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Show Issues and a Proposal Standards and Guidelines (U.S. Department of the Interior 1983) and Guidelines for Local Surveys: A Basis for Preservation Planning (U.S. Department of the Interior 1985). Both sets of guidelines stress the importance of creating and using historic contexts, statements that assemble "information about related historic properties, based on a theme, geographic limits, and chronological period," for example, "Coal Mining in Northeastern Pennsylvania between 1860 and 1930" (U.S. Department of the Interior 1983: 44718). A statement of historic context provides an intellectual frame of reference for identifying and evaluating properties, ensuring that information is organized to elicit clear patterns of significance. Despite the attention to context, the focus of historic preservation has remained on properties, neglecting other elements of culture, both tangible and intangible. Culture itself, of course, consists of knowledge and values, and is therefore fundamentally intangible. But it is expressed in many ways. A fisherman's house or workboat are tangible expressions, and his stories and occupational skills are intangible expressions, of the culture of his community. The policy study Cultural Conservation: The Protection of Cultural Heritage in the United States provides a useful account of governmental attention to cultural expressions other than properties, and describes their potential relationships to the historic preservation movement. Cultural Conservation uses the term folklife to name community life and values (culture itself) as well as its tangible and intangible expressions, and cites the definition found in the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976: "expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft...." The preservation instinct in folklife research has been strong. Traditions, like old buildings, are vulnerable to the effects of changing national and world trends, and even as folklorists broadened their focus from the survivals of pre-industrial culture to folklife within contemporary society, they maintained a protective posture. Folklorists have actively encouraged the preservation of cultural expressions through publishing and teaching and by celebrating certain art forms. Folk festivals and exhibits, which typically involve folklorists and governmental programs concerned with folk culture, have fostered the continuation of many forms of cultural activity. Similarity, many of the books, articles, films, video productions, and phonograph records folklorists have produced have stimulated regional and ethnic traditions, and their documentation projects have led to community-based preservation efforts. Attention has been paid to folklife by certain branches of government. At the federal level, folklife programs include the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Office of Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian Institution, and the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. At the state level, folklorists are found in folk arts programs at state arts councils and in a variety of other capacities in historical societies, museums, and other cultural agencies. |