American Folklore Society

Lore & Background

The American Folklore Society was founded in 1888 by William Wells Newell, who stood at the center of a diverse group of university-based scholars, museum anthropologists, and men and women of letters and affairs. In 1945, the society became a member of the American Council of Learned Societies. AFS is also an active member of the National Humanities Alliance.

Reader's Guide

The American Folklore Society serves as the primary professional organization for folklorists in the United States, with a membership that includes professors, public folklorists, arts administrators, freelance researchers, librarians, museum curators, and others involved in the study and promotion of folklore and traditional culture. As of 2016, almost half of its 2,200 members practiced their work outside higher education. The Society publishes the quarterly Journal of American Folklore and awards numerous prizes at its annual meeting, including the Zora Neale Hurston Prize, the Américo Paredes Prize, the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize, and the Chicago Folklore Prize. Its past presidents include Samuel Preston Bayard, Henry Glassie, Diane Goldstein, Dorothy Noyes, and Dell Hymes. Prominent members known outside academic circles have included Marius Barbeau, Franz Boas, Ben Botkin, Jan Harold Brunvand, Linda Dégh, Ella Deloria, William Ferris, John Miles Foley, Joel Chandler Harris, Zora Neale Hurston, James P. Leary, Alan Lomax, John A. Lomax, Kay Turner, and Mark Twain.

Did You Know?

• The American Folklore Society was founded in 1888 by William Wells Newell.
• As of 2016, almost half of its 2,200 members practiced their work outside higher education.
• The Society's quarterly publication is the Journal of American Folklore.
• Jason Baird Jackson served as president from 2016 to 2017.

European Roots and the Birth of a Discipline

Folklore studies as a formal academic pursuit took shape in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century, when scholars turned their attention to the oral traditions of rural peasant communities. The landmark collection Kinder- und Hausmärchen, published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, remains the most celebrated gathering of European peasant verbal lore and helped anchor the young discipline in the worlds of literature and mythology. Throughout the nineteenth century, European researchers maintained a steady focus on stories, proverbs, and songs drawn from relatively homogeneous rural populations. Even as the twentieth century arrived, scholars on the continent largely continued this narrow emphasis on the peasantry's spoken heritage. The discipline's early identity was thus deeply intertwined with literary and mythological inquiry, and the term folklore itself gained wider academic currency only in the 1950s, when scholars needed a label that separated the systematic study of traditional culture from the cultural artifacts it examined. This terminology settled across both Europe and North America, coordinating with parallel traditions in German Volkskunde, Norwegian folkeminner, and Swedish folkminnen.

The American Turn Toward Cultural Anthropology

When American scholars entered the field at the turn of the twentieth century, they made a deliberate choice that set their work apart from European colleagues. Under the leadership of Franz Boas, American folklorists directed their research toward Native American communities and embraced the full spectrum of customs, beliefs, and practices as legitimate folklore material. This broader scope aligned the American tradition with cultural anthropology and ethnology rather than with literature and mythology. Practically, it meant that American researchers adopted the same fieldwork and data-collection methods used by anthropologists and ethnologists, grounding their scholarship in direct engagement with living communities. The result was a discipline that draws on a wide alliance of academic fields, offering multiple theoretical perspectives and research tools. This interdisciplinary character remains both a strength and an ongoing source of internal debate within the field. As a modern academic discipline, folklore studies occupies a distinctive position that straddles the boundary between the social sciences and the humanities, reflecting the inherently cross-cutting nature of the traditions it investigates.

Legislative Protection and the Expanding Definition of Folk

The mid-twentieth century saw a wave of international and national legislation aimed at safeguarding traditional culture. In 1982, UNESCO issued a recommendation calling for global provisions to protect folklore from identified threats, and in 2003 it followed with the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. In the United States, Congress passed the American Folklife Preservation Act in 1976, timed to coincide with the Bicentennial. That law offered a broad definition of folklife as the traditional expressive culture shared within familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, and regional groups, encompassing everything from custom and belief to music, dance, architecture, and handicraft. The legislation was designed to recognize cultural diversity as a national strength worthy of protection. Meanwhile, the very word folk had evolved dramatically. Originally referring to rural, often poor and illiterate peasants, it now describes any social group of two or more people who express a shared identity through distinctive traditions. This flexible concept can encompass an entire nation or a single family, and it expands the material under study to include verbal, material, and customary lore alike.

Public Folklore and the Living Tradition

After the Second World War, a new branch of folklore studies emerged from the applied work of figures like Alan Lomax and Ben Botkin, who in the 1930s had championed the documentation and presentation of living cultural practices. This public folklore movement shifted the focus from purely academic collection and analysis toward active preservation and community engagement. Today, public-sector folklorists work through museums, libraries, arts organizations, public schools, and historical societies to document, preserve, and present the beliefs and customs of diverse cultural groups. The most prominent institution in this space is the American Folklife Center at the Smithsonian, which hosts the Smithsonian Folklife Festival each summer in Washington, DC. This public-facing work stands in contrast to the university-based academic tradition, where the primary goals remain collection, research, and analysis. Importantly, the tradition itself is not static or ancient; folklore is a naturally occurring, necessary component of every social group. It is created, transmitted, and used in the present day to draw boundaries between us and them, and its meaning can shift and morph across generations while retaining its relevance to the community that carries it forward.