ABSTRACT
The American folklife studies movement arose in conjunction with a trend in folkloristics away from strictly genre-oriented research and towards increased consideration of sociocultural context. The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress was directly involved in the pilot effort to broaden application of the Moss-Bennett provision to include living cultural resources. The need to generate a data base for futher National Park Service interpretive materials and programs established a very straightforward “pure research” role for the folklife study team. The folklife study report contains a history of social and economic change in the Big South Fork area from early white settlement to the 1970s; an ethnographic section reconstructing culture patterns of the 1900-1950 period based on ethnographic, oral history, and documentary data; and four family histories. Timely folklife research has a place in social impact assessment, project planning, and policy formulation as well as in culture resource management.
