Dorothy Noyes: Folklore, Exemplarity and Politics
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[00:00:00] Dori: I'm a child of the age of infinite confidence and infinite choice in American middle class life. I grew up, you can do anything you want. You can be anything you want. And there was no overhanging social necessity that I could perceive that made me focus and I had a hell of a time settling down. 

[00:00:24] From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff, with departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics and languages, among many others. The college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

[00:00:57] David: I'm very pleased to be joined today in the ASC Tech studios by Dorothy Noyes, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University, with courtesy appointments in anthropology, French and Italian, and Germanic languages and literatures.

[00:01:14] She is the director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and previously directed the Center for Folklore Studies from 2005 to 2014. Dr. Noyes, welcome to Voices. 

[00:01:25] Dori: Thank you for having me. 

[00:01:26] David: Well, I'd like to start with folklore. I don't have occasion to interview many folklorists, which is to my detriment, I think.

[00:01:33] So, maybe we start with a definition. Tell us what folklore is or what folklorists study. 

[00:01:38] Dori: Well, the word is terrible, but, um, you know, we joke about the F word, but it's actually useful to remember that your discipline has a complicated history. So, when American scholars talk about folklore, they mean the vernacular layer.

[00:01:55] of culture, what everybody has underneath formal training, underneath institutions. So we don't all write novels, but we all tell stories. We're not all architects, but we all arrange spaces in ways that are aesthetically pleasing. We don't all run for office, but we all have politics in the sense that we have to figure out power and collaboration in our community lives.

[00:02:19] That's the American definition. There's a European definition, which is a little bit more bound to history, that folklore is the cultural difference inside the modern world. 

[00:02:30] David: You have to Explain what that means. 

[00:02:32] Dori: So, you know, we had an enlightenment and we started believing in progress and we had education and we had science and we let go all kinds of other things.

[00:02:43] But in fact that was a relatively small group of educated men of the dominant ethnicity and everybody else Children, women, rural people, people of different ethnicities and religions, people with disabilities, in other words, most people did not really have access to that enlightened layer of culture and continued to practice oral tradition and custom and what theologians would call superstition and all of that residual culture and also all kinds of new emerging inventions happened on the margin of the institutions of modern life. And so all of that, it's basically a somewhat Marxist class based vision of folklore in Europe, that this is subaltern. Or it's the culture that has been marginalized. It's attached to people who have been marginalized.

[00:03:38] And I think both those definitions, the American one that says we've all got it, the president has folklore and the president for sure has folklore, and the other one that says the folklore is the culture of marginalized peoples, I think those are both useful definitions for us and we try to balance them.

[00:03:55] David: This isn't like high and low culture, is that too simplistic of a distinction? 

[00:03:58] Dori: Well, high and low is part of both ideas in that all of us, switch registers. The thing about folklore is it's about intimate difference. When you think about the origins of anthropology, The kind of stereotype of the origins of anthropology is it started with missionaries and colonizers, and it was imagining that the other was very far away, not only geographically, but culturally and conceptually.

[00:04:24] And when people started defining folklore, they were talking about their grandmothers. They were talking about their neighbors. They were talking about themselves in their childhood. So they were talking about this kind of intimate cultural difference. We are not always being modern and rational in every moment of our lives.

[00:04:44] So there's high and low in me. in different moments of my behavior. But of course, society also creates formal divisions between what is elite or what is high or what is recognized culture and what is illicit or on the margins, what is popular. Society decides some of it, but these things also interact in my own practice as a person.

[00:05:10] David: So, why did you end up in folklore as opposed to, I don't know, history or music or physics? 

[00:05:17] Dori: I flubbed as an opera singer. 

[00:05:19] David: Oh, really? You have to tell us this story. 

[00:05:24] Dori: I wanted to be an opera singer. I sang in high school. I ended up at Indiana University, because that's, where you would go to do this.

[00:05:32] I didn't have The confidence, quite, to pursue the life of an opera singer, but I knew some languages. I got interested in medieval literature. I got interested in tracing, where particular stories came from. And from that, I got down some pretty esoteric rabbit holes. 

[00:05:51] David: Well, I'm interested in your, work in folklore, and I want to talk about a book you published in 2016, the subtitle of which has really got my attention.

[00:05:59] So the book is Humble Theory, Folklore's Grasp on Social Life. What were the main conclusions of this, monograph? 

[00:06:07] Dori: It wasn't quite a monograph, it was collected essays. Uh, it was the problems that people had asked me to solve around various issues where, folklore's relevance arises.

