally Price were
Robert Baron is Folk Arts Program Director at the New York State Council on the Arts
Journal of American Folklore 123(487):63–91

Copyright © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
64 Journal of American Folklore 123 (2010)
“haunted” by “the risk of objectification” in their presentations of Maroon song and

dance for an exhibition of Maroon arts that they curated in 1982. Despite their exten-
sive knowledge of the culture and their ability to maintain “control” of the presentations,
they felt that the “spectre of a cultural zoo still hung over the enterprise” (1994:18).

They express further apprehension about the objectification of Maroons at the 1992
Smithsonian Folklife Festival, associating it with the zoos, circuses, and world’s fairs
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which exhibited human beings from
exotic places as “others.” The Prices contend that the mediation provided by the festi-
val’s “presenters/interpreters” does not avoid objectification (111). They are dismissive
of claims by participants in the festival that they benefit from their participation and
acquire prestige when they return to their own communities, because these benefits
do not justify what they “went through,” their feeling that they were “demeaned by
being put on display” (114).
In practice, public folklorists engage dialogically with community members to
mutually shape frames of representation. This may entail progressive disempower-
ment of the folklorists, with their authority diminishing as community cultural
self-determination is enhanced. This article will analyze how public folklore pre-
sentations and cultural tourism initiatives have succeeded (or failed) to enable
community members to represent their cultures on their own terms and foster their
agency. I will provide examples from several types of public folklore programming,
including festivals, concerts, demonstrations, and tours designed by folklorists for
cultural tourism initiatives.1 Public folklorists acknowledge the impact of their
interventions in other cultures as they construct representations that, even as they
may entail objectification, enable participants to provide perspectives on their tra-
ditions and advance their own interests.
Critics of public folklore like Handler and the Prices emphasize how cultures are
objectified by folklorists. They treat “objectification” as a dirty word, suggesting dis-
tortion and exploitation of a culture and its practitioners. As philosopher Martha
Nussbaum has observed, “objectification” is generally “used as a pejorative term,
connoting a way of speaking, thinking and acting that the speaker finds morally or
socially objectionable.” While at one time it was “a relatively technical term in femi-
nist theory,” by the mid-1990s it became more widely used “to criticize advertisements,
films, and other representations, and also to express skepticism about the attitudes
and intentions of one person to another, or of oneself to someone else” (1995:249).
Nussbaum argues that these conventional understandings of objectification are too
simplistic. Objectification can be benign or objectionable, depending upon the “over-
all context of the human relationship in question” (271). Nussbaum is not alone in
her view. Charis Cussins suggests that objectification can advance rather than con-
strain agency and proposes “a notion of agency not opposed by, but pursued in objec-
tification.” Studying women undergoing invasive procedures in infertility clinics,
Cussins found that they willingly subjected themselves to (and may actively partici-
pate in) “technological objectification” during these procedures in order to become
pregnant (1996:575). Cussins claims that such objectification is not necessarily “an-
tithetical to personhood” (576), and she “discern[s] potential gains for the long-range
self within each dimension of objectification” (599).
Baron, Sins of Objectification? 65
The notion of agency itself is a subtle one that requires careful attention. Every
individual involved in social interaction is an “agent,” engaged in actions meant to
bring about effects from the social situation. In contemporary social theory, agency
is seen as more than just a “synonym for free will or resistance,” anthropologist Lau-

ra Ahearn observes (2001:130). Rather, it is “the socioculturally mediated capacity
to act,” Ahearn argues, and she grounds this view in the “emphasis in practice theory
. . . on the social influences on agency,” where “human actions are central” but “nev-
er considered in isolation from the social structures that shape them” (117). The re-
lationship between agency and its social context is intimate. Agency not only is shaped
by social structure but also influences it in return, and social theorist Anthony Gid-
dens argues that there is an “interdependence of action and structure” (1979:3), with
agency constituting structure and structure informing agency. As agents, everyone
involved in a social interaction has power, in the sense of the capacity to act, and
Giddens suggests that agents employ their powers to “accomplish outcomes in stra-
tegic conduct” (88). There is, however, a second sense of the term “power” as well, an
individual’s or group’s power to “get others to comply with their wants” (93)—that is,
power as domination. Giddens states that “power relations . . . are always two-way”
(that is, power in the first sense of the word is always exercised by both the dominant
and the dominated) and that such roles involve relationships of “autonomy and de-
pendence” (93). This does not suggest that each party is able to affect the agency of
the other equally, and it does not deny the existence of structural inequities. In fact,
agency can be expressed in a wide variety of ways. Exploring the topic, Ahearn lists
“oppositional agency, complicit agency, agency of power, [and] agency of intention”
as differing kinds of agency and notes that “multiple types [of agency] are exercised
in any given action” (Ahearn 2001:130). In the social situations of public folklore
programming, all parties possess agency as they interact—the community members
whose traditions are represented, folklorists, administrators, and audiences.
It is instructive to note how agency is exercised, even in situations that may seem
highly objectified. Nussbaum’s feminist scholarship on sexual objectification (1995)
and research by Cussins (1996) and Iona Heath and John Nessa (2007) on doctor–
patient relationships show how agency can be expressed through multiple means.
Rather than being merely an object acted upon—a body rather than a person—indi-
viduals may accept willing subordination to the status of an object while recognizing
short- or long-term benefits for themselves, maintaining agency within the course of
their objectification during a sex act or medical procedure. Based on the analysis of
both erotic literature and lived experiences of sexuality, Nussbaum, for example, shows
how either or both partners may enjoy immediate pleasure at the same time as they
recognize that their body is an object of sexual desire and gratification for the other.2
The sexual “object” may subvert her or his objectification for the sake of one or an-
other kind of material advantage beyond the sex act. In a related vein, Cussins illus-
trates how patients may submit to depersonalized procedures in order to attain their
long-term medical goals. Some physicians are now recognizing the importance of
resisting medical objectification. Calling for doctors to engage in supportive relation-
ships with patients “with the aim of discovering a coherent explanation of illness that
makes sense to the affected person,” Heath and Nessa suggest how both physician
and patient can expand each other’s agency. Physicians need to recognize that they
are more than “agents of medicalization, promoting technological and pharmaco-
logical techniques and procedures.” Instead, they must “use the healing potential of
an ongoing doctor-patient relationship,” which serves to “diminish negative emotions

and promote health through a positive effect on immune function” (2007:887).
Objectification is a complex ontological phenomenon, far more nuanced and am-
biguous than received views of the medical professions, sexual relations, or public
folklore programming would suggest. Nussbaum sees objectification as a “multiple”
and “slippery” concept (1995:251). She contends that “all types of objectification are
not equally objectionable” and that the “evaluation of any of them requires a careful
evaluation of content and circumstance” (256). Objectification can occur within the
context of discrimination or oppression due to race, social class, gender, or sexual
orientation, serving as a vehicle for domination. Yet, even in oppressive circumstanc-
es of objectification, agency may be exercised by the dominated, through such means
as active or passive resistance and the advancement of long-term individual or collec-
tive interests. Objectification can be a two-way street, with both parties objectifying
each other to pursue their goals. In public folklore, objectification need not be objec-
tionable. It need not be, as Thomas Walker put it in a recent e-mail message to me, a
“totalizing repression,” stifling any agency of the community members presented, and
public folklore programs, as he rightly observed, involve far more than giving voice to
the unrepresented. Community members and their cultures may be objectified, but
at the same time they may exercise agency to provide perspectives about their tradi-
tions on their own terms, advance their interests, and enable their traditions to flour-
ish anew as a result of exposure to new audiences.
Intervention, Cultural Brokerage, and Framing
Since the 1980s, public folklorists have, implicitly or explicitly, acknowledged the
objectifying dimensions of their work and recognized its consequences, while devel-
oping means for communities to represent their own traditions. Three key public
folklore concepts engage these issues: intervention, cultural brokerage, and framing.
Folklorists create frames to represent artists and their traditions when they intervene
as cultural brokers to present traditions to new audiences.
Public folklore involves intervention in the lives and institutions of a community,
with an inevitable impact upon the traditions that are documented and presented.
Following from David Whisnant’s writings of the 1980s, public folklorists came to
view their work as, in Whisnant’s words, “unavoidably interventionist,” and they
became highly self-conscious and reflexive about the implications and consequences
of their work for practitioners of traditions and their communities (1988:233). While
their accounts of their work are not typically articulated in terms of “objectification”
or “agency,” they explore how traditions and their practitioners are altered through
their interventions, and they indicate how community members benefitting from
public folklore programming act to advance their own interests.
In The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector (Feintuch 1988),
public folklorists drew on Whisnant’s ideas in order to provide accounts of their
projects that examined specific interventions and their consequences. Jean Haskell
Speer, for example, described an oral history and folklife program she designed at a
rural library and her university’s extension learning center in Virginia, which had the
effect of validating and elevating the status of “nonelites” and of African American

