Review: A Companion to Folklore

The publication of A Companion to Folklore is a milestone for our field.For folklorists working in English language contexts, it will take a place alongside and, as a contemporary assessment, supersede older stocktaking-handbooks such as Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (Dorson 1972).Distinguished editors Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem have worked with a talented, international group of folklorists to produce a compelling, up-to-date survey of folkloristics.The volume is smart, optimistic, plural, and sophisticated.The collection has been published by commercial publisher Wiley-Blackwell as a title in its Blackwell Companions to Anthropology series.This framework accounts for the volume's format, scope, and editorial approach.It also prominently positions folkloristics alongside subfields of anthropology (such as medical anthropology and linguistic anthropology) and prominent thematic nodes in that field (such as the anthropology of the body and cultural resource management).Being situated vis-à-vis anthropology in this way creates opportunities, and perhaps also difficulties, relative to various regional, national, historical, and personal framings of folkloristics as an autonomous discipline or inter-discipline.But as implemented, A Companion to Folklore will be immediately recognizable to folklorists of diverse perspectives, including those who understand the field as distinct from anthropology.The volume successfully engages with the concerns of literary, historical, and ethnological folklorists and also addresses public folklore in an integrative fashion.A particular hallmark of the volume, beyond its combination of contemporaneity and historical awareness, is its internationalism.While every national or regional setting could not be addressed, the volume's Part II, Location, offers thirteen accounts of the history and present state of folklore research in a diverse selection of regional (e.g., Latin America, Oceania) and national (e.g., India, Finland, Ireland) contexts.While these chapters are a straightforward way of gathering in a diverse group of authors and perspectives, a welcome cosmopolitanism characterizes all of the volume's sections.The editors, central to numerous overlapping networks in international folkloristics, have made excellent use of their collegial ties.While I have not consulted all volumes in the Blackwell Companions to Anthropology series, it seems evident that A Companion to Folklore is an unusually international collection, one that reflects well upon the diversity and multicentrism of international folkloristics.Although doing so would bring many rewards, few folklorists will likely read this 675-page volume from front to back.Its uses will likely be different.The chapters gathered in Part I, Concepts and Phenomena, provide broad, theoretically-informed accounts of key issues in the field (e.g., Poetics, Performance, Tradition) or generic areas (e.g., Material Culture; Myth, Ritual, Symbol).This section holds the chapters most likely to appear on graduate seminar reading lists and to be turned to as