Emily Hilliard - Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia

FOR THE FIELDWORK that constitutes the foundation of this book, I employed collaborative ethnographic methodology through open-ended, mutually directed interviews, dialogue during the fieldwork process, and by sharing draft chapters with consultants and then incorporating their feedback. Most of the feedback I received was positive and minimal, but several consultants offered crucial corrections to details I had omitted or misunderstood. Some elaborated on points that they had made during our interviews or updated me on what theyve done since our last meeting, both of which helped me to more thoroughly understand their respective work and perspectives. I address the specifics of my engagement with each community in each respective chapter.

Collaborative ethnography may be an underused model, but it has great value and utility for many types of cultural work. It is an especially useful practice in a place like Appalachia, where journalists and cultural workers have extracted stories and cultural resources without community input, benefit, or respect, employing narratives that frame the regions faults as individual failures rather than systemic problems. Collaborative ethnography offers one pathway to address some of the overarching questions of cultural work: How do we tell stories about a place responsibly and equitably? How do we tell the multivocal, shared, overlapping, and at times conflicting stories of our own communities? How do we tell those stories of communities not our own? How do we enter into mutually beneficial relationships with the communities we work with? Rather than presenting the cultural workers perspective as definitive, collaborative ethnography frames narratives as participatory and equitable dialogues, so that dialogue and equity become both the topic and the method.

Of course, there can be drawbacks and limitations to this methodology, as many ethnographic texts have illuminated. Namely, the collaborative nature of the approach is somewhat in opposition to journalistic practices of objectivity, the work involves a significant time investment and thorough engagement that demands the whole of a person, and with this level of engagement, differences of opinion and opposing perspectives can be hard to untangle and resolve. Issues of equity remain too, particularly around compensation (folklorists or cultural workers are often paid for this work while consultants or interviewees are not) and authority (cultural workers are still generally seen as experts and often make the major curatorial decisions). But collaborative ethnography does present a road map for, not to mention a wealth of literature on, deeper, more honest and integrative work that I hope more writers, journalists, scholars, and cultural workers will consider adopting, especially when working with communities not their own.

One goal of this book is to offer examples of how collaborative methodology can be a tool for more public-facing writing and reporting that engages the participation of cultural communities. My engagement with this material in long-form essays oriented toward a general readership is also intended to demonstrate the type of thorough, historically grounded, critical, and community-engaged work that is necessary to responsibly and adequately present cultural heritage in a way that resists essentialist, stereotyped, one-dimensional, and exceptionalist portrayals. Such generalized conceptions can be detrimental to understanding the diverse and nuanced cultural life of a place, and Appalachia has been particularly susceptible to these types of flat, myopic depictions.

The field of public folklore has long engaged questions of cultural representation, dialogue, and equity, and has produced a vast body of work responding to those questions, not only in text but also in public programming such as festivals, panels, and concerts; apprenticeship and grant programs; cultural documentation and community archives projects; media production; and field schools, oral history workshops, and community expert programs that assist local communities in documenting their own culture. Public folklorists, as Mary Hufford notes, amplify voices in a democratic polity. All public folklore workprogramming, published media, and advocacyis imbued with folklore theory of cultural equity, collaboration, and interpretation. Though this text is focused on the fieldwork, research, and presentational aspect of public folklore, it is my hope that the book contributes to a picture of what folklore is, why it is important, and how the framework of folklore can help us understand, access, and engage with cultural communitiesboth those were a part of and those were not.