A seminar report by Dr Lauri Honko, Kalevala Institute
The position of research ethics in science is probably more conspicuous than ever before. Every grant application addressed to the Academy of Finland, for example, must today contain an assessment of the ethical dimension and impact of the planned research regardless of the discipline to which it belongs or the methodology to be applied. The main financier of research in the public sector in Finland wants to know to what extent the scholars are aware of the human, societal and cultural values which may be at risk if a particular study is carried out in a particular setting, and, perhaps more positively, how a particular study may contribute to a better understanding of and sensitivity to the ethical problems faced or even generated by the scientific enterprise. A new kind of reflexivity and responsibility in this field is very much in demand.
A Nordic project
Three years ago, an international group of folklorists, most of them from the Nordic countries, launched a project in order to assess whether it would be feasible to approach research ethics from a disciplinary angle, viz. that of folkloristics. The question was: is research ethics first and foremost so cross-disciplinary in science in general and in the human and social sciences in particular that no discipline can or needs to delineate a code of conduct of its own? Or is it essential for each branch of scholarship to create in its own sphere an ethical debate which may, in turn, contribute something to the more general cross-disciplinary ethics?
The latter view is manifest in numerous ethical declarations issued in recent years by such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, sociology and related fields. In the United States, the American Folklore Society published a code of ethics in 1988, and in Europe, a more global consideration of folkloristic work ethics was included in the recommendations issued by WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and Unesco during the 1980s. The largest international body of folklorists, the International Society for Folk-Narrative Research, did, at its 1998 congress in Göttingen, institute a special committee on ethics to spearhead international debate on ethics from a folkloristic perspective.
Somewhat optimistically perhaps, the Nordic group consisting of Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish folklorists labelled their project a “Folklore Fellows Code of Ethics” and, since the work was not to concentrate exclusively on the Nordic situation, invited a few members from outside the Nordic countries, too, first from Germany and the U. S. A. and later from India and Israel. An important tenet was to bridge the generation gap: older and younger scholars should work together. That is why young scholars preparing their doctoral dissertations were invited from Finland, Norway (U.S.A.) and Sweden. The steering group of the project consisted of Tove Fjell (Norway), Lauri Honko (Finland) and Barbro Klein (Sweden). Other standing members were Bente Gullveig Alver and Ørjar Øyen (Norway). The consultant experts outside the Nordic countries were Galit Hasan-Rokem (Israel), Ulrich Marzolph (Germany) and Margaret Mills (U.S.A.).
The label chosen for the project put the feasibility of formulating a disciplinary code to the fore. The possibility of a global code was not excluded, despite all the cultural differences in the research traditions of the five continents and the massive format of the task. The relationship between general scholarly ethics and a more discipline-oriented set of norms of conduct was pondered at the first meeting held in Uppsala in November 1998. In addition, a number of cases where ethical norms are put to the test were analysed on the basis of personal experience.
The second meeting took the form of Workshop IV (Folkloristic research ethics) at the 5th Folklore Fellows’ Summer School held in Turku in August 1999. Geographically and culturally, the group expanded to include representatives and discussants from India and the United Kingdom. Clarification was achieved in the componential analysis of the field of ethics in folkloristics (Sadhana Naithani, India), in the critical comparison of existing codes of conduct (Judy Rangnes, Norway/U.S.A.) and in the omnipresence of ethics in the entire research process (Sinikka Vakimo and Armi Pekkala, Finland). A detailed report on the proceedings of Workshop IV was published in FF Network 20: 2-10 (November 2000).
The conclusive meeting
The third and conclusive meeting of the project was held at the Kalevala Institute of the University of Turku in November 2000. It concentrated on the discussion of articles to be included in the project publication. The lively debate showed that the ethical code is in a constant state of flux and too comprehensive and complex to be codified in well-polished verbal formulations. On the other hand, the most important thing, ethical reflexivity and awareness of the dimensions of ethical conduct, seems to be growing and becoming a reality in all research, folkloristic and other.
A quick vote on the necessity of establishing a well-formulated ethical code for folklorists revealed a generation gap: the young scholars were fairly favourable to the idea of an “FF Code of Ethics”, whereas the feelings of the older ones were more mixed, despite (or because of) the fact that they had more experience and that they had worked extensively on the formulation of ethical codes in international and national organisations. More importantly, the frustration with a list of norms as a “sleeping pillow” gave way to a determined but flexible mode of application of ethical judgement in all research on an everyday basis. In this respect, there was no generation gap but unanimous support for unceasing ethical evaluation as part of the professional competence of scholars.
