"We've come a long way, Baby ... " may very well be a rallying cry for women concerned with their liberation from the banalities imposed upon them by an oppressive, male-oriented society, but it just as aptly captures the sense of vitality in the development of fieldwork techniques for folkloric research and folklife study during the last fifteen years.

About forty years ago, when folklore research in America was still in its infancy, Elsie Clews Parsons was a prominant figure in field research in oral traditions. Among her legendary methods of "collecting" was her fondness for anchoring her yacht in the waters of the Bahamas and summoning Bahamians to her side to tell her stories, jokes, and other oral material.

This kind of "collecting" was possible at a time when folklore research was perhaps more amateur than academic, more arrogant and presumptuous than sensitive and self-conscious. The concentration in those early days was on the "collecting" of texts--the stories, the songs, the jokes--to feed massive compilations of folktale and folksong collections and tale-type and motif indices.