Folklorica 2019, Vol. XXIII Editor's Note


 

FOLKLORICA 2019, Vol. XXIII 

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Editor’s Note 2019 

5e 2019 edition of Folklorica marks our transition to an all-online format. 
We are pleased to offer greater access to the journal across the globe, as befits 
SEEFA’s mission. Jim Bailey, the first president of SEEFA, exemplified this trait. 
5e tributes that followed his passing this year highlighted his collaborations with 
folklorists during the Cold War and beyond it. In his honor, SEEFA has 
established the James O. Bailey Travel Award to support student travel to the 
ASEEES annual conference. 5is journal is the result of Jim’s vision, and we are 
grateful for his support of our discipline and for his profound contributions on 
Russian folk poetry. 

5is volume is being produced in the context of a global pandemic and 
protests for justice across the world in response to the Black Lives Matter 
movement in the United States and the disputed Belarusian elections, to name just 
two examples. 5ese timely articles reveal the role that folklorists can play in 
elucidating the view of the “other,” namely minorities within a state. Dorian Juric 
explores historical texts by Croatian ethnographers studying the coffee culture of 
fellow Muslim citizens. While the authors had a genuine affection for the 
foodways under consideration, they approached the question from their own 
nationalist lens. Jake Zawlacki considers the adaptation of a traditional Kazakh 
folktale into a seminal animated film during the Soviet period. 5is film, he 
argues, helped to establish an idealized version of historical Kazakh ethnic 
identity that persists today, decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. 5e power 
of the Kazakh and Croatian examples to define and yet to restrict the conception 
of ethnic identity reveals the importance of folklore scholarship. 5ese remind us 
of our obligation to the folk in a fraught cultural moment across the globe: to 
convey the world through their eyes, not our own. 

Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby, Editor