Robert Cantwell - Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture

1993 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cantwell, Robert, 1945 Ethnomimesis : folklife and the representation of culture / Robert Cantwell
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8078-21 12-8 (cloth : alk. Paper) ISBN 0-8078-4424-1. (pbk.: alk. Paper)
1. Festival of American Folklife History.- 2. FestivalsUnited States. 3. FestivalsWashington (D.C.). 4. FolkloreUnited States. 5. FolkloreWashington (D.C.). 6. United States-Social life and customs. 7. Washington (D.C.)-Social life and customs. I. Title.
GT4802.C36 1993
394.2'6'0973dc20 93-9681
CIP

The author gratefully acknow-ledges the generous support offered toward the completion of this work by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Office of Folklife Programs, Smithsonian Institution. Portions of this text, in earlier versions, have appeared in The New England Review, The Journal of American Folklore, and in Jane Becker and Barbara Franco, eds., Folk Roots, New Roots: Folklore in American Life (Lexington, Mass.: Museum of Our National Heritage, 1988).

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Robert Cantwell is visiting associate professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound. 97 96 95 94 93 5 4 3 2 1

Late in the spring of 1985, the Office of Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian Institution approached me about writing a history of the Festival of American Folklife, soon to mark its twentieth year.

It is difficult to believe now, nearly eight years later, that having reached the age of forty, I could have failed to recognize the many snares that lay in the path of anyone presuming to write an institutional history of any kind. The first of these was something, happily, that I did realize immediately: I could not possibly write a history of the Festival of American Folklife. The available documentationhoused not only in ten or twelve filing cabinets groaning with the weight of memos, letters, contracts, and reports, but in thousands of square feet of storage space literally spilling over with uncataloged audio and videotape, film, and still photographs from twenty years of the Festivalbrought me to despair; not in a lifetime could I have brought to this mass of information the organization necessary to make out of it an intelligible historical narrative. I believed, furthermore, and still believe, that even a carefully researched history of the Fes