participants. One of the first programs she organized “brought more blacks and whites
together than is usual for the community—which produced some disquietude among
some community residents” (1988:158). Following from Speer’s goals for the project,
the local use of the library and learning center “increased quite substantially both in
numbers and in diversity of users.” A Christmas celebration at the learning center
following the completion of the project attracted an integrated audience for the first
time (163). Materials from the project were also used by a local industrial develop-
ment group as evidence that the community is culturally interesting. These materials
attracted the attention of politicians running for office, who recognized the value of
local cultural heritage in advancing their own political ends. Some of the participants
“became so visible” as a result of the project that they were regarded as “community
spokespersons or local celebrities.” A basket maker began to teach his tradition on a
regular basis, and his baskets became “prized possessions throughout the commu-
nity” (163). Speer demonstrates that her project benefitted multiple sectors of the
local society, including those that already had greater overall power and access to
resources as well as relatively less powerful groups like traditional artists, who were
able to advance their long-term interests through their participation in the project.
Speer’s programs advanced the ability of participants and the entire community to
act in various circumstances, giving them more agency. Speer notes that interviewers
who had been unemployed prior to the project “regained confidence” (163) in their
abilities. The community at large “gained a strengthened sense of political and cul-
tural substance,” which was reflected in their leadership of a regional coalition in
rural, mountainous western Virginia that advocated for more highway funds and
challenged the more powerful eastern and urbanized sections of their state. She felt
that the project made the community “more vocal about themselves,” and, articulat-
ing a fundamental challenge for the field, she asserted that “we need to ask what sorts
of cultural interventions lead to cultural self-determination” (164).
As cultural brokers, folklorists mediate among multiple parties—cultural institutions,
artists, academic disciplines, traditional communities, and audiences. As Richard Ku-
rin explains, “cultural brokers study, understand, and represent someone’s culture (even
sometimes their own) to non-specialized others through various means and media”
(1997:19). He adds that the term “brokering” is used to suggest that these representa-
tions are negotiated through and driven by a variety of interests on behalf of the in-
volved parties. Cultural brokerage occurs whenever there is mediation involved in
representing a culture. The cultural broker has unique access to differing kinds of
communities and constituencies, and he or she serves, in the words of ethnomusi-
cologist James Bau Graves, as a “facilitation agent,” connecting communities to domains
that they might not be able to access on their own, like government, the media, fund-
ing sources, educational systems, and new audiences (2005:150). In discussing his
experiences developing cultural programs in Portland, Maine, Graves demonstrates
that cultural brokers cannot view communities monolithically when they try to act as
facilitation agents, and he describes the competing, conflicting, and converging inter-
ests of differing ethnic and political groups among recent Sudanese immigrants. For
Graves, “to be a cultural mediator means to place oneself at the center of the intersect-
ing circles of interest” (148).

Frames spatially, psychologically, and interpretively define presentations, distinguish
them from ongoing community life, and shape the representation of culture. The
notion of the frame in the contemporary social sciences was theorized by Erving
Goffman, who drew on W. I. Thomas’s concept of the “definition of the situation,”
which Thomas (1923) saw as fundamental to the construction of social reality. The
“definition of the situation” involves the subjective understanding and interpretation
of an event by participants, and those understandings are also shaped by larger social
forces. Goffman saw the frame “of ” and “for” a social interaction as ways that actors
understand the meanings and premises of their interactions—“What is it that’s going
on here?” as Goffman put it (1974:8). Differing participants will have differing defini-
tions of the situation. Scholars who see public folklore as fundamentally objectifying
stress the power of folklorists to frame programs and thus to determine the repre-
sentation of participants, implicitly or explicitly rendering those represented as rela-
tively passive. Others see agency for both parties as they work out how traditions are
presented and interpreted. Folklorists and the community members they present (as
well as the organizations producing events) have differing definitions of the situation,
which may result in conflict, allowance for differing points of view, or the achievement
of consensus about how traditions are to be presented. As Graves demonstrates, there
are often divergent definitions of a situation within a particular cultural group, reflect-
ing the multiple ways it is differentiated internally.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was much public folklore scholarship of a the-
oretical character about intervention, cultural brokerage, and framing, but there have
been few such theoretical studies since. Both the earlier studies, which were written
during a period of heightened conceptual interest in issues of cultural representation,
and more recent descriptive accounts, which focus on folklore projects developed in
association with communities, show intervention in action. They help us understand
how frames are constructed by folklorists acting as cultural brokers, learn about the
framing of these activities by the performers of traditions, and see how authority for
framing is turned over to community members.
Based on fieldwork conducted at the Michigan Program of the 1987 Smithsonian
Festival of American Folklife by Richard Bauman, Patricia Sawin, Inta Gale Carpen-
ter, and a group of folklore graduate students from Indiana University, Reflections on
the Folklife Festival: An Ethnography of Participant Experience was the first in-depth
ethnography of a folklife festival (Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter 1992).3 In the study,
the team was especially interested in the differential and shifting framing of the event
by performers and demonstrators (who were referred to as “participants”). They con-
sidered how these framings represented individual participants, their communities,
and their traditions as they were recontextualized from their original setting and
placed anew in the situation of the festival. Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter viewed
the event as a “staging of behaviors that rekeys the [people] represented within the
frame of the representation.” These processes were understood to operate within the
context of a festival that juxtaposes “divergent frames of reference,” among its “pro-
duction . . . , participants . . . , and . . . audience” (1992:60).
By observing framing at the 1987 festival and analyzing the reports of participants,

the Indiana University team found that many participants were confused about how
they might reframe customary activities as recontextualized folklife performances
before public audiences. This was especially problematic for such everyday activities
as foodways and occupational traditions. Participants lacked “adequate and concrete”
explanations about what the notions of “folklife” and “festival” mean (27), the Indiana
team discovered, and they were not consulted about how their performance space
would be set up. Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter found that some participants may
resent, not understand, or actively resist the definition of the situation as it is framed
by the producers from the Smithsonian staff and the presenters. (Bauman, Sawin,
and Carpenter use the term “presenter” to refer to a group of people, “usually aca-
demically trained folklorists, historians, museum specialists or cultural programmers,
who are charged with introducing and contextualizing the cultural forms on display,
moderating discussions in sessions, and serving as intermediaries between the festi-
val producers and the participants” [6]. While some presenters work for the Smith-
sonian in an ongoing basis, the staff and the presenters were represented as constitut-
ing two different groups in this study.) Participants may not identify themselves as
“folk” artists (46) and may decline to offer narratives that they view as private (42).
The participants also maintained their own agendas. For this festival, which is held
in the National Mall in the heart of official Washington and in full view of the U.S.
Capitol, these agendas included career and economic advancement (19), touring the
city (21), and promoting the state of Michigan (19). Participants also sought to gain
political access to influential government officials in order to make their case for
concerns about matters like laws restricting gill net fishing and banning the sale of
muskrat meat (18–9; see also Carpenter 1994:222; Lockwood and Au 1994; Sommers
1994a).
We see here multiple types of agency at play. Participants express oppositional
agency in resisting the definition of the situation by the producers and presenters and
in declining to perform private traditions. They pursue long-term goals through their
intention to maintain their own agendas, while acquiescing to others in presenting
at an event where they were not consulted about how their performance space was
set up. Resistance, acquiescence, and the intentional pursuit of long-term goals, agen-
tive processes all, demonstrate that the participants are not merely objectified per-
formers on display at the festival. Power is exercised by the participants as well as by
the festival producers and presenters, when we view power—following one of the two
senses of the term that Giddens elaborates—as the accomplishment of outcomes in
strategic conduct by all parties to a social interaction, parties whose relationships are
characterized by both autonomy and dependence (1979:88, 92, 93).
Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter focused on the ways in which the festival was ex-
perienced and framed by participants; this differed from the framings of the Smith-
sonian staff, as well as from those of the contracted presenters and the organizers of
the Michigan area of the 1987 festival.4 They also identified dissatisfactions and mis-
understandings among participants, which had frequently occurred over the history
of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The organizers and presenters of the Michigan
area felt that they were overlooked in Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter’s research, and

they strongly disagreed with significant aspects of the unpublished draft proposal for
this study, “The 1987 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife: An Ethnography of
Participant Experience,” written by Patricia E. Sawin in 1988. In an August 31, 1988,
letter to the authors, Laurie Sommers wrote that the study was flawed because “of
lack of systematic attention to the role and perspective of the organizers” (quoted in
Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter 1992:10). Nevertheless, the authors contended that
their “perspectival bias” was justified because the study was expressly designed to
examine the perspectives of participants. Their “selective orientation was warranted,”
they argued, “all the more so because what the participants perceived to be happening
did not always coincide with what the festival organizers intended or even what they
had explicitly communicated” (10). The authors also contended that their study “chose
to foreground the participant’s experiences because up to the point of our research it
had taken a back seat to the concerns of festival producers and folklorists who analyzed
how festivals worked from their perspectives” (10–11). The divergent perspectives of
the Smithsonian staff, the participants, and the contracted presenters, fieldworkers,
and organizers of the Michigan area in the 1987 festival were discussed in a special
issue of Folklore in Use, entitled “Michigan on the Mall,” which was written in response
to Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter (Sommers 1994b).
Another limitation of Reflections on the Folklife Festival was its reliance upon re-
ports from festival participants. Drawing more heavily on observations of perfor-
mances would have provided the authors with a more holistic and fine-grained sense
of how participants resisted, accommodated, or acquiesced to the expectations of
Smithsonian staff. Such a research methodology would have revealed how agency
unfolded and changed in the course of the festival, both through verbal means and
the actions of participants. As Giddens indicates, agency involves both discursive
and practical consciousness, with the latter not usually expressed in an explicitly
codified form (Giddens 1979:57–58).
Reflections on the Folklife Festival foregrounded difficult issues about the control
of representational frames and the relationships among the Smithsonian festival staff,
presenters, and participants. It came at a time of substantial critical scholarship and
increased reflexivity about how cultural representations are framed in anthropology,
the museum field, public folklore, and academic folklore.5 A disproportionate amount
of this scholarship focuses on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which has served as
a laboratory for those scholars who wanted to use folklore programming to explore
the politics and poetics of representation. During the period when this wave of crit-
ical scholarship was being published, public folklorists working with other cultural
organizations had already begun actively to develop new methods for dialogue and
collaboration with artists in the framing of presentations. These approaches continue
to be developed, but they are all too infrequently recognized in academic publications
about public culture and public folklore.6
Cultural Conversations through Various Modes of Presentation
Describing the motivation for their study, Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter stated that
they sought to inspire improved practices and enable festival participants to enhance

