Please enjoy this summary of OFN’s current research and leave us a comment to share your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions!
OFN’s Research Lab, like the Apprenticeship programs it studies, originates with National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funds, awarded to folk arts managers, with the intention to benefit traditional arts. NEA (and state arts agency) priorities at the so-called “top,” place conditions on folk arts managers that ultimately impact communities at the so-called “bottom” of this chain. Seen frequently enough, this chain-reaction model appears necessary and becomes naturalized, like the principle of gravity pushing water over a fall. However, this model shows limitations when asking how Apprenticeships sustain cultural communities. From the waterfall model, funders are the powerful source at the top, folklorists are the free-falling shape that water takes mid-flight, and traditional artists are the chaotic frenzy of splashes, undulating gyrations, and volatile explosions at the surface below: fascinating to watch but illegible to be tracked and sorted through research.
Like water, power takes many shapes. This research is established on the premise that traditional artists and their cultural communities are not passive recipients of funding opportunities, but active agents of their own decisions; people who proactively seek, accept or decline opportunities. While funders seem to give and communities appear to receive, the waterway could instead be a river with dams or locks, or a bay with tides. A culture bearer may live where the water moves fast, or slow, or they may live far from the water. When the funder is a federal agency, the headwaters originate with public tax dollars, further complicating the facile waterfall analogy.
These contrasting models help us conceptualize the power dynamics that can (and do) affect how Apprenticeships can (and do) impact cultural sustainability in ways that communities find meaningful. All three tiers of influence—NEA, folk arts managers, and community—are interdependent and play roles in our findings. Our project marks the first step in a longitudinal analysis that will take many years. To be effective, we started by building a research foundation that centers the perspectives of Apprenticeship participants, also called awardees, collected while administering such programs. Awardees depict their traditional artforms as organic, more complicated than a single fiber in the cultural cloth. To some, the idea of Apprenticeships can be strange, alienating, and oddly detached from a healthy cultural ecosystem that is intertwined, diversified, and whole in its complexity. Still, for others, Apprenticeships have opened doors to cultural lifeways that are deeply affirming of identity and profoundly grounding in relational, humanistic values that many find difficult to encounter otherwise.
As culture keepers, Apprenticeship awardees are not a homogenous group. Beyond their cultural differences (demographic data typically collected by folklorists and reported to NEA), culture keepers may be highly professional studio artists with performing careers and international acclaim, or they may be reclusive self-taught crafters who quietly research and awaken sleeping traditions previously ripped away by genocide or diaspora. While all show artistic merit and excellence, it is the support of the folk arts manager that often draws out the community criteria and cultural context that determines such integrity. With so much variance among awardees, our research goals include elucidating community values that are culturally specific, while positing those that are commonly held across cultural differences.
Between funding source and recipient is the role of the Folklorist. When funding moves like an easy river, folk arts managers strategize outreach to help culture bearers gain access. When funding moves like a rushing waterfall, we strategize processes to buffer burdensome justifications and limit restrictions that often pummel communities. Folklorists work within a variety of administrative contexts. Some hold staff positions at a state arts agency, others work in non-profit or higher education institutions serving as the “designated partner” to a state arts agency; and there are folklorists in community-based organizations, too. Many variables outside our control determine our relative autonomy from a state arts agency and the politics of state government and elected officials. At any one time, an Apprenticeship program in one state will run very differently than in another, and an Apprenticeship program in the same state may be run differently over time based on leadership priorities. Many folklorists find opportunity in the variables, but it is also a place where inequity hides.
These many variables present research challenges, but also reveal the common structural elements that define Traditional Arts Apprenticeships: programs that support distinguished mentor artists to work with a promising apprentice of the same cultural community passing on the knowledge and skills of a living tradition that originate from their shared cultural heritage. Apprenticeship structures always include an application, a review panel, monetary awards, and a final report. They sometimes include performance requirements, ethnographic interviews, and publicity opportunities. A folklorist is expected to conduct outreach to the geographic and demographic reaches of their service area and ensure that awards are disbursed equitably over time. A folklorist provides technical assistance to applicants, helping them submit the strongest possible application. A folklorist often assembles a review panel and may author or co-author the scoring rubric with a state arts agency executive director. If an artist interview is required to help document the cultural tradition for public record, a folklorist frequently conducts (and ideally archives) these. If a final report is required from the awardees, a folklorist often drafts the questions and provides technical assistance, like phone interviews, to help awardees complete them. A folklorist reports annual data directly to the NEA or as requested by their state arts agency.
Our analysis compares these structural pieces to awardee values, showing where Apprenticeships support cultural communities, and where they fall short. We offer the model as a method for folklorists to make their own assessments and lay a foundation for scaffolding future phases of this collaborative research.