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The last issue of Voices included a transcript of a panel from the New York Folklore Society’s 2005 Writing Folklore conference. Titled “Thinking Culturally: An Insider’s Perspective,” the panel featured Joanne Mulcahy (Lewis and Clark College) discussing lessons from her fieldwork in rural Wisconsin and among the Inuit of Alaska; Kirin Narayan (University of Wisconsin at Madison) presenting from her work in India and the Himalayas; and Kevin White (State University of New York at Oswego) describing how he navigates between his Haudenosaunee Iroquois heritage and the experience of urban life, military service, and academia. I served as the moderator to the panel, in the role of the outsider mediator. As I reflect on the session, it seems to me that ethnographic writing opens us all to the dichotomies of insider and outsider identities. What the speakers all have in common is the writing life. They have all written on issues from inside their particular cultural identities, but also from the vantage point of a crosscultural framework and an academic sense of detachment. The transcript included only the panelists’ opening statements, so I want to share the discussion that followed with readers who may not have been there. In this column, I will reflect on this dialogue about writing folklore, rather than reviewing or recommending a particular text. The audience for our writing has great bearing on the insider/outsider identity of the writing. The reader is either brought inside or left excluded by the writing. Often that process is informed by the reader’s own intention. I am interested in how both writing and reading texts removes us from the immediacy of a topic and delivers us to a voyeuristic perspective from which we collect information and impressions. This experience can depend on how much the reader relates personally to the writer or to his or her subjects. Each speaker addressed aspects of this problem. Joanne Mulcahy stressed that all cultures are equally compelling to their insiders. Referring to a professor who tried to steer her away from study among the Inuit, she commented on the tendency of writers and teachers of folklore to favor certain cultures that typify paradigms or symbols of scholarly interest. Finding significant lessons in folklore nearer to home she noted that something as personal as a mourning ritual for children in a Wisconsin family can speak volumes about the place of tradition in culture, offering more depth than an extended analysis of an exotic (often staged) public event. Kirin Narayan spoke of the ethical question that arises in fieldwork when an ethnographer relies heavily on a particular informant or subject. A relationship can develop through interviews in which information shared crosses the line between public and private, so that writing can pose a risk to the relationship. Conversely, members of the community may ask why the ethnographer privileges a particular person over others. Kirin spoke of the need to check back often with one’s sources or informants to see if they are amenable to how they are presented in writing. Kevin White focused on the many versions of a key text, the Iroquois creation story. Each retelling is a testament to the reality, setting, and cultural life of the particular teller. He emphasized that there is no one correct story. The subjectivity of each telling and the reality of the story of each teller is the focus of White’s work. During later discussion, he added, “It’s a myth to be objective. . . . An outsider’s study of another group is not objective, because you are carrying your own baggage.” Each retelling of a story is an end in itself and informs about the reality of each generation that passes traditions along. Speaking from the audience, Judd Newborne, a Holocaust scholar and curator, talked about how insider accounts are packaged and objectified, citing what some have called “Shoah business.” Robert Baron responded that the commodification of culture is an inherent part of the writing process, but that ethnographers of necessity engage in a collaboration motivated by mutual self-interest to present themselves or to be presented: in short, to tell their stories. Storyteller Roz Perry responded in her own succinct way by asking if any writer, like any storyteller, really has to overcome her own insider/outsider dichotomies: “You are always telling stories to other people.” She continued, “Why are you in this business? If you are completely objective, no one is going to want to read what you write. You have to shape [the story] in a way that makes it interesting to audiences.” Most conference participants, as Roz Perry said, presented well the perspective of writers as subjective insiders who are informed by a larger world view that enables them to reach out across the page. Coming from the other side of the insider/outsider dichotomy, I could not help but take to heart many of the lessons of these sessions. Entering fields like folklore and ethnomusicology by the academic route, we may read widely from a varied literature, but the intellectual aesthetic is one of detached objectivity: just the kind of boring, unengaged narrative that Roz doesn’t want to hear. Not all of us are born storytellers. You don’t have to be one, though, to be a good listener. As I told the audience at the session, I try to be a good listener and to come to terms with being an insider to so-called mainstream society, with deep roots in both urban and suburban America, whose role is to envision an inclusive society by helping people of different backgrounds and persuasions understand one another a little better. Sometimes it is hard to mitigate the contradictory forces in today’s society that tend to drive people apart and to drown out local voices. But folklorists are a tenacious lot, who—against the odds—will keep on trying to get their story across.

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