Willow G. Mullins

Puja Batra-Wells

The Folklorist in the Marketplace brings together voices from multiple disciplines to consider how economics shape—and are shaped by—folk groups and academic disciplines. The authors ask how folk and folklorists can productively comment on the economic structures they inhabit. As trade, technology, and geopolitics have led to a rapid increase in the global spread of cultural products like media, knowledge, objects, and folkways, there has been a concomitant rise in fear and anxiety about globalization’s dark other side—economic nativism, neocolonialism, cultural appropriation, and loss. Culture has become a resource and a currency in the global marketplace. This movement of people and forms necessitates a new textual consideration of how folklore and economics interweave. In The Folklorist in the Marketplace, contributors explore how the marketplace and folklore have always been integrally linked and what that means at this cultural and economic moment. Covering a variety of topics, from creel boats to the history of a commune that makes hammocks, The Folklorist in the Marketplace goes far beyond the well-trod examinations of material culture to look closely at the historical and contemporary intersections of these two disciplines and to provoke cross-disciplinary conversation and collaboration. Contributors: William A. Ashton, Halle M. Butvin, James I. Deutsch, Christofer Johnson, Michael Lange, John Laudun, Julie M-A LeBlanc, Cassie Patterson, Rahima Schwenkbeck, Amy Shuman, Irene Sotiropoulou, Zhao Yuanhao

Conversations at the Crossroads of Vernacular Culture and Economics

The Folklorist in the Marketplace

Todd Richardson

Shelley Ingram

In Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies, authors Shelley Ingram, Willow G. Mullins, and Todd Richardson talk about things folklorists don’t usually talk about. They ponder the tacit aspects of folklore and folklore studies, looking into the unarticulated expectations placed upon people whenever they talk about folklore and how those expectations necessarily affect the folklore they are talking about. The book’s chapters are wide-ranging in subject and style, yet they all orbit the idea that much of folklore, both as a phenomenon and as a field, hinges upon unspoken or absent assumptions about who people are and what people do. The authors articulate theories and methodologies for making sense of these unexpressed absences, and, in the process, they offer critical new insights into discussions of race, authenticity, community, literature, popular culture, and scholarly authority. Taken as a whole, the book represents a new and challenging way of looking again at the ways groups come together to make meaning. In addition to the main chapters, the book also includes eight “interstitials,” shorter studies that consider underappreciated aspects of folklore. These discussions, which range from a consideration of knitting in public to the ways that invisibility shapes an internet meme, are presented as questions rather than answers, encouraging readers to think about what more folklore and folklore studies might discover if only practitioners chose to look at their subjects from angles more cognizant of these unspoken gaps.

Willow G. Mullins

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