Comparing the AAA and AFS codes
Two papers at the meeting were devoted to a comparison of the ethical codes published hitherto and bearing some relevance to folkloristics. First, Lauri Honko compared the anthropological and folkloristic codes issued in the United States. These span a period of fifty years (1948-98). Honko stressed the importance of reading these codes very carefully: they are rather different, they date from different periods and historical situations, and we should not assume that they are talking about the same thing. Even the same words and expressions may not denote the same over a long period of time.
What we need by way of a method is a “narratological” analysis of codes, Honko said. They seem to consist of propositions, yet they also reveal a kind of “background narrative” which lends cohesion to the list of propositions. The narrative in question is historically conditioned. That is why it must be contextualised. The situations which are implied in the general propositions may prove to be quite specific. Without a knowledge about the particular settings of ethical dilemmas we may not be able to grasp the actual meaning of propositions. This path naturally leads to the particular experiences of scholars formulating the codes. The true interests and goals served by ethical propositions cannot be disclosed without such contextualisation.
This view is corroborated by the rather limited scope of subsequent codes and by the changes in their focal interests. What was important in the late 1940s may have totally disappeared by the 1980s. For example, the very first anthropological codes had only two concerns: 1) that governments should not suppress scholars’ freedom of speech and 2) that informants should be protected. Yet they did not develop the second point as we are doing today. Instead, they elaborated quite extensively on governmental suppression. It is not difficult to see that this was the prime reason for creating the code in the first place. Yet it is a point which has disappeared from the later codes. Either the governmental suppression has become more subtle and taboo, or the pressure is not experienced by the scholars in the same way as before. In any case, the historical situation has changed.
The codes must be read in chronological order and in full. Any kind of piecemeal zig-zag reading or historyless comparison of short propositions is a risky business at best and easily leads to semantic fallacies not founded on the experiential world of the formulators of codes. A few observations stand out in the linear reading of the subsequent codes. One is that codes interact. At least the earlier ones tend to make an impact on the later ones. Another finding is that there is no stable or permanent ethical code. What we see is a continuous negotiation of the main ethical concerns whereby certain aspects of ethics gain importance while others become less visible. There may be horrifying gaps insofar as a particular aspect does not exist for decades until it eventually emerges and may, in certain cases, even dominate the scene for a while. Quite clearly, the codes reflect historical changes in the position of the profession and its institutions. The four codes produced by the American Anthropological Association create a historical profile of a scholarly community and its ideological development.
The five codes compared by Honko were 1) AAA48, 2) AAA67, 3) AAA 71/86, 4) AAA98 and 5) AFS88 (AAA = American Anthropological Association, AFS = American Folklore Society, the numbers indicate the year of publication). Despite the short interval in time, there is a major shift of paradigm between codes 2 and 3, probably due to the impact of the global crisis of colonial anthropology. Amazingly enough, it is only here that true concern for the cultures and people studied emerges as the dominant guideline.
All five codes focus on the behaviour of the researcher. Informants start to mean more in the third one but traditional communities, local and national institutions, commercial enterprises, educational agencies, and numerous other players affecting the cultural processes under study are either absent or mentioned only in passing. Field materials and their preservation are not discussed at all, except in the most recent code 4. The anthropological codes are surprisingly weak at the other end, in the culture of the Other. Such things as research permits are not mentioned in any of the codes. Important concepts from the folkloristic point of view, such as “folk”, “folklore” or “tradition”, do not appear a single time in these codes. The question is whether folklorists can or should apply ethical codes which do not recognise key aspects of their profession, such as the archiving of collected oral and other materials, the use of documents created in fieldwork and the ethical concern for their ownership, conservation and use outside the traditional context where they were created.
