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THE WORK OF PAT MULLEN ALWAYS INTRIGUES ME. In more than one American Folklore Society meeting, I have listened to him deliver papers on the most fascinating topics and asked myself, how does he think of these projects? What makes him dig in those particular places? It was, therefore, a pleasure for me to be invited to respond to Mullen's article on John Lomax's relationship with Henry Truvillion, as well as to reflect on Jesse Truvillion's own creative piece about his father, one of Lomax's informants in the Big Thicket of East Texas in the 1930s and '40s. I regret that I missed their joint presentation at the 1995 AFS meetings. All folklorists should explore the possibilities for enhancing our enterprise by inviting collaborators to join us in our presentations and in our scholarly endeavors, bringing them to the table, so to speak, both to agree and disagree with the way we do our work.
It is also a pleasure to see my own work-particularly my call for folklorists to adopt "reciprocal ethnography" as a field research methodology-invoked as Pat Mullen contemplates both his relationship with Jesse Truvillion and Henry Truvillion's relationship with John Lomax during Jesse's childhood. I agree that our work should always move toward treating the participants or collaborators (terms I actually prefer over the standard terms "informant" or "subject," as both suggest status differences between scholars and lay persons) as human beings, if not actually friends, and that we should always be as ethical and as honest with them as possible. However, my conceptions of "reciprocal ethnography" go beyond what has been presented in these articles and in the collaborative work as described by Pat Mullen and Jesse Truvillion thus far. I do not think Mullen is actually suggesting that the relationship between Henry Truvillion and John Lomax, nor the field research methodologies utilized by Lomax, represent efforts that would mark them as examples of "reciprocal ethnography. " If he is, simply by virtue of the fact that Jesse Truvillion claims the two men were "great friends," then I must say at the outset that I disagree with any suggestion that these encounters would qualify as "reciprocal ethnography."
If, on the other hand, Mullen is suggesting that his own relationship with...