At Oregon I've begun teaching folklore courses and am now part of the participating faculty in folklore. For my Fulbright at Université Laval I will be associated with the history department, which has programs in archivisme, archéologie, muséologie, and ethnologie. The translation of disciplinary names between languages may seem straightforward, since each of those French words has an obvious cognate in English. But it's really more complex that it appears. As Laurier Turgeon told me, the word "folklore" although used in French, does not carry the connotations that he and other researchers want to have. It suggests something outmoded, crusty and traditionalist. This was confirmed by a folklore colleague at Oregon, who said that in international meetings organized by UNESCO, the northern Europeans, from England or Scandinavian countries, embrace the term "folklore" and want to pursue it, while the southern Europeans do not like the term. Dan said that it carries associations with fascist nationalist projects to cultivate a racist notion of the folk. France I guess belongs with southern Europe in this case.
Laurier Turgeon holds a Canada Research Chair in History and Ethnology and formerly headed the CELAT or "Centre interuniversitaire des études sur les lettres, les arts et les traditions" which sums up the object of folklore/ethnology research without using either word. Oddly, the word "ethnology" is rarely used in English, or at least, I've never used it myself, even though I've often read and written about ethnography, and ethnology would logically be the science of which ethnography is just one part. So Laurier is a professor of ethnology.
Laurier and Dan both referred to the boost given their field by the UNESCO project on intangible cultural heritage. There's another term for folklore--"intangible cultural heritage"-- all the elements of traditional cultures that do not take the form of artifacts, artworks, or buildings, but instead are stories, performances, and other spoken words and gestures. Why do governments pay to preserve buildings and artifacts in museums while they do little to preserve the intangible cultural heritage? No doubt the endeavor has something of a "salvage ethnology" goal behind it, rather like the "salvage ethnography" that the soi-disant up-to-date anthropologists declare they don't do anymore, and the "salvage linguistics" that some of my colleagues in Oregon are very much committed to as they try to document and/or revive Native American languages that are spoken by only a small population of tribal peoples. So Laurier's projects include the "encyclopédie du patrimoine immatérielle du Québec." This is an effort to document religious traditions (not only Catholic but Jewish and Native too) in a largely secular Québec.
