New York Folklore Society Newsletter

"...I have tried to remain connected to the field of folklore through participation in folk arts panels and now as a board member of the New York Folklore Society. This has been a wonderful means for getting to know New York State and the people who live here..." —Cecily Cook

Cecily Cook continues our series of self-authored profiles of NYFS board members. Cecily is on the Development Committee.

NOTE: The New York Folklore Society Newsletter and New York Folklore Journal were replaced by Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore which debuted December, 2000.

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

Fall/Winter 1999

FALL/WINTER 1999 NEWSLETTER MAIN PAGE

Meet the NYFS Board

Cecily Cook
Joined in 1998

If I’m asked to explain how I came to do what I’m currently doing, I usually tell two stories. The first is that when I was 17 years old, I went on a bicycle trip in China, and this sparked a strong interest in Asia. The second is that when I graduated from college and had no firm plans for my future, I decided that I’d get some sort of an internship at the Smithsonian Institution. As broad ranging as the Smithsonian’s programs are, I figured there must be something there that I could do. I wrote off a few letters of inquiry and received two letters back advising me to contact the Smithsonian’s Office of Folklife Programs. At the time, I guessed that was the default answer to anyone with a general curiosity about regional and ethnic cultures, and perhaps it was. But I did contact the Office of Folklife Programs. I secured an internship, moved from Boston to Washington, and by April, I had a job working on the Festival of American Folklife’s Tennessee Program. By the end of the summer, I was hooked, and I applied to graduate programs in folklore in order to better understand the field.

In the fall of 1987, I moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to begin the M.A. program at the University of North Carolina. I had gone down with the intention of undertaking fieldwork with one of the recently-settled Southeast Asian refugee groups in the area, and in the winter of 1988, I found myself at the one year anniversary celebration of the Montagnard-Dega Association of North Carolina in Raleigh. This group of 230 individuals from the Central Highlands of Vietnam had just finished an eleven-year guerilla insurgency against the Vietnamese government, and they were just settling into their new life in the United States. Initially I tried interviewing people about their lives back in the mountain villages of Ban Me Thuot, Dalat, and Kontum, but every time I ended up hearing a story about the war in Vietnam; the circumstances that caused each individual to make the decision to leave their family and join the rebel group known as FULRO (a French acronym for the United Struggle Front for the Oppressed Races); the long march across northern Cambodia, and subsequent years in a mountain headquarters in northern Thailand; the Site II refugee camp; and finally North Carolina. After a while I figured out that this history was what this group wanted me to know, and I did my best to oblige them by writing my thesis on the story of the resistance and how they came to be living in North Carolina.

In September 1989, I relocated back to Boston to direct the Refugee Arts Group, a project of Country Roads, Inc., an organization dedicated to the conservation and presentation of the traditional arts of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao refugees living in New England. I had begun working with these groups when I was in North Carolina, and the larger populations in New England gave me the chance to work closely with artists, and in particular musicians and dancers from Cambodia. In collaboration with some extraordinary Cambodian American dancers, musicians, and scholars, I worked with the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival to organize several years of traditional dance and music workshops for practitioners of Cambodian traditional arts from across the U.S. and from Cambodia. In 1994, after spending a year and a half as a traditional arts consultant to the New England Foundation for the Arts, I moved to New York to become the program officer at the Asian Cultural Council.

The Asian Cultural Council is a foundation which supports cultural exchange in the visual and performing arts between the countries of Asia and the United States, primarily by making individual fellowship grants to artists, scholars, and specialists from Asia to come to the United States. I work with our grantees to develop their programs here; meet with prospective applicants; assist in preparing application materials for submission to our board of trustees; and administer funds once the grants are made. It’s a wonderful job, which has allowed me to meet an incredible range of fascinating people.

Since my work does not focus on the traditional arts, I have tried to remain connected to the field of folklore through participation in folk arts panels and now as a board member of the New York Folklore Society. This has been a wonderful means for getting to know New York State and the people who live here, and I look forward to being able to make some kind of positive contribution to the great work of the New York Folklore Society in the future.

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