In folklore studies, scholars have tended to draw a major distinction between pre- and post-archival folklore. The mode of circulation is regarded as being different, tradition is said to end at the door to the archive, and archival documents are considered dead artifacts. This talk will discuss the idea of viewing the archive as a link, rather than a cut, in the circulation of folklore. It will focus on two aspects in this circulation: intersemiotic translation in folklore collecting, and the subsequent act of curation.

Pertti Anttonen is University Lecturer in folklore studies at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He is a docent in folklore studies at the University of Helsinki and the University of Turku, as well as a docent in ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä. His publications include Tradition Through Modernity: Postmodernism and the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship.  

In Conversation With:

 Mario Wimmer teaches Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History in the Dept. of Rhetoric. His research focuses on the cultural and institutional history of knowledge, the critical history of rationality, and the history of an historical sense.

Deniz Göktürk is Associate Professor and currently Chair in the Dept. of German at the UC Berkeley. Her publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture as well as seminal articles on migration, culture, and cinema.

Sponsored by Berkeley Folklore Program, the Graduate Assembly, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.  For more information: ucbfolklore@berkeley.edu.