LAUREN GILGER: When you think of folklore or folklife, you might think of fairy tales or origin stories, maybe a particular type of music. But our next guest is a folklorist and she says it's much more than that.
KIMI EISELE: When people think of folklife, they often think of folklore and the stories that we use to survive and live and explain things. And that is definitely part of the discipline. But folklife, we like to describe it at the Southwest Folklife Alliance, as very simply the things we make, say and do. And so really, it's sort of the life of the folk, the life of the people, all the ways that we express ourselves and move through the world.
GILGER: Kimi Eisele is the managing editor of BorderLore, an online journal celebrating the culture and heritage of the Southwest Borderlands for the Southwest Folklife Alliance. So we asked her, how is a folklorist looking at this current pandemic and the ways in which it's changing the way we live our lives. Here's more of our conversation.
EISELE: So I am the managing editor of the journal. And so I'm always looking for stories that help illuminate these aspects of culture and heritage that reveal folklife. Another way that we like to think about folklife from our, our guru, Dr. James Griffith, otherwise known as 'Big Jim,' is, you know, he likes to call folklife often the beauty hidden in plain view. So these are often things that we do, make, say, every day, but we're not necessarily looking at them through any special lens because they're just these everyday tasks.
GILGER: So then when it comes to what we're experiencing right now in this pandemic, when so much about our everyday tasks, so much about our lives has changed. What do you look for when you sort of look at it as a folklorist or as someone who looks at folklife?
EISELE: So really immediately we obviously noticed that our ways of life were very interrupted and shifted by this pandemic. The beautiful thing about folklife and heritage and our customs is that they're not static. And so traditions are always changing. And so in that regard, some of the things we do and we have a lot of resilience. So one of the things we study, for example, is occupational folk life, which is the work that we do, how we show up for work, what we do, the tools we use, the customs that appear in our work life, the language we use. So that's you know, everybody has an occupational folklife. The from the bus driver to the delivery driver to the editor, you know, to the radio announcer, we all have these, this folklife. And so, of course, that changed for so many of us, whether we had to continue working and under duress and often frightening circumstances or whether we suddenly had to, you know, figure out how to do everything from home. And so that's one thing that we started thinking about and how our work lives are changed.
GILGER: Are there some examples that come to mind for you in terms of the documenting of this?
EISELE: Yeah. So, you know, one thing we did was we featured a photographer here in Tucson, Kathleen Dreier, who found herself out of work. She's an event photographer, and so she obviously lost all of her gigs. And what she started doing was photographing frontline workers in Tucson. And so people who are, you know, not just, not just health care workers, but social workers and people who are working at the canine dog shelter — all kinds of different workers, and she started photographing them. So, you know, we, and then we ran some of those photographs and excerpts from the interviews that she'd been doing with people. So we could see the kinds of resilience that people were expressing and the great care and compassion as well. And so it was sort of looking at like, how a photographer's work life changes. But also, you know, how all of these frontline workers are also impacted.
GILGER: Yeah, that makes me think of another example like... just the way that we celebrate has changed, right? Like she's not photographing weddings right now. Graduations look very different. How does that play out for you?
EISELE: Yeah, so ritual and observation of holiday and ceremony, those things, you know, obviously change. So people can't go to the graduations that they're used to going. So there's a high school near my house, and so the drive-by graduation ceremonies and birthday parties. We did have one, another radio producer actually, created a beautiful audio essay about the new kinds of rituals that she started developing with her 7-year-old daughter, who was feeling a little bit afraid, having to be home sort of in this uncertain moment and just, they started thinking about what other kinds of rituals they could develop and notice, and so it's a beautiful audio essay outlining some of those discoveries. So we in, in our resilience, we adapt and create new ways of celebrating.
GILGER: Yeah. So that brings me to my final question, which is about sort of what we can learn from this, right? Like, so much of this is, is difficult and frustrating and scary for people in the ways that it's changed our ways of life. But as you documented, as you look at the ways we're shifting and the ways that we are learning new, new ways of being, right, what do you think are the opportunities?
EISELE: There are so many ways in which we can look to our heritage or our any kind of traditional practice that we have, whether that's creating food from old family recipes or, you know, going back to doing puzzles at the dining room table or reading aloud to one another, you know, whether these are traditions based in some sort of faith or just in everyday activities we might do together. So that feels like a way of kind of returning to maybe a certain kind of heritage. But I do think also it's an opportunity to invent new ways of celebrating the way we express ourselves and finding out what, what really matters by doing that. And then just looking. Being curious, being attentive. You know, the tools of the folklorist are paying attention, interviewing, hanging out, noticing patterns. So bringing those tools to our own everyday experiences, whether we're, you know, walking from Point A to Point B or whether we're just, you know, kind of our daily routine has changed. That interruption allows maybe a new kind of attention to notice.
GILGER: That is Kimi Eisele, editor of the online journal BorderLore, joining us today. Kimi, thank you so much for your perspective on this.
EISELE: Thank you.