their self-representations. They saw their work as responding to the claims of “those
who champion . . . folklife festivals as a form of representation.” These proponents of
folklife festivals, the authors said, feel that they allow “those whose culture is being
represented far greater opportunity to talk back to the producers of the representation
than is offered, say, by a published ethnography.” Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter felt
that their work would help “realize” this “potential” of folklife festivals, which was
“rarely achieved in practice” (1992:2).
Public folklorists want to accomplish more than providing an opportunity for
community members to “talk back” to the author of an academic monograph. We
want to enable communities to represent themselves on their own terms. “Talking
back” suggests an older paradigm of applied folklore, entailing the unidirectional
application and dissemination of concepts and approaches from folklore studies by
scholars to the rest of the world; this approach has been superseded by both “public”
and “applied” folklorists.7 Public folklorists stress mutual engagement in cultural
representation, which Nick Spitzer calls “cultural conversation,” an expression that
points to a turn to the dialogical in the framing of cultural representations. Through
cultural conversation, folklorists can “represent ourselves to communities through
talk,” where we “learn their meanings and they ours” and “negotiate mutual repre-
sentations in museums or in the media, on the festival stage, or in the text.” These
representations “can reach nations, regions, and states of talkers while they feed back
into the source community with new ideas, techniques, and models for the future
of tradition—constituting a vocabulary with which those talkers can speak for them-
selves” (Spitzer [1992] 2007:99).
Each mode of presentation offers distinctive possibilities—and constraints—for fram-
ing. While presenting musicians on a stage or craftspersons in festival demonstrations
may entail objectification, such demonstrations can also be utilized as vehicles for com-
munity members to express their agency and shape how their traditions are repre-
sented to the public. Presenters should act as collaborators with community members
in this endeavor. In a “successful presentation,” writes Olivia Cadaval in a discussion of
the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, “the presenter both models behavior for the audience
and engages in an ethnographic encounter in which presenter and participant collab-
oratively construct representations for the public” (2000:191).
In considering the differing modes of presentation, it seems appropriate to begin
by discussing the elevated stage, a dominant context for performance. It is character-
ized by psychic distance and spatial separation between the audience and the per-
former, with a sharp division between front and back regions. Robert Cantwell notes
that the stage elevates performers from the audience, underscoring a strong distinc-
tion between the artist above and the audience below. He suggests that, as a “rule of
thumb . . . the higher off the ground you are, the more passive is your audience”
(1993:190).
While the elevated stage can be constraining for folk performers and thus limit
their interactions with audiences, it nevertheless serves as a dominant context for
performance in most contemporary cultures. There are often few, if any, alternatives
to an elevated concert stage for presenting traditional artists in performance for large

audiences. The concert stage also serves as a powerful symbol. Daniel Sheehy com-
pares placing a traditional artist on stage with “putting a picture in a frame and
hanging it on a wall. The symbol of the stage (or the frame) commands attention
and says, ‘This is art, and you should give it special consideration’” ([1992] 2007:223).
On stage, traditional artists are performing in a special space that serves to validate
and legitimate their art.
Public folklorists and ethnomusicologists have explored how to diminish the dis-
tance between artist and audience by fostering interaction between them, and they
have developed ways to equip artists to master the conventions of the stage. Many
traditional musicians customarily play for dances, and one way to create a familiar
context for them is to frame their performance as a participatory dance concert. Such
a framing can be constructed in the physical setting by situating the stage close to the
level of audience members. This approach can be carried forward in the stage design,
which Sheehy suggests could include “re-creation of . . . plazas, bars, or living rooms
[which] could provide a greater sense of traditional context and serve to better inform
the audience and make the performers more comfortable” ([1992] 2007:226). Such
an approach often gives artists more command of the situation than they would have
in a more static event based upon the “high art” mode of European concert perfor-
mance. James P. Leary explores these issues in his essay in “Michigan on the Mall.”
There, he reports that, at the 1987 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, he suggested to
Finnish American accordionist Art Moilanen and Croatian accordionist Bill Stimac
that they should “not be too high above or distant from the audience since they are
most accustomed to playing on ground level at close quarters with dancers.” He called
for the use of a “plywood dance floor, however small, near or in front of the musicians
for what is essentially a tradition of dance music” (1994:209).
While the practice of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival has been modified since
1987, Leary’s suggestions were ignored at the time. Reforms have since been insti-
tuted that include the encouragement of collaborations among presenters, participants,
and festival staff; the development of new orientation materials; and more explicit
instructions for presenters and participants.8 Dance floors and less elevated stages are
now used, but in 1987 Moilanen “felt swallowed up by the surroundings” (209).9 There
was a sharp divergence between, on the one hand, Moilanen’s and Leary’s frames and,
on the other, the frame of the festival’s staff. Leary attempted to diminish the distance
between the artist and the audience by trying to “banter with him between tunes, coax
out reminiscences, invite the crowd to ask questions and convert the context from
concert to workshop” (209). Moilanen still felt awkward, but he eventually solved the
problem on his own by jamming with several of the other Michigan musicians as he
would at home and by inviting them to sit in on his sets, thus using improvisation as
he took command of the frame. His actions are a fine example of an artist exercising
agency, overcoming the objectifying dimensions of the situation through his own
reframing of the performance, and altering the structure of the event.
For many, if not most, public folklorists, equipping performers for self-presentation
is an ideal, enabling artists to present traditions from their own perspectives and in
their own voices. However, folklorists recognize limitations to enabling artists to
present themselves to new audiences. Artists vary in their discursive skills and inter-

pretive capabilities, which are often geared to the universe of discourse in their home
communities. Public folklore programs for general audiences often require educa-
tional and contextual explanations that an artist may not have developed or may not
even ever have been expected to provide. The artist may not have had prior acquain-
tance with the audience, the setting may feel artificial, and there may be new and
unfamiliar performative conventions to which he or she must adapt. Leary acknowl-
edges that self-presentation mitigates objectification, but he recognizes that artists
are, understandably, dependent upon folklorists in new situations.
“Ideally,” states Leary, “presenters should be unnecessary, except as ‘coaches’ behind-
the-scenes.” Allowing artists to present themselves diminishes the implication that
they are “exotic specimens within a living museum, people to be understood and
approached chiefly through the ministrations of learned ‘experts.’” However, as Leary
indicates, many traditional artists are uncomfortable presenting themselves in festi-
val situations, since they are accustomed to audiences “already familiar with what
they do.” As a result, they “appreciate a presenter who knows them, their tradition,
and the structure and demands of folklife festivals” (Leary 1994:208; see also McMa-
hon 2007:180). This is especially the case when there is no mutually intelligible lan-
guage shared by the audience and the artists. For example, at the 2007 Smithsonian
Folklife Festival, I presented Senegalese farmers and blacksmiths who demonstrated
granary construction and iron forging. Though I tried to bring audience members
physically close to the artists to ask them questions, the artists frequently turned to
me to explain what they were doing.
Public folklorists and ethnomusicologists have developed methods to prepare tra-
ditional artists to present themselves in public programs, through workshops on
self-presentation, and by “coaching” them to present and explain their traditions to
new audiences.10 There are also initiatives to equip artists to eventually take over
responsibility to produce presentations without the mediation of a folklorist.
For example, the Community Cultural Initiative (CCI) of the Center for Tradi-
tional Music and Dance (CTMD) in New York City has worked closely with a num-
ber of ethnic communities to develop their abilities to produce, interpret, and organize
presentations of their traditions, both within and outside of their own communities.
This initiative is designed to enable the CTMD to withdraw over time from direct
responsibility for producing programs in these communities, with CTMD eventu-
ally becoming only an informal advisor.
In each community, CCI works with individuals and groups from diverse regions,
religions, and social classes. According to ethnomusicologist Tom van Buren (2003),
the CCI’s West African Initiative dealt with shared regional heritages within spe-
cific areas of Africa, rather than looking monolithically at a constructed pan-Afri-
can heritage. Focusing on the Mandan culture of the empire of Mali and its succes-
sor nations, the initiative developed from an interest expressed by cultural leaders
to develop new cultural programs and was undertaken, van Buren indicates, “both
for their own cultural empowerment and in order to seek a better level of recogni-
tion and relations with their neighbors in their adopted city.” The initiative recog-
nized the “dynamics of African immigrant communities’ interaction with each
other” and with African American communities in their own neighborhoods in

