In this guest InterDialogue, folklorist and InterPlex content and operations strategist Rowan Glass converses with K. Brandon Barker, Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington and editor of Children’s Folklore Review. Barker co-authored the book Folk Illusions with Claiborne Rice, introducing the term “folk illusions” to study children’s play forms in relation to the science of perception and cognition. He has also written on animal cognition and the folklore of science with comparative psychologist Daniel Povinelli, with whom he co-edited the book The Aesop’s Fable Paradigm. For several years, Barker led the Folklore and Science Section of the American Folklore Society, which he helped found.
The conversation begins with two notoriously murky words: how to define both folklore and science when both terms carry so much baggage? Barker makes the case that “the folk” are far less naive than some scientists assume, and that folklore’s ethnographic methods can offer insights into problems like vaccine hesitancy and misinformation by taking seriously perspectives often overlooked by or inaccessible to scholars in other fields.
Glass then addresses Barker’s research on folk illusions and what children’s play reveals about adultcentrism, body acquisition, and the science of perception. They probe the epistemological stakes of folklore scholarship in relation to the natural sciences, asking whether folklorists can or should advance universal claims and broad theoretical frameworks. They also talk about computation folklore and Barker’s work on the folklore of animal cognition. The conversation then turns toward humans’ seemingly inherent tendencies toward anthropomorphism and human exceptionalism—whether applied to animals or artificial intelligence. Barker asserts that our seemingly inherent penchant for projecting human qualities onto the non-human world might be more powerful, and perhaps more dangerous, than we realize.
Timestamps
0:00 – Introduction
2:22 – Defining folklore
4:14 – Defining science and the “folk as naive” blind spot
10:16 – The Folklore and Science Section at the American Folklore Society
12:53 – Folklore-science collaborations beyond the U.S.
14:42 – Computational folkloristics and the qualitative/quantitative divide
19:24 – What folklore can teach science about misinformation and trust
22:43 – Public and applied folklore as a bridge to communities
24:38 – Folk illusions: origins of the concept with Claiborne Rice
36:49 – Adultcentrism and body acquisition through play
41:32 – Folklore and the quest for universal claims in science
47:04 – Rites of passage and the search for cross-cultural universals
54:29 – Animal cognition and the Aesop’s Fable Paradigm
1:01:46 – Mental continuity between humans and other animals
1:03:41 – Human exceptionalism and the culture/nature divide
1:09:11 – Folklore’s perspective on artificial intelligence
1:13:18 – Closing thoughts on AI’s promise and peril
