The study of folklore (and of Native American culture) has moved from an attitude that the subjects (texts or culture) are decaying or disappearing to consideration of them as efficacious and meaningful parts of our present reality. Fieldwork connects us – scholars – to the community and provides contextual knowledge for textual synthesis and analysis. Fieldwork experience is at the root of major conceptual changes in folklore and Native American studies. Scholars in these fields – especially those who do fieldwork – are now less likely to use folklore or Native American texts to prove their own theories. Additionally, they are no longer content with merely documenting, collecting, classifying, and cataloguing information. Instead, folklorists focus upon the present realities of cultural forms and processes, using fieldwork to attempt a perspective based on "insider" discourse and practice, and to provide a more complete context by which to understand the people and their cultural productions equally. Attending to artfulness and greater context based on fieldwork, allows for the blending of social and aesthetic impulses of culture and represents an affirmative understanding of culture.

Folklore studies have always focused on interrelationships between language, literature, philosophy, and history (Johann Gottfreid von Herder and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are founders of folklore, which they called philology). Past folklorists focused on salvaging texts (mostly songs and folktales) in order to understand the past and sometimes to shape the present. Nevertheless, Richard Dorson points out that "folklorists, in this country at any rate, are not especially history minded, and prefer to examine folk materials by category, such as folktale and folksong, proverb and riddle, rather than by historical period" (1961, 12-13). Aside from the occasional nationalistic impulses to use folklore to buoy a certain historical ideal, folklorists were scholars of categorization.

Dorson is referring to literary folklorists like Archer Taylor, Francis James Child, George Lyman Kittredge, Stith Thompson, and so on, who collected and categorized numerous amounts of stories, songs, and "lore." Thompson and his cohort and students produced indices by which to trace a tale’s diffusion and possible origin, and by which to identify tales in literary works (he also studied American Indian folktales). Stith Thompson said of his life’s work that "he had spent his time working on indexes and classifications in order to facilitate the process of archiving material" (Zumwalt 1988, 59). Scholars in folklore and anthropology have long had a wealth of empirical data (such as the amazing and voluminous Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology), but they did not generally synthesize or attempt to see the bigger picture, until the 1960's.

Even the anthropological folklorists of the early 20^th century, namely Franz Boas and his students at Columbia University, focused on collection. Boas was a founding member and important force in the American Folklore Society as well as an anthropologist. Boas and his many famous students such as Benedict, Sapir, Kroeber, Jacobs, Radin, Mead, to name only a few, all considered themselves folklorists, contributing to and editing the Journal of American Folklore and serving as members and officers of the American Folklore Society. Zumwalt quotes Kroeber’s student George Foster as claiming, "In those days, we all did folklore" (1988, 68).

These heirs of Boas provided tremendous amounts of empirical data that they saw as reflective of culture. Their great contribution was as fieldworkers trying to present accurate, objective collections of the cultures they observed and lived among. Such experiences allowed them to overcome much of the racism of their predecessors in social theory: "Franz Boas was the first anthropologist to sweep evolutionary reconstructions aside and to assert at least partial custody of the sacred in behalf of all indigenous people. According to Boas, cultures were neither moral examples nor living fossils but simply different and equally valued" (Simmons 1988, 3). Such understanding comes from close contact with real people through the experience of fieldwork.

The Boasians used data they collected to understand given Native American cultures, although in the case of Tshimshian Mythology Boas considered the mythology to be meaningful and reflective of that culture but as it was in the past, so he largely ignored the contemporary culture he saw. This was partly due to his unwillingness to see cultural expressions as distorted or requiring psychoanalytical interpretation. Such understanding was foregrounded by his student Ruth Benedict (and others). But his attitude also encompassed a feeling of urgency because the culture would change from its pristine state: "Anthropologists also felt a powerful incentive to learn what they could about such cultures . . . pristine microcosms . . . before they succumbed to debilitating change" (Simmons 1988, 3).

When William Thoms coined the term "folk lore" in 1846 in England, "the folk," were considered the illiterate peasantry of a given region: "the term folk in its initial meaning referred to European peasants and to them alone" (Dundes 1980, 4). We now recognize as folk any collectivity (a group or a culture): "Who are the folk? Among others, we are!" (Dundes 1980, 19). This shift reflects a reorientation in thinking that recognizes the universality of the human condition and the vital importance of folklore to all cultures. "Lore" was originally seen as texts of stories and songs, and now encompasses any willed, individual, creative expression. Since the 1960's folklore has been defined as "artistic communication in small groups" (Ben-Amos 1972), meaning folklorists focus upon the relationship of individual creativity to the collective order. Folklorists are equally concerned with aesthetic and expressive aspects of culture and the people and societies that make and respond to creative acts.

From early on folklorists sought to classify the material they collected. In fact, the major shift in folkloristics (in the 1960's) was a move from collection and categorization (predominant among both the literary and anthropological folklorists working early in the century), to a new focus on synthesis. The new generation of folklorists recognize the interactions between how an individual tells a story and how the audiences react and interact, and interrelationships between art, architecture and other expressive elements of culture. Folklorists today look at the dynamic relations between the socially given, the traditional, and the creative individual. The field has re-calibrated itself from a focus on the traditional and ready-made, to a focus on the balance of traditional and emergent, socially given and creative. Such synthetic work seeks to better understand the world by recognizing the circular system of individual, group, and expression. Folklorists today have and use theories, but they also strive to maintain an empirical richness in their study, letting the fieldwork, the data, and the people involved direct the big picture as much as possible.

Today we appreciate collections and methods of previous generations, but the new insights of performance theory have further opened the field. Performance theory remains a valid and useful perspective but it must be attended to more frequently and fully. The more studies we have from a perspective of performance theory the better because culture is various and dynamic and can be almost infinitely described, analyzed, and appreciated (just as a text in literature can be read and understood from various perspectives).

Today, many folklorists use the word "consultant" rather than "informant" to refer to those with whom we work in the field. The word consultant represents a conceptual shift – giving the folk credit and space as performers and partners in understanding and analyzing material. They are not just a source to use. We work these days not to salvage something about to disappear, but to describe and analyze the present in cooperation with the people with whom we work. Those folklorists attendant to performance theory offer relatively full contextual pictures of the community in which they work. Those contexts aid our understanding of particular narratives or other expressive forms. Remember that folklore embodies a synthesis of the "folk" and the "lore." Ultimately, all of culture and humanity share these foci of folklore – creativity and society.