Harlem and the Bronx (70). It involved artists from various countries in the Man-
dan culture area (like Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Mali) and drew audiences from
the African American, Caribbean, and European American communities, as well
as those of African immigrants.
Often, when folklorists diminish their role in presentations, community members
will make choices based upon stylistic and aesthetic preferences that are different
from those of the folklorist. For example, they may choose commercially popular
performers rather than traditional ones, or they may present artists from different
regions than the ones that would have been chosen by the folklorist. When a new
organization, Badenya, assumed artistic responsibility for the final major concert
produced with CTMD, the South African popular music star Miriam Makeba was
featured in one part of the event. With the choice of Makeba, van Buren felt, “local
participation suffered to some degree.” Further, he noted that the traditional culture
of Mali “presented a different set of associations [for audiences] than the popular
South African-based pan-African appeal and progressive legacy of Makeba” would
have (73). As folklorists relinquish authority, the power dynamic shifts, and com-
munities that produce programming are less dependent upon the mediation of the
folklorist. However, as van Buren suggests, this may not result in greater inclusiveness
on all levels, and agency may be advanced for some community members and con-
strained for others.
Concerts produced through CCI fostered interaction between performers and
audiences through preconcert lectures and demonstrations and music and dance
workshops. At concerts, the performers encouraged dancing by audience members,
and, in some events, performers would leave the stage to interact with audience
members. However, some concert venues discouraged or prohibited dancing in the
aisles, which maintained the distancing characteristic of the proscenium stage con-
cert frame.
Folklife presentations occurring outside of the concert stage, on the same level as
the audience or slightly elevated from them, are more conducive to interaction among
artists, audiences, and folklorists. They are also often occasions for audience mem-
bers to share their own folklore, and the audience’s agency increases as they become
active participants in the event. Public folklorists have developed modes of presen-
tation that are uninhibited by the constraints of the concert stage, allowing for pre-
sentations better suited to demonstrating craft and technical processes and offering
richer interpretations of the cultural contexts of traditions and the personal history
of artists.
There are several principal modes of presentations. Demonstrations, for example,
present the production of traditional crafts, occupational practices, and foodways.
They may be presented continuously or as scheduled activities. Scheduled demon-
strations—including lecture demonstrations, which tend to involve more extensive
contextualization—often require the folklorist to more actively participate as a me-
diator. Demonstrations are presented on tables, in a setting that replicates a tradi-

tional structure (like a shop or house), or in a defined open space on the festival
grounds, enabling audience members to approach and engage the tradition bearers
face-to-face. These demonstrations may involve “hands-on” participation, with the

craftspersons showing visitors the techniques used to make an object. As Bauman,
Sawin, and Carpenter indicate, demonstrators tire of being asked the same question
over and over again for a prolonged period (1992:47). Scheduled demonstrations
avoid the problem of recurring questions during such continuous demonstrations.
Demonstrations are challenging to many tradition bearers, who are unaccustomed
to reframing their everyday activities as performances. When there is insufficient
preparation of presenters or demonstrators for the demands that the event entails,
inadequate mediation, and/or limited or no interaction with audience members, a
demonstrator can appear as a human being on display, one whose agency is con-
strained and who may seem objectified to the audience.11 When demonstrations work
well, however, face-to-face interaction between the demonstrator and the audience
advances the agency of everyone involved—agency that is of a kind and quality not
available through other modes of presentation.
Workshops on platforms slightly elevated from the audience are artist-centered
modes of presentation; they are focused upon the style and the biographical back-
grounds of the artists.12 Here, the participants will talk about and present a tradition,
sing a song, trade tunes with other musicians, or show their craft as they explain how
they learned and continue to practice their tradition.
Narrative stages, also known as talker’s tents or talk stages, are used for the presen-
tation of oral narrative or the discussion of various points of view about a tradition
or cultural issues. They are also presented on slightly elevated stages, in close proxim-
ity to the audience. When this format is used for telling narratives, the presenter may
elicit the stories from the participants, or, preferably, participants will exchange sto-
ries with one another with no intervention from the presenter. In recent years, pre-
sentations on narrative stages have tended to involve reporting about experiences and
events rather than the performance of personal experience narratives, legends, or folk
tales—genres that have been at the heart of folkloristics through most of its history.
The mediating role of the folklorist as presenter is often stronger in demonstrations,
workshops, and talker’s tents than in other presentational formats. More and more
frequently, however, presenters are members of the communities whose traditions
are being shared. They have internalized understandings of their own culture that
outsider folklorists do not possess, and sometimes they have coursework in folklore
or a related field. Folklorists, of course, may also be members of the cultural com-
munity whose traditions they are presenting. In this case, they possess native knowl-
edge, intersubjective understandings, and membership in the social networks of the
communities that they are representing. These insiders—or, rather, insiders/outsid-
ers—have experienced a certain distance from their home communities, conditioned
by their academic training, study of other cultures, and experiences living in other
kinds of communities. The insider/outsider public folklorist can approach presenta-
tion and interpretation with a kind of verstehen not possible among either local com-
munity members or outsider folklorists.
In a close study of the 1985 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Robert Cantwell ([1991]
1994) provides a fascinating account of a staff meeting where presentational frames
for the festival were planned. He also describes the success or failure of each of these
frames with regard to participant-audience interaction, the representation of the

voices of participants, the responses of the audience, and the degree of objectification.
His study suggests that certain presentational frames were especially objectifying,
feeding the stereotypes held by audience members from other cultures and insuffi-
ciently allowing the voices of participants to be heard.
A presentation by cornrowers at the 1985 festival featured hairstyles created by
local African and African American hairdressers.13 The “cornrowers’ exhibit” was
intended to “become a kind of informal ‘hangout’ on the Mall,” with the cornrowers
“placed in a small, ‘embracing’ semicircle,” at a height of six inches. One of the hair-
dressers, who was originally from Tanzania, brought some of her own clients to the
event (Cantwell [1991] 1994:172).
Another presentation occurred within a replica of the saddle-making shop of
leatherworker Duff Severe. Enlarged photos of his actual shop in Oregon served as
a background, and benches provided opportunities for conversation among the
cowboys participating in the festival. The festival staff intended to create an “inti-
mate” interaction with Severe, one that went “beyond the ‘two-dimensional’ en-
counter of more typically theatrical museum displays,” and to “reproduce” what
one folklorist in the meeting “called ‘life.’ ” Ideally, the staff hoped, “the shop would
become in effect what it was in its ‘natural’ setting” (Cantwell [1991] 1994:172).
A third presentational frame featured Kmhmu musicians, craftspersons, and native
interpreters. They were to be placed in a “compound”—a term to which a staff eth-
nomusicologist “took strong exception—which would include a garden, a blacksmith
shop, and a small platform shaded by a tent.” Two of the folklorists at the meeting
saw potential problems of “objectification.” One felt that the presentation area would
too closely represent a “cultural zoo,” and the other felt that the “lack of a common
language, which would normally provide a medium of communication between par-
ticipant and visitor, would in effect turn the exhibit into a ‘living diorama.’” The solu-
tion was to “redesign the platform so that the visitor, as the director put it, would be
‘surrounded by Kmhmu’ rather than [being situated] above them or separated [from
them] by a barrier” (Cantwell [1991] 1994:173).
Analyzing these differing modes of presentation, Cantwell saw them as embodying
a fundamental paradox, in which
the palpable substance and intrinsic forms of [cultural] representation [like those of
the festival] shape both that which is represented and the awareness to which it is
represented—even though the aim of representation is ultimately to dissolve itself
and its frame, bringing the visitor and the participant into a kind of mutual imagina-
tive absorption. . . . Devices of representation, such as stages, platforms, and ampli-
fication systems, and mediators, such as presenters and texts, permit the festival
planners to define to the visitor the reality they hope to represent—but they also
stand in the way of the thoroughgoing self-transcendence that the ideal representa-
tion would achieve. ([1991] 1994:173–4)
Reading Cantwell’s analysis about the degrees of success or failure of these presenta-
tional frames, we see how critical the devices of representation were to successful
interactions between the tradition bearers and their audience, the replication of nat-
ural contexts, and the presentation of traditions in the participants’ own voices.

