Herbert Halpert, 1911-2000

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Paul Smith, J. D. A. Widdowson

a Born in New York City on 23 August 1911, Herbert Halpert became interested in folklore in his teens. This led him to undertake fieldwork on childlore for his M.A. in Anthropology on "Folk Rhymes of New York City Children" at Columbia University, where he studied with Ruth Benedict and George Herzog. Subsequently, he collected folk songs and folk narratives in New Jersey; a study of the narratives became his doctoral dissertation, "Folktales and Legends of the New Jersey Pines: A Collection and Study," in the Department of English at Indiana University under Stith Thompson. In 1942, he lectured in the first Indiana University Summer Institute in Folklore. Following war service in the US Army Air Corps, he became Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Murray State College in south-western Kentucky. Here he encouraged students to collect folklore from their home communities and established an archive for the material. In 1956, he became Dean and Professor of English and Sociology at Blackburn College, Carlinville, Illinois, where he stayed until 1960. After a year as Visiting Professor at the University of Arkansas, he moved to the State University of New York at New Paltz for the year 1961-62. In the fall of 1962, he was appointed Associate Professor of English at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he established and developed the major programme in folklore which is now recognised internationally as among the leaders in the field.

From the outset Herbert Halpert's career was grounded in fieldwork, allied to the firm belief that students and members of the general public should be encouraged to recognise, interpret, and value their own traditions. He advocated the training of students in the techniques of fieldwork, and instilled in them the fundamental principles of establishing good working relationships with interviewees and of recognising the personal and ethical responsibilities involved in the collection of data in the field. These principles underpinned his founding and nurturing of the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA) as an integral part of the teaching and research activities of the Department of Folklore. MUNFLA has gone on to become one of the largest archives of recorded sound in Canada, with major holdings in folklore, folklife, oral history, and popular culture.

Herbert Halpert made an important contribution to the classification of folklore and to the application of these principles to archive collections. Together with his wife, Violetta Maloney Halpert, he devised, developed and refined a comprehensive classification of the genres of folklore. The classification not only contributed to the structure of folklore courses taught at Memorial, but also formed the basis for systems of accessioning and data retrieval in MUNFLA. Indeed, in the early years of the folklore programme at Memorial, the Halperts systematically discussed with individual students the material they had submitted as coursework, adding annotations before assigning the material to the Archive. The classification has proved invaluable in helping students and other researchers to identify and explore major and minor aspects of their own culture, and it is central to his strategy of encouraging students to record and analyse material across the full spectrum of folklore.

Throughout his life, he was an archetypal bibliophile. With Violetta, he built up one of the finest personal folklore libraries in the world. Above all, however, this is very much a working collection, virtually every book having within its pages a series of paper slips marking relevant information for easy reference in teaching and research. His compendious memory of where to locate a given book, and of specific topics within it, was legendary and he drew on both the materials in the Memorial University Queen Elizabeth II Library and his personal library, for example, when analysing and annotating texts, so maintaining his unique reputation in international folk narrative scholarship and as a bibliographer.

His interests in the field of folklore were extraordinarily diverse and extended to virtually every aspect of the subject area, as is amply demonstrated in the forthcoming collection of his essays, Folklore: An Emerging Discipline (2001), which makes available a wide range of his contributions which otherwise remain comparatively inaccessible. It is well known at Memorial that scholars and students embarking on what they think is a new or unexplored aspect of folklore are often advised to check his extensive list of publications to see if he has already written on the topic. In addition to his groundbreaking work in defining the subject and in championing its educational and cultural importance, he demonstrated the interrelationships between folklore, anthropology and literature, and showed how much they have to gain from each other. Drawing on his anthropological training, he was also interested from the outset in the context of the material, and he was one of the first to utilise the concept of the folk group and its internal networks. From the beginning of his long career, he advocated the functionalist approach to the study of folklore, and fifty years later, he was still putting these principles into practice.