[00:06:19] But humble theory, of course, is the opposite of grand theory. And instead of the grand you know, the great modern theories, which find deep causes for behavior on the surface. What really, I think, interests most of us in the humanities, but certainly those of us in folklore, is how the surface is organized.

[00:06:41] It's not the why questions, because the ultimate causes of my behavior may be determined by things that are beyond my consciousness, but that doesn't really give me anything to do in the world. What I want to know are the how does it work? How do we shape, you know, in particular, how do we mold communications in ways that get our messages across.

[00:07:03] So, Humble Theory was a way partly of, dealing with what's on the ground in front of you. Partly recognizing that we're not the only people theorizing. And if you belong to the listening disciplines this is Tim Lloyd's phrase for ethnomusicology, folklore, and oral history. In the listening disciplines, you understand that people have their own ideas, of course.

[00:07:25] They have their own theories of what they're doing. And those are limited. you have to draw back from those as a scholar. But nonetheless they're worth listening to, especially when people are in bars after the climactic event, and they are reflecting either satirically or dolefully on what just happened.

[00:07:45] You can hear some pretty astute observations from them, and those are something you want to take account into your own. in your own theorizing. So our theorizing starts pretty close to the ground, and then the other part of humility is that my discipline has a terrible history allied with nationalism, particularly, of course, in its famous German formulation.

[00:08:08] But, we have made a lot of mistakes, and wearing the scarlet F on our bosom sort of serves to remind us that scholars can make mistakes, and I I think that's something to keep in mind. You have to keep updating and revising. So that's humble theory. 

[00:08:25] David: I love the description of these and others as listening disciplines.

[00:08:30] It's always struck me that listening is an undervalued skill in the academy. 

[00:08:34] Dori: Yeah, I think Perhaps the humanities in general are starting with not the grand theory that we need to exemplify somewhere in the world. We're starting with the thing in the world that grabs our attention. So in a sense we start methodologically by listening, by looking, by saying.

[00:08:55] What is that? And trying to make sense of it. So the listening disciplines, epistemologically, are starting with a kind of humility before the object, a humility before the situation. Of course that has an ethical component, and this has been something that all of these fields have been working with intensively for the last many years.

[00:09:18] If you are listening, you are also listening because somebody is bothering to speak to you. Folklorists in particular tend to, it's not always true, but it's often the case that they come from the communities that they have gone back to study. They have an interest in helping those communities to thrive.

[00:09:36] An awful lot of our grad students in recent years have come from Southern Ohio. And they have really wanted to figure out, how do I get educated without leaving home and losing my connections? What can I do for my community? And that can't be flying in from above and saying, here's the God given solution to your problems.

[00:09:58] It really has to do with understanding how people themselves are defining their situation. So there's an ethical dimension to listening, but it also means who am I? I went in and studied, started listening in a small industrial town in the Pyrenees in Spanish Catalonia, back in the late 80s, and I was an American, and that had a certain prestige, and there were jokes about my being from the CIA, and that sort of thing.

[00:10:26] But fundamentally, you know, I'm this naive little girl who speaks the language, sort of. And they don't have to talk to me if they don't want to. So why are they talking to me? Well, they want to ventriloquize. There are things that, if you live in a small, tight community, You don't really talk about directly an awful lot of what folklore is about, in fact.

[00:10:48] In tight knit, face to face communities, is finding indirect ways of expressing things that would just be too painful or too conflictual to do in plain language, when you have to live together. Indirect communication, symbolic communication, is often how you want to do it. But at the same time, there's a lot of pressure in that, in sort of sustaining, especially in a place like Catalonia that had a civil war.

[00:11:14] You don't want that to happen again. But you do like opportunities to vent and this little foreigner comes and is listening, so that's a great opportunity. And so for a lot of people, I was an occasion for them to put out their theories of how life worked in their world. And that's an ethical responsibility.

[00:11:32] What do I do with that knowledge if somebody gives it to me? It's even more so for our colleagues who are working in, situations of present conflict and trauma. If somebody gives you their story, it's because they want you to do something with it. So this actually goes back to the very basic concept of tradition, which of course is central to us in folklore studies, and this is one of those.

[00:11:54] What does tradition mean? That was one of the chapters in the book. Because somebody said, write for an encyclopedia the definition of tradition. Well, it comes from and Fritz Graf will kindly correct me, but it comes from Roman law. Tradizio is the handing over, of an object.