The cornrowing presentation became “a genuine living place,” Cantwell states, where
people, especially children, congregated. They asked questions, talked to the hairdress-
ers, and had their hair braided in an atmosphere of “tender, sensuous intimacy.” They
were involved in the process of doing hair and of the female community formed around
it, and the event offered an “opportunity for the participants to express their opinions
and personalities” ([1991] 1994:175). This presentational frame enabled a public, dis-
cursive exercise of agency among participants. Erasure of the fourth wall occurred for
some audience members, who had now become participants themselves.14
The saddlemaking shop was a success for cowboys participating in the festival, and
they lingered and talked there. But Cantwell felt it “likely” that “the success of the
shop” for the cowboys “had a chilling effect for visitors, who may have felt they were
intruding” ([1991] 1994:176). He does not indicate, however, whether he asked the
visitors if they felt like intruders, and his analysis of the situation seems to be a pro-
jection of his own reaction to visiting the saddlemaking shop.
The Kmhmu area failed and did become a kind of “living diorama.” Communica-
tion was “difficult” between participants and visitors. Almost all of the artists tended
to ignore the visitors, perhaps because of a sense of “propriety, actuated by a kind of
embarrassment or modesty.” Only children, “unburdened by stereotypes and un-
daunted by language barriers they could not anticipate” ([1991] 1994:176), tried to
communicate with the participants. While this presentational frame was apparently
quite objectifying, we should not assume that the Kmhmu participants had no agen-
cy here. In making the choice to participate in the event and, presumably, in choosing
what they would (or would not) present, these artists did express agency. They may
have anticipated benefits from their participation that influenced their decision to
participate, or they might have acquiesced to an apparently objectifying presentation
because they felt they had no other choice. Without asking the Kmhmu participants,
we can only speculate about their intentions and how their choices were constrained
or enabled by the social context of the festival.15
Cantwell felt that approaching the Kmhmu “as closely as the festival setting permit-
ted” was “profoundly disquieting. . . . [T]hey are, after, all, a mountain tribe of Southeast
Asia, culturally enigmatic and physically exotic, catastrophically dislocated by a bizarre
war” ([1991] 1994:176). He is quite candid about his visceral feelings about the staging
of this area, and it is clear that the presentational frame inhibited interaction. The
problems with this frame demonstrate the importance of successfully using devices of
representation to enable the voices of tradition bearers to be heard, to lessen the distance
between the participants and the audience, and to diminish objectification. However,
objectification does not exist only in the eyes of the beholder, and it would have been
worthwhile to ask the Kmhmu how they felt about the way that they were represented.
And, since Cantwell was only one of many observing the Kmhmu’s presentation, it
would have also been worthwhile to interview other audience members to determine
whether they viewed the Kmhmu as objects, subjects, or perhaps both.
Cantwell does not suggest how the festival organizers might have avoided what he
portrays as the extreme objectification of the Kmhmu. I have found that when “ex-
otic” participants who do not speak the same language as visitors are involved in a
presentation, one should ideally use bilingual speakers experienced in festival inter-

pretation to explain the traditions being demonstrated and draw visitors into close
physical proximity with the participants. When bilingual speakers are not available,
other presenters can bring audience members near to the participants, where the
visitors can make eye contact with them, show interest in what they are doing, and
ask questions. These questions can be answered by the presenters versed in the tradi-
tion or a bilingual speaker referred by the presenter.
The Senegalese millet farmers and craftspeople whom I helped present at the 2007
Smithsonian Folklife Festival, for example, had never visited the United States before
or participated in a folklife festival. Most only spoke Wolof, though a few were able
to speak some French. There were many more presenters than Wolof speakers. I was
at the festival as part of a research project about the curation of public programs in
museums and volunteered to fill in as a presenter in areas where they were needed.
Diana N’Diaye, a staff curator, provided me with ethnographic background about
the participants, their cultures, and the traditions they presented, which I supple-
mented through conversations with the native presenters and by speaking with sev-
eral of the participants who knew a little French. I approached visitors that hovered
on the edge of the demonstration area, brought them closer to the participants, and
explained what was being demonstrated, such as blacksmithing and the making of
a granary. This diminished the physical and psychic distance between the Senegalese
participants and the visitors. Following N’Diaye’s advice, I encouraged the visitors
to focus primarily upon what the participants were making. By pointing out photo-
graphs of the participants’ village and other information on interpretive signage,
situating their villages in Senegal and the world, and discussing the local agricul-
tural economy, craft techniques, and functions of the objects, I helped the visitors
become more engaged in the presentation. Participant and visitor mutually acknowl-
edged one another without words, and some visitors made contact with the par-
ticipants by speaking to them in English, even though both parties knew that their
words were not being understood. The agency of the participants was expressed
through their practice and through nonverbal communication, rather than through
verbal, discursive interpretation. In palpable physical copresence—acknowledging
one another and tacitly recognizing an interest in communicating—the subject/
object dilemma, I felt, was being addressed, as the framing of the visitors adapted
to the situation.
Cultural Tourism, Voice, and Access
Cultural tourism programming can be at least as objectifying as any form of public

programming. It is too often exoticized, with a highly distanced relationship between
the tourists and the culture that they observe, and a lack of involvement from the
local community in determining how it is represented. Joining the ranks of govern-
ment agencies, applied academic disciplines, commercial enterprises, and private
nonprofit entities, public folklorists have become increasingly involved with cul-
tural tourism in recent years. In mediating among tourists, communities seeking
self-representation, and government tourist promotion offices, folklorists provide
opportunities for voicing local perspectives about a community’s cultural heritage,

opening up dimensions of expressive culture overlooked in conventional cultural
tourism representations. They frequently collaborate with traditional communities
in creating representations of their cultures, which are developed dialogically by
negotiating the frames of representation.
To examine this issue, I will discuss three examples of cultural tourism productions
created through the intervention of folklorists. These examples contrast significantly
in how dialogue with community members figured in the project designs and in the
degree and kind of access into the back regions of communities that these productions
afford tourists.
In partnership with the folk arts program of the Washington State Arts Commis-
sion, Northwest Heritage Resources produced audio “heritage tours”—CDs with
accompanying guidebooks that are designed to be used by tourists driving along
“corridors” on highway routes in various regions of the state. As they drive, tourists
listen to narratives, explanations of place names, music, accounts of crafts and oc-
cupational practices, historical testimony about events in the past of a community,
and even a muezzin making the call to prayer at a mosque. They also hear descrip-
tions of the natural landscape, geology, geography, and the industries and ethnic
composition of the villages, towns, and cities through which they are passing.
In the guidebook that accompanies Southeastern Washington Heritage Corridor
Tour: Richland to Clarkston (Lund 1999a), researcher and writer Jens Lund describes
the state’s folklore as a part of its “invisible landscape.” This landscape includes the
“music, songs, stories, and reminiscences of the people of southeastern Washington.
They are as much a part of the landscape as its natural wonders, but are rarely acces-
sible to the casual traveler” (1999b:3).
The invisible landscape can be viewed as an intangible dimension of the “back
region,” a concept originated by Erving Goffman that was adapted by Dean Mac-
Cannell in his theoretical work on tourist experience (Goffmann 1959:144–5; cited
in MacCannell 1976:92). Goffman and MacCannell view back regions as places nor-
mally closed to outsiders. For the tourist, back regions have a special allure because
they are realms of greater authenticity (MacCannell 1976:93–4). Access to back regions
may be provided in controlled situations, or a back region may be represented through
a constructed tourist space, embodying what MacCannell calls “staged authenticity”
(91). In the Washington State heritage tours, visitors are invited to experience back
regions directly, providing opportunities for less-mediated tourist experiences, includ-
ing the possibility of face-to-face encounters with local residents.
The Washington State heritage tours describe events where visitors are welcome.
Some of the individuals who are heard on the CDs expect that they might meet tour-
ists and indicate that they would not mind their visits. In many cases, though, it is
highly unlikely that tourists would actually meet the individual whom they are hear-
ing in their car. Lund, who discussed this project with me in an April 2005 telephone
interview, feels that the representations of people whom tourists are unlikely to meet
make for a more objectified situation. This attitude reflects the high degree of sensi-
tivity that public folklorists have about how cultures are represented and the impor-
tance of individuals telling their own stories in a direct and minimally mediated
fashion. Such representations are, however, far less objectifying than most of the ones

typically produced for tourists. This is particularly true in the case of Lund’s audio
heritage tours, since he is firmly committed to having these stories told through the
voices of the community members themselves—even if they clash with his own ide-
ological views or the conventional wisdom about the historical record. Lund feels
that the lives of rural Americans are especially neglected and widely misunderstood.
The ecologically sensitive urbanite, Lund believes, is oblivious to the requirements of
food and timber production and to the subsistence needs of workers in the agricul-
tural and forestry industries. To address this, Lund said, he represents the voices of
such workers on a number of the tracks on the discs.
The Southeastern Washington Heritage Corridor Tour includes a section on the
Hanford nuclear facility. Created for the Manhattan Project, the facility housed the
first full-sized, continually operating nuclear reactor ever built. On the CD, we hear
narratives of workers for the Manhattan Project, including Margie De Gooyer, the
first woman to operate a mass spectrometer, as well as a contemporary nuclear work-
er at Hanford. The older workers speak nostalgically of their early days at the plant
(a time when they did not know what the facility made), and a contemporary work-
er matter-of-factly describes the process of generating electricity, using what the tape’s
narrator calls the “peaceful” atom. While Lund recognizes that these accounts do not
speak to the viewpoints of opponents of atomic energy and nuclear weapons, he felt
that they should be heard and that they are representative of the local culture, par-
ticularly the culture of the area’s nuclear industry workers. Echoes of an alternative
perspective are present on the disc as well, as this segment of the tour (disc 1, tracks
1–4) begins with the song “Atomic Power,” a 1946 country music hit that speaks of
the fearsome strength of atomic energy and its potentially apocalyptic uses.
Multiple perspectives appear more explicitly in a segment about the Whitman
Incident (also known as the Whitman Massacre). This well-known historical event
involved the 1847 killings of white settlers by Cayuse Indians at the mission founded
by Dr. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. The CDs tell us that the settlers were viewed
as responsible for a measles epidemic that killed large numbers of Native Americans.
The narrator relates a received view of this event and points out a historical marker
along the road that locates the site of the incident. She also mentions retribution
against Native Americans, which is given flesh and amplified in Native American
terms by Marjorie Wahenika of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation.
On track 18 of the first disc, Wahenika relates how the killings served as a pretext for
the expansion of white settlements, which resulted in disastrous and massive land
losses for her people:
There was just a very few, a handful, that were . . . responsible for the killings. But
. . . after the killings occurred, all of the Indians in . . . the Walla Walla Valley were
blamed for it. And so then they were on the run for two years before five of themselves
gave—five of the men gave themselves up. And it’s documented in the trial that there
was Christian teaching [of the Indians] because they tell . . . through an interpreter
they tell them . . . “Did not your God give up his life to save his people?” Well, that’s
what we are doing, so our people can be free again and do as [they did] . . . before
all of this happened. And so five of them were hung in Oregon City, and then the

