Key Principle
When a community's material culture has been deliberately destroyed -- bulldozed and flooded, as with the Salt Creek Valley -- no single research method can reconstruct what was lost. Mordoh employs a four-method design combining folklife research, oral history techniques, local history research, and cultural geography. Oral history becomes not merely supplementary but essential: "Descriptions of past folklife still live in the memories of the past residents, and, as such, oral history is a valuable tool for folklife research." The physical destruction forecloses architectural analysis, forcing the researcher to rely on living memory, fringe-area observation, family photographs, and the transplanted folklife of relocated residents.
Why This Matters
The Salt Creek Valley case is methodologically extreme. Most folklife studies can survey surviving buildings, map settlement patterns, and observe ongoing practices. Here, the houses were "deliberately razed and covered with water." The closest methodological precedent -- Charles Martin's 1980 Hollybush study of an abandoned Appalachian community -- still had decaying physical structures to measure. Salt Creek has nothing. This forces a rethinking of what constitutes admissible evidence in folklife research, elevating family photographs, oral testimony, and informant-produced sketches (like Hazel Taylor's hand-drawn barn floorplan annotated "This Is The Best I Can remember") to primary-source status.
Good Examples
The four-method integration: (1) Folklife research -- Sigurd Erixon's "science of man as a cultural being," combining verbal lore, material culture, and geographic analysis. (2) Oral history -- tape-recorded interviews with displaced residents, following Dorson's "oral traditional history" model that derives "from the folk rather than from the elite." (3) Local history -- written documents, Army Corps of Engineers records, newspaper accounts. (4) Cultural geography -- settlement forms, field patterns, and the interaction of place and folk. "Documentary evidence alone cannot fully illuminate the largely unwritten processes of cultural adaptation that are involved in pioneer settlement." -- E. Estyn Evans (Ch. II, p. 55)
Case study over survey: The Salt Creek area encompasses approximately thirty-five square miles with thousands of former small farmers and several hamlets -- far larger than Martin's one-square-mile Hollybush. Rather than attempting exhaustive coverage, Mordoh limits fieldwork to "a smaller area within the valley and to a limited number of families, most inter-related or acquainted with one another," following the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project's finding that case studies of individuals or families "could show how traditions manifest themselves in people's lives." (Ch. II, pp. 70-71)
Oral history as re-creation, not reconstruction: Barbara Allen's critical distinction: "When narrators re-create history, especially community history, in tape-recorded interviews, they do not merely relate what happened; they try to convey a sense of the past as it was actually lived." What narrators provide is experiential and contextual, going "beyond historical fact." The folklorist collects "the narrative -- both its form and its content -- not only the facts contained in it." (Ch. II, pp. 77, 80)
Informant-dominant interviewing: Following Linda Degh's model of making recordings "in relaxed settings, when the tellers felt at ease," with informants having "the upper hand" and the interviewer being "as passive in posing careful questions as possible, in order to avoid guidance or manipulation of the ad hoc formulated texts." This preserves the folkloric form that structured questioning destroys. (Ch. II, p. 77)
Counterpoints
Oral history has inherent limitations. Martin found that at Hollybush "many participants were dead, and...those surviving were unable to articulate the totality of what had occurred." Neither oral history nor architectural analysis alone suffices -- "both methodologies...were needed; they complement each other." The Salt Creek case is worse because even the complementary architectural data has been destroyed. (Ch. II, p. 67)
The folklife approach risks impressionistic breadth at the expense of depth. Lightfoot acknowledges that "even with a team of collectors...this would be quite impossible" to document all the folklore of a region. Mordoh's response is to use "examples from different genres of folklife to demonstrate the existence of a particular lifestyle within the community" rather than claiming exhaustive coverage. (Ch. II, pp. 61, 69)
Community insiders and outside institutions may use entirely different structural components to characterize the same place. Salt Creek residents organized memory around "extended family and neighbor ties and the daily routine of farming," while the Army Corps of Engineers characterized the area by its flood events. The researcher must recognize and navigate this divergence. (Ch. II, p. 80)
Key Quotes
"Documentary evidence alone cannot fully illuminate the largely unwritten processes of cultural adaptation that are involved in pioneer settlement. What is needed is the co-operation of the social anthropologist, the cultural geographer and the student of folklife." -- E. Estyn Evans (Ch. II, p. 55)
"The object of folklife research is to arrive at a deeper knowledge and understanding of man. It is the science of man as a cultural being....Consequently, folklife research is essentially to be regarded as a branch of general anthropology or ethnology." -- Sigurd Erixon (Ch. II, p. 56)
"My intention is not merely to reconstruct the past, but also to re-create it, providing a basis for understanding the significance of the past to the folk who shared it." (Ch. II, p. 88)
"I will demonstrate that some cultural items, some aspects of folklife, are more important for cultural identity than others and thus are, while transformed, retained. I will also explore the reasons for such selectivity." (Ch. II, p. 69)
"This folk history is an extension of our personal history, and it belongs to us as elite history never can." -- Dorson (Ch. II, p. 75)
"oral history is one of the tools available to the historian in recreating the tapestry of life and expressing it in such a way as to capture its wholeness and richness." -- McDonald and Muldowny (Ch. VI, p. 309)
Rules of Thumb
- When material culture is destroyed, oral history shifts from supplementary to primary -- it is the only method that preserves what statistics and surveys cannot capture.
- Use the case study method for large-area research: depth with a limited number of inter-related families is more revealing than shallow coverage of an entire region.
- Treat the oral narrative itself as an artifact, not merely a vehicle for facts. Verbatim transcription preserves folkloric form; structured questioning destroys it.
- Let informants control the interview. The community "will include people who can turn interviews into conversations, who can present its significant texts" -- find them and let them lead. (Glassie, Ch. II, p. 81)
- Combine multiple evidence types: oral testimony, family photographs, informant sketches, newspaper accounts, government records, and field observation of fringe areas and transplanted folklife.
- Selective cultural retention is the central analytical finding: some folklife items are "more important for cultural identity than others" and survive displacement while transformed. Track what survives and what does not, and ask why.
- "Antiquarian responsibility" justifies documentation for its own sake: a lost community "deserves to be documented for antiquarian reasons alone, even apart from what this case study may reveal concerning communities." (Jabbour, Ch. II, p. 73)
Related References
- material-folk-culture.md -- The physical record that was destroyed, forcing reliance on these methods
- oral-traditions-folklife.md -- The intangible practices that oral history uniquely captures
- comparative-displacement.md -- Other cases demonstrating oral history as the only corrective to absent official documentation