[00:12:14] that confers a responsibility on the receiver. So when a priest gets the chalice that he will then celebrate communion with as a part of his ordination, that is a handing over. When somebody is handing over a story to me, they are letting go of it. They're giving me possession of it. They're allowing me to do something with it.

[00:12:37] But I've, by taking it, I have taken on that responsibility. 

[00:12:41] David: And is a responsibility, isn't it? Mm hmm. as I'm listening to you, and as I'm thinking about how I introduced you in the departments of English, Comparative Studies, Anthropology, Germanic Languages and Literatures, you have described yourself as an intellectual claustrophobe, which I just love.

[00:12:58] First of all, Tell us what that means. What do you mean by that really evocative term? 

[00:13:03] Dori: I hope it does not mean that I don't have much of an attentions span. I have been working on that in the course of my life. But, I mean, I love my colleagues and I love the different case studies that I've worked on in the course of my career.

[00:13:16] I do love, diving down into the Catalan industrial town or some other situation. But if I get too deep into that local conversation, whether it's a local scholarly conversation, or a policy conversation, or a community conversation it gets ingrown. find that, certain ideas keep circulating, certain debates end up stagnating, and I really need the stimulus of people who think in a different way.

[00:13:46] So I need both the different methods and the people who, at the beginning of my listening to them might sound like space aliens, and I have ultimately learned, respect for things like the quantitative social sciences. Mm-Hmm. , often, it's easy to listen to people who are very far away from you, disciplinarily, because they don't threaten your personal identity.

[00:14:10] It can be more difficult interacting with your near neighbors just because the narcissisms of minor differences make a difference there. But either way, it is good for me to be challenged. So that I don't get lazy, and so that I don't get bored, and so that I actually bring new questions to whatever my work is.

[00:14:33] It's not that I, um, have really changed what I do, but I think I do it with more awareness. 

[00:14:39] David: Hmm. Is it easy to be this is the term I use to describe myself, is it easy to be intellectually promiscuous? 

[00:14:46] Dori: It is certainly a danger in my case. 

[00:14:48] David: How so? 

[00:14:49] Dori: Yeah. You know, I think I'm a child of the age of infinite confidence and infinite, choice in American middle class life.

[00:15:00] I grew up, you can do anything you want. You can be anything you want. And there was no overhanging social necessity that I could perceive that made me focus and I had a hell of a time settling down. 

[00:15:13] David: You are a co author of a book titled Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration, A Guide for the Academy. And it sounds like that's the sort of thing we're talking about here. Tell us, about this volume. 

[00:15:24] Dori: Yeah, I should say, of course, A Guide for the Academy was a bit of the publisher's insistence on making it sound useful. I think the book is really a reflective essay. On interdisciplinary process, it comes out of a collaboration in Europe that's very typical of the way that research is organized in Europe today.

[00:15:46] A large interdisciplinary research grants that are formed around a topic that is understood to have some currency, and this is how PhD students are recruited and paid for. It is how research is supported, and it organizes the lives of scholars in a way that hasn't yet happened here. And I became a consultant on a six year project in Göttingen, in Germany, on cultural property.

[00:16:12] And cultural property is one of those slogan concepts like resilience like heritage, like sustainability, things that really sound great in part because they're very abstract. We don't really know what they mean. And cultural property was an idea that had arisen in response to perceived problems of cultural appropriation.

[00:16:33] So it sounded really good. And in practice, figuring out how are you going to implement this, who is going to be the owner of this cultural property? How do you stabilize it in such a way that anybody has control of it? The technical issues, the policy issues, The ethical issues were immense, so the kind of thing on which you need economists and lawyers and so on.

[00:16:57] So, I and the two project leaders. of this project, observed the social dynamics of the research group as we were trying to come together and understand an object that we all felt a little uncertain about, cultural property. Everybody said, alright, it's happening, but nobody was really embracing this thing.

[00:17:22] So that meant that our differences in thinking about the problem, in a sense, became that much more exaggerated. So the book is really a study of how intellectual differences arise in the course of collaboration, and recognizing that is inevitable, recognizing that is productive, but thinking about strategies of mitigation.

[00:17:45] And the strategies of mitigation really happen at a lower level that I would think of not as collaboration, but as intellectual sociability, interdisciplinary sociability. And part of that is just real sociability, that you hang out together, you have lunch together, you get to trust each other socially, so you're willing at least to be polite to each other intellectually, and figure, okay, this is a reasonable person. there must be something to what they're saying, maybe I should try harder to understand it.

