Traveling on a Dogsled to the Jordan Valley: Fieldwork in the Study of Folklore of Jews

This article engages the transformation of fieldwork as an idea based on specific methodological practices, and the way different conceptions of fieldwork circulated and adapted to the study of the folklore of Jews. Doing fieldwork is not a theory, but as a concept and practice it travels between different disciplinary and ethnographic contexts. This article engages a number of synchronic episodes in which fieldwork was applied to Jewish subjects, tracing the scholarly contexts from which it was borrowed, among them: networks of corresponding authors at the end of nineteenth century in Central Europe; Russian political agendas of “going to the people”; Russian imperial expeditions to Siberia; German diffusionist works in Africa; Boasian anthropology; and studies of Japanese culture from a distance during the Second World War. On the diachronic level, these different crossroads of Jewish folkloristics with other ethnographic initiatives reflect a turbulent history of mobility, displacement, and immigration that underlies Jewish life in the twentieth century. These different adaptations, paths in which fieldwork was translated to the study of Jews, enables an examination of fieldwork as an idea that keeps traveling, or better, in Tim Ingold’s terms, “meshwork”—a texture of interwoven threads.