“Ethics in Folklore Research”, Elizabeth Tucker,
(American Folklore - An Encyclopedia. Edited by Jan Harold Brunvand. Garland Publishing, Inc.
New York & London, 1996)
A code of conduct for responsible and fair treatment of the human subjects of folklore research.
As humanists and as social scientists, researchers in folklore have sought to gather significant
information while respecting the integrity of their informants. This dual focus upon data collection
and human rights has generated compelling ethical dilemmas.
Regulations for the protection of human research subjects in the United States have been
implemented since the late 1970s; nonetheless, fieldworkers have had considerable leeway to
apply the dictates of their own consciences. Manuals for fieldworkers, from Kenneth S.Goldsteins
A Guidefor Field Workers in Folklore (1964) to Bruce Jacksons Fieldwork (1987), have placed
increasing emphasis upon ethical issues. Primary concerns include the fieldworker’s self-
presentation, methodology, ownership of material, reciprocity, protection of informants’
identities, and respect for sensitive issues.
Recent controversies on ethics have reflected evolving definitions of the folk. Cultural
anthropologists and folklorists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to view their
informants as data sources quite different from themselves, requiring careful manipulation and
propitiation. More recent researchers have tended to see their informants as fellow human beings
who become partners in a shared fieldwork enterprise. As Robert A.Georges and Michael Owen
Jones point out in their book People Studying People, “fieldworker and subject are first and
foremost human beings” (Georges and Jones 1980:3). With this common humanity as a central
premise, ethical considerations have become crucial for successful fieldwork.
Before fieldwork begins, the researcher must make choices that have ethical dimensions. Choices
of subject, site, and informant population may involve consideration of sen sitive social and
political issues. The researcher’s presentation of himself or herself to the group can be
completely honest or somewhat manipulative. “Role-playing,” sometimes recommended for
folklore students, calls for introducing oneself as a “student,” “teacher,” “collector of local
history,” or other personage. While such a term may be accurate to some extent, it limits the
informant’s perception of what the researcher is trying to accomplish. If the chosen term is not
accurate, it makes the researcher vulnerable to accusations of falsehood. As Bruce Jackson says,
“getting the information isn’t important enough to warrant going undercover and lying to people”
(Jackson 1987:263).
How the researcher chooses to record information also has ethical implications. If handwritten
notes are the chosen method, the researcher runs the risk of getting an incomplete or misleading
version of what the informant said. While tape recorders are much more accurate, it is easy to
conceal their usage; folklorists must think carefully about being open with their informants. Video
cameras are less easy to conceal and are appealing because of the range of audiovisual
information they capture. However, the collector may find that some informants are reluctant to
give permission for its use, since visual images fully reveal one’s identity. Obtaining permission
for recording information is always important, no matter what method is used. At the time of the
interview, Edward D.Ives recommends, the researcher should explain how long tapes will be
preserved and what sort of access people will have to them, in an archive or otherwise. Getting a
signed (s.475) release at the end of the interview is crucial, with any restrictions on future usage
specified by the informant (Ives 1980:51).
The question of ownership has undergone much revision since folklore research began. Whether
an informant ultimately owns the story, song, or joke he or she has shared with a collector and
what the collector has the right to do with that material are complex issues. With recordings of
traditional or semitraditional songs and music, debates about ownership have become especially
intense. Litigation about ownership of the song of television personality Barney the Dinosaur,
roughly based on the folksong “This Old Man,” gained media attention in 1994. Ideas about
ownership of traditional materials and their offshoots continue to evolve as precedents build in an
increasingly litigious society.
Closely related to the ownership question is the issue of reciprocity. If informants indeed own
their material, what sort of compensation should they receive? Judgments vary from Goldstein’s
preference for nonfinancial assistance and compensation for wages lost to Jackson’s case-by-case
determination of payment “on the basis of the relationships among the people involved, the
money available, and the realities of the situation” (Jackson 1987:269). If the fieldworker makes
a substantial sum of money from something that an informant provided, it seems only fair to
share some of that Money with the person who made it possible. However, variations in research
situations have brought about many different responses to the payment issue.
