Zoom Link:

February 20, 2025

Sabra J. Webber

In the early 1890s Fletcher Basset, representing the Chicago Folklore Society, was planning an international folklore conference as an adjunct to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. But the Chicago Folklore Society, unlike most folklore societies of the time, favored a literary, rather than an anthropological approach to folklore. Thus, William Wells Newell and Franz Boas each representing anthropology and the American Folklore Society intervened stating that the scientific credibility of folklore studies would be threatened by this association with literature. Yet at possibly contrastive moments over the history of anthropological or folkloristic fields scholars considered it laudatory to interweave theoretical or methodological practices from various disciplines. This disposition was practical in light of the necessary awkwardness of disciplinary labels. Not long after the end of the Chicago World’s Fair, we find Boas’ obituary for his friend and colleague Newell praising him for his “literary inclinations,” by means of which he “came to be a power in the field of anthropology …enabling him to see that the gulf between the mental life of primitive man and civilized man…that many students had constructed, had no existence in reality.” Boas continued, “to understand him aright, we must also not forget the broad humanitarian basis of his scientific interests.”  After briefly elaborating on my abstract above and my particular scholarly foci, I will take the greater part of the chat to draw from my own and others’ methods and theories for gaining insight after returning from field experiences/studies. These may build on or appropriate the work of scholars or artists from various specialties. After I throw out some examples, I would be pleased if my colleagues would share examples from their own work