In 1967, at age fourteen, Frank Proschan attended the inaugural Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The Festival of American Folklife, as it was originally called, was the first Smithsonian program to demonstrate the folk traditions of the country’s varied ethnic and cultural communities. Proschan had no idea that he would later help build the Festival into the premiere exhibition of global cultures it is today.

“That first Festival was a potpourri of the mainstream American folk traditions of the day, with Appalachian, African American, Hispanic, and Chinese American participation,” he recalls. “It was eye opening and transformative.”

The “whole sensorium” of the Festival drew Proschan into a career researching folk traditions. Today, after more than five decades in culture work, Proschan has gifted his research as a folklorist and anthropologist to the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, named for the Festival’s founding director. Alongside these materials, Proschan has created a generous endowment that will fund an annual summer internship for young professionals similarly interested in Asian American cultural research.

The impetus for this endowment grew from his work with the Festival in the 1970s. Struck by the growing mountain of audio reels and photographs documenting the first years of the Festival and what would become the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Proschan tried to convince leadership of the importance of conserving this “archive,” when they were more concerned with the demands of ongoing production.

“I was a passionate advocate, sometimes with effect, sometimes with little effect, appealing for resources to go to the Archives. The very first shelves that we had for reel-to-reel tapes, I built them in my basement.”

Proschan was captivated by music long before his first job with the Smithsonian. As a teenager, he fell in love with classical music, country blues, and the music of the ’60s folk revival, and in the early Festival years divided his time between working at the Smithsonian and at a Georgetown record shop. Over the next five decades, his musical and folklore interests expanded and took numerous detours. From studying folk puppetry to safeguarding cultural heritage for UNESCO, Proschan’s career is paved in “serendipity.”

Today, he advises young students and professionals that they’ll never know what direction their career can take until they try. In a recent career workshop for students at Fulbright University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Proschan offered his own professional journey as a lesson in embracing both opportunity and uncertainty.

One such opportunity arose for him in December 1977, when everyone at the Center was away for the holidays. “Ralph Rinzler and I were the only people in the office,” he remembers, when a visitor arrived with an idea of an international puppetry festival to coincide with the 1980 World Congress of UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette). Their conversations led to Proschan spearheading grant writing for a set of research projects in folk puppetry.

“It was the serendipity of being there during the ‘use or lose’ (annual leave) season, with the grant deadline only a few weeks later. I got more and more intrigued and then served as the liaison for the researchers.”

Next, while he was pursuing further education at the University of Texas at Austin, an over-enrolled graduate class bumped him into the world of linguistics and Southeast Asian studies. Here, he studied how to record the undocumented language of the Khmu people, many of whom had recently immigrated from Laos to the United States as refugees after the Vietnam War.

“You couldn’t buy an app that would teach you how to speak Khmu, so it was a matter of recording stories and songs and then trying to transcribe them, learning how the language works.”

At the time, Proschan says, many researchers had an “ivory tower” approach to working with communities, where research and public service didn’t mix. Not for Proschan, who handled doctor appointments, landlord legalities, and insurance claims for his new Khmu friends.

“It’s the ethos I learned at the Smithsonian, that you are trying to develop multifaceted relationships with the people you are asking to participate in the Festival. You’re not building a wall between their day-to-day concerns and their creative talents.”

Proschan continued to conduct research inside communities, and his career took him to many parts of the world. In the 1990s, he conducted research in the Khmu homeland of Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and other grants. In the 2000s, he taught workshops throughout Southeast Asia in field research and festival curation. After another period of curatorial work at the Smithsonian, he took a role at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. There, beginning in 2006, Proschan brought his American perspectives to the international discussions of intangible cultural heritage: “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated there with—that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.”

Through the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO supports communities in safeguarding their living expressions of cultural heritage. Proschan offers two examples: “Festivals serve as an opportunity for communities to reflect upon their selves and to represent their culture to themselves and to others. Traditional puppetry is also very much a system of communities, artists, performers analyzing and then re-presenting their own society and their own culture.”

In addition to donating his research materials to the Archives, Proschan hopes his endowment will make it possible for future generations of culture workers to follow their curiosity. Watching his often-challenging career path, his mother lamented that he had not become something practical like a plumber; he jokes wryly that he chose a far less stable but more personally fulfilling path.

“Find things you love and are passionate about, but don’t be afraid,” he advises. “Be curious, and don’t prejudge. Don’t shut doors in front of yourself. Be ready to seize opportunities and try things out.”

Proschan’s endowment to the Center can permit young professionals to have equal opportunities, regardless of financial capability. He also hopes that the future interns will have a personal research interest or connection to the Asian American and Southeast Asian materials in the Archives. “Bringing personal connections to the materials is a very strong point in making the experience interesting and useful for them but also making the internship as useful as possible for the archives and the Smithsonian.”

But Proschan is far from finished with his career. He anticipates a return to Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand to revisit some of the villages where he did fieldwork in the 1990s and to repatriate recordings and photographs now in the Rinzler Archives. He looks forward to returning the materials to the people who helped create them, or to their descendants. Proschan’s records are a global collection, designed to sustain and reconnect communities with their heritage.

Proschan’s sincerity of spirit creates more than a vibrant research practice; it forms instances of shared humanity.

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At the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, we hope that Frank Proschan’s endowment sparks a new tradition of planned giving to create opportunities for young people interested in cultural heritage and archival work. If you are interested in endowment opportunities or including the Center in your estate plans, please contact Liska Radachi, Associate Director of Advancement, at RadachiL@si.edu.

Eowyn Stewart is a writing intern with the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.