The difference between such disciplines as folkloristics and cultural anthropology may seem minimal at times. Both may excel in fieldwork and the understanding of other cultures. Both may start their investigations at home and render a better understanding of “givens”, i.e. one’s own culture. Now that folklorists have become better culturegraphers and anthropologists have, partly thanks to various ethno-disciplines (ethnography of speaking, ethnoscience, etc.), absorbed more comprehensive interests in oral texts, even the most established idea on the difference, namely that what for anthropology represents a thin slice of culture labelled “verbal art” constitutes the capital object of research for folkloristics, is becoming obsolete.
Yet the road to Mysore is longer for folklorists than to representatives of anthropology, philology, musicology and many other disciplines. This is so regardless of Benfey and many other, more convincing comparative studies on truly old, international narrative themes. Thus it is the internationality of folklorists which is at stake, when the members of the International Society for Folk-Narrative Research convene, for the first time in their history outside Europe, on January 6-12, 1995, in Mysore, Karnataka, India.
The way may be longer for many reasons, but one is certainly the folklorists’ attachement to their own landscape, region, province, nation. The primary field of experience lies for the folklorist much nearer than for the anthropologist. But it is precisely this value which makes a special understanding possible between folklorists from, say, Asia, Africa and Europe. I experienced that in China, Bangladesh and India at a time when Euro-American anthropologists had been kicked out of many post-colonial and developing countries.
Another sensation of globality for me was the international Committee work at Unesco during the 1980s with the Recommendation for the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore. In those circles the Euro-American community of folklorists weighed so little that I almost lost my faith in the internationality of the ISFNR.
A third argument for the need for more globality has been the experience provided by the Folklore Fellows’ Summer School. Recent applications to the 3rd training course in Joensuu, Finland, in July 1995 came from five continents, and the competence of the applicants is even higher than before.
A colleague asked me about the last leg on the road to Mysore, a 5-6 hours’ drive from Bangalore to Mysore. “Take a taxi,” I said, “it is much cheaper than at home.”
Lauri Honko
(FFN 9, November 1994: 1)