As we present the Seventh Annual Festival of American Folklife, it seems fitting that we explain again why a museum such as the Smithsonian Institution is concerned with living performers.

We are a conservation organization, and it seems, to us that conservation extends to human cultural practices. The possibility of using a museum that is essentially a historical documentary museum as a theater of live performance where people actually show that the objects in cases were made by human hands, and are still being made, practiced on, worked with, is a very valuable asset for our role as a preserver and conservator of living cultural forms, and it should be understood in those terms. It is not a kind of razzle-dazzle, a vaudeville show that we put on. It is, rather, a demonstration of the vitality of those cultural roots which surround us and are so often overlooked.