[00:18:18] But also creating enough mutual confidence that you could say, this assumption seems crazy to me. Where did it come from? And the getting people to tell stories of where their assumptions came from became a really productive thing. 

[00:18:34] David: So, do I understand then that you implemented some of these mitigation strategies for this group that you were, observing, listening to?

[00:18:41] Dori: Well, I was in the luxury position of just looking on, but my very hard working colleagues and co authors Regina Bendix went to huge lengths. And, found also the dynamics of power in academe that you can work a lot with PhD students who have an incentive in making this thing work. You can get young people to be the crucible of things that senior professors may not always be motivated to support.

[00:19:11] And there again, the question of temperament, the intellectual claustrophobes are the ones who are going to find refreshment, in this kind of encounter, whereas others are taking it on as a kind of duty to the field. And they will do their duty, but they'll practice a kind of polite avoidance.

[00:19:30] David: Did I understand you to say that this kind of collaboration is more common in Europe than in the United States? 

[00:19:35] Dori: Well, I think we are certainly working at it. In Europe, I think it pretty much is how anything gets funded. You have to apply for these large grants. this is how the graduate programs happen.

[00:19:49] This is how anything gets done. And that is something that people have recognized creates perverse incentives. there ends up being a certain amount of flavor of the month research. Everybody is working on the same hot topic for three years, and then they throw it over and they start working on the next hot topic.

[00:20:07] There's also too much incentive to Arrive at results and, publish things too quickly. it works against more idiosyncratic and more long-term kinds of reflection here. I think we certainly have a push and we have fantastic Ohio State initiatives, of course, like the Godit that are creating these kinds of conversations.

[00:20:29] So. I think these are good and worthwhile. I think people should not be forced into interdisciplinary marriages because the forced marriage isn't necessarily a happy one. But you can create a good ground for them happening through things that we have at Ohio State like the interdisciplinary centers. 

[00:20:49] David: I introduced you as the current director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. First of all, tell us about the Mershon Center. 

[00:20:56] Dori: The Mershon Center is one of Ohio State's remarkable assets. It began in the early 1960s through, well, Ralph Mershon himself was an enormously interesting figure in the history of Ohio State. He was a pioneering electrical engineer. He was part of the first electrical engineering class.

[00:21:17] At Ohio State, he invented techniques for getting hydroelectric power to mining installations in Pennsylvania, things like this. Then he went to work for Westinghouse and invented a lot of things there. Then he went off to the First World War, became a colonel, came back to Ohio State, worked as an independent electrical engineer, but in his spare time he invented the ROTC with President William Oxley Thompson. He invented the Ohio State Alumni Association. He apparently organized the structure of the colleges. He did a whole lot of things at Ohio State. He left his money, his endowment, to Ohio State. The Mershon Auditorium was named in his honor, because he also thought everybody should read literature and enjoy theater. He was a very rounded man. But the Mershon Center was founded out of that endowment in the early sixties as a fairly typical cold war security studies center that was worried about the obvious international issue that brought together military historians and international relations scholars and ultimately also diplomatic historians.

[00:22:27] And from that base thinking about the problem of the Cold War, the problems of détente and of deterrence and so on. Ultimately, it had some pioneering directors one of whom, Ned Lebow was there in the 80s and decided Maybe we didn't actually predict the end of the Cold War. Maybe we need some amplification in our methods.

[00:22:49] He was another intellectual claustrophobe, and brought in a lot of people from the humanities and the arts. And the directors who have followed him, Rick Herman, and Craig Jenkins, and Chris Jelpe, all followed this idea that security will be more creatively conceived if we look at people who are looking on the ground at peacemaking and people who are modeling war in theater and people who are bringing new perspectives to the discussion.

[00:23:21] David: Is this how a folklorist becomes the director of the Mershon Center? 

[00:23:24] Dori: Yes, it took a while. I'm not quite the oldest member, but I have been there since Almost my arrival at Ohio State, I think, 1999. I've been an affiliate of Mershon since then. And mostly it was just the fresh air. Listening to social scientists.

[00:23:43] It has not turned me into a social scientist, but it made me a smarter folklorist. Because I had to understand institutions, I had to understand high politics to understand what was happening at community levels, and from there, my interest started, growing.

[00:24:00] But one of the principles of, as you know very well, one of the principles of success in academic life or anywhere else is if you keep hanging out, ultimately you'll make yourself useful, and now I hope I'm making myself useful. 

