Firsthand observation and documentation of folklore. Fieldwork is the key research act for most scholarship in folklore, anthropology, and oral history. ln 1964, Richard M. Dotson wrote, “What the state paper is to the historian and creative work to the literary scholar, the oral traditional text is---or should hc-to the student of folklore.” Today, few folklorists would limit the field; gathered information to “texts,” and many could not even agree on what the word text means, yet Dorson’s observation still holds true.
Fieldwork consists of observing and documenting people where they are and doing what they do. it is one of the three major modes of acquiring primary information in the social sciences. (The other two-"statistical surveys and decontextualized interviews 'or performertrees-ware rarely used in primary folklore studies.) Fieldwork infonnation is gathered with various media: notehooks, film and video came “as, and audio recorders. Fieldworkers may seek items in active tradition (things people do now) or things in passive tradition (things they know and recogniz~ and may even have an aesthetic for but wouldn‘t, unless solicited, perform or utter). Fieldworkers may join in the events going on (participant observation), or they may pretend to he totally outside those events (except in large community events, such as festivals and parades, it is difficult for a fieldworker to he totally invisihle). They may he active in their pursuit of information (interviewing, asking for items, asking for explanations), or they may he passive (waiting, observing, recording).
Some folklore Ieseaicheis use preexisting pIint or electronic media as the sources of primary infOImation (fOI example, studies of the apparent scope, chamcter. and function of folklore materials in commercial advertising or political speeches or folklore in the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain or folklore on the Internet). But such studies are predicated on ideas of folklore derived from fieldwork. M ilman Parry and Albert Lord’s hypothetical and theoretical work on the nature of Homeric peiformance and composition was extrapolated from their extensive fieldwork among Serbian epic singers. They were able to assert that certain. materials in classical texts were grounded in folklore performance and transmission only because their fieldwork let them understand the character of such perfonnance and transmission.
Even folklore scholars whose work is totally theoretical are dependent for the substance underlying their generalizations and speculation on the field, work of others. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to theorize cogently and relevantly about the meaning of folklore in a community unless someone had first gathered information about what folklore exists in that community and what functions the folklore performs. Comparative folklore studies (texts or behaviors from different places or times compared for differences in aesthetic or functional aspects) is predicated on the quality and scope of the field’gathv cred material.
Folklorists doing fieldwork may be looking for specific genres or kinds of folk behavior: ballads, recipes, survivals of older traditions in modem commur nities, modern folkways in technological communities, or the nature of folk performance. It is difficult to know the social meaning of an item of perforr mance without knowing about the conditions of performance. For example, the place and function of ballads in a community are interpreted differently if many people in that community sing many long ballads on a regular basis to a wide local audience that knows and enjoys such ballads or if, by contrast, the performers sing their songs only when collectors come in from the outside to solicit them. The words and tunes may be the same, but what we make of them may vary. One may analyze a particular ballad text differently if it was lcarncd from a book, a recording, a school chum, or a grandparent.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars often examined texts alone, much as literary scholars examined texts of poems as freestanding items. Today, however, folklore texts are rarely examined without considerzv tion of collateral information. Only through fieldwork can researchers gather the items, provide information for identifying folk genres, and locate the nature of folk lore peiftmnanee in ordinary life.
It is just that scholars are more sophisticatcated now about the questions that might be asked; it is also that the equipment available today frees the fieldworker to ask more sophiscatcated or multidimensional questions. When fieldworkers can examine context-not just context of performance but also context of recording, the relation between scholar and source. Put another way, it is no longer just the joke that is investigated. Rather, modern researchers ask a host of question: Who tells which jokes to whom and under what c