Yet, this is what the only folkloristic code in the bunch (AFS88) is willing to do, Honko said. That code is simply a copy, not a copy of one code only, but for every single sentence in AFS88 a source can be found in the anthropological codes. AAA could have raised a copyright case against the American Folklore Society and they would have won it. Consequently, then, the words “archive”, “oral”, “tradition” do not appear a single time in the AFS code. It is questionable whether the AFS possessed the competence to “inquire into the propriety of those unethical actions by folklorists and take such measures as lie within its legitimate powers” without first asking the AAA. The code is practically worthless for comparative purposes, and the two remaining, presumably more folkloristic than anthropological declarations, the Unesco Recommendation and the WIPO Draft Treaty must be compared not with AFS88 but with its original source, mainly AAA 71/86.
In the subsequent discussion Ørjar Øyen referred to the Ethical Code of the American Sociological Association, adopted two years ago, saying that it shows “much more concern for the other party, the people, the rights of the individual, the rights of society, the ownership to knowledge, to cultural elements, to I would not say intellectual property rights but folk property rights.” Bente Gullveig Alver pointed out “that if you want to read our history it is important for you to have a very broad context of the codes. You ask about the man behind the codes… but for me it is more interesting to read [about] the single cases [reported] in the periodicals, for example. You see where the problems are and how people have tried to deal with them.” Galit Hasan-Rokem declared herself “an advocate of the immanent history of folkloristics, the internal history of folkloristics” and emphasised the importance of understanding what kind of ethical problems people have faced while working in different cultures and periods.
General and specialised research ethics
Next, Bente Gullveig Alver and Ørjar Øyen presented their joint paper “The challenge of research ethics: an introduction”. Three years earlier they had published a joint book in Norwegian on research ethics in science, social research and humanities. Now they had been invited to write an introduction to the project publication at hand. According to them, there are issues of principle in research ethics that apply to research work in general. It will be necessary to pay attention to the over-arching principles of research ethics. We are supposed to be honest, we are supposed to be truthful; these are among the demands that apply to all branches of science. And then there are some discipline-related issues. We note that different scientific disciplines have different agendas. For example, in sociology people collect data and utilise them for their research purposes, and then the data are thrown away. There is a lot of pressure through data legislation favouring the destruction of data after use. In folkloristics, or in history, data are archived for research purposes. The main agenda is that of recording for posterity, taking care of the cultural heritage. So the disciplines have very different approaches to the material they study.
The Research Council of Norway has invested a lot of money in recent years in programmes on research into ethics. This is in fact a universal tendency. There is interest in how ethics apply to research more specifically. At the same time we notice an emphasis on legislation on data protection, the handling of personal information, the regulations for archives, the protection of cultural heritage, material and intellectual property rights. So work is being done all the time on ethical guidelines for research.
Alver and Øyen addressed “a dramatic reorientation in attitudes towards science. We see it among politicians, we see it among the general public, it is reflected through the mass media. And we note the number of issues through which we as researchers must be prepared to respond. There is a critical attitude towards science and research, which is of a very different nature from what we saw, let us say, 50 years ago. We note the changing role of the researcher, researchers have become a part of the general population [while] they were a very distinct group some time ago, unapproachable, privileged, today just normal people. Then research is a matter of concern to everyone.” This change has made an impact on research ethics.
“What are the risks? We talk about risks inflicted on individuals and on society. The risks are that we trespass into what people regard as their private domains, and of course there is a lot of cultural variation in terms of what is regarded as domains of privacy. There is the issue of what can be determined as damage… there is also the issue of the feelings the people have of what is happening to them and anticipated damage, there is risk to third parties… People tell us stories, and the stories involve other people and we do not go out and ask these other people how they feel about having been the object of recording. We trespass into the sacred, we expose hidden knowledge, we commit symbolic violence… We must raise the question, are all problems researchable? Our answer [is that] all problems are researchable as a matter of principle. But we know that some are inaccessible because we do not have the methods. And some problems are so sensitive and ethically so difficult that it might be a good idea not to touch them. We are pointing to what we regard as a fact, that personal engagement sometimes gets in the way of truthful reporting, that proximity to our research topic may threaten the attitude of detachment needed to achieve fruitful reporting.”
The ensuing discussion circled around the question of general and disciplinary ethics, the trespassing into sacred traditions, the question whether the change in attitudes toward scientific research has taken place in the West but not necessarily in Africa or India, and whether the customary comparative approach of folkloristics should be avoided in order not to trivialise people’s unique experiences, narratives and performances.
