AFC’s 2022 Parsons Fund Awards Support Indigenous Youth Advisors and Research in Indonesian Art

The Gerald E. And Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award For Ethnology at the Library of Congress

This year, the American Folklife Center has awarded Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons funding to two innovative projects that will benefit from research in ethnographic collections at the Library of Congress:

• Navajo musician and artist Jeneda Benally received a Parsons Fund Award to bring a team of Indigenous Youth Advisors to the Library to research and create content for the public radio program “Indigenous YOUth Nation.” The team will work with AFC/Library staff to access collections containing traditional knowledge, discuss the impact of archival materials on their own communities, bring their listeners some of their own cultural stories, and build bridges between generations.
• Ethnomusicologist Edward Herbst of Middletown, Connecticut, received a Parson Fund Award to spend several three weeks at the Library researching Indonesian materials as part of the “1928 Restoration, Research and Repatriation Project,” a collaborative initiative undertaken in cooperation with the Indonesian institute STIKOM-Bali. Specifically, funding will enable Herbst to research the Margaret Mead Collection to catalog Balinese traditional masks and other cultural history, and to review never-before-seen Mead-Bateson-Belo film footage.

The Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons fund was established to enable individuals to come to the Library of Congress to pursue research at the American Folklife Center and other LC divisions with ethnographic holdings.