rest of the people, they kind of calmed down. And then the treaty of 1855 took place
here, and then that was done. And then we deeded the land over to the government,
and then we were moved south here. And at one time the whole land base for the
people here was 6.4 million acres. And after the treaty of 1855, we went down to
158,000 acres.
This account is complemented by the guidebook for the tour, which says that Nar-
cissa Whitman treated Indians with condescension and that Marcus “took little or
no time for the informed parlaying that local Indians viewed as a sign of trust” (Lund
1998b:12).
Since Wahenika is an interpreter for the National Park Service’s Whitman Na-
tional Historic Site, a tourist who stops by might well meet her and talk with her about
the Whitman Massacre. Others heard in the CDs might also be encountered by tour-
ists, and the tour’s producers do not discourage such encounters, which involve an
informed access into the back regions of a community. Unlike the back region expe-
riences provided in conventional cultural tourism, which often involve highly con-
trolled encounters or simulations of local life, tourists and local residents may en-
counter each other on their own, relatively unmediated terms and have experiences
that are more agentive for both parties. Tourists meet community members in every-
day situations, where they can interact unencumbered by an accompanying tour
guide, with community members free to engage in a more spontaneous, non-pre-
packaged situation.
In contexts where the tourist encounters an event, business, or institution de-
scribed in the tour or meets a person whose voice has been heard virtually through
the CDs—such as Santos Garcia, a master saddle maker who operated a saddle shop
at the time the tour was produced—the tourist then experiences the site in its full
actuality. The actuality of the experience of visiting this shop, which did not func-
tion day-to-day as a tourist destination, raises challenging questions about Kirsh-
enblatt-Gimblett’s view of the inherent virtuality of tourist productions. She claims
that “heritage and tourism show what cannot be seen—except through them,” con-
tending that “a key to tourist productions is their virtuality, even in the presence
of actualities” (1998:166). Heritage is produced through the “instruments of their
display.” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett indicates that display serves as “an interface that
mediates and thereby transforms what is shown into heritage” (7). The “process of
exhibition (as knowledge, as performance, as museum display),” she contends, “en-
dows heritage . . . with a second life” (149).16 Visiting Garcia, tourists would expe-
rience the artisan and his shop in an actual and firsthand manner; through the CDs
and their accompanying guidebook, the mediation of the tourist production and
its virtuality would occur in a limited way prior to the visit.
A somewhat different approach was taken by the folklorists who designed the 2004
compact disc set From Bridge to Boardwalk: An Audio Journey Across Maryland’s
Eastern Shore (Irvine 2004). They sought to protect the privacy of the communities
and individuals they represented by creating an audio portrait of the region rather
than a synchronized audio tour keyed to specific sites and events. During the project’s
early planning phases, these folklorists seriously considered creating an audio tour

modeled on those of Washington State, and they discussed this possibility with Lund.
Ultimately, the members of the project’s steering committee (made up of folklorists
and community members from the Delmarva Peninsula) decided to create a cul-
tural tourism production that functioned as a “buffer” between the tourist and the
communities represented. Rory Turner, who served as one of the project directors,
and Thomas Walker, who initiated the project, explained to me in April 2005 telephone
interviews that distrust of cultural tourism by local residents was one of the main
reasons that they took the more distanced approach of the audio portrait. The steer-
ing committee was also influenced by the ideas of anthropologist Erve Chambers,
who contends that “over the last couple of centuries or so, the most significant thing
about heritage has not been what it might come to represent, but rather who gets to
represent it and to what intent” (2006:2).
Self-conscious and critically reflexive about their role as mediators, folklorists in-
volved in this project wanted to let individuals from the region involved in tradi-
tional occupations and forms of expressive culture speak for themselves in their own
voices. They created a production that did not include any narrator and deliberately
insulated the individuals from what the folklorists feared would be intrusive visits by
tourists.17 However, the booklet that accompanies the CDs provides tourists with
resources for planning their visit, including information about public events, tourist
services, museums, and other cultural institutions.
While From Bridge to Boardwalk is meant to let tradition bearers tell their own
story, folklorists involved in the project recognized their role in determining the
interpretive frame through interviews and the editing process. The steering commit-
tee members had diverging ideas about how the representation of the Zionaires, an
African American gospel group, should be framed, and differences could also be
found between the ideas of the steering committee members and those of the en-
semble itself (Rory Turner, telephone conversation, April 2005). Members of the
steering committee sought to provide an overarching perspective on the regional
character and folk culture of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, one that would be incorpo-
rated in the master narrative of the discs’ booklet and expressed through the voices
of the tradition bearers. While the Zionaires wanted to represent their music as a
Christian ministry, members of the steering committee sought in interviews to con-
vey its history, form, and style, along with the regional and familial contexts of the
Zionaires’ music. The responses of the Zionaires largely elided these matters and
emphasized their religious calling and the paramount importance of the holy spirit.
Turner related to me that there was a rather intense dialogue among the members
of the steering committee, in what he called its “circle of collaboration,” about direct-
ing the interviews toward nonreligious issues. Some members of the team, including
the producer, felt that the Zionaires should be allowed to express themselves on their
own terms, even if they did not relate to the overarching objectives of the production;
others tried to direct the interviews to focus on other matters, like cultural history
and folklore. Turner felt that the members of the steering committee had varying
degrees of alignment with the Zionaires regarding the creation of a frame acceptable
to both parties, with some members more open than others to the Zionaires’ rhetoric
and choices. Ultimately, some nonreligious matters were embedded within the Zion-

aires’ representation of themselves on the CD. However, the Zionaires’ expression of
their religious mission was a principal feature of this segment. On disc 2, track 4,
Zionaires manager and member Wendell Brooks says, “It’s more than a group, it’s
more of a ministry. Well, it’s a ministry of music. And there are some people—ini-
tially what gets them into church and to Christ is not a sermon, but it might be a song
that they hear that their ear likes. So they’re [thinking], ‘OK, I’ll go listen to this.’ And
they like the sound, and eventually they start listening to the message.”
The project booklet’s description of the Zionaires places the group in context and
also notes their religious mission:
During the 1950s, four young congregants of Mt. Hope AME Zion Church in Prin-
cess Anne formed The Zionaires, an all-male group. For almost a half a century The
Zionaires have spread the word of God through music to church and radio audi-
ences on the lower shore of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. They attribute their
remarkable survival to the words of King David [in Psalm 146:2]: “I will sing prais-
es unto God while I have any being.” (Eff and Manger 2004:68)
In contrast to From Bridge to Boardwalk, the publication A Wabanaki Guide to

Maine, produced by the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, encourages direct,
unmediated encounters with traditional artists. Folklorist Kathleen Mundell served
as a principal consultant for the development of the guide, along with Theresa Secord,
a Penobscot basketmaker with strong marketing skills and an extensive educational
background. Secord was also the geologist for the Penobscot nation for many years.
Designed to spur tourist visits to the region and the purchase of crafts, the guide
profiles basketmakers and other craftspeople; lists their names, addresses, and phone
numbers; suggests visits to their homes and shops; and describes other natural and
cultural attractions in and around the lands of the four Wabanaki Indian tribes. The
guide includes maps of the “Wabanaki Trail”; gives information about Wabanaki
cultural history and the natural landscape; suggests canoe trips; lists cultural events,
festivals, and museums; and provides, as Mundell put it in a telephone interview in
April 2005, a “perspective on place.” Basketmaking is at the heart of the booklet, which
profiles basketmakers and other craftspersons and describes a tradition with utilitar-
ian origins that is now oriented toward tourist markets. It asks, at one point, “How
do you recognize the home of a basketmaker? Look for the piles of brown ash logs
outside. Then follow your nose. The fragrance of sweetgrass lingers, whether the grass
is freshly harvested and hanging to dry, or gracing baskets woven decades ago” (36).
Tourists are invited to “stop by any time at the home of Richard Keezer” and other
craftspersons (39). The only aspect of the basketmaking tradition that alliance mem-
bers specifically asked to be left out of the text and closed to tourists is the ecologi-
cally fragile sweetgrass growing areas, which are kept in a back region to protect them
(Mundell, telephone interview, April 2005).
While Mundell has been a trusted advisor to the alliance for many years and con-
tinues to serve as a consultant to it, she defers to its Native members about decisions
on nearly all substantive matters. This relationship has resulted in a publication that
offers perspectives on Wabanaki traditions and is fully vetted by the Wabanaki tribes.