Another aspect of fairness to informants is disclosure of their identities. Some folklorists prefer to
use pseudonyms or just informants’ first names, in order to protect their privacy. Others believe
that pseudonyms are not sufficient to protect privacy, so other identifying details should be
changed as well. The need for protection of informants varies according to the kind of material
collected; for example, tellers of dirty jokes tend to be more concerned about being identified
than sharers of traditions about the weather.
No matter how innocuous die material may seem, researchers must be scrupulous about
respecting the preferences of their informants. If no specific preferences are given, researchers
simply use their best judgment. Jackson recommends that fieldworkers apply the Golden Rule,
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” to all fieldwork questions that do not
have a clear, immediate answer.
Yet another layer of ethical complexity comes from consideration of informants who cannot fully
consent to sharing information. Children, for example, may enjoy telling dirty jokes to
researchers but may then regret having done so when they are older. While parents have the
legal right to give permission for their children to be involved in a research project, some
advocates of children do not believe that this is fair. Mentally disabled individuals and others
whose judgment is affected by illness or stress may not be able to give full consent either. Each
researcher must decide how to handle such situations until litigation provides more definite rules.
As discussion of ethics continues, researchers develop guidelines for appropriate conduct. The
drafting of a “Statement on Ethics” for the American Folklore Society in 1986 caused much
debate. Although the resolution of many ethical issues is still unclear, it is quite clear that ethics
will be a prime topic for folklorists’ discussion in the future. (s.476)
References
Georges, Robert A., and Michael Owen Jones. 1980. People Studying People: The Human
Element
in Fieldwork. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goldstein, Kenneth S. 1964. A Guide for Field Workers in Folklore. Hatboro, PA: Folklore
Associates.
Ireland, Tom. 1974. Ethical Problems in Folklore. In Conceptual Problems in Contemporary
Folklore Study, ed. Gerald Cashion. Folklore Forum Bibliographic and Special Series 12:69–74.
Ives, Edward D. 1980. The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and
Oral History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Jackson, Bruce. 1987. Fieldwork. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Smidchens, Guntis, and Robert E.Walls. 1986. Ethics and Fieldwork. Folklore Forum 19:117–124.
(s477)
FIELDWORK, Bruce Jackson
(Folklore: an encyclopedia of beliefs, customs, tales, music, and art / edited by
Thomas A. Green, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 1997)
Firsthand observation and documentation of folklore. Fieldwork is the key
research act for most scholarship in folklore, anthropology, and oral history. In
1964, Richard M. Dorson wrote, “What the state paper is to the historian and
creative work to the literary scholar, the oral traditional text is—or should
be—to the student of folklore.” Today, few folklorists would limit the fieldgathered
information to “texts,” and many could not even agree on what the
word text means, yet Dorson’s observation still holds true.
Fieldwork consists of observing and documenting people where they are (s.302)
and doing what they do. It is one of the three major modes of acquiring
primary information in the social sciences. (The other two—statistical surveys
and decontextualized interviews or performances—are rarely used in primary
folklore studies.) Fieldwork information is gathered with various media: notebooks,
film and video cameras, and audio recorders. Fieldworkers may seek
items in active tradition (things people do now) or things in passive tradition
(things they know and recognize and may even have an aesthetic for but
wouldn’t, unless solicited, perform or utter). Fieldworkers may join in the
events going on (participant observation), or they may pretend to be totally
outside those events (except in large community events, such as festivals and
parades, it is difficult for a fieldworker to be totally invisible). They may be
active in their pursuit of information (interviewing, asking for items, asking
for explanations), or they may be passive (waiting, observing, recording).
Some folklore researchers use preexisting print or electronic media as the
sources of primary information (for example, studies of the apparent scope,
character, and function of folklore materials in commercial advertising or
political speeches or folklore in the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and Mark
Twain or folklore on the Internet). But such studies are predicated on ideas of
folklore derived from fieldwork. Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s hypothetical
and theoretical work on the nature of Homeric performance and composition
was extrapolated from their extensive fieldwork among Serbian epic singers.
They were able to assert that certain materials in classical texts were grounded
in folklore performance and transmission only because their fieldwork let
them understand the character of such performance and transmission.