The main task, according to Barbro Klein, would be to “delineate the themes that would be specific to folkloristics as a discipline. It seems to me that one of our grand problems is that there are so many colleagues and that the demarcations of the discipline are so fuzzy that we really have a rather fluid notion of what the disciplinary agenda is, so that we need that kind of discussion to be able to formulate the particular disciplinary profile within the area of ethics. So we would really talk about the intellectual agenda of folkloristics as a field at the same time.”
The widening scope of research ethics
The next paper, by Judy Rangnes, concentrated on the horizontal comparison of existing research ethical codes. She reiterated the main points of her earlier paper, see FF Network 20: 3-5. She had continued the analysis and went much deeper into such phenomena as the “different implied meanings of harm”, the topics that were not mentioned at all in the codes, “such as how to work ethically with photographs, video documentaries, electronic formats and internet access” and the broad variety of ethical aspects in the codes. She did not find this multitude disturbing but said that “the ideal in my view would be to create standards of research ethics that include all these important issues, and that are not limited to meeting the needs of any one interest group.”
The discussion which followed dealt with the semantics and interpretation of codes, especially the question whether we are entitled to “rewrite” the expressions found in the codes utilising sources from outside.
Barbro Klein spoke on “Folklore archives, heritage politics and ethical dilemmas. Notes on writing and printing”, a topic she had dealt with at the 5th FF Summer School, see FF Network 18: 9. She expanded her presentation to include, for example, the “distinctions between such concepts as ethical notions, political notions and ideological notions”, admitting, however, that they tend to overlap. The magnitude of the political and ethical dilemmas that folklore archives can pose seem to derive from the fact that the folklore archives have been central to the construction of national or regional symbols. Along with cultural historical museums, school systems and many other institutions, folklore archives became central to the formation of many modern nation states. The archives do not only represent the traditions of the nation, they also become examples of what a true heritage should be like. Archive materials tend to become normative. Archives may be used for political control and exercise of power. The traditional creative expressions of individual citizens are ordered and classified, and thereby open to surveillance.
Klein exemplified the ethical dilemmas in the editing of folklore texts. “On the one hand as folklorists we have the responsibility to describe correctly and with respect the points of view that our informants express, or the points of view that they construct together with us in interviews. But on the other hand, most of us would not accept or condone destructive behaviour, evil thoughts… ideas or actions on the part of our informants.” The editor may often have good reasons for not citing the exact words of the informants: to protect them or third parties, for example. In effect the editor may improve the views of the informant, in order to save him from himself.
“The entire chain from questionnaire to printed text is shot through with heritage politics. The questionnaire, the excerpt card and the printed text all have to do with concern with how national heritage is to be presented, represented.” The result is that the informant “is deprived of agency and power” and that “the text conforms to a neutral and fragmented ideal devoid of personal associations” representing “the view of folklore where folklore texts are not seen as the works of individual creators… [but as] examples of a stock of shared traditions.”
The participants offered more examples of collation, combining of different sources without specifying them, purposeful editing, disturbingly short quotations from the informant’s speech, lack of linguistic exactitude in the presentation of oral discourse and other acts conducive to the unreliability of folklore texts. On the other hand, as Galit Hasan-Rokem pointed out, “canonisation is a process of culture between orality and literacy, all the time. Different parts of society find themselves as agents of canonisation in different stages, it’s been priests, it’s been kings, it’s been all kinds of rulers and so on, it just may be that at certain stages folklorists will find themselves as agents of canonisation of a culture.”
Multicultural representation
Galit Hasan-Rokem then presented her paper, a case study asking who is entitled to represent the traditions of a multicultural place, in this case, Jerusalem. “The poetics and politics of visual representation of folk cultures of Jerusalem is political dynamite”, she said.
In 1992 a fieldwork project was launched on the folklore and folklife of Jerusalemites, contracted by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. with the intention of including it as an item in the Mall of the American capital in summer 1993, as part of the annual American Folklife Festival. The two other themes planned for the 1993 festival were the Cajun culture and social dancing, both in the U.S. As for Jerusalem, the plan did not materialise and it has been postponed from time to time ever since.
The obvious reason for the postponement, the possible conflict with the simultaneous handling of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process in Oslo, was never openly stated. For two years, however, collecting went on by two teams working separately but informing each other. The project ended up with two archives of folk culture of Jerusalem, one at the Riwaq Institute for vernacular architecture headed by Professor Suad El-Amiri, and the other at the Folklore Research Center of the Hebrew University headed by Professor Galit-Hasan Rokem.