Mundell indicated to me that the only significant dissonance between the alliance
members and her involved the design of the Basketmakers Alliance’s gallery, with
Mundell favoring a “cleaner,” less cluttered design that would more easily convey
information.
A Wabanaki Guide to Maine has been successful in substantially increasing tourism,
with the number of visitors outstripping the ability of the commercial infrastructure
to accommodate them. During the summer, the number is so great that local residents
may have to drive much longer distances to find gas for their cars, since service sta-
tions often exhaust their supplies, Mundell told me. As is so often the case, cultural
tourism is having a mixed impact—good and bad, but mainly good here. The basket-
making tradition is stronger than ever, with growing numbers of younger and older
Indians now becoming basketmakers and with sales and prices of baskets increasing.
The alliance is maintaining high standards of craftsmanship within Wabanaki norms
of tradition and innovation, as illustrated in—and fostered by—the Guide.
Like other types of contemporary public folklore programs, cultural tourism proj-
ects developed by folklorists maintain as a paramount objective the creation of op-
portunities for community members to represent their culture on their own terms.
When they provide access to back regions, such cultural tourism initiatives offer
unique opportunities for encounters with local residents and their traditions, and an
entrance to domains of community life not customarily experienced by outsiders.
While the folklorist frames such experiences through the CDs or printed materials
that tourists use prior to these encounters, the encounters themselves do not contain
the high degree of mediation and the kind of negative objectification characteristic
of many conventional tourist experiences. In some cases, such as From Bridge to
Boardwalk, folklorists may prefer to maintain the distance between tourists and local
residents wary of cultural tourism, relying upon audio and print materials as vehicles
for community members to provide perspectives on their traditions. Folklorists using
either of these approaches engage in dialogue with community members over how
their traditions are represented, striving to prevent negative objectifications through
their close consultations.
Conclusions
In every folklife public program, folklorists and community members maintain dif-
fering frames, regardless of how much authority for representation is yielded by the
folklorist to the community. Differential intents are maintained by the folklorists and
community members, and each party exercises agency in multiple ways, even in situ-
ations that may appear to be objectifying to the onlooker. Community members may
accept, acquiesce in, accommodate to, alter, resist, or subvert the representational
situation, while pursuing both immediate and long-term interests. These interests may
include economic advancement, the reaching of new markets for their work, the pro-
motion of their community, social prestige, the perpetuation of a tradition, or the

changing of policies that are viewed as detrimental to their traditions. For folklorists,
agency is not only expressed through the control of the means of representation, cul-
tural brokerage, and the interpretation of another’s culture. Through involvement in

public folklore programs, folklorists can also, among other things, advance the safe-
guarding of the cultures that are represented, build a career that enables them to make
a living as a folklorist, and gather data for their research. While we should have no
illusions about the power asymmetries that exist between folklorists and the com-
munities that we represent, mutual self-interest shapes our relationships, and the bal-
ance of power may shift over the course of events.
Subject-object dialectics are continually at play in public folklore, as agency is
pursued through processes of objectification. Allowing oneself to be placed in a situ-
ation where one is perceived as being on display before an audience may entail ob-
jectification, but it does not foreclose agency. In fact, the acceptance of such a situation
is itself one kind of agency. While, for example, craftspersons continuously demon-
strating their traditions at a festival may be seen as objects by those audience members
who casually pass by, the folklorist’s resourceful use of modes of presentation can
help craftspersons to present perspectives about their traditions on their own terms
and to openly express their agency.
In some situations, folklorists feel that a high degree of mediation is needed in
presentations to make clear the perspectives of both folklorists and community mem-
bers. In other situations, folklorists deliberately step back and let community members
speak for themselves as much as possible. A third alternative is one in which the
folklorist completely yields authority, and the responsibility for presentations is en-
tirely assumed by the community. Whatever the circumstances, public folklorists
generally operate with a high degree of reflexivity about interventions and their impact
on the community.
Even in highly objectified situations that public folklorists might find reprehensible,
community members have sometimes benefitted from the interventions of ethno-
centric outsiders representing their cultures; while exploited here, they are still able
to exercise a kind of agency. James Clifford contends that even while it is appropriate
to recognize “coercion, exploitation, and miscomprehension” in ethnocentric repre-
sentations of other cultures, such representations can “produce reflection and cul-
tural critique” for those engaged in the representation and offer experiences that can
be pleasurable and personally expansive for the people whose culture is being repre-
sented (1997:198). As an example, he discusses Edward Curtis’s 1914 film Land of the
Headhunters, which tried to recreate precontact Kwakiutl life, with “boy-meets-girl
romance, evil sorcerers, masks, war canoes, and severed heads.” Featuring “headhunt-
ers,” the film was unquestionably “sensational,” but it did provide benefits to the
people that Curtis filmed. Clifford indicates that the participants “earned good mon-
ey and enjoyed themselves,” and they “knew that Curtis’s portrayal of their traditions,
while sensational, was respectful.” Since “spectacle was, after all, very much a part of
Kwakiutl culture, Curtis tapped a rich tradition of acting [there].” Clifford contends
that the Buffalo Bill Wild West shows, while also highly stereotypical, “involved re-
spectful personal relations” with Native Americans, enabled them to escape “pacifica-
tion” on their reservations, and provided opportunities “to travel and observe the
world of whites.” While acknowledging the substantial exploitation in these situations,
Clifford stresses that “it is also important to recognize a range of experiences [that
Native Americans there had] and not to close off dimensions of agency (and irony)

in their participation.” Further, he recognizes how agency can be pursued through
objectification when he states that “performance of culture and tradition . . . may
include empowerment and participation in a wider public sphere as well as com-
modification in an increasingly hegemonic game of identity” (1997:199).
By recognizing the varieties of objectification and their complex nuances, we can
gain new insights into issues in public folklore. For example, objectification can work
both ways, with folklorists and participants mutually objectifying each other. After I
presented to a new audience the musical ensemble of an Indo-Caribbean Tassa musi-
cian, the group’s young leader told me, definitively and non-pejoratively, that I am a
businessman. I do not think he was fully informed about what I do for a living or un-
derstood the world of government and nonprofit cultural organizations; however, he
did clearly see the instrumental dimensions of our relationship. I felt that the musician
saw me as someone who could get gigs for him; in his view, presenting him was part of
my work as a “businessman,” a word he used in the context of what I see as a mutually
beneficial relationship marked by mutual regard. As lovers may joyfully objectify each
other when making love, and doctors and patients objectify each other during an op-
eration, I am happy to be objectified if it helps the artists and communities I try to serve.
Whether objectification in the course of studying or presenting another culture is good
or bad depends upon whether the relationship is morally correct, occurs in a context
of mutual respect, and allows for the agency of those whom we represent.
Folklorists and other cultural specialists should be open, self-critical, and reflexive
about the personal and professional benefits we gain from participation in public
folklore programming. When Richard Price, one of the harshest critics of public
folklore, presented Maroons at the 1992 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Smithsonian
staff noticed that he prominently displayed and promoted his publications in the
presentation areas. However, in On the Mall, we do not hear from the Prices about
this benefit from their involvement in the festival; rather, they stress the objectifica-
tion of the Maroon participants and dismiss claims by the Maroons themselves that
they benefitted from their involvement in the event. Like other public folklorists, I
take as my highest priority the creation of benefits for the communities with whom
I work, but I would lack candor and true reflexivity if I did not acknowledge that a
successful program is in some ways a commodity—one that has benefits for my own
professional status and advancement. As honest cultural brokers, we must acknowl-
edge the moral issues involved in assuming responsibilities for representing other
cultures and in gaining personal and professional benefits from this work. We need
to recognize that objectification is inherent in the process of representation and un-
derstand how agency can be pursued through it. All folklorists should come to terms
with how objectification in the representation of cultures may entail the instrumen-
tal use of others, exploitation, and the apprehension of people and cultures as “things.”
Whether we are involved in creating a folklife festival, an academic publication, or
an exhibition, folklorists have a moral imperative to avoid exploitation and address

any other problematic dimensions of objectification that we can mitigate.
While folklorists hold the balance of power in the public programs we organize, this
authority can, should, and usually is used for beneficent purposes. William Westerman

