Dan Ben-Amos is a storyteller at heart. This makes him perfectly suited to be a folklore professor, as his lectures often dwindle off into stories.
Two of the courses he teaches at Penn, “Introduction to Folklore” and Narratives Across Cultures, allow him ample opportunity to practice his story telling with an audience of about 60 students.
These two courses don’t belong to a folklore department. One hasn’t existed at Penn since 1999, and currently only graduate students can get certificates in Folklore Studies. The Center for Folklore and Ethnography tried to fill the void for some time, but closed in 2008.
History of folklore
Ben-Amos came to the folklore department at Penn in 1967, when the program was internationally acclaimed around the country and was one of the first of its kind at a university in the U.S.
The inception of the department has its own legend, a story that Ben-Amos considers folklore rather than truth.
When Roger Abrahams, a graduate student at the time, wrote his dissertation about an African American dialect of English, the English Department rejected it because the subjects “didn’t speak the Queens English,” joked Ben-Amos. As the story goes, the University decided to make a new department where such material would be considered appropriate.
The folklore department, at the time, “was a small group of people, very central [and had] good scholars,” Ben-Amos said. But since, many of the folklore scholars have moved to different universities or left.
‘A huge blow’
“We suffered death, we suffered retirements,” Ben-Amos said of the department, which is now officially the Committee on Folklore.
The downgrade from department to committee has also affected students trying to study folklore.
Folklore graduate student Linda Lee has been trying to get her graduate degree in folklore studies for almost a decade. “Things were fine when I was admitted,” Lee said. But right after she joined, a major professor left.
“That was a huge blow,” she said. The program also stopped accepting new students in 2003 and then shut down its archive.
Lee felt cut off from “the kinds of professional development resources that I had expected to have access to,” she said.
“Each time something happened, each time another resource was systematically shut down, it was a huge blow to everyone and caused a lot of heartache and distraction.”
The folklore department also struggled with money, and Ben-Amos is hopeful that, with more money, they could “transform into a full-fledged department.”
For now, though, folklore studies on an undergraduate and graduate level have at times been absorbed into other disciplines, a trend that Lee notes exists across universities, as many specialized programs have been consolidated under larger departments.
“In my thinking,” Ben-Amos said, “it is the responsibility of the intellectuals … to maintain a rigor [in the] scholarship of folklore.”
Finding the appeal
Of course, many students don’t think to study folklore — even Ben-Amos admits that the choice wasn’t clear to him initially.
As an undergraduate, he juggled courses, and there was something in his first folklore course that “struck a responsive chord.”
But times have changed. “In 2012, folklore does not have the same popular appeal that it had in the 60s and the 70s,” he said.
The appeal may not be popular, but it’s founded in a different aspect of life: technology.
“I think that as … the culture, civilizations, [move] into technological spheres, there is a need to counterbalance it,” he added. “There is a certain point where texting is not enough — you want to look in the eyes of a person.”
In his classes, Ben-Amos hopes to help students have this connection. In the 70s, Ben-Amos inspired his then-student, David Azzolina, to break ground in the folklore world of Penn.
“I was actually the first undergraduate degree in folklore,” Azzolina said. He found that not many undergraduates took folklore courses, but when he took Ben-Amos’s class, he was captivated by the material.
“The content is inherently interesting,” Azzolina said, adding, “it is so much the fabric of your life.”
Now, Azzolina teaches at Penn as a librarian and in a course that explores the intersection of folklore and sexuality.
Lee was studying English and European studies at Amherst College when an elective class in folklore changed her perspective on life.
“A lightbulb went off in my head suddenly,” she said. “What I was looking at started to make sense.”
As a student of Ben-Amos, Azzolina agrees that learning folklore is learning about the world.
“I think it opens up new horizons for [students],” Azzolina said. “They’ve learned to think about things that they’ve never had the opportunity [to consider.]”
For Ben-Amos, studying folklore allows students to “have a grasp on the universe,” he said, adding that traditional classes, like math and science, cannot cover all the complexities of life.
Because Penn has a reputation for being professionally oriented, folklore is sometimes not taken as seriously. But according to Lee, folklore is “explicitly relevant” in fields as diverse as medicine, law and business.
“Folklore has a continuing relevance,” Lee said, adding the discipline continues to grow and change with society and popular culture.
And for Lee, folklore is an integral part of any student’s education.
“Folklore challenges us to take seriously the parts of our life that we take for granted,” she said.
This article has been revised to accurately report that a folklore department at Penn hasn’t existed since 1999 and that the Center for Folklore and Ethnography closed in 2008.
