AFSNews Careers Column October 1997

Careers

John Wolford is a museum assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri--St. Louis (UM-SL) and the urban anthropologist at the Missouri Historical Society (MHS). He describes his background and shares some of his insights in this month's column.

If you have suggestions for future columns, please contact me at Career Services, Lucina Hall, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306 (tel: 765/285-2430; fax: 765/285-3757; e-mail: 00jpgoodwin@bsuvc.bsu.edu).

For general information about career planning and conducting a job search, as well as a variety of other resources, visit Career Services' World Wide Web site at http://www.bsu.edu/careers/home.html.

Joseph P. Goodwin Ball State University

Why did you choose to study folklore? What was the focus of your studies and research?

My case is not so unusual. I came into folklore because I had always been interested in diverse areas of the human condition. I had bounced around several different majors during my undergraduate days, ranging from pre-med to American literature to anthropology to psychology and then finally back to English--this last time in creative writing, in which I obtained my bachelor's degree. Once I had finished my B.A., I wondered what I would do with my life--again, fairly typical. It just so happened that the year I graduated from the University of Louisville, a Ph.D. candidate from Indiana University, Roby Cogswell, had been hired to teach a course there on Ohio River Valley folklore. He inspired some of the faculty there with an enthusiasm for folklore. When I asked my professors about graduate programs, they suggested folklore, particularly because of my interests in culture in its various manifestations. The idea clicked--it seemed right. So I researched the various schools and decided to go into the discipline.

A family influence on me was no doubt crucial as well, although unacknowledged until I was enrolled in graduate school. My grandmother, Leah Jackson Wolford, was a folklorist. All my life, I had known that she had written a book about teenagers having parties in Indiana back at the turn of the twentieth century (The Play-Party in Indiana), but I had never given it more than passing--although admiring--thought. I had certainly never considered her a folklorist. Her life had nonetheless intrigued me. She had come from a small town in Indiana, was the first in her family ever to receive a B.A., and then had gone on to earn a master's degree in English. She not only had written a theoretically progressive master's thesis, but she was also able to transform it into a book published for the centennial of Indiana's statehood in 1916. She had done all of this by the age of 24. She died tragically of appendicitis just two years later, right after the birth of my father, her only child. He carried on her literary interests, obtaining a master's in English during his hours off from being a lawyer and raising seven children, and then going on to teach English at the University of Louisville at night. I must have felt the swirl of the literary, folkloristic, and pedagogical influences throughout my early life. Growing up with rooms lined with bookcases and stacks of books no doubt provided an ambient context.

I was anticipating quite a different focus for my graduate training than I received. When I went into the doctoral program at Indiana University, I was expecting to learn the secrets of mythology, particularly Greek and Roman. That was what folklore meant to me. Of course, I could have majored in those areas, but I became fascinated by the more anthropological, spiritual, historical, and material cultural aspects of the field and found that those were the courses and the emphases I pursued. The breadth of my interests led me to seek a double major in folklore and American studies with a history minor. My particular interests in American culture led me to classes whose teachers inspired me and became my mentors--John Bodnar in oral and social history, Sandra Dolby in folklore and American studies, Stephen Stein in religious studies, Bill Reese in American studies and the history of education, Warren Roberts in material culture, Roger Janelli in folklore and anthropology, and, after I finished my course work and was "ABD," Henry Glassie in folklife.

What are the key skills that you learned or developed as a folklorist?

The key skill I honed from my inherent intellectual tendencies was an interdisciplinary acuity. I had always gravitated toward interdisciplinarity, and I found that both folklore and American studies encouraged that development. At the time I was in graduate school, I was excited by the variety of intellectual stimulation and development I could plunge into. Through American studies, I took courses in religious studies, history, and the history of education; in folklore I studied arts and crafts, architecture, ballads, religious anthropology, and cultural anthropology. But I also was quite conscious of the perilous occupational landscape ahead for folklorists (or anyone invested in an advanced degree in the social sciences or humanities), so I tried to construct meaningful links among my courses. I felt that a broad academic background that evinced logical connections and some sort of professional development would eventually look good to the right people.

In this pragmatic vein, I attempted to develop my professional resume by volunteering for various jobs and by obtaining a variety of work related to our field. For instance, I volunteered in the Folklore Archives early on in my graduate years, and I worked on the student journal, Folklore Forum. I did book reviews whenever the opportunity presented itself, not only for Folklore Forum but also for other publications (which I solicited). Looking back, I feel now that I should have worked harder on publishing articles rather than reviews: in the coin of the academic realm, reviews are fairly worthless while articles carry value.

As for paid work, Roby Cogswell got me a job early on in Louisville teaching family folklore to schoolchildren during the summer. I seized upon this opportunity for the experience and the locale, even though, as a second-year graduate student, I felt unworthy to teach. Later in graduate school, I became an assistant instructor of folklore and then an instructor of American studies, thereby learning not only how to teach under a professor but also how to construct and teach a class on my own. After obtaining my Ph.D., I continued teaching through the Folklore Institute as an instructor of folklore at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI).

