The Making of Objects, Events, and the After: The 1986 Festival of American Folklife

Held within the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH) is a Material Culture Collection obtained over the last 53 years in relation to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, previously the Festival of American Folklilfe. This collection has acted as decoration for the CFCH’s offices, a repository for memories and maker knowledge, and as a present-day touchstone through which community members may recognize folk cultures. These objects are also extensions of the events from which they came, as they materially reflect the maker’s knowledge and local culture as well as their role within the festival and the CFCH, keeping and shaping the identity and history of the latter. Drawing on pre-exiting material culture literature, objects from the Material Culture Collection are understood to be resonators (Lemonnier, 2016) born out of many spacetimes (Munn, 1986) to interact with the present. This thesis will prove these meanings and representations by using objects collected from the 1986 Festival of American Folklife Rice in Japanese Folk Culture program.

Author

• Lew, Emily

Language

• en

Date created

• 2020

Type of Work

• Master's Thesis

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Anthropology

Degree

• M.A.

Advisor

• Bell, Joshua
• Dent, Alexander S.

Committee Member(s)

• Kuipers, Joel

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/6969z1541