I think the Big Idea of my digital history project will be the changing relationship of the State to “folklife.” What constitutes Folklife versus merely folk practices, e.g., when does the state feel obligated to document or protect some form of folk practice? What is emphasized as folklife and what is not? How does “folklife” (a huge and complicated term in this context in its own right) benefit or not benefit from bureaucratic oversight? What is the implication of “folklife” housed with Division of Historical Resources and what does it mean that it's being moved over to Division of Cultural Affairs? I know that the "real" answer here is that the National Endowment for the Arts, who also funds Cultural Affairs, only wants to manage one grant--so how can I separate out the "real" (mundane, mostly technical answers) from larger trends?
This is further complicated because I do work for this department and I anticipate using some of this research in a work setting. Of course, no historian is truly a free agent, since historians are usually beholden to institutions, but it seems as though public historians experience this obligation tenfold. If my research were to show that some folk practices in Florida (among Black or Native American populations, for example) were not highly regarded by the state government until they were effectively endangered or relegated to the realm of the past--how would I present that? Or if part of the research is that "folklife" in practice means groups living in poverty, what's the implication that those impoverished groups are also Black or Native American? I haven't started deeply researching this but I suspect that at the end of this project, there will be a possible conversation about the ways that the state and federal government has negatively impacted the Florida's participants in folklife, then pivoted and curated a form of nonthreatening Folklife. That's not something that I think I can realistically present in a work setting, though of course that makes me in some way complicit. And it's a further complication in that good projects require Big Ideas, so if the product of my research is what I suspect it will be, I will need to be able to create a revised second project with its own Big Idea.
