Each day as I travel through downtown Tucson I am amazed at how quickly the most ancient of human behaviors have changed. For as long as there have been Homo sapiens - roughly 200 000 years - people have filled their lives principally with two activities: talking directly with other people and doing physical things.
If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars he or she should learn something about fieldwork something about bibliography something about how to carry out library research and something about how to publish that research.