As we present the Seventh Annual Festival of American Folklife, it seems fitting that we explain again why a museum such as the Smithsonian Institution is concerned with living performers.

We are a conservation organization, and it seems, to us that conservation extends to human cultural practices. The possibility of using a museum that is essentially a historical documentary museum as a theater of live performance where people actually show that the objects in cases were made by human hands, and are still being made, practiced on, worked with, is a very valuable asset for our role as a preserver and conservator of living cultural forms, and