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1. 1 2019-12-20T23:12:57+00:00 Helena Colindres 0c4e96608d23ebe552d79cf7c777fbff5194ea7f The Phonograph 1 A Colonial Legacy plain 2020-01-03T16:17:47+00:00 Jennifer Fraser 404477000adfd4e5c7a1128cfac82e1fc740e8c3

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• 1 media/Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.jpeg 2022-05-30T18:59:46+00:00 The Discipline of Folklore in the Nineteenth Century 26 plain 2022-06-07T20:37:27+00:00

  In the introduction to 100 Years of American Folklore Studies, published in 1988 on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Folklore Society (AFS), President Alan Jabbour wrote, “It behooves us always… to reflect on the ancestral missions that have shaped us, the inherited values that we reflect and must radiate into the future” (Jabbour, vii). 100 years earlier, the AFS was built on the frameworks of white intellectuals such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, whose four main objectives of the brand new discipline of Folklore were to document,

  “(1) physical type of man;
  (2) material existence [material culture]...
  (3) intellectual existence including music and poetry, oral tales and legends, medical knowledge, and mythology; and
  (4) geographical phenomena affecting or modifying the above features'' (McNeil, 2)

  This desire of Schoolcraft’s and of other intellectuals and anthropologists of the time to observe, analyze, and categorize the bodies and cultures of various groups of people was focused on Indigenous peoples in North America, and was spurred by the belief that Indigenous peoples were “dying out,” their cultures were disappearing, and “civilized” America must rescue the “primitive customs,” not the people, from this inevitable fate (Pisani, 73).

  In the years following its founding, the AFS continued to practice salvage ethnography. Much of the material that was collected and written about by members of the AFS was published in the accompanying journal, The Journal of American Folklore (JAF). Although the AFS endeavored to include material taken from both Indigenous peoples in North America that was collected by anthropological folklorists known as “the Indian men,” and European folklore collected by “literary folklorists” or “English folklorists,” a small minority of the material published in the JAF was European (Zumwalt, 9). William Wells Newell, the first active president of the AFS, considered the discipline of folklore to be included within anthropology. Newell argued, “In its broader meaning..., folklore is a part of anthropology and ethnography, embracing the mental side of primitive life, with especial reference to the narratives in which beliefs and habits are related or accounted for” (Zumwalt, 9). Anthropological folklorists traveled to Indigenous groups around North America, collecting written stories as well as narratives and songs recorded on the phonograph.
  They then analyzed and published these stories in publications such as the JAF, whereupon they were consumed and dissected by other white academics such as Alice Cunningham Fletcher, John Comfort Fillmore, and Jesse Walter Fewkes.

  In the wake of Charles Darwin’s Origins of the Species (1859), the theory of evolution began infiltrating all disciplines, including the study of society and culture in the form of social darwinism (Bronner, 6). According to Hugo A. Freund in the article, “Cultural Evolution, Survivals, and Immersion: The Implications for Nineteenth-Century Folklore Studies,” Daniel Garrison Brinton, second president of the AFS, “focused less on the investigation of individual cultures than on evaluating them in comparison to modern western civilization” (12). This claim about Brinton’s practices lays bare another nefarious impetus of nineteenth-century folklorists: to prop up their own “superior” civilization at the top of their constructed hierarchy by reestablishing that “primitive cultures,” (amalgamated into one “other”), belonged at the bottom. They did this by constantly reaffirming that the musics, stories, and rituals that they extracted from Indigenous peoples were at “basic” levels of development, and were struggling to become the same as those of the West.
• 1 2019-12-18T02:09:01+00:00 Glossary Terms 7 A list of terms used throughout the site plain 2022-05-21T16:09:27+00:00 Click on the links to reveal the definition of the terms below. 
  • Arrangement
  • Arrivant
  • Community-based repatriation
  • Culture
  • Decolonizing
  • Denial of Coeval Presence
  • Epistemicide
  • Ethnomusicology
  • Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition
  • Indigenous
  • Mary Hemenway
  • Orientalism
  • Primitive
  • Repatriation
  • Salvage Ethnography
  • Settler
  • Settler Colonialism
  • Social Darwinism
  • Transcription
• 1 2022-05-21T16:09:17+00:00 Term: Social Darwinism 2 Definition of Social Darwinism plain 2022-05-21T16:11:32+00:00 Social Darwinism is a group of ideals that use Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution to justify racial and colonial subjugation, which had social, economic, and political implications. As it concerns musicology, social Darwinism was a large factor in inspiring early musicological studies and fieldwork, as the first musicologists believed they were researching prehistoric or unhistoric peoples and cultures. Many even pursued their musicological study out of concern that the musical cultures were dying out (a process called salvage ethnography), but failed to make larger connections as to why said cultures were dying.