For a moment then, in the words of Hasan-Rokem, there was “a model of cooperation, of regional cooperation, of the possibility for peaceful coexistence that is operated through a folklore project”. It “served to contradict and subvert some of the dominant interpretations of… the position of Palestinians and Israelis in the city. It certainly was designed to subvert the idea of a unified Jerusalem under Israeli rule, and it certainly was designed to subvert the idea of the denial of any Jewish right in Jerusalem by some Muslim fundamentalists.”
Folklorists from both sides “tended to decline including those forms of traditional expressive culture which had been co-opted by established and elite cultural institutions such as actors functioning as storytellers, again forms of canonisation and institutionalisation. The municipal administrators on the other hand were worried about the trivial and lowly image of the city which the selection of our informants was bound to create. — On the other hand the suggestion of the deputy director of the culture department of the municipality to send a small chamber music orchestra to represent his Jerusalem at the festival was absolutely unthinkable to us”, Hasan-Rokem said.
“The interface between the folklorists and the representatives of the Smithsonian Institution, most of whom were professional folklorists, was occasionally no less complicated than our relations with the municipal administrators. The folk dance groups, a very popular Israeli pastime, were rejected… by the more theoretically oriented of the Smithsonian folklorists. They labeled it revivalism, which in their terminology stands in stark contrast to folklife. — The Israeli team tended to view the decision as based on a lack of understanding for the role of invented traditions in the actual folklife of the country.”
The negotiations between the Palestinian and the Israeli teams touched questions of belonging, identity, lawful claim, inherited ownership, continuity, uniqueness of sentiments of each of the national entities represented. Both parties had difficulty with the fact that the representation had to be such that the Americans could understand what they saw. From the local point of view that was introducing distortion into representation.
The example shows that folklorists always have to operate under knowledge of their own lack of control. Guidelines and rules may be prepared under the presupposition that professional folklorists will be able to control the field. “But there are lots of factors that they are not able to control, not as folklorists and not as humans”, the speaker concluded.
In the discussion there was unanimity about the political force inherent in all folklore work. But how are we to draw the line between ethics and politics? Many participants found it very difficult while others felt that, for example, it is not possible to speak of “identity ethics” and that there is a difference between ethical misconduct and political misconduct.
The problem of informed consent
Tove Fjell spoke on the “informed consent” to be acquired from the people studied. She defined three main types of consent, the written consent and the oral consent, both given in advance, and third, “passive consent”, which means that the informant has been informed by, say, a superior office, in writing or by word of mouth that a research project will be going on at a given place during a given period without individual consent having been obtained.
Fjell’s empirical research setting was observational participation in a birth clinic for which she applied for permission and signed a confidentiality pledge. She was not allowed to meet the women in the ward before they had read an information sheet about the project and signed a consent that allowed the researcher to attend the delivery. In fact the research permission was given at a high administrative level, well above the people to be studied. In the delivery unit it was the midwives who would determine the selection of women to be observed. Fjell was never allowed to see women who were considered too pain-inflicted, or women with a special history like previous deliveries of disabled infants.
Similar situations may occur in connection with interviews. Fjell had interviewed a number of female Vietnamese immigrants about their encounters with the Norwegian health service, prior to, during and after the delivery. Interpreters provided by the municipal interpreter agency were used as the women knew that the interpreters were bound by professional secrecy. The interpreter elicited the women’s oral consent on behalf of the researcher.
Despite the major differences between health-work informants and immigrant informants in terms of language skills and cultural knowledge, they did have one thing in common: both groups related to a “door opener” whom they depended on in many ways: their superior officer and their interpreter respectively. The power structures were rather clear. “We may well query the health workers’ and the immigrant women’s motivation for accepting a proposition from a research community and ask how real their informed consents were”, Fjell concluded.
As it turned out in the discussion, few folklorists had elicited written consent from their informants. Yet there was usually an informal “working contract” on the basis that the interviewee accepted or rejected the suggested topics and could withdraw from the project at any time, as Lauri Honko said. Galit Hasan-Rokem saw some difficulty in Fjell’s choice of research topics, especially when they implied obvious lack of personal contact between the researcher and the informant. The discussion eventually focused on the big question already mentioned above: are all problems researchable? Is it legitimate to intrude in people’s lives at their most vulnerable moments?
