On the Right Path to an Introduction and Field Situation?

Hey fellow students of religious studies--I need a little help in the way of my paper! I'm working on the field situation right now, but I'm going to put up my attempt at an introduction. My question is: does my introduction seem conducive to an outline of the academic discussion taking place on Folk art/culture? Does it flow at all, or even make sense? Please don't worry about being critical, I need all the direction/input I can get. Thanks a bunch! I might update a new post with the field situation soon, so you don't have to bend over backwards to edit the thing either; I just want to make sure I'm kind of on the right path. Hopefully. Maybe.... Alright. Here we go.

Folk...the people. The folk of the town. The folk of the region...It’s hardly what you would ascribe to the word ‘folk’ if you were looking at a dark, silhouetted cyclorama depicting such gory scenes as a soup-ladle disembowelment—and yet there they are, staring at you and whispering in your ear, contributing to the din of popular culture and the tangle of Folk cultural lenses. The haunting silhouette work of contemporary Folk artist Kara Walker insights a visceral response that is still connected to the haunting themes of folklife in the Old and antebellum South...and therein do we begin to get a sense of how these representations are connected to the greater “Folk” culture of a region. Shadowy shapes of the Maenadic African American slave-women giving birth (albeit the umbilical cord still attached) and/or being molested by a typical Southern plantation owner pervade the walls; the dark, featureless forms create quite the spectacle, and yet they are somehow easier to observe than one would think—perhaps because there are no details. Just black scenes.

Folk art, belief, and material culture supply us with a way of looking at the inner reaches of particular communities, even if the subject matter is not so contained or comfortable. Perhaps one of the more interesting ways to observe abstract cultural phenomena is through this dichotomous lens of the direct and indirect spectacle, especially when the subject matter lends itself to the grotesque, the bizarre, the myth, and the magico-religious. More importantly however, is the hermeneutical value that Folk cultural fodder (in all of its forms) affords to the interpretation and analysis of belief. To this end, the dynamic region of the American South has presented a rich, unique story of Folk belief through art and material culture spanning the late 18^th century ethos through the contemporary art realm; Kara Walker is one example of a modern artist who draws from the folkloric themes of the South’s yesteryear. This serves as an interesting vantage point from which we can compare the aspects of visual culture in the past and present—especially as they relate to myths, rituals, spectacles, and magic.

Despite the potential picture it paints, little scholarship has been devoted to the particulars of Folk culture in the American South. Perhaps this is because the very act of characterizing individual material culture undermines the true intentionality behind it; for example, looking at a Cherokee ceremonial headdress on the wall of a museum is highly anticlimactic, and far less generative of meaning and narrative than seeing the piece of art on a human being during a Native American shamanistic ritual—namely, the piece in its own context. The substance of ‘Folk’ research exists largely in the domain of speculative definitions, backed by an extensive corpus of ethnographic fieldwork.  For an accurate investigation of Folk art and material culture in the American South, however, it is pertinent to first delineate these adjacent classifications and components taking place in the greater academic discussion before delving into the particulars of the fieldwork.