10 - Modern Folk, Modernist Documentary

Summary

This chapter situates the documentary movement of the 1930s and its preoccupation with the folk within the larger history of American modernism. I show how “the culture concept” emerged within the overlapping fields of anthropology and folklore to guide the practice of ethnography and its “study of modernity’s others” in the age of US imperialism and world war. For some Black and Native ethnographers, the folk offered an avenue for staking a claim of history, contribution, and modern belonging. New Deal documentary projects repurposed the folk as stalwart protagonists of the past, the backstory to a centralized narrative of national culture and its constituent parts. By contrast, many documentary books destabilized representations of the folk, producing a more self-reflexive account of social relations of power. While some texts anticipated the Cold War turn to the plight of the individual, others took aim at the racial fault lines of American exceptionalism.