Even folklore scholars whose work is totally theoretical are dependent for
the substance underlying their generalizations and speculation on the fieldwork
of others. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to theorize cogently and
relevantly about the meaning of folklore in a community unless someone had
first gathered information about what folklore exists in that community and
what functions the folklore performs. Comparative folklore studies (texts or
behaviors from different places or times compared for differences in aesthetic
or functional aspects) is predicated on the quality and scope of the field-gathered
material.
Folklorists doing fieldwork may be looking for specific genres or kinds of
folk behavior: ballads, recipes, survivals of older traditions in modern communities,
modern folkways in technological communities, or the nature of folk
performance. It is difficult to know the social meaning of an item of performance
without knowing about the conditions of performance. For example,
the place and function of ballads in a community are interpreted differently if
many people in that community sing many long ballads on a regular basis to
a wide local audience that knows and enjoys such ballads or if, by contrast, the
performers sing their songs only when collectors come in from the outside to
solicit them. The words and tunes may be the same, but what we make of (s.303)
them may vary. One may analyze a particular ballad text differently if it was
learned from a book, a recording, a school chum, or a grandparent.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars often examined
texts alone, much as literary scholars examined texts of poems as freestanding
items. Today, however, folklore texts are rarely examined without consideration
of collateral information. Only through fieldwork can researchers gather
the items, provide information for identifying folk genres, and locate the
nature of folklore performance in ordinary life.
It is not just that scholars are more sophisticated now about the questions
that might be asked; it is also that the equipment available today frees the
fieldworker to ask more sophisticated or multidimensional questions. When
fieldworkers had to take down all words by hand, approximations of narratives
or tunes were sufficient. Now that machines capture the words and music,
fieldworkers can examine context—not just context of performance but also
context of recording, the relation between scholar and source. Put another
way, it is no longer just the joke that is investigated. Rather, modern
researchers ask a host of question: Who tells which jokes to whom and under
what circumstances? How are the jokes interpreted? Who laughs, and who
does not laugh? What part do those jokes play in the social event going on?
How does that redaction of that joke relate to others made of the same words?
Is the meaning the same if the context is different? What is the relation
between observer and observed? The whole reflexive movement in field
sciences in recent years (see, for example., Clifford and Marcus’ 1986 work,
Writing Culture) is predicated on a technology that can document the observer
at the same time that it documents the observed.
Fieldwork is a technology-driven endeavor. The kinds of questions one
asks of field-gathered material are based on the kinds of information that can
be gathered in or brought home from the field. Fieldworkers approaching
complex events will define their options differently if they have access to various
kinds of image and sound recorders and know how to use them effectively
and efficiently. Fieldworkers studying material culture have different questions
and therefore may incorporate different technologies than fieldworkers interested
in narrative tradition or matters of custom or belief. Fieldworkers trying
to document the folklife of a community may need a wider range of technical
expertise than fieldworkers focusing on genres or items.
Nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century folklorists depended on simple
recording devices and techniques, including notebooks and memory. They
used bulky machinery to record musical performances on cylinders and then
on large flat disks. These machines were capable of recording only a few
minutes of performance before they had to be wound up and supplied with a
new recording surface. Furthermore, unless the recordist struck a tuning fork
or other device of known frequency at the beginning or ending of the record- (s.304)
ing, there was no way for a listener to know exactly at what speed these
recordings were to be played. That meant listeners never knew if they were
hearing the recordings at the right tempo or pitch. Because the equipment was
so bulky, movement was difficult, and performers often had to be brought to
where the machine was located. Cameras used large glass plates and required
a great deal of light, either natural or flash powder.
What the great folklorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
provided us were not so much records of performances but rather interpretations
or versions of performances: They were not only editors of what they
found but also participants in the line of performers they documented. When,
for example, folklorist Vance Randolph spent an evening listening to stories
or songs and then went home and wrote up the stories he had heard or sat at
the piano and worked out songs he had heard, he was doing exactly what
many folk performers do.
Folklorists now can gather more complex field documents because they
have at their disposal instruments that provide a record of transient detail that
was impossible to obtain a half century ago, such as: small, automated, 35mm
cameras weighing less than a pound that zoom from wide-angle to telephoto
shots and focus and set apertures automatically, using film capable of making
images in moonlight; video cameras easily held in one hand that record highquality
images in low light and high-fidelity stereo sound on tape, using
rechargeable batteries that last two hours each; audio recorders controlled by
crystals, with tapes that are therefore replicable on any crystal-controlled
machine anywhere; and, for the truly sophisticated user, digital audiotape
(DAT) machines with real-time coding. A fieldworker can carry a full
complement of this new equipment—video camera, still camera, crystalcontrolled
audio recorder, enough tape for a dozen hours of video and sound
recording and enough film for hundreds of separate images—in a shoulder bag.
