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INTRODUCTION
Folklore always flows from the past, via the transmission of knowledge and practices from person to person, people to people, and generation to generation.
The discipline of Folklore flowed from the past as well: Popular Antiquities was a pre-disciplinary progenitor of both Archaeology and Folkore, In England, George Laurence Gomme was one of the main formative figures of Folklore Society (founded in 1878), and he argued passionately for Folklore to be considered alongside Archaeology, utilizing the same methods, as opposed to the neighboring discipline of Anthropology. His commanding 1908 work, Folklore as an Historical Science, drew this line forcefully.
This view of folklore was also a part of the larger Zeitgeist in the construction of the nation-states, a part of the discipline since the days of the Grimms. The locus of political power was increasingly held to derive from the "people," who were to be defined by folklorists, linguists, and historians. Thought to be "pure" in their origins, the study of folklore began as a politically tinged quest to discover the story of the nation. As such it played a crucial role in the European political realm, and the larger cultural processes of ethnogenesis (as per Wolf 1982).'
THE AMERICAN VIEWPOINT
In America, the times had a different tenor. America was, in contrast, a country of immigrants, engaged in a long process of seizing lands from Native Americans through military conquest. The European view of folklore as nation-building using deep historical roots2 made little sense across the Atlantic.
On December 17, 1916, at the AFS meeting in New York, the retiring president Robert H. Lowie gave a speech sharply admonishing those who would seek to find historical truths in folklore. Lowie reiterated these same points later, in the Journal of American Folklore, Volume 30, 1917. Lowie stated that nonliterate peoples not only do not have history in their folklore, but that they essentially have no history whatsoever. Summing things up, he proclaimed, "I deny utterly that primitive man is endowed with historical sense or perspective" ( 164). Lowie's articulations of the denial of historicity in folklore took root. The ongoing silences seem to confirm Lowie, that the study of the past is properly found in linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology, but not, it would...