I chose to read the article Sins of objectification? Agency, mediation, and community cultural self-determination in public folklore and cultural tourism programming. Here are the two questions that I came up with pertaining to the article.

1. Baron mentions professionalism quite a few times in the article, talking about the role of a public folklorist in terms of career goals and advancement. This made me think about intentions and motivation connected to money. In my eyes this field school is much more about knowledge than any type of monetary or career boosting gain. So how do Baron’s themes here change when we, students are given the role of folklorist? Is there a chance that we may be taken less seriously than someone older with more experience? Or do you think that the community members will be more comfortable collaborating with those less informed who lack preconceived expectations about their culture? In other words do you think that we as students are able to represent the cultures of these people in a purer way than a professional, career oriented folklorist?

2. Baron devotes a section of the article to the idea of framing cultures when representing them. He talks about the power of the stage, stating that “While the elevated stage can be constraining for folk performers and thus limit their interactions with audiences, it nevertheless serves as a dominant context for performance in most contemporary cultures.” Baron also quotes Daniel Sheehy by likening the stage to “putting a picture in a frame and hanging it on a wall”. In other words, the stage becomes a tool to help legitimize the art (72). He continues to enumerate the ways in which this framing can be used to diminish the distance between the artist and the audience by “fostering interaction with them”. I am majoring in cinema studies and plan to use my camera heavily in documenting the cultural traditions we will be examining during our stay. I believe that many of the ways in which artists can be framed on the stage can apply to the use of framing in terms of film and cinema. One thing that stood out to me in Baron’s article was the seemingly simple decision on how high to place the stage on which the cultural artists were performing in order to encourage the idea of it being a participatory event. With this in mind, I began to think about the ways in which camera techniques can influence and dictate audience opinion. Everything from camera angles to positioning to color adjustments to use of sound can affect the way in which an audience perceives what they are seeing. What are some techniques that can be used to encourage interaction  and eliminate distance between the subject and the audience? How similar do you think the idea of framing on a stage is to framing with a camera?