Coming Soon: Special Winter 2024 JAF Issue on Folklore, Heritage and the Public Sphere

The JAF editorial team is pleased to announce the release of the 2024 Winter issue of JAF: A Global Quarterly (v. 137, no. 543), a special issue on “Folklore, Heritage, and the Public Sphere,” which will be available online and arrive in mailboxes soon. This special issue, which grew out of a webinar series sponsored by the Fellows of the American Folklore Society, raises critical issues of global significance—including climate change, social inequity, cultural appropriation, community engagement in sustaining heritage, and sustainable tourism—and addresses how folklorists might engage with them.

Guest editors and webinar coordinators Robert Baron, Mary Hufford, and Amy Shuman sparked and captured an international and interdisciplinary conversation focused on key conceptual issues and challenges in heritage theory, policy, and practice. The webinar, and now this special issue, created an opportunity for different arenas of discourse—heritage studies, on the one hand, and public folklore on the other—to converge in order to explore, in their words, “how the present constructs the past and how to humanely prepare for the future.” Shared include the negotiation of power dynamics among heritage stakeholders, integrating  intangible and tangible heritage with environmental sustainability, interventions to sustain traditions through heritage productions,  transformations of form, content and cultural  meanings as cultural practices are recontextualized through heritage,  the coalescence of local knowledge and academic expertise in community collaborations and how heritage can be used to advance social justice as well as how it is used divisively as an instrument of oppression. 

The Fellows invited six folklorists to start the conversation in an AFS Fellows-sponsored webinar in 2021; their revised presentations are included in the issue. The featured speakers were asked to outline current ways of thinking about heritage, illuminated by their own experiences with public practice, field research, and policy. A month later, virtual discussion salons involving 85 participants from 11 different countries furthered discussion of the webinar topics, amplifying multiple voices of colleagues in folklore, heritage studies, and related disciplines who work in a wide range of settings. The special issue includes summaries of these salons.

Special Issue Contents

Folklore, Heritage, and the Public Sphere: Introduction, by Robert Baron, Mary Hufford, and Amy Shuman

Articles

Folklore and Cultural Heritage: Reflecting on Change, by Valdimar Tr. Hafstein

“Won’t You Help to Sing These Songs of Freedom?” Sharing Authority, Co-curation, and Supporting Community-Driven Heritage Work, by Diana Baird N’Diaye

Towards Sustainable Visits, by Owe Ronström

Culinary Tourism as Public Folklore: Heritage in Negotiating Competitiveness and Sustainability, by Lucy M. Long

Folklife, Heritage, and the Environment: A Critique of Natural Capital, Ecosystem Services, and Settler Ecology, by Jeff Todd Titon

Anticipatory Heritage, by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Salon Summaries

Mutual Engagement, Co-Creation, and Yielding Authority for Representation: Strategies and Practices

Public Folklore, Heritage, and Social Justice

Tourism through Folklore: Challenges and Opportunities

Sustainabilities

Anticipatory Heritage

Obituaries

We memorialize the loss of Dan Ben-Amos (1934-2023).

Book reviews
Dictionary of Authentic American Proverbs (Mieder), reviewed by Erik Aasland