This first ethnographic study of a folklife festival focuses on festival participants the dancers, musicians, storytellers, and artisans at a public display of folk culture. These essays investigate the contention by supporters of these events that this form of folkloric representation is as intellectually legitimate as scholarly research."

..". engrossing, nuanced, productively and honestly critical in the best sense of the term." Richard Bauman

After recounting their experiences as cultural mediators between African American Maroons from the Suriname rain forest and U.S. festival-goers on the Washington Mall, the authors reflect on how folklorists, anthropologists, and museum curators represent others, as well as themselves."

Stith Thompson (1885 1976), often called the father of U.S. folklore, completed A Folklorist s Progress in 1956. This reflection on his life leads the reader on a journey from his birthplace in Kentucky to the universities of Wisconsin, Harvard, California, Texas, and finally Indiana University. Throughout his career he interacted with scholars throughout the world. His life story reveals his influence on the direction of American folklore scholarship in this century. His influence moved the study of folklore from a romantic approach to a "scientific" approach. He helped establish folklore...

These twenty-one animal tales from the Colombian Caribbean coast represent a sampling of the traditional stories that are told during all-night funerary wakes. The tales are told in the semi-sacred space of the patio (backyard) of homes as part of the funerary ritual that includes other aesthetic and expressive practices such as jokes, song games, board games, and prayer. In this volume these stories are situated within their performance contexts and represent a highly ritualized corpus of oral knowledge that for centuries has been preserved and cultivated by African-descendant populations...

These twenty-one animal tales from the Colombian Caribbean coast represent a sampling of the traditional stories that are told during all-night funerary wakes. The tales are told in the semi-sacred space of the patio (backyard) of homes as part of the funerary ritual that includes other aesthetic and expressive practices such as jokes, song games, board games, and prayer. In this volume these stories are situated within their performance contexts and represent a highly ritualized corpus of oral knowledge that for centuries has been preserved and cultivated by African-descendant populations...