TWO WAYS TO SHAPE A DISCIPLINE IN AN “EXTREMELY SUNDERED PART OF THE WORLD”
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An American folklorist reading the first issue of Ethnologia Europaea finds it natural to draw a transatlantic comparison. In 1971, the long-established Journal of American Folklore published a special issue, “Toward New Perspectives in Folklore.”1 This collection of articles marked a social and intellectual watershed in U.S. folklore studies: influence shifted to a new generation of researchers and to the emerging paradigm of “verbal art as performance” within a larger ethnography of communication. The immediate “new perspectives” were heterogeneous, however, drawing on a range of disciplines and theories for inspiration. In part this resulted from the different backgrounds and empirical foci of the contributors; in part it was a sending out of trial balloons to see which might float. The common impulse was to build a science from the precarious institutional base of a field generally considered to be residual.