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Area of specialization: Women in Folklore
Dr Fouzia Saeed, with a PhD in Education from University of Minnesota, USA, has been working on women’s issues in the field of folklore, development and social change. Her career started as a Deputy Director Research at the Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage (Lok Virsa), where she developed and supervised a folklore research program and contributed to improvement of the folklore archives and the library of the Institute. She herself has done research on various aspects of folklore, through the Institute and on her own. The book, Women in Folk theatre, is the most well known of her work at Lok Virsa. This captures descriptions of the tradition of folk theatre through women’s eyes and their experiences. She has done research on other entertainment forms like folk circus, folk dances and folk natak (drama), and has mostly focused on women’s experiences in each of them.
Her book, Taboo, , is an ethnography that captures the fading traditional systems of prostitution in South Asia, with their close relationships with classical music and dance, as they are steadily replaced by the more exploitative modern brothel systems. The book was published in English and Urdu by Oxford Press has been translated into Hindi and Marathi by nonprofit groups in India. A Japanese translation will be out soon.
Her research on traditional woodcraft and furniture of D. I khan, one of the traditional furniture producing centers exemplifies her work on Pakistani material culture. She also helped put together modest folklore museums in organizations she has worked in, including the Allama Iqbal Open University and maintains her own collection of folk dresses and jewelry.
Dr Saeed has been actively involved in reviving Pakistani folk performance arts through organizations she has been associated with, and is also a folk dancer herself. Through the Folklore Society of Pakistan (www.folklore.com.pk) she, with her peers, re-established the trend of Marwari singing, which had almost died in Pakistan. The revival efforts of this tradition included organizing annual festivals, producing music albums and working with these hereditary musician communities to empower them. She has also worked on traditional culture and social change through Action Aid and the Interactive Resource Center.
She created a youth leadership training camp at Mehergarh: A Center for Learning, where she uses empowering aspects of traditional culture as a main theme. Mehergarh uses culture as a firm base to launch social transformation initiatives. She believes that the firmer we are rooted in our own cultural values the farther we can advance. However, she recognizes that Pakistan has progressive traditions that we need to hang on to and damaging and discriminatory traditions that we should prune in order to move ahead.
She has taught courses on Women in Folklore in the Department of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-e-Azam University as a visiting Professor.
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