[00:24:15] David: I'd like to talk about your, your two current book projects on the exemplary. They both have exemplary in the title. First of all, tell us these two book projects and what's, the larger theme here? 

[00:24:26] Dori: So exemplarity, it's not a word that normal people use in English. If you speak Spanish, you probably do know the term ejemplaridad because it comes up every time there is a corruption scandal.

[00:24:39] David: Interesting. 

[00:24:41] Dori: It is a word that one has from both Christian tradition, I'm going to set you an example, go and do likewise. And it also comes out of a kind of Republican tradition, Machiavelli, a leader should say set, outrageous, compelling examples that other people are encouraged to emulate.

[00:24:58] And those two things together are part of the common sense of our political life and our social life. We talk about setting examples and bad examples and leading by example and, having role models and all kinds of ideas that, Social progress will come about by all of us looking to each other for examples and following them and improving on them.

[00:25:23] David: Good examples. 

[00:25:24] Dori: Well, yes. 

[00:25:25] David: I take exemplary to mean, like, the highest. 

[00:25:27] Dori: Yeah, and I'm trying to figure out how to deal with that moral weight of the term. So I have an edited volume that is now under review called The Global Politics of Exemplarity, which came from the last international conference that Mershon did the week before the pandemic broke out that deals with this as a principle of international politics. And then I'm myself doing a monograph, a very long, one of those late career books called exemplary failures. And this is really about an anatomy of exemplarity in liberal politics from the late 18th century to the present.

[00:26:07] But so I'm trying to figure out what is it in this common sense of Western liberal politics that we say all the time, but we have never really stopped to think about. What does it mean to lead by example, and what are the dangers when that happens? So the moralizing, yes, exemplary means somebody good and wonderful, but bad examples are something that gets worried about, and making an example is of course a longstanding principle of punitive justice.

[00:26:37] So those things work together. And, I think there is a real principle here of, there's a real cultural mechanism that I think you can see cross culturally and you can see it theorized in different ways in different places. So, Ying Zhang from the history department is theorizing how this works in the Chinese tradition.

[00:26:59] But, I think there's a general process. We influence each other in social life, of course. Every day, I look around to my peers to see how they behave. How can I shape myself based on people around me? How can I sort of push myself ahead a little bit in such a way that I'm still going to be able to relate to these people?

[00:27:19] That's our everyday process of social influence. But in larger scale state level politics, certainly once we have mass society and mass media, we're talking about performances on a more organized scale of a more emphatic kind. I need to call attention to this thing I want to happen.

[00:27:43] And so what I think really, we have a lot of talk about values in politics and we have a lot of talk about norms. And this for me as a folklorist is too abstract. maybe your religion believes in peace and my religion believes in peace. That doesn't mean that we're going to be able to live in the same neighborhood without getting into conflict.

[00:28:04] What we really need again, the kind of questions of the social forms. And so I think conduct in social life really spreads through observing impressive gestures, observing somebody do something risky, and thinking about that and either wanting to Align yourself with it, wanting to add yourself to it, or maybe wanting to push back against it and say no, that's not how we behave. we have to stand against that and do something different.

[00:28:37] David: Give me an example that, either example. 

[00:28:40] Dori: So it's a big deal, in contemporary social movements. And social movements, of course, are very interested in what works. So, activists in one country are looking around the world for good ideas. Examples that they can follow. But to think about how they work in a political situation Colin Kaepernick's taking a knee.

[00:29:02] So that was something that had an enormous immediate viral influence and obviously social media helped. But he was most immediately there in the middle of a football game and making, in a place where all eyes were on him because ordinarily, you know, as An American football player, he might have a few fans from his team, he might have a Twitter following, but he's not quite a public figure.

[00:29:30] And so this is a way of finding a stage ready made for him and commanding attention in a way that I think impressed people initially because it wasn't for himself. It was commenting on a situation that he felt was of national importance. And so that worked, but not entirely in the way that he had anticipated, and that's part of why I think exemplarity is interesting.

[00:29:57] You can design a performance, but you can't dictate how people are going to receive it. And you can't design it out of nothing. You are using gestures that have been used before you. You are dealing with examples that have come before you. And so exemplarity, when I use that, Terrible abstract noun. I'm trying to think about that full process of producing and performing and receiving and transmitting examples in the same way that story is produced and transmitted and received in oral tradition.

[00:30:33] Dorothy Noyes. Thank you.

[00:30:37] More podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Produced by Doug Dangler, I'm Jen Farmer.