has outlined larger objectives for “applied and public folklore as a transformative activ-
ity.” He calls for collaborative initiatives, with “goals determined by the interested
parties themselves.” Such goals might include building institutions, facilitating “more
equitable access to the arts, . . . greater appreciation for folk culture and indigenous
knowledge and practice,” and support for “the conservation and dissemination of
meaningful forms and traditions that enrich people’s lives, families, and communities.”
Folklorists are urged to “uncover, unmask, and critique the historical and economic
factors that prevent us from meeting human needs and safeguarding the environment”
(Westerman 2006:123–4). As Westerman suggests, we should recognize the inequities
experienced by the communities we represent and situate our praxis within this broad-
er social and economic context. Within the kinds of public folklore events I have con-
sidered in this article, communities gain forums for discussing their traditions and
exercise agency as they develop means to represent their cultures in new contexts.
Many of these communities have limited opportunities for self-representation outside
of local presentational contexts. Through public folklore programs, artists reach new
audiences, devalued art forms and traditions receive validation, and communities
encounter and learn from one another in a relatively neutral setting. While participants
in public folklore programs may be “objectified” to varying degrees, objectification is
not an either/or situation, and agency bursts through, expressed in a multiplicity of
ways, even in heavily objectified situations. Through public folklore, communities are
able to advance their cultural interests and have the opportunity to speak to larger and
more diverse audiences than would be available to them if their only representation
to the wider public was through the conventional means of scholarly production.
Notes
I presented earlier versions of this work: in May 2005, when I served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist at a
symposium entitled “The Graduate School of Cultural Interpretations: Nationality, Locality, Textuality”
(held on Seili Island, Finland) and in lectures at the Finnish Literature Society, University of Joensuu,
and the University of Turku; in October 2005 at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in At-
lanta, Georgia; and in January 2008 at the Chinese University for Nationalities and Chinese Academy of
the Social Sciences, for which I received support from the Asian Cultural Council. Research for portions
of this essay was conducted as a Smithsonian Fellow in Museum Practice. I am grateful to Felicia R.
McMahon, Thomas Walker, the Journal of American Folklore editors Harris M. Berger and Giovanna P.
Del Negro, and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments about this article.
1. Public folklore also involves activities other than the presentation of artists in public events and
cultural tourism, including services to help artists promote and market their work, field research, exhibi-
tions, folk arts in education programs, and activities that are not primarily of an artistic character. I am
confining my discussion to consideration of festivals, concerts, and cultural tourism because they relate
to the issues of objectification and agency considered here and because of the relevance of existing schol-
arship on these topics to that theme.
2. Nussbaum’s pathbreaking article, “Objectification,” was written at a time when feminist legal schol-
ar Catharine MacKinnon and feminist writer and activist Andrea Dworkin were advocating for legislation
banning pornography and using objectification as a central focus of their argument. In propounding a
more nuanced view of objectification, Nussbaum discussed works of erotic literature to respond to Mac
Kinnon and Dworkin and show that not all sexual objectification is morally objectionable. She discusses

passages from D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Isabelle and Véronique by Laurence
St. Clair (which is a pseudonym for James Hankinson), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library,
and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl.
3. Known at the time as the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, this event is now called the
Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
4. Framing also involves other aspects of public folklore programs, such as program booklets and
signage. See Diamond (2008:51–5) for a discussion of signage as a framing device.
5. See, especially, Baron and Spitzer ([1992] 2007), Cantwell (1993), Clifford (1988), Clifford and
Marcus (1986), Kirshenblatt-Gimblett ([1988] 2007, 1991), Karp and Lavine (1991), and Karp, Kreamer,
and Lavine (1992).
6. Much of the writing about public folklore by public folklorists involves program design and inter-
pretation and appears in what David Shuldiner and Jessica Payne refer to as “‘fugitive literature’ . . . grants,
recommendations, public program notes, and other genres that either never leave their office or only
reach audiences involved in particular events” (1999:3). An issue of New York Folklore entitled “Public
Folklore Writing and Scholarship in New York State” (Taussig-Lux 1999) was exclusively devoted to such
fugitive literature and consisted of materials published for public programs, exhibitions, and recordings,
much of it ephemeral.
7. In 1999, the journal Folklore in Use: Applications in the Real World was renamed The Journal of Ap-
plied Folklore. In their “Note from the Editors,” a statement published in the first issue that appeared
under the new title, David Shuldiner and Jessica Payne remark upon the “contribution” of public folklor-
ists to the “growing legitimation of applied folklore,” which includes “collaborating with, rather than
simply working ‘on behalf ’ of community members” (1999:2). Most folklorists working outside of the
academy today self-identify as “public folklorists” rather than “applied folklorists,” especially those involved
in public programs. This journal, which is no longer published, included studies about such topics as
health care delivery, multicultural education, organizational culture, cultural tourism, and environmen-
tal conservation.
8. Richard Kurin and Diana Parker discuss these reforms in “Michigan on the Mall,” stating that
“Michigan taught us several things about our practice” (1994:178).
A video produced by the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Presenting at the
Festival: Methods of Cultural Conversation (n.d.), instructs presenters to view themselves as “engaged
partners” in a “three way conversation” with artists and audiences. It encourages ongoing self-evaluation
by presenters, urges them to help participants move toward self-presentation, suggests that they model
behavior for audience members, and discusses the creation of frames for interpretation.
9. Some traditional artists may prefer a higher stage at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, however. Jay
Straker reports that a performer in the Tuareg ensemble Tartit at the 2003 festival “lamented the fact that
the two performance stages used by all the Malian bands were not higher off the ground. A more highly
mounted stage of the type Tartit had become used to at other events increased distance between the band
and public, giving performers a greater sense of fully orchestrating the formal integrity and affective tone
of a given set” (2008:85).
10. The Folk Arts Program of the New York State Council on the Arts has supported workshops for
traditional artists to develop methods for interpreting their traditions to audiences outside of their cus-
tomary performance situations. Traditional artists experienced in self-presentation act as instructors. See
Baron (1999:195).
11. Krista Thompson (2008:106–9) discusses presenters who were ineffectual, unable to communicate,
and unsuccessful in countering stereotypes of Africa at the 1997 African Immigrant Folklife Program at
the Smithsonian.
12. At many traditional folk music festivals, which may not involve folklorists at all, workshops are
facilitated by musicians and serve as the primary interpretive vehicle. While they often do not deal in
depth with contextual issues, they reveal the performers’ lives in music, their repertoires, and their
distinctive musical styles. The term “workshop” has also been used to refer to instructional sessions at
arts events, where audience members learn particular crafts, music, or dance styles and techniques
from master artists. For the purposes of this discussion, I am only examining workshops of an inter-
pretive character presented at folklife festivals and other public programs involving the mediation of

folklorists.
13. “Cornrows” are a traditional style of hair grooming, with the hair tightly braided close to the scalp
in both straight lines and complex geometric designs.
14. The active engagement of “cultural insiders” as audience members can enhance the experience for
the “cultural outsider.” Sheehy states that the “cultural mixing of audiences can have the result of expand-
ing the dimension of the theatrical frame.” In audiences including both insiders and outsiders, “the insid-
ers, acting out their own, extra-theatrical, socially determined notion of frame for the ‘ordinary’ setting
(e.g., conversing with the performers, responsorial shouting in the style of an African American church
congregation, or dancing) may end up being part of the performance in the minds of the outsiders, en-
hancing the outsider’s own sense of the traditional performance context and giving greater meaning to
the performance” ([1992] 2007:224).
15. Discussing presentations of DiDinga refugee traditions that she produced in Syracuse, Felicia
McMahon describes how traditional artists selected particular songs from their repertoire. She states that
it was “like behavior in any social interaction in which one chooses a certain course of action from sev-
eral possibilities” (2007:182).
16. Edward Bruner calls into question the notion that a “second life” is entailed in any tourist produc-
tion. “One critique of Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s (1998) book Destination Culture,” Bruner writes, “is that
it relies so much on recontextualization, in which cultural heritage is seen as being taken from one con-
text and given a second life in another, as a material object would be taken from an indigenous ritual and
then placed in a museum display. My position is more radically constructivist in that for me, every time
heritage or tradition is enacted it is given new life, irrespective of where that enactment takes place, as a
continuous ongoing process” (2005:257). From this perspective, we might look at the encounters encour-
aged in the Southeastern Washington Heritage Tour as one kind of especially interactive and emergent
enactment of heritage by the community members that the tourists encounter. This might be compared
with other emergent but more controlled and mediated tourist productions.
17. By way of example, Turner told me in a November 2008 telephone interview that rather than
walking on the lawns of crabbers to look at crab pots, listeners to the CD encounter crabbers who express
their sensibilities with interpretive depth in the discs’ interviews.
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Sins of Objectification? (R Baron)

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Sins of Objectification? (R Baron)

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Robert Baron

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Is public folklore programming inherently objectifying? Do folklorists represent par-

Journal of American Folklore 123(487):63–91

“haunted” by “the risk of objectification” in their presentations of Maroon song and

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Intervention, Cultural Brokerage, and Framing

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Cultural Conversations through Various Modes of Presentation

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diator. Demonstrations are presented on tables, in a setting that replicates a tradi-

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Cultural Tourism, Voice, and Access

Cultural tourism programming can be at least as objectifying as any form of public

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In contrast to From Bridge to Boardwalk, the publication A Wabanaki Guide to

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motion of their community, social prestige, the perpetuation of a tradition, or the

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an exhibition, folklorists have a moral imperative to avoid exploitation and address

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