Graduate students [in Folklore] should think carefully about the ethical and political implications of the kind of work you plan to do. Folklore scholarship has a checkered history: it has been used to legitimate fascist regimes and also to make human rights claims; to assist military intelligence in waging war against indigenous populations and also to promote intercultural understanding. The material we study is not our creation or property, as mathematics is of the mathematicians. Indeed, folklore scholars are a tiny minority among the people who study and document folklore–that is, their own culture. We need to consider our intellectual, moral, and material debts to our informants, as well as their proprietary rights in the "data," and the consequences of making in-group knowledge public.
Ohio State University - Center for Folklore Studies