The effects of all this technology are multifold.
First, the fieldworker is capable of acquiring an enormous amount of
information—far more than was ever possible previously. Before mechanical
means of reproduction were available, documentation of even the simplest
text was at best an approximation, limited to what someone could write
down in the midst of an event that could never be redone exactly. With early
means of reproduction, it was possible to make crude recordings and obtain
still photographic images in a narrow range of situations. With modern
equipment, it is possible to get extremely accurate sounds and images in a
wide range of situations. Second, the fieldworker has been freed of the need
to concentrate on capturing items (the machines do that) and allowed to
consider more complex questions, such as the way various parts of performance
or enactment interrelate or minute complexities of performance itself.
The performance analyses of Dennis Tedlock, for example, would be impossible
without accurate recordings that can be listened to again and again with (s.305)
the problem of how to get information has been replaced by what is to be
done with the great mass of information so easily acquired. A nineteenthcentury
collector of ballads or animal narratives had no difficulty managing
his information; it was easy enough to organize the songs and stories and
provide simple annotations giving the specifics of performance. A twentiethcentury
fieldworker coming home with videotapes, audiotapes, and
photographs of a complex event has a far more difficult job of documentation,
storage, and analysis.
In the field, the researcher looks at a world of nearly infinite possibilities:
so many songs, dances, stories, images, recipes, redactions, processes, interactions,
moments, movements, facial expressions, and body postures. Once
home, the researcher deals with a world of specific and limited possibility: the
kind, quality, and range of information brought home, no more and no less.
What is not in the notes, on the film or tapes, or in memory is gone.
Subsequent analysis will be predicated not on what existed out there in real
life but on what made it back. Since field documents may be used in studies
never envisioned by the fieldworker at the time of the fieldwork and since
analysis may occur long after memory has had time to impose its confusions,
proper documentation is of key importance in all fieldwork projects. Without
notes on who was doing what and under what conditions the documentation
and event occurred, sound recordings, videotapes, and photographs may, in
time, be nearly useless.
Fieldworkers also deal with the problem of preservation. A large portion
of the audio cylinders made early in the twentieth century, for instance, have
already turned to carbon dust, and no one knows how long information on
audiotapes and videotapes will last. Audiotapes made in the 1960s often
present problems today because the recording material has pulled away from
the backing. And notes made with felt-tip pens fade. The most lasting form
of documentation is graphite pencil on acid-free paper. Such paper is enormously
resistant to decay (it lasts centuries), and the graphite particles, imbedded
in the paper fiber, are not subject to fading or oxidation.
The immediate result of fieldwork is the acquisition of various kinds of
documentary materials. A long-term result is involvement in a range of ethical
questions and responsibilities. To whom does the material one brings home
from the field belong? What obligations are there regarding privacy and
ownership issues? Who is owed what if material is used in a book or a recording
or a documentary film? What obligations obtain toward other researchers
working in the same area or on the same materials? Fieldwork is only one part
of a complex series of personal, intellectual, and ethical acts and decisions. (s.306)
References
Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics
of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dorson, Richard M. 1964. Collecting Oral Folklore in the United States. In Buying
the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States, ed. Richard M. Dorson. Chicago:
University Chicago Press
Finnegan, Ruth. 1992. Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research
Practices. New York: Routledge.
Georges, Robert A., and Michael O. Jones. 1980. People Studying People: The Human
Element in Fieldwork. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goldstein, Kenneth S. 1964. A Guide for Field Workers in Folklore. Hatboro, PA:
Folklore Associates.
Ives, Edward E. 1964. The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in
Folklore and Oral History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Jackson, Bruce. 1987. Fieldwork. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Jackson, Bruce, and Edward D. Ives, eds. 1996. The World Observed: Reflections on the
Fieldwork Process. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Lord, Albert. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tedlock, Dennis. 1983. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.(s.307)
