The Greater Cleveland Ethnographic Museum

Nothing lasts forever. Every organization has a lifespan, and at some point every organization’s lifespan reaches its end. Nevertheless, even extinct organizations can achieve useful afterlives and continue to serve as resources, so long as records of their work are maintained in analog or digital archival collections, and so long as the communities they served are still coherent and culturally vibrant. This essay tells the story of an extinct US public folklore non-profit organization, The Greater Cleveland Ethnographic Museum (GCEM), a small but important organization that was active for just six years—from 1975 to 1981—in the multiethnic midwestern US city of Cleveland, Ohio. During its brief life, the CGEM was typical of US public folklore organizations of the period: small and underfunded, but with an extremely dedicated staff, many strong partnerships with ethnic communities and their leaders throughout the city, and supported by what was at the time a significant investment by government in folklore and traditional culture. Even though the GCEM has been gone for almost 40 years, the archival documentary records of its activities have been preserved through the continued dedication of its leaders and staff and the support of other cultural and educational organizations in the Cleveland area, and are still available as a community and a scholarly resource.

The Practice of Folklore

This book proposes to answer the pressing philosophical as well as psychological question of why people repeat themselves. It redefines folklore as traditional knowledge that serves this need in human lives and develops a "practice theory" around this idea. Practice, more than other suggested keywords of performance or enactment in social theory, connects localized culture with the vernacular idea that "this is the way we do things around here." The term invites study of what people do repeatedly to understand what they have in "mind." Demonstrating the application of this theory in folkloristic studies, Bronner offers four provocative case studies of psychocultural meanings that arise from traditional "frames of action" and address issues of the day: labeling of boogiemen to express fear of sexual molestation, connecting "wild child" beliefs to school shootings, identifying the crisis of masculinity in adolescent expression. Turning his analysis to the analysts of tradition, Bronner uses practice theory to evaluate the agenda of folklorists in shaping perceptions of tradition-centered "folk societies" such as the Amish, unpacking the culturally based rationale of public folklore programming, interpreting the evolving idea of folk museums in a digital world, and assessing how the terms folklorists use and the things they do affect how people think about tradition. This is a book intended to think about what people do in the name of tradition, and why.

Applications and Representations of American Folklore and Folklife Studies

Folklore and folklife research is applied to a range of institutional settings that can be categorized in five different spheres of representation. These spheres overlap, but they include academic folklore, applied folklore, public sector folklore, public folklore, and private sector presentations of folk culture. This range of work revises the common dichotomy made between academic and public folklore. In addition to the overarching idea of heritage in applications of folklore and folklife research, key concepts such as preservation, interpretation, presentation, and representation that pervade the five modes of folkloristic work are discussed in relation to each sphere. The different situations within which folklorists work implicitly and overtly influence how they will preserve, interpret, and present folklore and folklife.

STONE, CURSE, REGRET: CHARACTER EDUCATION FOR CHILDREN IN FOLKLORE INDONESIA

Folklore has a charge and ancestral community values, moral values, and education are deliberately conveyed to the public. Folklore generally tends to use natural elements. Utilization of natural elements into the markermoral messages in folklore. Five Indonesian folklore that utilizes the rock has a tendency to tell the story of the curse and regret. The folk story is legend Shopping Atu (Batu Belah) of Aceh, Maluku Badaong Batu, Batu Princess Cry of Lampung, Legend of the Stone Cry of Borneo, and Legend of the Stone Crying of West Sumatera. The important thing that needs to be examined from the delivery of the moral message of folklore is as follows.(1) Explaining the way of delivering a moral message in folklore containing the word 'stone' in the title of the story. (2) Describe the effect of "condemnation and regret" at the folklore character education for children.(3) Explaining the use of the theory of deconstruction as a method of interpreting the text carefully. The interpretation of the results is intended as the material development of new stories that can be read by children in Indonesia. The transformation of the story would be adapted to the needs of the formation of the character better by not changing the charge and ancestralvalues.