Research

I joined the faculty of the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 2004, having returned to Indiana from the University of Oklahoma, where I had served as a professor of anthropology and as curator of ethnology in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Prior to going to the University of Oklahoma, I was affiliated with the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I served as Curator of Anthropology. I was trained as an undergraduate at the University of Florida, where I was involved in urban sociology research and in museum-based collections studies in archaeology and ethnology. My graduate work in folklore studies and in cultural anthropology took place at Indiana University Bloomington. The richness of the Indiana University Bloomington campus community, including its libraries, archives, and research centers, but especially in terms of faculty and student colleagues, was a major factor motivating my return to Bloomington. I have been affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University since my return in 2004 and, since 2016, I have held a joint appointment in both departments. I work with colleagues and students from both units.

I am a folklorist, ethnologist, and cultural anthropologist whose current research is focused on heritage policies and practices, craft as a kind of material culture, and museum collections as resources for both historical ethnography and community-based cultural revitalization efforts. I presently lead two projects based in the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Laboratory that I direct. The first is primarily fieldwork-based and is known as the “Craft and Heritage in Upland Southwest China” project. The second is primarily museum-based and is known as the “Museum Ethnography in the Native South” project. These two projects build on a longer run of work studying in ethnographic museum collections since 1989, collaborating with Native American communities in Oklahoma (USA) since 1993, and with colleagues and partner institutions in China and the United States since 2013. The work in Southwest China has fostered a growing interest in neighboring upland regions of Southeast and South Asia. I am now reading intensively about these regions and engaging with current and former advisees concerned with them.

While my current research is focused on the areas noted above, my broader research program touches on a much wider range of issues, including studies of ritual, storytelling, oratory, music and dance, ethnobotany, social organization, cultural history, and issues of historical consciousness. I also work on general conceptual and theoretical issues in folklore studies and ethnology, including questions of traditionalization, appropriation, property, and heritage. I am interested in the history of the “Americanist tradition” in North American anthropology and folkloristics as well as other regional and provincial “traditions” of work in these fields, particularly those rooted in Northern Europe and East Asia. While folklore studies, ethnology, and cultural anthropology are the labels that attach to me and to my work most obviously, my approach to these overlapping fields has been shaped by engagements with the anthropological subfield of linguistic anthropology, the interdisciplinary field of ethnohistory, curatorship as an area of professional practice, and the neighboring discipline of sociology in which I was initially trained.

My experience as a curator has also entailed many of the responsibilities typically associated with a public folklorist—collaboration with tradition bearers, exhibition development, and the planning of programs that bring local cultural traditions to wider publics. I continue to work in museum contexts and to teach courses related to museum work and public folklore. I served as Director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures between the beginning of 2013 and the end of 2019. I am a Research Associate for the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.