The hegemonic impact of the scholar
The last session of the workshop was devoted to a joint paper presented by Armi Pekkala and Maria Vasenkari, both of whom have recently carried out extensive fieldwork interviewing present-day Ingrians in Russia. Although life history interviewing was the main method for both, supported by participant observation, “still we came up with different interpretations”, said Pekkala. According to her, it had something to do with the conceptualisation of the interview and the life-history interview in particular. In the beginning, it was not the “informed consent” or similar things but the hegemony, the authority of the researcher’s position which proved problematic. The fact that the researchers were Finnish (a nationality that the informants rated high and a language which they shared), created a supremacy which resulted, among other things, in the fact that practically nobody rejected an invitation to interview. The impact of the researcher’s position on the material she produces with the informant needs evaluating.
The goal is to produce valid, reliable knowledge about the women’s lifestories and the meanings they give to life and themselves. It presupposes trusting relationships with the informants and the creation of a valid source for interpretations. It requires many visits and time-consuming cooperation with a limited number of informants, an active role from both the interviewer and the interviewee. It requires tape-recording in order to grasp the meanings created in the interview situation and to preserve the interaction that was going on in the situation. The interview material will be vast. There is a reciprocal relationship where the researcher tells about herself, too, i.e. she takes part in the interaction as a human being, not only as a human doing.
The material usually contains some very intimate sections; this is typical of life-history interviews. The protection of the informants’ anonymity and their right to be treated in a justified manner in the archiving, publication and presentation of research materials are thus essential. The intentions of the research must be made clear to them. The mixing of roles, that of a friend and that of a scholar, becomes increasingly problematic, Pekkala stated.
Maria Vasenkari had sent the participants her article on the dialogical notion of fieldwork published in Arv 1999. In her research, she focuses on representation and “the ethical dimensions of the researcher’s and the discipline’s influence on culture and society through fieldwork and through research results”.
In the discussion the colleagues wanted to know why audiotape, not video, was so heavily emphasised in the methodology. The answer was the tight budget plus the difficulty of carrying lots of equipment in the field. When Lauri Honko provocatively asked whether it was the people studied, their life-stories or the research process by which these were elicited that was the main object of interest, Galit Hasan-Rokem went on to praise “the methodological project in which knowledge is considered to be produced interactively in the situation of communication, and not thought of as existing as an abstract category before that”. Bente Gullveig Alver stressed that “we have to have a good knowledge of what we are doing. But we also have to know something about ourselves, about the material… this is a very good example of these young scholars going out and being more conscious of their work than we were when we were young.”
Conclusion
The concluding discussion was unanimous over the need for ethical education, also for folklorists, be it guidelines which need to be revised from time to time or just articles, books and debates on ethical dilemmas encountered in modern research. The term “continuous consent” was offered as a reminder of the fact that ethical considerations should never cease during the research process and that folklorists should strive for the status of invited guests in other cultures, i.e. outsiders as such but welcome to share cultural materials in a responsible way without hurting the values inherent in them or the people expressing them.
No ethical code will ever have the power of implementation, yet a knowledge of ethical guidelines will give people in the field of folklore tremendous professional pride. Most ethical principles are multidisciplinary, but, in the words of Ørjar Øyen, the sociologist in our project, the ethics of textualisation could be a folkloristic contribution. Folklorists command “the way texts are formulated to fit preconceived notions of truth or reality or canonisation. Such issues are very important but they are not special to folkloristics; they also apply generally, say, to the entire field of qualitative methods.”
The seminar seemed to offer a solution to the dilemma of the simultaneous presentation of general and specialised ethics. This was the processual view on ethics. The strength of the discipline-oriented approach is that we deal with concrete events. A sequential analysis of the research process from the ethical point of view will contextualise the problems. Scholars, however, deal mainly with the primary or first life of folklore, and the ethical problems of the secondary use of folklore remain beyond their reach. For this reason it might be better to analyse not only the research episodes but the entire folklore process from the discovery and archiving of folklore to its recycling and application, revival and commercial use, cultural and political functions. Folklore belongs to people, not scholars.
(FFN 21, March 2001: 2-7)