During my graduate school days, I also looked toward fieldwork and the applied sector, although not as hard as some of my friends. I had always felt that I should improve my skills in these areas, both because they are intrinsic to folklore and because they would add to my professional development. While I did not seek employment as a folklore fieldworker on distant projects, since I wanted to stay around my growing family, I did pursue field experience in a related discipline, history. I interned in oral history for John Bodnar at Indiana and later did other oral history work for him, developing the variety of skills necessary to work as either an oral historian or a folklorist. In my last days as a Ph.D. candidate, the Folklore Institute offered me a job as a slide archivist, which I greedily accepted, seeing it as an opportunity to develop yet another facet of the folklorist's arsenal of skills. In pursuit of a broad-based background in folkloristic skills, I had considered taking courses in or volunteering at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University in Bloomington, but never did. Now that I work at the Missouri Historical Society, which maintains a premier historical museum, I have had to develop many of those museum skills on the job.

After obtaining my Ph.D. in 1992, I applied for every academic and applied position that looked even remotely appropriate, but I recognized that my chances of being hired were always slim. I maintained professional activity by presenting papers, working at IUPUI, and networking to obtain consulting positions. When I was offered my current position, I was beginning a large oral history project for a not-for-profit organization in Indiana.

How did you get your job?

I simply applied for the job, which I had seen advertised in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The job announcement was for a person with a Ph.D., a folklorist, an oral historian, an Americanist, and an urbanist. It was the job I had always trained for. I still figure it was partly luck, but it was also a bit more than that. My Ph.D. training prepared me for a cultural context that saw a need for social historical documentation in American urban areas and a social context in which universities and not-for-profit cultural institutions were attempting to streamline their payrolls and share employees. Although I can't claim to have realized exactly what I was doing, I had been unconsciously preparing myself for exactly this kind of position, where I work within a university department as a professor while holding a professional position in a cultural institution. With both academic and applied experience behind me, I made myself well qualified for my work.

What does your work entail? How do you use your skills as a folklorist in your job?

I am considered full-time staff at both the University of Missouri and the Missouri Historical Society, but my time allotment is 50-50. I have full privileges at both institutions. At UM-SL, I teach one course each semester, perform some service activities (I am currently the library liaison and the internship director for the anthropology department), and attend meetings (currently departmental and American studies meetings). At MHS, I run a monthly talk series, contribute to exhibits, and attend more meetings (mostly for exhibits and special projects), but primarily I am in charge of oral history projects.

My interdisciplinary background, I have found, has proven the most useful in my job. With my anthropological and historical academic training, and with my oral historical, teaching, and archival job experience, I find that my interests and concerns converge significantly enough with those of my colleagues to create a constructive work environment. Moreover, I find that my emphases on aesthetic expression in everyday life are well received in my two workplaces, so I feel that I have an influence over some of the products of the institutions. For instance, my interests in legends and stories surrounding the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis found expression through part of the exhibit on the fair currently at MHS's museum. Likewise, at UM-SL, I developed the Introduction to Folklore class and have taught it three times in the eight semesters I have been here, and I have taught American folklore once. In the courses that are not overtly folkloristic, I have nonetheless infused folklore material and a folklore sensibility so that I am exposing not only my students but also the faculty to folkloristic methodologies, theoretical positions, and authors.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Many other folklorists have told me that my position is ideal, since it is a combination of aspects of our field and of our training that is rarely available to folklorists. I am able to teach and to do fieldwork as part of my job. I have an institutional base--in fact, a multi-institutional base--which enables me to function as a folklorist. I recently became a fellow of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at UM-SL, which allows me to swap a semester of teaching for a semester of research, an opportunity available to me because of my university position. I feel I can influence professionals who have an impact on the public, either through museum exhibits, programs, or teaching, which is possibly a greater opportunity in my current position than I could have achieved in a position created for a folklorist.

Being a folklorist amid other scholars is not an easy thing, however. I find that I have only myself and my readings to keep myself grounded in the folklore community, since there are few folklorists around. I am surrounded by historians and anthropologists, mostly--close academic cousins to be sure, but distinct enough in their own traditions to be foreign. I have to mindfully maintain my folkloristic consciousness, which I do by attempting to instill in any discussion or activity the folkloristic contour to the topic. That is, in my everyday worklife, I express the convergent qualities of folklore, thereby showing where historical matters take on expressive or symbolic qualities that are interpretively significant or where anthropological subjects are not simply statistical or ethnographic or data-driven but humanistic as well. The mixture of my innately congenial presentation with the obvious weight of the folkloristic input has resulted in success perhaps as often as not.